[ale] Linux in Atlanta's public schools

Tue Jul 2 14:44:53 EDT 2013

Ah Jim, this discussion brings up so many bitter-sweet memories for me.

I remember when you were running the K12LTSP list, and I was deploying
K12LTSP in disadvantaged schools in deep rural South Africa. Your list was
my core survival tool and Jim you personally solved many problems for me
and the non-profit I was running at the time. The heady days of Etherboot
and rom-o-matic (when Ken Yap himself would help me resolve boot issues),
hand-built UV eprom erasers, reclaiming old BIOS chips from dead
motherboards to create etherboot NICs. My EPROM programmer was the single
most expensive piece of equipment that we owned. We made thin clients out
of refurbed PC's that were donated to us by government departments and some
companies. By tapping into the corporate social responsibility project of
UniForum (the .za domain administrators) we were able to deploy several
thousand seats into the most grueling of environments. I believe they are
still running to this day (although with the demise of K12LTSP, the project
switched to Ubuntu shortly after I left South Africa).

Finding you on ALE when I moved to Atlanta really brought home to me what a
small world it is. One day I plan to attend a monthly meeting so that I can
thank you in person and tell you the story, or perhaps one chapter of the
story, of thousands of Linux-using schoolkids in Africa that you had no
idea you actually helped! And drink beer.

Your stories of corruption are distressing to me because they sound so much
like what I encountered in South Africa at one level or another. It bothers
the heck out of me to see the same issues cropping up in an officially
developed nation: we have no excuse for this kind of behavior in the US
(not that anyone does of course, but here we're quick to use terms like
Third World corruption, banana republic and so on, when we seem to be
living in a glass house). When it came time for a government sponsored
rollout into all 2000-odd schools in one South African province, Microsoft
and their OEM partners came out hitting hard, and even though we deployed a
fully functional demo site that "just worked" while the Windows teams were
still booting, there was NO chance that Linux was going to happen ... too
many palms greased and too much incompetence. In another South African
province a DoE official actually threatened me with "consequences" if I
dared to install non-Windows systems: I turned that province into my
show-piece.

One tale of woe, and there certainly were a few: the DoE sent a Doze
technician to one of our sites who was so confuzzled by not being able to
find hard drives in the refurbs, that he went and installed hard drives,
and Windows, on each machine! After that little experience we started to
glue-gun the IDE ports on the MB's before deploying. lol. You can't win 'em
all.

Anyway, just want to say is it's awesome that there are still believers out
there. I would be willing to join with someone, or better yet a team of
people, in taking a shot at rekindling the idea in Atlanta schools.

The concept-plan I used in South Africa was very community oriented - we
would have the school take responsibility for basic infrastructure and even
have the kids help pulling Ethernet cables, with teachers and senior
students trained in system administration. Regrettably, I had to leave SA
before implementing the full self-sustaining concept that I had in mind
(that's another story). I still believe though, that the basic concept is
universal and regardless of the fact that Windows and corruption won one
battle in Atlanta, the war is far from over as many fervently Microsoft
shops are more susceptible than ever to the viability of FOSS.

cheers
ed

On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 10:58 PM, Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com> wrote:

> I had no more resources to throw at it. After it was all over, I ran the
> numbers and thanks to the ridiculous number of meetings I had to go to on
> the project I made just barely over $5 an hour. Can't feed a family on that
> even working 60+ hours a week.
>
> We looked at expanding that process and there was just not enough traction
> to justify staying in it. Marketing up against "everyone use Windows" was
> outside of our financial ability. When I spoke at NECC (National
> Educational Computing Conference) in San Antonio in 2008, the room was
> quite surprised to hear the greatest single challenge was "political
> engineering". My surprise was that the room was packed to overflowing.
>
> Don't get me wrong: the process WORKS. We came up with the first
> generation of LTSP that would scale to 10's of thousands of simultaneous
> clients. What we did has not be replicated at even half that scale anywhere
> in the western hemisphere to date. There are some projects in Europe and
> Scandavian countries in particular that are close to that scale.
>
> Technology changes as well. What worked then for thin client processes is
> not an ongoing solution now. Between 2006-2007 and now, KVM and SPICE have
> progressed to provide a far better user experience than what we could do
> then with LTSP. Server technology has vastly exceeded what we built with in
> 2006. A dual proc, dual core with a total of 8GB RAM was sizable then and
> laughable now. Schools we installed with 5 servers we could do now with 1
> and still have expansion room.
>
> There was a serious emotional toll on the project as well. Watching the
> leadership squander resources to pad their own pockets or just out of total
> ignorance was bad enough. But watching them do it at the expense of 140,000
> kids who already getting kicked in the social balls just by being there was
> too much.
>
> On the very first school we worked at, we met the librarian who was
> tickeled pink about the whole project. When I ran into her the following
> year at DragonCon, she was spitting bile over the project in general and us
> in particular. It seems the day after we were "officially done", some
> windows idiot from ITD went to her school and messed with the servers and
> they never worked again. Of course I was never informed of this or else I
> would have certainly RUN and fixed things. In fact, that school was the one
> where we verified the restore process that was fully documented
> (step-by-step cookbook) and provided to APS. They broke it and didn't care.
> And the people who were trying to make things work there had no power to
> get anything done. As far as the librarian was concerned, we built an
> unstable system that broke as soon as we left and no one could fix it so it
> was bad from the beginning.
>
> People expect Windows to crash and loose data. But a Linux system is
> touted as being so  uch better and more stable so that when ANYTHING goes
> wrong, the PHBs and everyone want to throw it all out. APS really thought
> LTSP would work like a VCR. Set it up and walk away and it magically works
> with no intervention. Well, for the most part that was true for most of the
> rest of the year. The next school year, all the thin clients were in
> different rooms and didn't autoregister (by design - needed to KNOW which
> room they were in for many reasons) and manually registering was about 20
> file edits per system.
>
> <sigh> good and bad memories from all of that.
>
>
> On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 10:09 PM, Dustin Strickland <
> dustin.h.strickland at gmail.com> 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.
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>> 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
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>>
>>
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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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> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>
>

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