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School Internet Program Audit Shows Fraud and Waste
uid0mako writes "CNN is reporting on the abuses of E-rate. E-rate is a government-sponsored program that provides discounted Internet access and internal connection gear such as wiring, adaptors and servers to underprivileged schools. One of the incidents includes $24 million spent on 74000 wireless network cards that never left the loading dock."
What, fraud and corruption in a government run program paid for by the little guy? I find this so hard to believe!
*note to the sarcasm imparied: my tongue was firmly in cheek.
Who said that they needed to leave the loading dock? Aren't they wireless?
Har.
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
How many journalists and lawmakers will play the 'Won't someone think of the children' card?
24000000 / 74000 = ~$324/NIC
guess they weren't buying Netgear cards at that price... ouch!
... with 74000 wireless network cards? Creating an geomagnetic field disturbance for science class?
I hope they get punished adequately for this. Companies never seem to learn that such acts - if discovered - will be hazardous to their business.
A blog like any other.
Shortly after this program started, one of our local schools wired itself, and oh-so-coincidentally did it in a way that required recarpeting and painting the entire place to repair the "construction damage". All paid for out of the fund of course. I'll bet there are ten times more little scams like this that add up to way more than the big noticable ones.
Friends don't let friends do bad math:
24M / 74K = ~324.
I have watched the e-Rate program since its inception, and am neck-deep in it now...this sort of thing happens over and over again. It is a multi-billion-dollar boondoggle, typical government program. Schools are forced to hire entire staffs, or outsource, just to fill out the hundreds of pages of paperwork. The end result? Rejection, or perhaps more paperwork. But in any case, all of those billions are funneled to IT giants like Microsoft and IBM, as well as the Telecom companies that are given "preference" for their stone-age T1 technology. Want to put in your own glass fiber between buildings? Not covered by e-Rate, because that would step on the phone company's toes. Better to lease a dozen T1 lines, in their eyes. The whole thing needs to be gamma-irradiated and shot into deep space...and the "Universal Service Fee" that covers it eliminated.
He was talking about a school system in Arizona (I believe) that spent some ridiculous amount on a system from IBM that was so complicated, the school system couldn't maintain it. The best part was how IBM "forsaw" that this would happen, and charged and additional $27M to build a "lavish support center" that the teachers could call for tech support.
What the hell's wrong with these people!?! (Not IBM, I think that part is hilarious)
Nuke Gay Whales for Jesus.
I'll keep this in mind when I get my next phone bill and notice the 30% taxes added on to it. At least half of that is the "Gore Tax", which was put to such great use as we see. Now that almost all American public schools have their intarweb installed, I see no reason to continue this financial rape of the public. This program should be phased out, since it has clearly outlived its usefulness. It's nothing less than irresponsible to suggest that a federal tax be used to pay the monthly internet bills for schools and libraries (neither of which are supposed to be federally controlled to begin with).
Ahh.. i can dream atleast...
Hmmm.
Slashot is a write-mostly medium.
I did the calculations and didn't believe them so I did it in excel. I saw your post and was about to reply and said woops $324 - you know in calculus you the first test to determine if the numbers are correct is to just look and see if they are plausible - well I shouldn't have done that. Man I need to get a sales job like that.
Is not an entierly bad idea, but its not being done properly.
First off, not every kid should have an internet connection. Period. The Internet is not sesame street (which every kid SHOULD have.) In fact, I consider it more like the streets of NYC, at night, in the bad part of town.
Its simply not safe for kids to have un-guided access while at school. Blocking programs are even worse. As such, internet connections should be wide open and subjet to constant teacher review. Perhaps a single lab, with all monitors in view of the proctor would be considered adequate.
The rest of the money here is simply wasted. The current problems with america's education system is epidemic. Youve got underpaid, unmotivated and uneducated teachers, attempting to simply control a group of apathetic and uncaring students, who have little to no motivation and guidance from their gaurdians. The problem cannot be pinned on any single group. Everyone is messing up here, equally.
And as Americas education system continues to collapse the nation will be seriously hurt by this. A nation of unmotivated morons cannot compete with.. well.. india. Nor should we be able to. I dont know if youve looked at the job market in minute detail, but a major part of the problem is that people are too incompetant to do the job.
no
Education bureaucrats waste large amounts of money.
In other news, the sky was reportedly blue this morning and there seems to be a large amount of water west of Oregon.
More late-breaking news as it becomes available. We now return you to your regularly scheduled argument about text editors.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
I just finished high school at a public school. This is not at all uncommon. They spent $50k on a lab for the CCNA students and found the two worst teachers I have ever had to teach it. Both were underqualified and took the same 4 semester course over the space of 2 weeks. Obviously, they passed the class instead of learned the material, and it showed. Of the 18 students who started the first year (myself included), only 3 made it to the next year, Semester 3. Cheating was rampant on tests as the teacher thought his time was better spent ticking out emails and doing lesson plans for his biology classes than enforcing anti cheating measures.
After the 15/18 failure rate, he was replaced the next year. This new teacher was even more awful. He took the course the same way, and used us remaining 3 students to "help him" rebuild the lab. This involved taking old donated computers from the A+ lab and making them seaworthy for the class. Oh, and grabbing some old desks from the woodshop on the other side of the campus and doing chimp work with a drill to make them able to stand. Of the 3 remaining second year students, all of us dropped out. Of his 24 first year students, all of them dropped out as well.
These wastes of money were apparant, we got these expensive routers and bridges and our teachers were unable to answer simple questions about them. Useless, I think the routers ended up being shipped to another school so they could try their hand at the CCNA program.
Oh, and other schools in the district have had the CCNA program for a few years, and are turning out graduates due to good (suprise!) teachers.
Click here for a free picture of an iPod!
Why the surprise?
This is just another line charge placed on the American taxpayer designed to make some elected official either "feel" that he or she is "trying to make a difference" in the lives of some poor students. What a waste of the taxpayers money!
When will the dialogue in the US ever turn to spending cuts and elimination of wasteful programs in order to solve tax revenue shortfalls?
from cnn: The cards were purchased in 1999 for about $24 million, including supposed installation charges. The price is with installation charges included.
"The program, run by the FCC and administered by a not-for-profit corporation, is widely credited for helping poor and rural schools get wired, giving students better learning tools." ..
Of all the problems with poor and rural schools, they spend money on this? Technology is a good thing, but when my rural school only had an 800 average SAT score (of the people motivated enough to take it), you have to wonder why resources get wasted like this.
Anyone know what the heck they are going to do with all those wireless cards? Surely they aren't going to continue to sit at the warehouse.
The article also mentions nothing about what is going to happen to the institution and companies involved. Is it just me or are news articles a little week now a days? or is it that peoples' attention span has shorten and so too must the articles?
a) 1996 - Gore/Clinton tax *your* phone bill to "put internet on every school"
b) Any school can spend whatever money and get the ERATE fund to reimburse the school
Waste and abuse happens because this tax should not even have existed to begin with. If school districts had to spend their own money, based on *local* taxation, this sort of careless purchasing would not happen.
You vote for politicians who introduce taxes, you bring this upon yourself.
