[ale] Linux in Atlanta's public schools

[Jim Kinney]

where do I begin....

As referenced in the ALE posting, two parents installed Linux in the form
of LTSP in their school. They fought the APS process and managed to show
that having working computers used more than 20 minutes a week made a
significant educational improvement in the school. Most importantly, they
found a tipping point ration of 3 students per _classroom_ computer was was
the minimum needed to achieve this impact. The choice of Linux was for
cost, security, reliability. Using thin clients allowed a lot of students
to use a single "server" in the classroom and minimized maintenance of the
overall process.

APS then was motivated by the performance statistics to do a larger-scale
pilot project. That's where I came in. Assisted by Aaron Ruscetta and Jeff
Hubbs, over the span of 6 months we deployed 33 enterprise-scale server,
2200 thin clients in 7 elementary and middle schools for APS.


At the end of that school year, schools that had been performing poorly and
had solidly embraced the new classroom technology showed significant
improvements. Some of these improvements were not manipulable by faculty as
the tests were done on line by the students.

Once again, APS had to continue the process as there was compelling reason
to expand what had started as a parent project.

What happened next was classic APS corruption. My team had already been
first-hand witness to blatant theft of servers, contractors being arrested
for attempting to pickup 12-year-old girls, and what smelled suspiciously
of refurbished servers provided as new servers (of the 33 deployed, 12
failed out of the box and required new motherboards). APS handed the next
phase of the process to a contractor with financial ties to a person (who
was not an APS employee but a contractor with no actual contract) with the
authority to decide who got the contract. The contractor then managed to
never get a single server running LTSP in any school despite multiple
millions spent in server purchases. They simply didn't have the the Linux
expertise to make it work.

As I understand it now, the new head of ITD threw out the entire pile and
put in windows systems. The old head of ITD is under indictment and many of
the APS ITD staff should be joining him. I would strongly recommend
avoiding APS on this topic.

I can't confirm the timeline of events, but my brief look when the APS test
cheating scandal hit the news loosely aligns with my concerns: APS chose to
not continue working with me and my team likely because of the "trouble" we
caused raising red flags on ethics. The followup group didn't have the
skills to maintain Linux systems and certainly not LTSP systems so the
existing servers died of neglect. The performance gains promised in the
grant process that funded the initial and following installations were not
going to materialize so the need to keep the funding going in the ITD group
was a key factor in APS pushing test cheating. The cheating took place in
the schools that were touched by the LTSP process that were not being
maintained. In particular, Parks Middle School was one of the schools that
showed remarkable improvements in 2 and 6 months and the teachers
attributed it to being able to split the classes in half (we installed at a
2:1 ratio instead of the minimum 3:1) and the time spent on test drill in
advance of the actual tests due to an abundance of working systems. Once
those systems failed and APS was unable to return them to service, the
performance improvements began to fade and thus the push to regain them at
any cost.

All sour grapes aside, what we saw when those systems went live was nothing
short of total gratitude from the teachers and rampant enthusiasm from the
students. That was the highlight of my professional career so far.


On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 7:07 PM, Dustin Strickland <
dustin.h.strickland at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have been thinking for the past few weeks about trying to get my local
> schools to migrate to Linux. It seems like a much-needed change. Technology
> is becoming more important with each day that passes-- and the coverage of
> it in the curriculum is disappointing, to say the least. I remember when I
> was in Yeager middle school, not too long ago, the only class I had
> pertaining to computers or technology was a class on how to use Microsoft
> Word.
>
> Computers are far too important, and other subjects becoming far too
> deprecated(in my opinion), for coverage of technology in our schools to be
> limited to how to use MS Word. It's almost insulting. Sure, there are
> programs that the majority of people need to be familiar with, but kids
> need to at least know about the basic components of a computer and the role
> of the operating system. It seems to me a logical step - in order for the
> children to gain an interest and actually learn, they need to be introduced
> to Linux. Perhaps, then, we can see about adding some more technology into
> the curriculum.
>
> As I was researching this topic to prepare a statement for the Douglas
> County Board of Education, I stumbled upon <a href="
> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.user-groups.ale/44438/">this</a>
> posting. If anyone has any more information on this case, please let me
> know. I haven't been able to contact the Board of Education yet, but I will
> keep you all posted.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>
>


-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III
*
*Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain
at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail.
It won't fatten the dog.
- Speech 11/23/1900 Mark Twain
*
http://electjimkinney.org
http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/
*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20130701/a8d1184a/attachment.html>