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For example, this study of Chinese math scores found: "It was found that the parental involvement was not a major predictor for children's mathematics achievement, which again did not support the hypothesis that students from families with high parental involvement would have higher mathematics achievements." There are several studies like this.

Most of the correlational analyses I can find on the net cite a significant, but relatively low (less than 0.4) correlation between parental involvement and they are not filtering out socioeconomic status, so they mainly tell us that rich folks spend more time with their kids and not how important parental invovlement is.

If we are going to have professional educators, it would make sense to place most, but not all, of the burden on them to do the educating.

I see it like this: the management of a company is responsible, at the end of the day, for the profitability of the company. They can "blame" their employees or the family situation of their employees if they like, but at the end of the day it is obvious where the responsibility lies. In education, it's similar. We can blame students and their families all you like, but the primary responsibility lies with teachers and administrators. If at the end of the day the schools are failing (and they are), it is they who have failed to perform their primary job function by overcoming these barriers. In my experience, good teachers produce results even in bad situations. Unfortunately, my observation is that a minority of teachers are good -- perhaps 10%.

I know of a geek grrl who's much interested in CS. Her name is Sacha Chua, currently studying at the Ateneo de Manila University. She's been making waves in the local CS scene here in the Philippines, as well as international stuff. She's one of the members of the academic team who won the Microsoft .NET BEST contest held recently, in fact. Ironically, she's a big advocate of Linux and Open Source (and Emacs!). She's recently awarded as a special science awardee in my school, aside from running for Cum Laude honors.

She also started three AskSlashdot main threads: 1 2 3

You might find her essays about girls into CS insightful: Essay 1 | Essay 2 (taken from her science awards nomination thingees)

I know of a geek grrl who's much interested in CS. Her name is Sacha Chua, currently studying at the Ateneo de Manila University. She's been making waves in the local CS scene here in the Philippines, as well as international stuff. She's one of the members of the academic team who won the Microsoft .NET BEST contest held recently, in fact. Ironically, she's a big advocate of Linux and Open Source (and Emacs!). She's recently awarded as a special science awardee in my school, aside from running for Cum Laude honors.

She also started three AskSlashdot main threads: 1 2 3

You might find her essays about girls into CS insightful: Essay 1 | Essay 2 (taken from her science awards nomination thingees)

I know of a geek grrl who's much interested in CS. Her name is Sacha Chua, currently studying at the Ateneo de Manila University. She's been making waves in the local CS scene here in the Philippines, as well as international stuff. She's one of the members of the academic team who won the Microsoft .NET BEST contest held recently, in fact. Ironically, she's a big advocate of Linux and Open Source (and Emacs!). She's recently awarded as a special science awardee in my school, aside from running for Cum Laude honors.

She also started three AskSlashdot main threads: 1 2 3

You might find her essays about girls into CS insightful: Essay 1 | Essay 2 (taken from her science awards nomination thingees)

A very interesting distribution that was recently developed at the Ateneo de Manila University called AdmuLinuxGO seems to be a very good distribution for newbies who aren't really sure they want to go the Linux way. It's the only distribution I know about that you can run completely from the CD, no on hard disk installation is needed. It's a great distribution for newbies to try, as it doesn't really require any installation at all, you simply boot from the CD and you get a complete graphical Linux development system.

We do our own software development, working with PHP, Perl, Java, and a few other cool things. It's a terrific opportunity to develop our skills in network administration and programming. We've even done some outsourced projects.

We get a lot of volunteers and we do our own training, which usually means that newbies get a quick walkthrough and some pointers about documentation.

So let's take those points one by one..

1. Be vindictive to other students in the dorm

   Who, us? Let's see. Occasionally people blatantly break the rules, like when they port-swap or download banned images, but we handle those cases rationally.

   I don't think there has yet been a case of abuse of power around here. If there were, then the other sysads would probably step in and reprimand the person. We're all in the dorm, anyway. It's rather hard to hide, yes? =)

2. Do something illegal like script kiddying themselves to a DoS

   Okay. Sysadmining is a matter of trust. Only a few people have shell accounts and (naturally) even fewer have root. Script kiddies are dealt with harshly because it's clearly prohibited by our policies. One of the sysads goes over to the script-kiddie's room and has a niiiice, long talk with him/her. People who misbehave even with the warning get taken off the network.