The next pasture is always greener
My friends who are teachers confirm that nothing has changed. So this article comes as no surprise.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
I think we need to get George Bush more directly involved to find out what's going on here and to ask the really tough questions like, "Is our children learning?"
This is called "Trickle down economics". The Teamsters get the cash, and it trickles down to the rest of us
Never underestimate the bandwidth of 74000 network cards on a truck that has never left the loading dock.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
It's a shame that there appears to be so much abuse of this programme. Sometimes I wonder if these types of programmes are really necessary, though. Mostly out of interest, what kinds of advantages do children actually get out of having computers in schools? By themselves the use of computers certainly doesn't cover the primary topics that schools are usually expected to teach, so presumably there's some expectation that having them there will either hugely benefit children in some other way, or will positively enhance the effects existing teaching.
I guess that in theory children can get used to having them around. To some extent it means that computers would be available for someone who might be able to learn from them extensively if they wouldn't have been able to otherwise. But is anyone out there aware of any actual research that demonstrates that computers in schools results in a verifiable positive return? (Keeping in mind that lots of people who never had computers in school were simply trained in the workplace.)
I don't mean to criticise, but I ask because I see a lot of people and governments claiming that it's a good thing. On the other hand, I haven't actually seen much evidence or that much that might convince me that we're much better off than we were a few years ago, when significantly fewer schools had access to computers.
I also don't mean to imply that maybe schools shouldn't have computers at all --- only that pouring vast amounts of money into actively supporting an infrastructure that deprecates so quickly might not be very effective. If the availability of technology means that most of people will already end up having reasonable computers in their homes within the next decade anyway, then pushing them so much in schools could be quite obsolete.
John Ashcroft. Why? Because, apparently he is the cause of all the woes in the USA... oh and George Bush too... (BTW that's sarcasm!)
There should not be ANY fraud! Oh wait....this is government funded pork.. I forgot.
Gorkman
That took advantage of this program. Our district received a massive government grant (in excess of 20 million? I think). This was of course split up between 5 seperate smaller districts in small towns. Each one of these districts had an elementary, middle school, and high school. In addition there was a Vocation School. This money from the government lead to a massive revamp of IT services in all those schools which included:
-Connecting 5 towns to the Vocation School with redundant fiber lines
-Purchasing top notch routing and server equipment for each of the schools
-purchasing in excess of 200 brand new computers for each building
-and the founding of an Internet Service Provider which server the area as a dial up provider and as the central hub that tied the schools together.
It also led to the vocational school receiving much needed tech upgrades to CS labs and the Photo and Design Mac labs.
When this government money is well spent, it can be a great force for good. But once a unscrupulous contracter gets his hands on those kind of funs, these massive frauds occur.
Despite the fact that there are abuses, and they may be wide spread, I was part of a group of students who wired a dozen or so schools in the town where I went to college. we did the network diagrams, organized the groups, taught people how to do patch panels and the like.
:)
It was in the top three most rewarding experiences in my life, and one of the most valuable for jobs skills. it was a truly unique experience, and I would hate to see this go away because some people can't freaking be honest.
I'd be happy with oversight (lots of stuff needs oversight) but don't remove it. I heard that there was a proposal to just turn it into generic school grants or something, and I think that would be a mistake as well
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
...any time you have lifelong beauracrats running a program---they are more interested in prolonging the program than accomplishing anything. I believe we need to get back to the 19th century in terms of our government, where all federal jobs are up for replacement with each new administration. I know it would be a nightmare, but maybe someone would think it was time to cut some of the dead wood out instead of replacing it.
Don't be a looter...and yes, I know that it's spelled with an "A" instead of an "E".
Vi is better.
Actually, when you consider they're all contending for the same frequencies, even with spread-spectrum channel hopping, you're not going to get even close to the theoretical max with so many devices talking at the same time.
[In the days before switched circuits, you'd run into problems when you started nearing 50% of your bandwidth with ethernet... I don't know how much better the collision handling is in 802.11b/g, but I'm guessing it's not so good that it can handle 74k nodes simultaneously talking.]
And yes, I know the joke that you're alluding to -- but that one's accurate, and we still use it. [well, maybe not a whole station wagon full]
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I sure hope you're being sarcastic and that's not a kneejerk reaction. The problem isn't companies, the problem is SCHOOLS being morons and taking all this "free money" and spending it on multi-million dollar solutions when a $100 switch and a box of cable would fit their needs.
The real problem is that this all paid for through a tax on your phone bill (think: Universal Service Fee, meaning most people never realize how much they pay for it) and the structuring of the program encourages waste. "Buy the biggest and best things that you can so we can get good PR for helping the children!" Meanwhile, anyone who questions the program's merits stands a chance of being labeled "against education" or even a racist, since the program (supposedly) exists to help poorer schools.
A better article on this can be found at the New York Times.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
First, Kids need to read books at school. Google is great.... for the LITERATE. Now, I am programmer/analyst and my charge is to write the code that performs analysis on student test data. The results my programs output are factored into deciding wether or not a particular school/district is "making it" according to the Bush endorsed "No Child Left Behind Act". Billions of dollars of federal money are on the line. I am performing these analyses on my state issued Pentium III with 128 megs of RAM and a 15" monitor. I think this computer cost $3.49 at Comp USA. Some ass just allowed a purchase of 27 Meelion dollars worth of new fangled walkie-talkies and I can't get a flat screen or at least a $5 stick of RAM?
--Always, I mean never..., No I mean always check your references.--
It's our money of course, but what the heck? Just keep spending. If you disagree, you must be against the children.
...we should instead place our trust in all those benevolent capitalists, like Hitachi... ...oops, never mind. ;)
Look - a clear and serious fraud has been commited. People should be livid about this, even more so if this kind of behaviour is the norm. Just because it always happens doesn't make it right, and only pressure and accountability will ever sort the situation out. Shrugging the shoulders and going "so?" is really not all that helpful.
Cheers,
Ian
By turning all landowners into renters from the school board we have given these bureaucrats way too much power. Year after year landowners pour money into the school system even if they have never placed their children into the local system. This power imbalance can't be fixed without dropping property taxes and restoring property rights. Money is power and spending all of the money budgeted (and more) is the way you preserve the power. Our school systems have become a NEA jobs program first, an underfunded teachers retirement plan second, and an educational system third (if at all). Until we end tyranny and restore property right this will never be fixed. The power balanced is too skewed as long as the right to endlessly tax property exists.
What corruption in a school; Never. I thought all board members and administrators are highly educated. When they bought 10 trailers for my child and his friends to go to class in from "A construction company, Inc." whose president Bob Jones is heartbroken that their building is late. This is necessary because "His Construction, Inc." is over budget and 3 years late. As chairman of the for the construction company board Bob Jones is upset. I also just learned that the new building is almost finished but "His Inspecting, Inc." just found out that the new building is not up to code and needs 3 million to fix. Bob Jones as CEO and lead inspector commented that he is almost in tears.
I think that the never leaving the loading dock issue is the smallest issue here. the price should tell you that actually shipping these cards was probably irrelevant from the beginning.
wonder how much they spent on the access points...
