After the teachers in Los Angeles nearly went on yet another strike, they may want to study a recent scandal that reveals where some of the district’s money is going. According to a report in the Westside Current, a former Los Angeles Unified School District employee and technology vendor, Gautham Sampath, just pled “not guilty” to money-laundering charges after allegedly rerouting $3 million to LAUSD technical project manager Hong Peng to land a $22 million contract for his information software.
Assuming Peng is guilty in this instance — and the hilariously illiterate texts between her and Sampath would suggest she is — it is reasonable to conclude she has probably done the same with other tech vendors, paying gargantuan sums of taxpayer money for often shoddy, useless software and pocketing large sums for it. And she is far from the only person doing it. Sampath’s company, Innive, evidently has “government contracts in California and elsewhere in the country.” This means that all over the country, local and state governments are awarding multimillion-dollar bids to conmen with few legal repercussions.
To be clear, this is money that could have gone to teachers, counselors, and administrators. This is money that could have been kept by the homeowners paying extortion-level property taxes. This is money that families could have applied to alternative schooling options.
But instead, this kind of corruption continues to siphon away taxpayer money without anyone realizing it. Years ago, I wrote about the expenses that consume most of a school district’s budget, namely extracurriculars, special education, and disciplinary programs. What I should have added to this list was technology.
For the past couple of decades, school districts have raided their rainy day funds, issued bonds, and gone broke paying for iPads and Chromebooks, educational software, and specially trained personnel tasked with helping faculty use these products. And aside from a few district bureaucrats safely hidden in a nondescript office building that the district somehow owns, no one really knows how much any of this costs. Naturally, this lack of transparency makes it all too easy for embezzlement, laundering, and bribery.
Moreover, in my own experience of teaching high school English, most of these programs are usually worthless. I have no clue how much local districts are paying for so many research databases, note-taking apps, informational organizers, or AI tools, but I do know I never use them, nor do any of the teachers I’ve known.
Ironically, what’s worse than this useless software is the software we actually do have to use. Whether it involves recording grades, taking attendance, referring misbehavior, or compiling standardized assessment data for each student, these programs are, as a rule, terrible. They are poorly designed, convoluted, and frequently glitch and crash. Added to this are our online textbooks, which force users to click two dozen times through two dozen dropdown menus to open a particular text — and usually require a few periodic reboots afterward.
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