I think putting cutting technology into the hands of students is a great idea. The caveat is that they are mature enough to understand how to take care of it and use it. Kids nowadays are much more advanced than we'd like to think and have access to things both good and bad that I never had when I was growing up. Getting in front of it and leveraging this for educational purposes was a laudable cause.
How do unions equate to an educated workforce? You can also be an outstanding teacher and not be part of a unionized workplace. I'm not anti-union but where education is concerned these teacher unions don't have our kids best interests at heart.
With my comparison to airlines I should have been specific. Consider things like Flight Attendant paperwork, taking money for onboard services. None of this has anything to do with safely operating an aircraft but the union won't let you change anything until a rigorous amount of work study programs are completed and negotiations have concluded on any additional workload. If you're paying for the employee to work the flight and you provide them with technology to make their jobs easier and more efficient they'll still want something in return for all these innovations. The same can be said for teachers unions even though individually workloads on their members will decrease.
It was a great concept by the LAUSD but again, poorly executed and thought out. Think about kids dragging home tons of books everyday, the cost in textbooks isn't going down and this kind of tech allows for more innovation in teaching. Kids can become more engaged and be given the tools to succeed in life by leveraging the right technology, not just for technologies sake. The blame lies then with the board and those at the top responsible for implementing it. It's a billion dollar mistake but that happens everywhere, even in business. The real issue is a billion in education dollars is tougher to recoup.