[ale] What happens when a school switches to Linux

[Jim Philips]

Well, everybody KNEW that Linux users are smarter. But have they done any 
research to show that we're better looking too? ;-)

On Wednesday 21 June 2006 20:26, Daniel Howard wrote:
> 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
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