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Would the BSA looking at the files on every computer on a University campus be a violation of FERPA? Many University sysadmins feel that FERPA covers providing access to student's files/programs/emails as well as grade reports and other personal information since they can be held to be a form of student record; the FERPA act is deliberately vague on this. Some security experts even advise not providing copies of files to police without a warrant or subpoena. So the BSA prowling around on student-accessed computers would violate the privacy of every student on campus, no? Or are they 'acting in the interests of the University'?

What a marketing strategy for Hollywood - get the Federal Government to start pushing their products. Wow. Does anyone still think Congress isn't for sale?

What if Congress was this interested in promoting education and science instead of movies? You would be better off.

What is "Computer Literate"? How do you determine if someone is "Computer Literate"?

I'm seriously asking you seriously, not with any sarcasm. Does Computer Literate and Computer skills mean that they can make word documents? Does it mean they can use MS Outlook? (If it does, then I'm not computer literate because I've never used MS Outlook and never bothered learning MS Word. But, I can use Star Office and Netscape) I did find this paper which may be helpful and does address this question for you. I would seriously stress the idea of truly evaluating what using a computer really means. I think when you folks boil stuff down you'll end up teaching searching and researching techniques as well as basic e-mail concepts... really... the thought process behind forming a good search isn't intuitive to everyone it involves a very basic understanding of set theory and many poorly educated kids will have no clue what that means but it could be valuable to teach them.

Think "Library Science" and you might be heading in the right direction for "Computer Literacy". Offer the course in an "at your own pace" format if you can. Make it so the smart kids can finish in a week and the not-so-smart can take a whole semester if they need to.

As for more advanced IT topics, are you going to teach System Administration? Web Development? Programming? PC Repair and troubleshooting?

As for programming I reccommend taht you consider Pre-Calc as a prerequisite. I've taught programming to students who hadn't been introduced to the concept of a "function" without the mental tool of the "function" in the student's head your programming instructor will have a hell of a time. Some of my student's didn't know what a variable was and it was very hard to progress past "Hello World" with those students... and this was a COLLEGE class... albiet the Adult Education section.

I run junkbuster as my proxy server, and it has the neat feature of setting the User-Agent string. I've encountered a few sites that falsely claim to not support my browser (and would I please upgrade to something on a windows machine..), so I've taken to changing my ua string to "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)".

no complaints yet, except hotmail freaks out and displays a 2 inch textarea for message editing.

Personally, as a Finn, I would never consider moving to a place where

• over 20% of adults are having trouble reading
• corporate interests result in laws like the DMCA
• the foreign policy threatens the safety of the entire world
• etc...

Well, to each his own, I guess.

PS. The $42000 speeding fines were recently dropped to about $5000 in court.. ;-)

Most college financial aid offices will take special circumstances (such as sudden and recent job loss) into consideration when calculating financial aid. See this Dept. of Education document, as well as the financial aid offices of colleges your kid wishes to attend, for more information.

Can that happen?
I know this sounds a bit naïve, but there are some places were I feel
I shouldn't have to see ads. My taxes (as much of a pittance that they are)
pay for post offices among other things. Why should the post office then need
get funding from elsewhere? I would be willing to pay 35 cents for a stamp if
it meant not having to see ads in the post office, just as I would pay more
taxes to make sure there aren't
any ads in schools

Children at this age are not capable to defend themselves from the lure of the computer gaming commercials.
They need the help of grown-ups not to fall for computer games and become addicted. Probably most underaged slashdot readers are already overstrained with processing all the information they found on the internet.
When they are exposed to computer game propagandizing sites they'll have no chance against the psychological tricks used there and fall for computer gaming addiction at once.
Personally I think posting such stories here is totally irresponsible of the slashdot editors.
Therefore I beg you to stop it.
It's for the future of the generations to come.

Well, I was all set to jump in here to trash this thing and thought, "How are they going to measure the effect of this?" Politicians like nothing better than to throw some of your money down a black hole, and nobody knows if it was a net benefit (other than the folks who got the computers.)