Wow! I can't believe I get to do this one!
Let's See:
Insert Generic Sig Here:
This just tells us that soclialism requires audits, just like capitalism requires competition. More auditors and penalties for fraud would improve just about every department of government. More real competition would improve most of our private services.
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/ad-homine m.html
An Ad Hominem is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument. Typically, this fallacy involves two steps. First, an attack against the character of person making the claim, her circumstances, or her actions is made (or the character, circumstances, or actions of the person reporting the claim). Second, this attack is taken to be evidence against the claim or argument the person in question is making (or presenting).
The thing about the whole "won'tsomeonepleasethinkofthechildren" said in a mocking tone, repeating the old Simpson's joke, is that it's so frequently used as an excuse to not have to think about the children at all. Sometimes, just occasionally, they need thinking about.
The article and parent post are both talking about government waste. A little elaboration on the libertarian philosphy would have been nice, but the poster is dead-on.
At the bottom of the endless pile of paper work which characterizes all regulation lies a gun.
Alan Greenspan
As someone who works for the technology department in a rural school district, I can honestly say that I believe in E-rate. It has funded our past two network upgrades. Without it, we would be stuck on a painfully slow network with 100mb links to campuses and underpowered NT4 servers. In a rural district, large technology budgets are not a reality. We have worked up to what we have. Money from taxes is just not like it is in the city, yet we are at the forefront in this town. Our students are equipped to deal with technology in the business world, our teachers are being trained and constantly improving their skills, and we continue to strive to improve. This summer, E-rate has funded a large upgrade that will give every teacher a VoIP phone and all of the closet and core switches will be upgraded. We have long since been a 3com operation and are continuing. Our older closet switches, 3com SuperStack II's have been in operation for about six years and it is time for them to be replaced. They have run 24/7 and are starting to fail. Without E-rate the money to replace this equipment would simply not exist. There are always going to be those who abuse the system, but for us it has proven to help us keep up with San Antonio.
I used to do contract work for a Gov't agency, and they'd get shipments of computers that were four or five years old, still in the original box. More than half of them wouldn't even boot, and the ones that did were so hopelessly out of date...
Typical government stupidity/inefficiency. They pay too much because some dumbass senator snagged the contract for local pork, and then they spend YEARS deciding who needs "New" computers.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I was a high school student several years ago; most of my family works for public schools and I have heard a lot of great stories about how IT works or does not work for teachers and students. Here is the summary.
As far as I remember, IT was a total disaster in my school. We were able to get computers and get them setup; however there was no qualified support. There was no single person responsible for providing user assistance and doing system administration! When computers crashed, students were not really allowed to repair them, instead our librarians tried to come to the rescue; it took them hours and hours to fix a simple problem. Go figure.
When it came to security of networks and school computers, it was even worse. First of all, every damn computer had some sort of "cop" software installed that prevented access to "bad" sites. As a result, students were not research about breast cancer or human sexuality eventhough the pages came from dot GOV. The best part about it was the fact that students usually knew more than teachers and staff; boy, it was fun seeing old ladies trying to remove a picture of a naked chick from the background.
Then there were students who did not know what to do with computers due to the lack of knowledge. I went to a good school that was required to bus certain number of students from the inner city and other "problematic" areas in order to meet some sort of a standard. Some of these kids knew zero about computers and there was nobody in school who could teach them. At least several computers had to be replaced every year because a frustrated student's actions.
My girlfriend work for public schools in MA. The state of IT in her schools is simply pitiful. They have the oldest technology, and virtually no help. Two guys who are in charge of the system have no interest in making things work. When the schools receive new computers or software, there is not enough training provided; therefore, nobody can use them efficiently!
So what's the point? Well, the point is that you can waste government's money in many ways. Direct stealing is just one of them.
Any system has waste and abuse - that is human nature. The question is, is govt worse then private sector, or our views distorted by selective reporting (eg, the difference in ability to obtain public vs private records) political bias, etc The other thing - most of what we call "govt waste" seems to be run by small/med buisnesses, which, I would imagine, are mostly run by republicans... Is this fraud worse then CEOs using the company plane for ski trips ?
Have you ever bid on a government project in Puerto Rico? We did once. The RFP was so full of irregularities that inidicated the process was corrupt that we complained and the whole thing got shut down. It was clear that the winner of the process had been selected before the search began and they were local and weren't qualified to do the work. This sort of thing happens all over, but the most blatant case I ever saw was in PR.
Lasers Controlled Games!
I hate it when the government rips itself off by paying for things out of the wrong funds. That money should go for computer hardware (granted I think somone with a fucking brain should be making the purchasing decisions) not school repairs.
If the school looks like hell, then that should be a big clue sign that the government should, I don't know, GIVE THEM MONEY FOR THINGS THAT ARE USEFUL.
I don't know how they can spend so much on hardware, and not have a damn clue. I mean, if you've ever been to best buy, you should know better.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
common sense and (fiscally) conservative I've ever seen on Slashdot so far. Refreshing.
"If you are not liberal when you are 20, you have no heart. If you are not conservative when you are 40, you have no brain." -Winston Churchill
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
I myself am still in highschool, and I know that where I live, such acts by anyone to drain money from a school would be very upsetting to many people. Especially when you count in the fact that for the past several years the schools have had to make budget cuts and work with the funds that they get now. I am outraged by this companies action, and I hope that many of you are as well. The children in those schools may well determine the future of the human race, or whether there is a future.
Ah, you found me!
There was a great and depressing story in the Atlanta Journal about the Atlanta Public Schools mismanagement of $73 million in E-Rate funds a few weeks ago. Good read, if you have the time.
Here's a snippet:
Here's the link, minus soul-sucking registration:
A $73 million spending spree
Truly disgusting. Maybe they'll have an auction. I'd like to have a $100k Cisco router as a doorstop.
The only hassle was the NikeNet had to be reinstalled every morning and was sometimes stinky after gym.
I pray I am considered a conservative when I am 40.
What you don't think labels evolve over 20 years? Damned liberals want to give blacks rights...
Anyway, guess, who did she study to become, and is currently becoming? A Washington lobbyist! No kidding...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
We have an entire generation of compu-phobes, unable to install anti-virus software, unable to make their VCR clocks stop flashing 12:00, but they are masters at conceptual education and just -know- that (in the case of Michigan) giving every 6th grader a laptop is going to make all the difference in the world. They don't have a clue what these laptops can be used FOR, but they KNOW that it is important that every 6th grader knows how to write 50 words into a Powerpoint presentation instead of learning how to construct a logical, grammatical paragraph that can be scored by the computers at SAT-central.
Weeeeee! Just wait until a class of 40 can no longer email their .ppt file to the teacher for 30 seconds of scoring because the entire class has been spammed into oblivion. Then again, maybe somebody can do a science project studying if all of those p3.n1.s pills actually work.
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
"Vi is better"
... it had been sick for so long, who knows if it will ever fully recover! And the other obvious retort that 'emacs is best'.
