[ale] Linux in Atlanta's public schools
Jeff Hubbs
jhubbslist at att.net
Mon Jul 1 22:24:13 EDT 2013
We moved on. You know - food, heat, mortgage, and stuff. For my part,
I've left the IT industry and the fact that having more people make more
money was far, far more important than delivering high-quality
cost-effective computing solutions that actually had educational
traction was just one reason why.
On 7/1/13 10:09 PM, Dustin Strickland wrote:
> 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
> <mailto: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
>> <mailto: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.
>>
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>>
>>
>> --
>> --
>> 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/
>> ////
>>
>>
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