So I go to look at the Maine educational stats , thinking that it is some sort of backwater, lagging behind Arkansas. I was quite suprised to find that the average scores are all above the national average. ALL the scores are all solidy above average.

So I need to rethink this. Maybe they are smart enough already, and don't need computers. Maybe they will do and learn very clever things with these laptops.

Oh, the other interesting thing on the gov's web site.
Students at all three grades who reported using the Internet at home had higher average scores than those who indicated they did not use the Internet.
Other than the disingenuously scaled graphic, they forget the basic statistical principle, "Correlation does not imply causality"

You might be better off saying "Smarter kids use the Internet more." Or the two may have nothing to do with each other.

Well, I was all set to jump in here to trash this thing and thought, "How are they going to measure the effect of this?" Politicians like nothing better than to throw some of your money down a black hole, and nobody knows if it was a net benefit (other than the folks who got the computers.)

So I go to look at the Maine educational stats , thinking that it is some sort of backwater, lagging behind Arkansas. I was quite suprised to find that the average scores are all above the national average. ALL the scores are all solidy above average.

So I need to rethink this. Maybe they are smart enough already, and don't need computers. Maybe they will do and learn very clever things with these laptops.

Oh, the other interesting thing on the gov's web site.
Students at all three grades who reported using the Internet at home had higher average scores than those who indicated they did not use the Internet.
Other than the disingenuously scaled graphic, they forget the basic statistical principle, "Correlation does not imply causality"

You might be better off saying "Smarter kids use the Internet more." Or the two may have nothing to do with each other.

However, regardless of the vendor, dumping technology into the schools is not going to necessarily benefit or improve our schools (assuming this is the background motivation for Microsoft's proposed penalty settlement). We've learned this lesson already!

Red Hat's proposal is a step in the right direction in terms of broadening the vision. Let's not lose sight of the background goal - something beyond just punishing Microsoft. We should take Red Hat's proposal a couple of steps further...

1. The schools need teachers that know what to do with all the technology being unloaded on them. Microsoft should also provide funds for teacher training, toward how to use technology in their classrooms and beyond, using sound pedagogy.
2. There is not enough good educational software out available on any platform (unix-linux-xbsd, MacOS, Windows). Microsoft should also establish a fund that rewards development of open source educational (or education support) software. Perhaps, money can be awarded through a competitive proposal process or an annual contest for best of class software in a number of defined categories. Of course, all developer participants would contribute their work as Open Source projects.

   There have been small-scale exemplars of this seed funding approach by NSF (NEEDS), Dept of Education (ERIC), and even Apple (of old - when HyperCard was hot).

The score changes from the 1996 test show only a statistical difference in the 12th grade results, and these differences are marginal at best. Even within the statistically different 12th grade results, the only statistical change was in the group that scored in the 50-percentile (a promising stat from that figure is that there was a statictically significant increase in the top performing 8th graders).

One graph that I found troubling was the one showing the numbers above and below basic proficiency levels for the 12th graders, where the numbers falling below understanding the basics increased. We can hope that this is a statistical fluctuation and not the start of a trend.

By the way, the web site is very impressive in how much information is presented from the test question to the error on the test results. My biggest beef with statistics reported in the media is that they either never give error bars, or they'll ignore the errors; they'll report political poll results as one candidate ahead in the polls even if that person is ahead by less than the margin of error (this leads to the whole topic of basic ignorance of relative risk and you don't want to get me going on that rant!).

The score changes from the 1996 test show only a statistical difference in the 12th grade results, and these differences are marginal at best. Even within the statistically different 12th grade results, the only statistical change was in the group that scored in the 50-percentile (a promising stat from that figure is that there was a statictically significant increase in the top performing 8th graders).

One graph that I found troubling was the one showing the numbers above and below basic proficiency levels for the 12th graders, where the numbers falling below understanding the basics increased. We can hope that this is a statistical fluctuation and not the start of a trend.

By the way, the web site is very impressive in how much information is presented from the test question to the error on the test results. My biggest beef with statistics reported in the media is that they either never give error bars, or they'll ignore the errors; they'll report political poll results as one candidate ahead in the polls even if that person is ahead by less than the margin of error (this leads to the whole topic of basic ignorance of relative risk and you don't want to get me going on that rant!).

