[ale] What happens when a school switches to Linux

[Daniel Howard]

As many of you may have seen in today's Atlanta Journal Constitution, 
Brandon Elementary scored top in the District of Atlanta Public Schools 
and third in the state on CRCT testing.  This is the school where two 
ALE'ers, William Fragakis and I, converted all the old, nonfunctioning 
PCs into Linux thin clients running K12LTSP, got over 100 donated PCs 
from businesses, and bought over 60 new NTAVO thin clients at $99 each 
and ended up more than tripling the number of working PCs in each 
classroom.  More interestingly, compared to 3 other similar schools (in 
demographics, parent income/education level, and PTA funding) in the APS 
district:

*  Brandon's math scores were the highest in every grade except 4th, and 
sometimes significantly so, e.g. grades 1 and 2.

*  In grades 1-3, Brandon was the top scorer in all subjects except 3rd
Grade Reading, and was only 1 point behind the top scorer there.

*  Adding the total number of points above the Exceeds Expectations
level on the mean scaled score for all subject scores and all grades 
gives the following results:

       Brandon       187
       Jackson       123
       Morningside   125
       Smith         127

which means Brandon surpassed the other high performing schools in the 
district by about 50% in how much they exceeded expectations.  I'm still 
trying to get the data from last year to compare, but everyone's 
recollection is that we were not the top and had similar performance to 
the other three high performing schools.

Feel free to use the above data and make the case for your local school, 
and let me or Jim Kinney (with whom we've been working to convert our 
classroom server model to an enterprise server model with less than ten 
servers for the entire school) know if we can help you make the case.

Thanks to the group for all the support!  Daniel