> It's doubtful that anyone with vision would be willing to work for the pay most
> county school systems are able and willing to pay.

That isn't the problem. I'm way out in flyover country and even our school system pays enough I'd take it considering it is almost as secure as being a teacher. And remember, it is the benefits and job security that make working for the government attractive, until quite recently it wasn't the actual money and things are in the process of correcting back to that historical norm. But I have dealt with them enough to know better, it isn't the money that makes me conclude I'd rather do handjobs for cash if things were ever that bad. It is the knowledge that I'd be dealing with weapons grade stupid on an hourly basis even if I were running their IT shop.

> Oh yea, I'd love to download that 8mb PDF over THAT connection...

Each student could download an 8MB PDF every hour, even constrained to 25Kbps, which is slow by modem standards. And that assumes the average student could READ an 8MB document in an hour, which few could unless it is a comic book. And assumes each student needs to download a different one and can't retrieve the one copy cached locally before class by the instructor, and therefore directly available over the gigabit ethernet.

What drives the bandwidth needs are video and the rush to shut down the entire backend operation in the local school plus the school board and outsource all traffic except printing and perhaps the most basic of file serving. This scheme only appears to make sense because of the artificial economy created by the SLC funding mechanism that leaves the school system only paying a small portion of the bandwidth bill. In a more typical network a lot of the traffic is local and a smaller Internet feed will suffice. The Cloud is bringing this same idea into the Enterprise setting and the same hillarity is going to ensue as all the supposed savings are likely to be eaten by vastly scaled up Internet conection expenses.

> Connections to schools aren't that expensive.

Yes they are.

> Most of the infrastructure is all bought and paid for through the 1996 telecommunications act.
> Schools, universities, and libraries get internet connectivity at absurdly cheap prices.

And because they don't see the true price of it they buy services they would never consider if they actually paid fair market value for it. But there is no bandwidth fairy, there is a reason there is a whole subculture of ISPs servicing SLC funded sites, it is great money with little risk because they are all government customers and most of the actual money is OPM. But it is being extracted in taxes from each and every one of us who uses a phone or accesses the Internet in the form of a special tax labeled "Universal Service Fund" on your bill. It also pays for the newly discovered 'right' to have a cell phone paid for by someone else and plans are afoot to jack the tax another notch to pay for the about to be discovered 'right' to Internet access even if you choose to live in a spot where it isn't practical.

> In fact, in the state of Illinois, they don't even have to connect to the internet directly,
> they only have to get a line to one of the very many connection points to the state funded
> network, which has more than enough connectivity to the internet to handle any workload.

On the other hand, this is a very good idea. Too bad we would never consider it around here in Louisiana.

> An OC-24 is a bundle of 24 optical cables.

No. An OC is roughly the same as a copper based T-3 which is of course based on the classic T-1. which is itself based on carrying two dozen 64Kbps calls multiplexed together. An OC-24 is therefore about the same as two dozen T-3 lines but would normally be delivered on a single pair of fiber. I know the single pair of fibers on our wall that currently delivers only 30Mbps can deliver anything up to 1000Mbps with nothing more than a phone call and a signature on an updated contract, no truck roll needed.

> Weighing teachers against each other based on their
> student's results is inaccurate, because you have no control.

Every time the notion of judging the performance of teachers by their output, exactly like EVERYONE else with a job is judged, promoted and fired.... this red herring is thrown out. It is crap.

You test at the start and again at the end of the year. Any problems in the students aren't lilkely to change during the year, if the parents have been defective, apathetic, etc. in the past they are (as a group) likely to remain so, involved parents probably won't suddenly stop caring. So you certainly can draw conclusions from the difference unless it is your position that it is normal for there to be no measurable difference year over year, that the teacher, school, hell; just the passage of a year is expected to make zero difference in what a child knows. Or is it your position that there is no reliably measurable difference between a 'good' and a 'bad' teacher?

In fact a GOOD teacher would probably want a class of slighly at risk kids since if they can fire the imaginations of even a quarter of em the potential will be there to make a vast swing in the average. Meanwhile a class of upper class kids already operating at or above grade level would be a lot harder to inspire any such large improvement in.

And guess what? As a matter of public policy we probably want the best and brightest teachers choosing to work with that exact group of kids, slightly behind but salvagable. Amazing how often the market driven goal is the right one.

> The problem with my metric is that it's impossible to measure.

Which means it is useless. Mine is chosen almost entirely on the basis of being actually measurable and thus IS useful. Come on over to the reality based community, it is sane and it works every time it is allowed to be triumph over unreasoning emotion.

Really. How many other professions are there where the people in charge will openly assert that it is impossible to measure their output, immoral to even try and oh, by the way we insist on being granted tenure even though the notion is utterly inapplicable to K-12 education. And please continue bankrupting the public coffers thowing ever increasing sums of money at us, recession or not, just don't expect anything to improve.. or to even be able to know if things are getting better since measurement is a null concept in our industry. But if you DON'T give us more money it is a certainly the children will suffer.

That madness has went on for decades now but things are so bad nobody believes the schools are working so things are going to change. Choose whether to be part of the solution.

> but because they didn't improve she's a bad teacher

You say that like it is a bad thing. If the kids didn't improve from when they came in at the start of the year that means the teacher sucks. Or give me a definition of 'good teacher' that includes 'kids don't improve'.

I don't want to hear any blah, blah excuses either. If the kids wasted a year in that classroom there is no reason to inflict that teacher on another batch without major corrective action and/or retraining. Or would YOU put your kids in that class if they posted their last year entry/exit scores on the door?

> why would the school not upload to you tube?

You obviously know nothing about the way schools work. There is an entire industry devoted to reinventing every wheel for educational use. Some of it makes some sense, schools have a lot of mandates for privacy and so on, but most of it is simply because. YouTube would be right out, a contract with an edu specific video hosting site would be required, and it would of course require a hefty annual contract with each school system. Each school would have to get a customized portal with the school logo, colors and such or it is a no sale. Access controls are a must. You can't put a picture that includes a student on a school's public facing website without moving a lot of paper for clearances.... meanwhile the local paper's website has the same photo from the game up that day and the kids themselves post everything onto their facebook pages in realtime. And it simply must be this way, the idea that it could be different could never occur. If nothing else, schools simply wouldn't be able to handle the concept of a vendor that doesn't charge.

Thank HTML5 for the death of caching as much as the advertising.

It is all apps now. And in schools they KNOW they are all incompetent boobs so they want nothing that requires skilled labor to maintain. So outsourcing is the word. Everything. Gradebooks, attendance, cafeteria manegement, email of course, Courseware, scheduling and calendaring, yearbooks. If it isn't being delivered from the cloud now it is because they are still fighting over which vendor they want to write a check to. (read as the bidding is still fierce over who will kick back more.. ok, I'm a cynic) That pattern means they need LOTS of bandwidth now and will need an ever growing amount going forward into an HD Video for everything future.

And the vendors love it. It will of course drive lots of sales to schools themselves but when the kids can't do their homework without a constant high bandwidth connection it drives the 'Internet is a 'Right'' meme that leads to even more billions and billions of sweet sweet government money that will only be available to the politically connected.

I'm allergic, so if I tried to huff a kitten, I'd likely wind up with my face swollen shut. I suppose that makes it unsafe...