The score changes from the 1996 test show only a statistical difference in the 12th grade results, and these differences are marginal at best. Even within the statistically different 12th grade results, the only statistical change was in the group that scored in the 50-percentile (a promising stat from that figure is that there was a statictically significant increase in the top performing 8th graders).

One graph that I found troubling was the one showing the numbers above and below basic proficiency levels for the 12th graders, where the numbers falling below understanding the basics increased. We can hope that this is a statistical fluctuation and not the start of a trend.

By the way, the web site is very impressive in how much information is presented from the test question to the error on the test results. My biggest beef with statistics reported in the media is that they either never give error bars, or they'll ignore the errors; they'll report political poll results as one candidate ahead in the polls even if that person is ahead by less than the margin of error (this leads to the whole topic of basic ignorance of relative risk and you don't want to get me going on that rant!).

The score changes from the 1996 test show only a statistical difference in the 12th grade results, and these differences are marginal at best. Even within the statistically different 12th grade results, the only statistical change was in the group that scored in the 50-percentile (a promising stat from that figure is that there was a statictically significant increase in the top performing 8th graders).

One graph that I found troubling was the one showing the numbers above and below basic proficiency levels for the 12th graders, where the numbers falling below understanding the basics increased. We can hope that this is a statistical fluctuation and not the start of a trend.

By the way, the web site is very impressive in how much information is presented from the test question to the error on the test results. My biggest beef with statistics reported in the media is that they either never give error bars, or they'll ignore the errors; they'll report political poll results as one candidate ahead in the polls even if that person is ahead by less than the margin of error (this leads to the whole topic of basic ignorance of relative risk and you don't want to get me going on that rant!).

• Female students had higher average scores than their male peers.
• Students eligible for the free/reduced price lunch program had lower average scores than students not eligible for this program.
• Generally, the higher the level of parental education reported by students, the higher the average writing scores.
• Students who reported saving, or whose teachers saved, their writing work in folders or portfolios had higher average scores than students whose work was not saved.
• Students at grades 8 and 12 who were always asked to write more than one draft of a paper had higher average scale scores than did their peers who were sometimes or never asked to do so.

It might still be interesting to see the long-term trend assessment that's planned for next year.

Several students at my school, Leland High, decided that we should undertake a challenge unlike any other. A goal was set to be the first high school to launch a satellite into outer space and have it communicate back with earth, as vaguely mentioned in a Slashback. This particular program is called Cubesat, but only consisted exclusively of universities and private corporations/citizens until we came along.

Much like the engineers in this article, we are using off-the-shelf parts to build our satellite, albeit not from Radio Shack since Radio Shacks don't seem to carry much in San Jose. The antenna we are designing exemplifies the simplicity of the components. In theory, guitar string or the wire used in braces would do the job easily. Our power system is even more simple: d-sized lithium batteries (non-rechargable) linked together.

The parts for our Cubesat will cost less than $5,000, more likely less than $1,000. We are hoping that our prototype will function properly during a test launch on an amateur rocket. After that, designing the antenna configuration (for those who are knowledgable about radio, our cube-shaped satellite forms a poor ground plane and we are also confined to a difficult broadcast frequency) and internal layout (to ensure that our satellite has a perfect center of gravity).

You can reach the webpage for the Leland Cubesat team here. Be forewarned, some of the information is slightly out of date at the moment. I will do my best to fix that as soon as possible, but priorities lie elsewhere at the moment.

No one is forced to eat there, do business there, or work there, but they're somehow super oppressive and evil.

Whoever modded this up to 5 must have been reading too much Ayn Rand. In fact, if these companies force competitors out of business, I am essentially forced to eat there. (Yes, I know, I can go home and make myself a sandwich, but you get the point.)

When it comes to real estate, marketing, etc., these corporation have an incredible amount of power compared to the competition. Now those who are wont to jump for joy at this display of capitalism in action should take note of a few things.

The ability to drive out competition can have nothing to do with quality or service. Merely the ability to pay higher rents, etc., until the competition leaves.

