[ale] Linux in Atlanta's public schools

Mon Jul 1 22:55:45 EDT 2013

'Murica

On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 10:24 PM, Jeff Hubbs <jhubbslist at att.net> wrote:

>  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> 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
>>
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> 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/20130701/400580a0/attachment-0001.html>