:0)>
Well
I use nano BTW, except when I have to edit sudoers or something when I spend half an hour hitting <esc> then a RandomKey and getting nothing done. Then I try to work out how to use nano instead. It's usually something simple, like using a different distro
I'm kidding!!!
not to the program. I have been involved with E-Rate at a small, rural school district for years.
1. The equipment has to be infrastructure (servers, telephone PBXs, fiber or wiring, and telephone and internet connectivity.
2. The schools must share the costs. How much they share depends, generally, on the number of students who qualify for free lunches.
3. Not all schools that apply receive the aid.
4. Companies which furnish the equipment must be certified as qualified to do so.
If schools are using these funds for repairing rugs and floor after installation of cabling then they are committing fraud. My school district has updated its antiquated telephone system (including the use of VOIP to take advantage of the fiber that we installed prior to the E-Rate program and a voice-mail system so that one staff person did not have to always answer the phone), updated email servers and web servers, created servers for elementary students to share lesson plans, and more.
This program has been instrumental in helping this agricultural community educate its students better and I'm proud to have been involved.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
I work for a rural public school system in Alabama. I am the network addministrator. Thanks to E-Rate we have a fiber optic network that connects the systems 7 schools and 2 tech centers. We have atleast 1 computer in every classroom for students to access. We have a computer at every teachers desk to create lesson plans and manage student information. We have T-1 internet access and a back-up DSL line. I have seen children do some amazing things thanks to the computers that without E-Rate, we would not have. The problem with E-Rate is that the administrators(superintendents and board memebers) get the idea that they will have this great network and tons of technology in the schools, but don't have the forsight in planning to hire enough technical support staff to keep it all flowing and running. I am the network administrator and computer technician for all 7 schools. Thats over 1000 computers that I am solely responsible for managing and maintaining. That's way too much for one person! This school system and others needs to make sure they hire enough staff to manage technology inventory along with maintainence and everything that goes with having a state-of-the-art network. E-Rate is not the problem. E-Rate is a savior for alot of schools. The Administration of the school system is the problem. Thats just my 2 cents. Thanks.
If it can go wrong it wnetscape: Segmentation Fault, Core dumped
I-rate with E-rate?
Thanks, I'll be here all week.
I'm sure that the schools wouldn't turn down some helpful (& free gratis) advice from a certified IT professional. Do you think the head and governors (or whatever education boards you have in the US) have, in the main, the first clue about setting up a school wide network for 1000 users?
If you do (have a clue), perhaps you could help out.
Yeah, I know often suppliers are centrally mandated and why would the school trust you - if you're a parent and you work for a well known (locally or nationally) company I think your chances are high.
Another thing (while I'm ranting): Schools have a lot of money to spend on equipment, perhaps if they were allowed to spend a bit more on consultation then they wouldn't waste all the equipment money!?
Obviously a failure of Bush's "leave no NIC behind" campaign.
Yet in a discussion of student standards, and particularly in response to a poster who seems to be advocating that we reduce the amount of education offered to one group of children, is it not relevant that the poster can't spell "incompetent"?
Ad Hominem is a perfectly valid debating tactic in response to a post which carries a subtext of "I am superior to the average joe".
Okay, I was following you until the wheels came off and you veered off Education Drive onto Roe -v- Wade Ave.
Abortion has nothing to do with this article. Mod Appropriately.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
May be so, but do you really think they know better?
I saw a lot of this while I was in school too and didn't realize it wasn't normal until I got older.
What can be done?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Unfortunately, E-rate grants didn't cover hiring independent consulatants - so they only had enough budget to have a consultant out once a week; they were able to understand that fixing this mess might take a while, though. We went out and documented what they had, installed a FreeBSD firewall (VERY restrictive - only known good outbound, no unrequested inbound at all) and server (converted workstations), and gradually cleaned workstations of the multitude of viruses, trojan horses, worms, spam relays and game servers that were installed everywhere. Finally, since the school couldn't get grants to replace their hubs we ended up chaining small 100mbit switches inbetween the uplinks of each hub - this cut network traffic a LOT. This got them to the point that their network was at least usable, even if they couldn't afford nicer hardware.
(I did find out that some other school districts in the area had similar setups; one had gone so far as to simply switch the router off permanently to avoid the issue!)
The next year, a directive came down from on high that unless content filtering was installed the district would have to repay the entire E-Rate grant! We added SquidGuard to the FreeBSD firewall, and setup a little web program that let teachers request that sites be added to/removed from the blocklist. It worked wonderfully, and kept the state off our back. The school then received a grant to buy 'administration software' and opted to use a horrible Mac-ported-to-Windows program that would crash spontaneously on its own with no users (we tried it on several different hardware/software setups). This cost thousands, took us months to get up and running - and is hated by staff and student alike. It also added enough bandwidth use to the network (for some reason, ALL of its database requests were broadcast rather than directed!) that things started to creak again.
The wierd thing with grants is that they are very specific in what you can do with them. The school could get grants for stuff they didn't want (wireless access for the whole school, laptops to give to kids), and couldn't get grants for things they did want (new switches NOT from the phone company who still recommended 10baseT hubs, consultant help). Bush's budget cuts meant that they could no longer afford our help, so I haven't been out there in a while. I heard a rumour that they got another E-Rate grant and now have a PIX firewall, a dual-CPU server, a giant bank of switches - and not even login security. That may be apocryphal, but it wouldn't surprise me.
Lead developer, http://wisptools.net
You know, in my day each of our schools were connected with paper cups and a box of string.. and we were happy with it!
That is one huge freakin' fraud. Even if those wireless cards were super expensive and fancy, lets say $200 to be insanse. 74000 * 200 is only $14.8 million. They claimed $24 million! Nobody noticed this? The fact they haven't left the loading dock is more insane.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
what the fuck were you doing listening to rush anyways?
we all sit in front of computers and talk on cell phones for hours a day... we don't need any extra sources of potential brain damage =P
Looks like a dupe
Great summary of why diversion of funds is a bad idea.
So every year each district (or Board of Ed) gets this lump sum of cash that could buy some much needed software or new machines, but instead goes to some guy to Defrag, and Scandisk!
The other side of this coin is that the grants don't go to the individual schools. In NYC whern we were under the Board of Education one of their biggest problems was that the "Money for Disadvantaged Schools" , rarely got to the "Disadvantaged Schools". The Board of Ed, then the District would hoard the money and never disburse it to the individual schools.
Then again if you were surprised to find out about these elements of Red Tape and corruption in government, you must have just been unfrozen. Welcome to 2004, it's not all bad.
I boycott signatures
As an actuall high school student right now, I can tell you it is not possible to volunteer to help with IT in a school system. My school has a support contract that will be voided if any non-certified, non-payrol person touches certain systems. Even if they got a new contract with a company that offered decent service, there's still confidentiallity issues. Because it's windows, if you can access administration functions, you can access all the attendance and grading data (the part that's not still on flopies). The same people who are manipulating the school systems are preventing their repair by students who know what they are doing.
Simon's Rock College
When I entered high school, ahem public high school, there was 1 computer for every other student. We were forced to take simple applications classes and do projects using internet sources routinely. This sort of education made it possible to have a 90+% graduation rate and close to a 70% college attendance rate. Our school also put out alot engineering majors.
