[ale] Linux in Atlanta's public schools

Mon Jul 1 22:02:00 EDT 2013

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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