The short-term "benefits" of these megacorps often hide long-term effects that we will pay for long after this crop of shareholders cashes in on their stock dividends. An example is the loss of rainforest land and subsequent reduction in biodiversity due to slash and burn cattle ranching.

This is one of the main problems with capitalism as practised today. Cheap, short-term solutions can almost always win out by hiding expenses in long-term issues that aren't considered. If companies had to pay taxes based on those cost (e.g., throw-away packaging, strip mining), then we wouldn't see some of quality of life issues that plague us today.

And we want the government to be super-powerful to protect us from the corporate evil, but it'll never occur to us that the government's power might be used against us.

The best way to combat this possibility is not by donning fatigues and joining the local survivalists, but by staying involved in a government by the people.

1996, you say? Interesting. The High Performance Computing Act of 1991 paid for increasing network backbone infrastructure over the next 5 years. Perhaps there's a connection? However, I seem to remember some guy getting a whole lot of shit for taking credit.

TCP/IP. HTTP. graphical web browsers. What do these things have in common? Answer: they were all created with government funding.

I filed my taxes online this year. I'm filing for student aid online this year - did you know you could do that? They do the whole process online, right down to your digital signature. I can renew my Texas driver's license online.

In fact, I can't think of a single interaction I've had with state or federal governments in the last year that I haven't been able to do entirely online. I'm not quite sure where that $225 million is going, but I don't like it. Instead of making more services accessible, they should give Senators and Representatives e-training classes to make them more aware of current issues and get them to check their friggin' e-mails. Start there, before throwing more money at the problem.

America has slowly become more aware of school violence in the past decade. This is perhaps a poor assessment of the reality: "less that 1% of all homicides among school-aged children (5-19 years of age) occur in or around school grounds or on the way to and from school." In addition, about 2% of all serious disciplinary offenses occurring in schools, during school hours were violent altercations involving a firearm or other weapon; approximately 105 violent deaths (1994 to 1996) (85 of which considered murder) occurred on campuses in a two year period, not all of them necessarily deliberate or with a gun. Perhaps a crusade against heart disease would save more lives than against school shootings, but the vivid imagery of "the media" presents school violence as a serious problem. While school violence is a problem, it is not the problem; the value placed upon school violence is absurd. Despite any irrationality behind its hubbub, school violence illuminates a more complex problem than bloodshed in schools. School violence demonstrates an utter depravity and lack of humanitarianism in the current generation; the carnage in schools represents a more acute difficulty than the deaths of 105 students. The carnage in schools represents the cruelty of an idle humanity.

America has, in a sense, become too luxurious for its own good. It has stagnated. Up until the end of World War II, America was occupied. The American Revolution, westerly expansion, the Civil War, industrialization, the Spanish-American War, World War I, a quick bout of depression, and World War II all kept America's hands full for almost 200 years. America is similar, in many ways, to the Roman Empire: it grew and grew, always occupied with an invasion (three Punic Wars kept Rome busy for almost 200 years, for instance) or further expansion. Rome's breaking point was reached, however, and its modus operandi failed it. An idle Senate and great class-battles weakened Rome, allowing northern barbarians to take over. The U.S. grew and was constantly occupied, mainly with fighting, but has reached the limit of the capitalist mode; like Rome, the classes have massive contrast, and, like Rome, there is no overriding societal goal. In short, America has ADHD and nothing to do.

The only solution for so great a problem - the dawdling of a society - is collapse. Society is a phoenix, and it hastily approaches its nadir. America has two choices: either attempt a societal, cultural, and political revolution and suffer the fate of Bolshevik Russia; or accept its own demise gracefully and come out that much the better for it.

Sources:
CDC Media: Facts About Violence Among Youth and Violence in Schools
U.S. Department of Education: Principal/School Disciplinarian Survey on School Violence (see second table)

I think this explains why girls do better than boys when younger, but worse later, in education. Girls are good at doing routine tasks. It has been scientifically shown that they have a higher boredom threshhold. However, boys desire stimulation, and so the pre teen education system disadvantages them.

I'd love a citation on this.

I know you're just a bullshit troll, but I'm still calling you out on the bogus gender stereotypes.