I don't mind paying the tax, the problem with education and IT is the lack of knowledge most older teachers have. I personally think the tax gives interested students a better edge on the foreign competition.
Interesting link containing facts about technology in public schools
It's all good.
tell us something that isnt new with the US public school system.
Thing is, the people who run the school system are not good with managing money. this is proven fact, the dont look into the best priced software, or hardware, or anything.
it's whoever treats them to the best lunch.
Sometimes the best of all debating tactics is to say "None of you are worth my time."
Then you automatically win. Try it.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
E-Rate filings take a good 3-4 months of time to manage (from the School Site/District PoV.) So even if I'm not involved 100% some of the specifics tend to rub off on you. For instance: the summary is misleading, E-Rate does not cover all network servers. In fact it's pretty specific in that it will fund DHCP/DNS/Radius servers, but not things like file services/mail/etc. Our routing equipment, and a good deal of our switching equipment is covered, but the most expensive components to the network(the enterprise servers) are not.
Now THAT is truely priceless.
Any sufficiently well-organized Government is indistinguishable from bullshit.
The other thing that I remember is that this deal was put into place in return for the us government giving the telecom industry huge breaks on establishing universal service - basically getting everyone hooked up with phone service. The telecom industry made out like bandits on this one - the government funded lots of hardware and construction costs for them, and until the e-rate plan came into effect, they didn't have to repay these loans in any way. And in fact these same telecom giants whined like little babies about having to do something in return.
My memory may be a little shaky on this stuff, but I'd recommend checking it out a little further before directing all the mud at the schools who were jerks about the e-rate plan.
Those who abused this plan should be severely spanked, but I'm sure that there are some schools who actually did benefit from this program.
Anybody else have that experience? My highschool was well-funded, reasonably well administered, and had an excellent network setup. We had network drops in every room, two switch racks, a nice fileserver with space for every student to store their stuff on, backed up every night, two large MAC computer labs, one PC lab (the CAD lab). Our network was set up by a contractor for a reasonable amount of money, and we ended up with free fiber-optic between the two switch racks (they were on either end of the building, the contract called for 100 mbit minimum, and the two switches were just beyond spec distance for regular cat-5). Our internet connection was modest, but donated free from the local ISP in town. Our IT guy was an extremely intelligent guy, and had a small group of the "nerd herd" students as assistants.
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
All I can say is, "why is anyone surprised?". This program begs to be abused. It's the most tedious, convoluted, beurocratic POS I've ever had the misfortune to be involvewd with. I don't remember the details exactly, as they have never applied to my district, but one of my colleagues in another district ran into a situation under certain parts of the application where you can't submit the application without having bids for service in hand, but you can't get bids until after you have submitted the application and gotten certain pieces of information back from the SL. It's basically impossible to follow the application process properly. The official solution from the SL organization that runs the helpdesk for the program? Lie. Just say you have bids when you don't, and after you get the information back from the SL so you can properly do the RFP, get the bids.
It's insane, there are tons of little things like that. Not to mention they only fund certain types of projects and equipment, so it's almost impossible to get a good quality, cohesive solution. Unless you use this money exclusively to offset the cost of telco services, any projects you do based on it (assuming you follow the rules) will turn out totally half-assed, and they never account for the costs of owning the equipment itself. School districts are so underfunded that they usually can't afford to hire competent staff, so you've almost always got people in the IT depts that don't _really_ know what their doing, and don't have the time to improve themselves, so the IT depts are always screwed up and wasting money because they take vendors and other agencies like the SL at their word, and frankly don't know any better. Case in point, I'd bet the wireless cards that sat on the loading dock sat there because the person who was running the project got canned because of a funding shortage, and nobody else knew about them, or didn't understand them. Since IT projects in education are never driven by business needs there is little pressure put on people to make things work.
Combine this with the fact that schools are so grossly underfunded in general, people are so used to "making do", that they don't even blink when something doesn't work right or doesn't get done right, they expect it not to from the start. And if they can find a loophole that will get them some money to work with, ethical or not, most of them will use it, since there is no other way that their needs will be met. It's sad, really, that so much lipservice is paid to improving education, but nobody in the position to do something about it _for real_ ever does. This is just another example of this.
Nahh, it's "finance" (sic) by the Universal Service Fee on your phone bill. It all goes to a big government corporation called "USAC" or the Universal Service Administrative Company. From there it goes to the "SL" Schools and Libraries sub-program, and from there a large amount flows back to telecom companies in the form of discounts on leased T1 lines. When they get done handing out discounts on "Priority 1" services such as phone and T1 lines, they let "poorer" schools have some money for hardware discounts, which is quickly eaten up by software licenses for "email software" such as Windows Server 2K3 and the like. Anything that might be left over will be dumped into routers and switches, usually Cisco (since we need the best for our schools, right?) Usually there isn't much left once the telecom companies get done billing their $1500 a month lines. A school I used to work at had 7 such lines...and got e-rate discounts of around 60% on every one of them.
I just hope that the supposed "conservatives" we have running the country now will find their brains and stop spending all the money we don't have.
Dunno what you're using, but on FreeBSD it's as simple as:
bash-2.05b$ export EDITOR="/usr/local/bin/nano"
HTH.
Without using a penny of E-Rate money, or money intended for traditional classroom, pullout, or library materials - I and another teacher did the following:
1997-1998
Repaired and put 15 existing P-166s into place running Win95 onto a 16 port 10Mpbs hub. Then when out and bought parts for 13 C686-200s. Had a dozen students build them and install Win95 OSR2 on them. Linked them to another 16 port 10Mpbs hub and uplinked that to the first. All were physically placed behind a Celeron 300a running Slackware and IP_Masq which of course was running a public IP via the school ISDN line. I also ran Squid on the Linux box to efficiently use the ISDN line - even later when upgraded to a T-1.
The resulting lab cost only $8000 bucks tech-wise, and the new tables that arrived a few months later another $5000. The lab was used at least 5 periods a day on average for almost every week of the school year.
Once again, not a penny used from E-Rate.
Right when I left, the 3 month old administrative servers were being replaced with the exact same but newer administrative servers. And a board req. for dozens of high-end Cisco hardware items was being acted upon.
And of course the Union was screaming during negotiations:
"The District says they have no more money - how are they buying this stuff?"
=8-)
Guess how?
The problem with this program (I work in the public school system - as a 'technology coordinator' - think system/network administrator, technician, paper jam fixer, power switch operator - you get the idea) is PEOPLE.
Originally, the program was supposed to be a means for the FCC to funnel funds from the Universal Service Fund (hey gang, it's been part of your telephone bill since 1934 --- where do you think rural area access to telephones came from?) to develop telecommunications infrastructure for schools. In many American schools, a basic 1890s technology is not in the classroom. It's called a telephone. Also, the intention of this project was to also assist in the installation of data circuits for classrooms, and also telecomm access at a reduced rebate rate (it's a rebate program, not a giveaway).
