{"id":404,"date":"2004-05-31T00:44:33","date_gmt":"2004-05-31T05:44:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/2004\/05\/31\/nec-pleads-guilty-to-defrauding-poor-s"},"modified":"2004-05-31T00:44:33","modified_gmt":"2004-05-31T05:44:33","slug":"nec-pleads-guilty-to-defrauding-poor-schools-in-e-rate-program","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/2004\/05\/31\/nec-pleads-guilty-to-defrauding-poor-schools-in-e-rate-program\/","title":{"rendered":"NEC pleads guilty to defrauding poor schools in E-Rate program"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a364'><\/a><\/p>\n<p>\n One of my interests lately is in the intersection of technology and<br \/>\n education (if you haven&#8217;t noticed from some of my blog posts).   Catching<br \/>\n this story on NEC pleading guilty to defrauding a set of poor schools<br \/>\n in the San Francisco area of making them buy way more technological<br \/>\n equipment than they needed is just awful.   The concept behind the<br \/>\n E-Rate program that is mentioned in the article is a really great concept.<br \/>\n The general idea is to take a portion of taxes from the local districts and<br \/>\n funnel this money into poorer schools to buy computers and other technological<br \/>\n tools to help enable education.\n <\/p>\n<p>\n However, it seems greed got in the way of the middle men and they ended<br \/>\n up recommended some of these poorer schools pay an order of magnitude more<br \/>\n money (add an extra zero) to buy equipment they had no need for.  I<br \/>\n think this sucks, since the basic concept is a good idea however when<br \/>\n corruption like this involved, I can understand why people will start<br \/>\n voting down similar initiatives in other areas.<br \/>\n One solution that could help is a liason between<br \/>\n the vendors and the schools that can explain in plain English what would be<br \/>\n necessary for the school district and what isn&#8217;t.  One major problem<br \/>\n is most techies want a high pay rate to give these suggestions.  Ever<br \/>\n take a look at the average pay of a technology director or senior level<br \/>\n design weenie?   I&#8217;m sure there are many who want to help but finding them<br \/>\n that is on acceptable terms to both the poor schools and to the technological<br \/>\n consultant is probably not as easy as it seems.  And here&#8217;s another kicker&#8230;<br \/>\n you want someone competent in the field to guide you but you know nothing<br \/>\n on the field but you know you need it for work.   How do you know you can<br \/>\n trust what they&#8217;re saying when whatever they say can be total B.S?   I<br \/>\n think this is a REALLY challenging situation for poor schools and<br \/>\n institutions looking to beef up their IT infrastructure.   Corporations<br \/>\n tend to be after the dollar so you can never be sure how much you&#8217;re<br \/>\n hearing is market-ware.  Going after an individual is an exercise in russian<br \/>\n roulette.   The easiest option is to find a friend or a friend of a friend.<br \/>\n The old human network of trust.  In the absence of competence, your best<br \/>\n defense is trust.\n <\/p>\n<p>\n <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2004\/05\/28\/technology\/28net.html\">Link to story<\/a>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of my interests lately is in the intersection of technology and education (if you haven&#8217;t noticed from some of my blog posts). Catching this story on NEC pleading guilty to defrauding a set of poor schools in the San Francisco area of making them buy way more technological equipment than they needed is just [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":704,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1212],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tagme"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/704"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=404"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}