3. Fill bandwidth with quake and/or MP3's and have other students be completely powerless against loss of bandwidth

   Hmm. Lots of people play Counterstrike over the network, and it does tend to cause a lot of collisions. =) But the network's still pretty fast. We don't shape packets to.. discourage.. these things.

4. Be very unprofessional and unable to fix problems quickly, and finally

   You give students too little credit. =) Network problems are fixed as soon as the responsible sysad is free (we have people assigned to certain locations). Activating someone's account takes one day. Network troubleshooting - depends on the kind of problem, of course.

   We don't do computer maintenance, since the students are in charge of that. We keep the network up and running, and we look for ways to improve it. We try to avoid problems whenever possible. =)

5. Not be organized enough because of the high level of turnaround in students (every four years!).

   That's why training is very important. The seniors will be graduating soon, but other people are being trained. We place a lot of emphasis on creating a low-maintainance, hassle-free system that makes it easier for succeeding batches to admin the network.

You got that right. But it's fun and it's experience and it's a cool excuse to work with Linux and all sorts of other nifty things. I get to meet other geeks. I like that. =) or a free for all for students who wouldn't care about the users. Well, that part I'd disagree with. Although we're there to keep the network running, our job's really to help people connect.

I really don't mean to troll nor am I bitter about dorm living, I just haven't met many cool dorm student representitives.

Ah, don't worry about that. Maybe you're just looking in the wrong place. =)

We do our own software development, working with PHP, Perl, Java, and a few other cool things. It's a terrific opportunity to develop our skills in network administration and programming. We've even done some outsourced projects.

We get a lot of volunteers and we do our own training, which usually means that newbies get a quick walkthrough and some pointers about documentation.

So let's take those points one by one..

1. Be vindictive to other students in the dorm

   Who, us? Let's see. Occasionally people blatantly break the rules, like when they port-swap or download banned images, but we handle those cases rationally.

   I don't think there has yet been a case of abuse of power around here. If there were, then the other sysads would probably step in and reprimand the person. We're all in the dorm, anyway. It's rather hard to hide, yes? =)

2. Do something illegal like script kiddying themselves to a DoS

   Okay. Sysadmining is a matter of trust. Only a few people have shell accounts and (naturally) even fewer have root. Script kiddies are dealt with harshly because it's clearly prohibited by our policies. One of the sysads goes over to the script-kiddie's room and has a niiiice, long talk with him/her. People who misbehave even with the warning get taken off the network.

3. Fill bandwidth with quake and/or MP3's and have other students be completely powerless against loss of bandwidth

   Hmm. Lots of people play Counterstrike over the network, and it does tend to cause a lot of collisions. =) But the network's still pretty fast. We don't shape packets to.. discourage.. these things.

4. Be very unprofessional and unable to fix problems quickly, and finally

   You give students too little credit. =) Network problems are fixed as soon as the responsible sysad is free (we have people assigned to certain locations). Activating someone's account takes one day. Network troubleshooting - depends on the kind of problem, of course.

   We don't do computer maintenance, since the students are in charge of that. We keep the network up and running, and we look for ways to improve it. We try to avoid problems whenever possible. =)

5. Not be organized enough because of the high level of turnaround in students (every four years!).

   That's why training is very important. The seniors will be graduating soon, but other people are being trained. We place a lot of emphasis on creating a low-maintainance, hassle-free system that makes it easier for succeeding batches to admin the network.

You got that right. But it's fun and it's experience and it's a cool excuse to work with Linux and all sorts of other nifty things. I get to meet other geeks. I like that. =) or a free for all for students who wouldn't care about the users. Well, that part I'd disagree with. Although we're there to keep the network running, our job's really to help people connect.

I really don't mean to troll nor am I bitter about dorm living, I just haven't met many cool dorm student representitives.

Ah, don't worry about that. Maybe you're just looking in the wrong place. =)