[ale] Linux in Atlanta's public schools

Mon Jul 1 22:09:18 EDT 2013

Well, why not try a different area? You might be surprised at the results.

On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 10:02 PM, Jeff Hubbs <jhubbslist at att.net> wrote:

>  Where to begin, indeed.  The crying shame is that we (Aaron, Jim, and I)
> had done a lot of the scenario planning work to scale up what we had done
> to the entire district - tens of thousands of seats - and create the
> industrial processes we'd need to "go big" and still improve on what we'd
> done.  We had even joined forces with an established and well-respected
> 8(a) local contracting firm to make it easier to do business with us.  But
> because of the circumstances Jim described, we couldn't get a fair hearing
> even though we had demonstrated in no uncertain terms that our systems
> worked extremely well in that environment (even though we had almost no
> control over hardware selection).  Yet the outfit selected to do the work
> couldn't come close to replicating what we had accomplished even though we
> mostly just made use of very common tools and capabilities present in most
> any Linux distribution.
>
> On 7/1/13 7:55 PM, Jim Kinney wrote:
>
>   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/
> *
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing listAle at ale.orghttp://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists athttp://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> 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
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20130701/ecfb9c10/attachment-0001.html>