Just so this isn't a one-sided game, here's an article from US News about how women now outnumber men in higher education. And here's a report from the US Department of Education's Education Statistics Quarterly that suggests that girls continue to excel in verbal skills relative to boys at all ages, and that there's no statistically significant difference in their achievment in math and sciences.

Kinda shoots down your central assumption ("girls do better than boys when younger, but worse later, in education").

Any response?

-Isaac

The conservatives in the US are horrified at the k-12 educational system.

So are the (intelligent) liberals. The difference is that the conservatives want to give up on public education (via vouchers) while the liberals want to fix it.

It wouldn't need fixing at all if "intelligent liberals" hadn't broken it to begin with.

Look back in time. Rich kids get more textbooks. Rich kids eat better meals so they learn better. Just look at the statistics of childhood wealth vs. college education! The dept. of Education has a lot of it right there.

Please, whatever you do, don't make your sites like the FAFSA on the Web site.

Everything I go there I can't believe it is a government site. In fact, when I first went there I was very hesitant to type in my information because I was sure I wasn't in the right place. I'm not saying that government sites have to be bland, but I think they should have a certain amount of respectability.

Assuming students have no Constitutional rights, privacy, or due process is ludicrous. The reality is that every student has these rights, just most willfully waive them to save time. Being a resident of California, where this particular event occurred, I can promise you that this student did not suffer any of these problems, unless he verbally agreed ahead of time.

I wish it were that simple. The Supreme Court has rolled back student freedoms considerably since the Tinker decision (which said freedoms don't stop at the schoolhouse door). Most notable is the Hazelwood decision (1989) which limits the freedom of the student press.

There's a pretty good (albeit old) discussion of Hazelwood at:

http://www.ed.gov/databas es/ ERIC_Digests/ed321253.html

Some states (and I believe CA is one) have laws which affirm student freedoms. However, and I think unfortunately, the SC is moving in the other direction.

best,
cbd.

Everybody knows that France has faced a similar problem for years. The French People keep using English words like "internet" and "computer," which goes against their policy of having a Perfect Language.

Thank goodness somebody found a solution. Simply declare the language dead and all is solved.

The remarks of the U.S.Secretary of Education were made in conjunction with the release of the department's Safeguarding Our Children action guide.

Note on that page two important things:

• the term he uses is "mechanical profiling", not "behavioral profiling" -- which sounds more like automated profiling like Mosaic 2000 than anonymous tip lines like WAVE
• he also says that schools "should make sure that all school staff and community members know the early warning signs, use them for identification and referral purposes", which sounds pretty close to what Pinkerton would claim WAVE America is all about

So, this story is perhaps relevant to the WAVE problem, it doesn't necessarily reflect totally good news. I suppose reading the action guide itself will let us know for sure.

If indeed FAFSA on the web refuses to allow all 4.x versions of Netscape for Linux, I suggest writing to the U.S. Department of Education through the web form at http://www.fafsa.ed.gov/contact.htm.

The Department of Education, along with other Federal agencies, is putting a great deal of effort into electronic access to government services. You can see the education piece of this at http://www.students.gov, the Access America for students page. There are links from there to other agencies including the IRS and the Department of State.

Given this situation, I think the Department of Education will be value and act upon suggestions for improvement from technically savvy Linux users who happen to be up and coming college students (and thus, customers).

One of the comments on the LinuxToday Story mentioned the the Dept of Education's FAFSA site has similar browser issues. For those of you that aren't US college students, FAFSA is the federal student aid form required for almost any kind of financial assistance. I'm home for winter break and don't have access to my linux box right now so could someone verify if this is still the case? If so, this is an infinitly more important cause than Fox's site.

I could have sworn I too had seen at least one study demonstrating a negative correlation between education and religion. But for the life of me, I can't come up with the evidence.

In fact, the 1996 National Household Education Survey on adult civic involvement in the US seems to counter that idea.

According to that study, the percentage of people who attend religious services at least once a month holds pretty steady across all levels of education. Unfortunately there's no breakdown of how conservative/fundamentalist those various religious services are, so it's hardly definitive proof. But it does make me wonder a little.