However, the way the FCC implemented the program makes it as unwieldy as a bulldozer in a rowboat. I've been dealing with the program and our member 16 school districts (largest is 2,011, smallest 98) in our extremely rural area (this was supposed to help poor and underserved areas, remember?). Well, most of our schools gave up in disgust with the bureaucratic hassle -- there are a number of FCC forms to fill out (FCC Form 470, FCC Form 471, FCC Form 486, FCC Form 500 --- all of 'em multipage, and with incomprehensible instructions written by guess who -- The FCC!).
It helps schools, but the program needs redesign. I could go on for hours about the flaws in the program. I find these reports of fraud and waste to be incredible; I've had schools turned down for the least little wrong dot and t on the forms. I also get corrupt companies every year trying to "help" us write our E-rate applications (which, BTW, is verboten) so they can get a piece of the pie. Well, 2.25 billion dollars isn't a whole lot of money per student when divvied up among all students who are eligible.
The discount (rebate) that each school building gets is based on the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) also known as the Free/Reduced Lunch program. Funding is poverty indexed, therefore, the schools with the least amount of technical support are the ones who will get the most money. This returns the problem of people: the really poor districts who can't afford luxuries like reading and math experts to help their underachieving students learn (it helps if they get to eat at home and have a dry, warm place to sleep also) are suddenly, on the filling out of a few pesky forms, presented with a funding source for "technology". Note that this program provides funding for telecomm access, internal network wiring for qualifying districts, and maybe a server -- no workstations (and definitely no Corvettes as I've seen in one of these little articles). You have to purchase these services and goods from a certified (Form 472) vendor, who all have to "bid" on the project (this was before the time of CheneyBurton). You select a bid, and fill out form 471 to accept that bid, and pony up your district's (usually in the 20-40% range) money for the project.
Remember, this is for telecomm services. If the school depends solely on the vendor for advice, the vendor gets pretty much carte blanc on whatever they want to do. I see that the SLC audits are starting up (the source of these stories). Now, I haven't had one yet (we only do videoconferencing T-1s and basic telephones, about 6,000$US a year per site - combined), but the audits of the schools are pretty fierce. Also, there's no appeal process: if the audit chooses, they can demand any amount of payment back (now, this is from the school, not the vendor -- ).
Corrupt people abound in this world (or haven't you noticed?). Programs like these provide unscrupulous individuals and companies the opportunity to slash at the federal boodle for short term gain. However, I understand that all E-rate projects will be audited; the audits tend to go unnotice
I am an e-rate administrator. I have been doing it now for 7 years. I'm the IT guy at my public library, but since no other administrator had the foggiest notion of e-rate, and since it helped pay for our T-1 lines, I got the job added to my IT duties. It is more properly a business office function, but there is no way the business office could have handled it. I have probably received about half a million dollars from e-rate in the first six years. Some observations:
1) E-rate does not pay for ANY equipment unless the poverty rate in your district is above a certain level. Reimbursement percentages are also pegged to the poverty level. Poverty level is measured by the percentage of studens eligible for free or reduced school lunches. If the poverty level is above 50%, the reimbursement rate is 80%. If the poverty level is, say, 6%, the reimbursement level is 40%. The rest fall in-between. You don't get to even apply for equipment unless you're in the 90% category. And THAT usually means urban-decay school districts or rural school district.
2) Most e-rate is for payment for POTS or WANs. A lot of that is tariffed, so there is no competition. There is very little fraud in this huge category, which accounts for the vast majority of erate funding.
3) E-rate funding for equipment actually discriminates against school districts that had the foresight to get tech savvy early on. We have 5 districts in our county. One was well-known early on for the qty and wuality of their computer infrastructure. Another didn't bother with tech at all. Both were at the same reimbursement rate. So whgen erate came along, guess who got a ton of money for infrastructure? The district that didn't know anything.
4) The bureaucracy of e-rate is almost unimaginable. My career has spanned 30 years so far and I've never seen anything like it. You must fill out a Form 470 to allow bidders to bid on your projects, even though, as I said above, this is mostly for tariffed services. The Form 471 must be filled out at least 30 days later, which details to the penny your projected expenses. Form 486 is to show when services actually start and Form 472 is for reimbursement and must be signed off by the telco in advance.
5) (And this is amazing). You must project the costs for services starting in July by December of the previous year and justify these projected expenses by showing bills from the previous year. In other words, Year 7, beginning in July, 2004, must be justified by bills received as far back as December, 2002 through November, 2003. As you know, telco bills are complex and ever-changing. If you happen to attenpt to justify with bills that times 12 show less than you;re asking for, they won't give it to you, so you have to find the biggest bill for the previous 12 months to 'prove' your case even though an average of the entire 12 months is more accurate.
6) If you over-estimate and don't actually spend the money you said you were going to, then, of course, you get reimbursed only for the amount you spend. If you UNDER estimate then, of course, you get reimbursed only for what you spent. This is the 'heads I win, tails you lose' rule.
7) You have to go through EACH bill by hand and ensur ethat you back out the fifty cents you spent on a directory listsing, because that'snot eligible.
8) In one case I know about, the school district provided educational services to the local prison, along with all their elementary schools and such. They were bumped up a notch in reimbursement %'s because the prison inmates all had complete room and board, therefore none of them were in "poverty" as measured by the free anb reduced school lunch numbers. They were 100% 'rich' and qualified only for the lowest rate (20%)
9) the papoerwork is so onerous on erate that many small library districts don't even bother. It costs more than its worth.
OK, I'm done now. I gotta go fill out a few 472's.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
To all those teachers that are dying to get computer equipment: Go to the local recycling center and check to see what they have.
;-)
I've been going there and while they don't always have something they often have Pentium II or better machines. About the only things you need to buy for them are monitors and keyboards. Most already have memory or drives. I haven't paid for any PCs for quite some time.
Load the free OS of your choice on them and run with it.
They won't be the fastest things in the world but they will be able to be used without too much trouble.
Need help setting them up? Give extra credit to students able to help with the setup and loading. Not a lot obviously but I'm sure you can find something they'll think is worthwhile. Maybe negotiate some after-hours tutoring with them to help them through tought subject. I'm sure if you went to the other teachers they wouldn't mind if it meant them getting set up with a system.
Just make sure you get all the root passwords though and change them after it's all done.
Oh, and stay away from Windows like the plague. It'll cost you money to keep it if you get it. Treat it like a disease.
"Bah!" - Dogbert
I have been in and around E-rate since its inception, and I've seen a lot of good and bad come from it.
Firstly, it isn't exactly like the government just dumps money at schools. They have to apply, and the application is a major PITA. Then, they rate them on a funding percentage, and in three categories: Internet, Telco, and internal. The best I have ever seen is a district that managed 95% funding in all three. That was a migrant farmworker community, that when the pre-test ID file was dumped for the highschool, had 2 (as in only two) non-hispanic students.
Anyway, most districts land in the 75-80% for Telco and Internet, very few can get the internal stuff. So even the poorest schools are either coughing up the 5% or writing another grant to piggyback the E-rate.
