[ale] Palladium/MS: ideas for retaliation - OT now --RANT--

[James P. Kinney III]

On Wed, 2002-06-26 at 15:01, Geoffrey wrote:
  What about all that lotto money.  Think 
> any of it goes to fund teacher pay increases?
> 
Not a dime goes toward teacher pay, nor teacher training, nor smaller
classes. The vast majority of it has gone towards all those PC's in the
class rooms. Most, the overwhelming majority, of the teachers don't
utilize the PC's for anything more than a little typing and some web
surfing. 

In Dekalb county, all of the student access software is pushed out on a
Novell network. It is a huge pile of drivel garbage written for and sold
by Jostens company. Yeah. The class ring scam people. The same scum
buckets that do school yearbooks and are behind many of the
"fundraisers" that the schools do. Much of that software is the most
basic  (and boring) drill and test stuff I've ever seen. A Debian
installation screen is better looking than the 12" monitored, IBM PC
(really! I've seen them) hooked up with token ring.

The harsh reality of public school education is the teachers aren't
going to push for anything better (or different) than what they already
have. They don't/won't/can't use it already for a multitude of reasons.
There are a precious few who have adopted the technology and could use
anything put in front of them.

The school districts have no reason to change anything they are doing.
As long as they are doing "the norm", their funding from the state and
feds is intact. The district level decision makers are not leaders. They
are brainless, ball-less minions who simply follow the wind.

The vast majority of education policy starts at the state level.
Bubbaville in the capital. The IT decisions are heavily influenced by
the rising power and influence of the Georgia Net Authority. GaNet
recently rammed an "NT ONLY" policy downed the throats of state
government offices for servers. Their argument was "consistent platform
for better support". I'm glad I wasn't there during nimba and code-red!

The way to get Linux in schools is not to have LUGs asking to do the
work, but have big companies "donate" the labor of the LUGs to do the
work. If HP here in Georgia offered to provide Linux installation
services for free to the Ga schools that would take it, then got LUGs to
do the work, maybe even tossing a few $$ at the people doing it, and
then making arrangements to provide support, through the LUGs at a
reduce fee to the schools who took the offer, it MIGHT work.

But I'm pessimistic enough that Georgia is one of the "lost cause"
states as far as education goes. So I don't see that spending much
effort on it is anything but a waste of time compared to finding
employment outside the south and moving. Georgia has been ranked in the
bottom 5 states on quality of education since the records on education
began. 

-- 
James P. Kinney III   \Changing the mobile computing world/
President and CEO      \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244             \.___________________________./

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7 




---
This message has been sent through the ALE general discussion list.
See http://www.ale.org/mailing-lists.shtml for more info. Problems should be 
sent to listmaster at ale dot org.