Now, here's the most common abuses I've seen... Unused equipment. Hey, it's cheap, so order 20 times what you think you're going to need, because it's a one shot deal and we need to prep for the future. Of course, the future arrives and all that excess equipment is obsolete. Anyone who has been around E-rate can point you to warehouses and storage closets full of unused gear (personally, I think half of Cisco's annual sales end up in school warehouses to rot). The real fraud is the "labor" that consulting companies sneak in. It's very grey, but E-rate was originally intended to fund equipment and access, not consultant's time. But through loopholes (which everyone uses, myself included) you can bill "labor" into the grant. Hell, one company I used to work for was only solvent because of E-rate fraud (one of the many reasons I left).
Just to show you the massive waste in the poorer schools (these examples all courtesy of SBC) here's a few choice ones: A spare Cisco 6509, populated. Sits on a table looking pretty, on the off chance that other two dual Sup RPS switches might die. Same place, SBC sold them 12 Cisco video servers at $15k per. When I started looking into installing them, turns out their nothing more than 1U Win2k servers with some crappy streaming software. SBC also pimped them over 200 Cisco 350 bridge radios (for a district with less than 10 sites), and of course, a full CiscoWorks package (incorrectly installed).
E-rate is nothing more than corporate welfare for the great Satan SBC. Unfortunately, the smaller and poorer districts really need something like it for Internet access. But it really needs some work. Personally, I'd like to see some serious jail time for the sales pukes who abuse this system. Because it isn't like some small district decides they need $500k worth of Cisco switches. They listen to what the sales whores tell them, mostly because they don't know any better. There's the rub.
There's no way to fix it. Anything the government funds is corrupt. Period. Welcome to the wonderful world of corporate welfare. We should take a page from the Ag book and start paying companies *not* to do work for artificial price support. Pork baby!
Here's something to ponder.
Any server which hosts web pages is a "web server". Even if it's a box that does nothing but run Windows file serving stuff, pushing files out to a box that actually runs a web server. That means you can move your web pages out to it and it qualifies.
You can also buy a box and call it a "DHCP server". That's right, nothing but DHCP.
Then it gets better. After a year of it being installed in the right place, you can decommission it, move it somewhere else in the district, and it's totally legal.
You can also buy a bunch of APs, leave them in their boxes at the school for a year, then redistribute them after that any way you wish.
As long as you have good handwaving skills, you can get almost anything approved. How about ripping out the category 5 wiring (less than 10 years old now) to install cat-6, just for a supposed "video over LAN" solution? Hint: these drops are for workstations, not servers, and they barely use 10 Mbps, let alone 100, and will never need gigabit!
I've been watching this from the inside, and it is a porkbarrel fest the likes of which few are aware.
Brevard County used 1 million for a elementary school server. from florida todayl storyN0 618CROSSPOINTE0.htm
http://www.floridatoday.com/!NEWSROOM/loca
24 000 000/74 000 is equal to about $324 a card. Is that normal for wireless eternet?
The news isn't the coruption it's the getting cought.
You've heard for nearly 30 years how our public schools are under funded.
The reality is just plain sick. The budget is up to each states govener (or what ever budget process that state has) the school board can't dictate it's own budget but each state school board wishes to.
The budget problems are largly artifical. Some times it's visable such as inflated salerys and unnessisary staff for the board while cutting back at the schools. Some times it's not such as when a large block of money is missing.
The flaw in this is that ultimately the school board has total control over everything BUT the budget and has learnned it can hold the state hostage for more money.
At one time California had the biggest budget for it's schools and the worst grades yet they maintain it's the budgets fault.
The solution is to transfer athority to the state govener so that at the person in charge of the school system can't pass the blame to the person in charge of the budget.
That is the core fraud. The money has to go SOMEPLACE else it shows up and the clame that the money isn't there rings hollow.
So school boards play a game shuffling moneys around to pretend they don't exist.
How bad it is depends on the state. I expect it's all legal or quasi legal type activitys. Nothing quite so much as stuffing ones own pockets. Just putting money budgeted for repairing schools that are falling apart into signs telling everyone what isn't being fixed.
(The sign actually lists what needs fixing and what has been fixed. A running checklist. A few years ago the signs themselfs needed repair and nothings checked off)
Goddess only knows where the rest of the money went.
This happends every now and then. Someone dose an audit of the school system (often the state governer after taking so much abuse) only to see money vanish down a rabbit hole and the school board can only say "ops".
This time someone found the rabbit hole.
As for the school boards part it's not likely they set it up IMAO as much as I think they looked the other way as it happend. It's pritty obveous when schools never receave the hardware they are expecting.
I don't actually exist.
And there's a reason it's called case law. Once a federal, and especially supreme, court has made a ruling, it gets forever quoted in court AS IF it WERE law. People just are too proud to admit when there are errors. Equal protection (as if we had it) is a good thing, but sometimes comes at the cost of equally bad protection. We need more of those rare lawyers/judges we understand the letter of the law, the SPIRIT of the law, and are willing to ignore bad case law.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
I have to deal with USF as part of my job. It's a nasty, evil redistribution-of-wealth concept made into practice. I could write a book about the bad aspects of it, or frame it as a political issue, but I can trim away all that cruft and state my major gripe in economic terms:
Its stated purpose was to help pay for the ongoing communications costs for "poor" school systems. In reality, it rewards only those municipalities that are the most corrupt or financially incompetent, while doing the opposite of its stated purpose in those districts that don't qualify for a high level of reimbursement.
In other words, my district (which ranks in the "poorer" half in terms of wealth in my state) has to choose a less than adequate solution for bandwidth, because our residents and businesses are bearing the tax burden of ERate, which is greater than upgraded connection costs would be if we were to get it through a property tax increase.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
I.E. They get a supplier to list their computer memory as:
Toilet seat, $400.
on a random other project.
Though it seems kind of foolish to do it with a school program.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
It's jungle law
I feel that good education (and good healthcare) are things that would truly benefit the country as a whole.
That is what is usually called socialism.
Grandparent's I do not consider it my responsibility to buy computers for your wife's school.
That's called libertarianism.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
I work for a large county school system that receives a great deal of funding but never seems to have enough money to go around. Part of the reason is the tremendous amount of waste and near-fraud that goes on. Over the last few years I've seen such things as:
-Several years ago school board decides to upgrade ancient, decrepit computers to 1.3 Ghz AMDs with 256 megs RAM and a 80 GB hard drive. This is probably a good idea. But they ended up paying over four thousand dollars each for the new systems. This is an unbelievably high price. I was astounded when I heard about it, since I had recently purchased a similarly system for myself and payed about a thousand dollars. It's especially bad when you consider that the board should have been able to get a much better deal than the average consumer, since they were buying 50 of them and would surely have qualified for some sort of volume discount. When people started asking question about it, they explained that they had to pay so much because the computers all came with a 'long-term service contract'. Service contract? Huh? At that price you could replace any broken computer twice and still end up saving about $50,000.
-School Board lobbies for a special one-time funding increase to buy computers. They talk a lot about how many of the kids don't have computers at home and will be at a disadvantage when they grow up if they don't have any computer exposure. Your basic 'someone please think of the children' argument. Fine, alright, the Board gets it money - but the kids don't get any new computers. Instead, the board uses the money to purchase a humongous server for their central administrative building. Perhaps it was necessary, but certainly not what people had in mind when they approved the funds.
Basically the board pulls something like this every 3-4 years. They just wait long enough for many of the board memberships to change and for most of the local politicians to forget about their last swindle, then go poking around for more computer money.
Being from north of hte border, I'm a little ignorrant of the e-rate program.
But here's my attempt to pull it together.
Computer exposure for kids is good only to a certain degree. Giving them access to the internet so they can do their research, browse, chat online and then cut and paste their assignments into powerpoint presentations isn't a good thing.
Let's quit with trying to keep up with the home users and get back to teaching kids how to learn and explore their world live and in person.
Remember, government is the problem, not the solution.
Derek Greene
Because you've done something for the greater good? And that's the problem, no one wants to do good unless they see a way that they will somehow benefit from it.
And on the note of local funding -- no one wants to fund their local schools anyways, especially in the areas this program is targeted to. You go into a poorer area and say "Hey, we are going to raise taxes to pay for schools!" ...duck because there's gonna be a shitstorm.
You say, "If the local taxpayers don't want to spend the money to maintain the infrastructure, then why should you and I, who don't even benefit?"
The local taxpayers say, "If the taxpayers who actually have kids in the schools don't want to spend the money to maintain the infrastructure, then why should you and I, who don't even benefit?"
And then the people with kids in school say, "I just can't afford it, and besides, isn't everyone supposed to help pay for the schools?"
On a side note, here in Ohio, it was recently ruled unconstitutional to support schools exclusively through property taxes. Problem is, that's the only place districts really have to get money. The state funding system is entirely fucked up. Not only has the state bugeted money to districts, then taken half of the money away halfway through the year, but the entire funding system has been ruled unconstitutional no less than FOUR times! (The CNN page says 3, but that is from 2002.)
I wish that if I was doing something unconstitutional, even after being ruled against four times, I could keep doing it without consequence!
Fuckwit politicians.
...How many good-quality textbooks AND decent teacher salaries that $24 million could have bought otherwise?
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
Because that would be a fine setup for a few vi sessions and gcc.
I work at a school that received the E-Rate "grant". Unfortunately, I wish they would have given me a million dollars to work with and do it myself. There are various ethernet ports that seem to go nowhere. Many of the hubs were placed in the most ridiculous places. I am actually typing this right now over an E-Rate installed network.
Being the school's "everything digital" guy, I expected to have a little access to the routers, switches, etc... Unfortunately, not only am I not allowed to telnet in, all the equipment is locked up preventing me from even troubleshooting the ports to nowhere.
Overall, I ejoyed our strands of CAT-5 that were strung throughout the school by parent volunteers better than our new million dollar network.
I see a few posts in this thread that appear to be rather ill informed. Some school districts do blindly throw technology at their users (students & teachers) and call it a successful application, the idea being that computers must magically be better for learning. Of course this is not the case, and schools must have a plan for implementation. Disclosure: I worked from 1998 to 2002 in support positions at two districts in the Metro Detroit area. One was in a lower-income district with a charter school, the other was for a public district in a middle to upper income suburb. Both used E-Rate grants, and I was involved in minor way for the former's application. Yes, this story about waste is sickening. And I don't enjoy having yet another tax on my phone bills. But the implementations of E-Rate in my personal experience has been prudent. The former school paid for a fractional T1. That's a significant amount of money that can be put back into books, free breakfasts, materials, etc. The second district used their E-Rate money to fund a major WAN upgrade. There was a lot of competitive bidding from contractors. We wound up with a lot for our buck. As far as piss-poor IT staffing goes, I would suggest that it depends on the district's value of technology. I was fortunate to work in places where it was an important part of the curriculum and we received an adequate budget. There were staff devoted to IT matters at both the district and school level. And 90% of these individuals were highly competent. So if your kids are complaining about broken computers and lax security, take it up with the district's Director of Technology. Don't complain to the teacher or even principal, because they will have similar complaints that they won't publicly acknowledge. Of course it is a shame that E-Rate pays for only parts of IT. With poor planning, it could be a recipe for disaster when you can't afford to pay anyone to install your shiny new equipment, much less maintain it. Since I've worked in education as an IT person, I've had the benefits of seeing how schools work as an outsider. I've heard the complaints from teachers about uninvolved parents and I've seen how well they serve as a significant adult figure for up to 30 kids at a time. I've also heard the complaints from parents in my extended family and at my current workplace about how teachers expect too much from them. I've given several speeches about the topic, and could write all day about it, but here are a few obstacles to technology in the classroom (in my unprofessional opinion): - With all the extra committee work, conferences, grading, and lesson preparation, teachers sometimes don't even have time to go to the bathroom, much less explore cool new technology. Translating this into a lesson plan takes even more time. Do you have any idea how much preparation a field trip takes? Ask a teacher sometime. - Technical hurdles, which I don't really need to get into for this forum. Imagine trying to give a distraction-free lesson to just 10 kids in a computer lab and one browser has the wrong proxy, another has porno adware, and another spontaneously reboots. With as much malware that's out there right now, I'm really glad to not be working for users that click every damn thing that pops up. - Behavior problems with kids themselves due to family/ADD/just being a kid. Popup ads are distracting, advertisements are everywhere, and the kid next to you has found a really cool picture of a fighter jets. Kids also tend to tune out teachers when a computer is in front of them, and blurt out randomly about things appearing on their monitor. - The nature of using the Internet as a research tool. The only directions I've ever heard in the classroom regarding reliable sources of information (for reports or whatever) have come out of my own mouth. Students are not taught how to view information critically. It is also much too easy to cut and paste your way into creating a report (and ignoring writing concepts of structure, relevant content, and context). So failures of technolog
The great majority of E-rate funds go to huge urban districts where staff is concerned with things like if kids can play on the playground without getting hit by gunfire from the gang war in the project high rises across the street.
Here's a "scenario": Some grant writer from the central office tells the Tech Office they have two days to spend $200,000 or it will be returned to the feds, so they order wireless cards for all the machines they planned to buy. Local taxes come in low, so the machines get cancelled by a bean counter in Fiscal Services on the other side of town.
The tech guy who ordered the cards is not told, and is, in fact, transferred to a position in one of the schools. The secretary takes maternity leave, the custodian discards all records of the guy that got transferred, and the new guy has no idea that there are thousands of wireless cards in a warehouse somewhere.
Unless you have lived it, you probably can't believe the level of disorganization in a lot of schools. Most of it isn't even real "corruption". They just are not prepared or organized to run a sophisticated data operation.
go out, register a business and get the school to pay you. When I was still at school back in 97 it worked just fine.
Or in your .bash_profile file (or .bashrc)
have the line
EDITOR=/usr/local/bin/nano
EXPORT EDITOR (along with everything else).
That's "taxpayer funded", and moreso "phone-user" funded. Just another example of how taxes and government are evil, and not always necessary evils at that.
hmm....that works out to about $us320 (which is what....about $aus500 or so) per card, unless the original figures were wrong or my calculator's broken...who cares that they weren't delivered, the system is a rort even if they were. Tell the schools to go to their local computer shop, it'll be cheaper.