NYC Fails Controversial Remote Learning Snow Day 'Test,' Public Schools Chancell...
source link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/02/13/1832236/nyc-fails-controversial-remote-learning-snow-day-test-public-schools-chancellor-says
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NYC Fails Controversial Remote Learning Snow Day 'Test,' Public Schools Chancellor Says
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This is the first time NYC Public Schools has implemented remote learning on a snow day since introducing the no snow day policy in 2022. The district serves 1.1 million students in more than 1,800 schools. Banks blamed the technical issues on IBM, which helps facilitate the city's remote learning program. "IBM was not ready for primetime," Banks said, adding that the company was overwhelmed with the surge of people signing on for school. IBM has since expanded their capacity and a total of 850,000 students and teachers are currently online, Banks said. "We'll work harder to do better next time," he said, adding that there will be a deeper analysis into what went wrong.
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IBM is not ready to do more then suck up contract funds.
Most of the techs who know what they have been doing have been layed off due to age and the over seas reps are not that good.
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This is what happens when you buy IBM in the 2020s. There's countless other e-learning platforms out there bound to work better and be cheaper, but IBM has its tendrils deep in NY politics since its' headquartered in NY State. So, they got themselves a deal and then found out because of their stagnant company, they couldn't fulfill the contract with reliable services.
Nobody buys new IBM products in the 2020s, they just pay for legacy ones. Whoever decided to use IBM in the NYC Ed Dept should be fired,
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This is NY, everyone from the governor to NYC city council members has ties to significant corruption.
Somehow the free market figured it out how to do this a few years ago when there was a true crisis, 4 years later and everyone and NYS needs to spend close to a billion annually on a âoenewâ solution?
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We already know that the entire concept of remote learning doesn't work very well, and its not because of internet technical issues. So why bother?
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Because it's still better than nothing, and apparently it's only as a fallback if it's impossible to get to school.
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Building and maintaining this kind of surge capacity for like 3 days a year of snow-days seems pretty ridiculous to me.
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Wait, what? A horde of slashdot commenters have been emphatic that remote work not only works very well, it is superior to working in person. So how could it be that remote learning doesn't also work very well?
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It's not that remote learning doesn't work, it's that the IBM software to allow remote learning didn't work! You're not going to do much learning on an error screen.
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*sigh*
Because LEARNING and WORKING are two different tasks.
Learning is when a person does not understand what to do and is tasked with acquiring knowledge. Work is when a person does understand what to do and is tasked with implementing that knowledge. The latter is far easier to do remotely than the former, because the outcome of work is self-evident, but the outcome of learning is not.
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Nonsense. All we know is that recent ad-hoc approaches to remote learning, teachers with little to no training trying to fumble their way through zoom and garbage like Google Classroom, don't work as well as classroom instruction for k-12.
Why bother? Because the potential benefits are incalculable. We've seen what it can do for adult learners and we've learned a lot over the past 25 years about what works and what doesn't. There's still a lot of room for improvement, but we reached parity with classroo
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Here west of Boston, it was barely 2 inches. 'cept for the past three days there was a drumbeat of zOMG foot of snow! and everything got closed and canceled. Except in the places that waited until 4am or so to make the weather call.
Back in the 90s, weather calls used to be made even later, around 5 or 6am. You had to wake up and turn on the radio to hear if school was out. Because people didn't trust forecasts too far ahead *and* because there was still the broad attitude that "the show must go" on re: scho
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I remember those days. Back then we were not afraid to stand at a school bus stop, waiting for the bus to arrive, and doing that without a mask on our faces.
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Ah yes, the good ol' days. When being a worthless plague rat who deserves to choke on their own bodily fluids was a good thing.
That was sarcasm, in case the anti-vax plague rats whoosh on it.
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Yes. I remember those days. Back when the mission was more important than any individual, and the correct response to a national emergency was to tell the people to summon their courage and get on with their work, not indulge their cowardice and make up reasons why sending kids to school is anti-intellectual.
My side may have its yahoos, but your side landed firmly on "school is bad" and "be afraid" as the planks in its platform. A pox on your house.
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Pfft. I had to walk three miles to and from school in the snow. Uphill. Both ways.
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Here west of Boston, it was barely 2 inches. 'cept for the past three days there was a drumbeat of zOMG foot of snow! and everything got closed and canceled. Except in the places that waited until 4am or so to make the weather call.
Back in the 90s, weather calls used to be made even later, around 5 or 6am. You had to wake up and turn on the radio to hear if school was out. Because people didn't trust forecasts too far ahead *and* because there was still the broad attitude that "the show must go" on re: scho
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Fails test
Immediately throws IBM under the bus.
The jokes practically write themselves.
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IBM was probably thrown under an electric bus that slowly rolled to a halt due to poor battery performance in cold weather./sarcasm
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line 1 of contractor responsibility, take all the blame for the shitty middle management that doesnt do any actual work
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There are aspects of capacity planning that were seemingly ignored. You can have a system that can accommodate 1 million users, obviously across multiple nodes, but if you forget that all of those users may login at the same time you've failed. The initial wave forces you to dedicate more resources initially than you need during a steady-state. Who else remembers the "NetBIOS waves" we used to encounter when we first connected corporate LANs across all locations with centralized Windows NT domains? We knew
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I am not sure which was worse - "NetBIOS waves" or Netware Services broadcast storms.
I worked on networks that had both protocols... 'the Good Old Days" !! HAHA
After 4000 or so users you would start to see serious scaling problems with both network protocols (Netware might have been worse) even in networks broken up by routers (OSI Layer 3, for those that remember that).
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This issue has been solved a long time ago though. We no longer need to rely on a single server, there is no reason every DB canâ(TM)t have a copy with a few million records. 100MB or even 10GB is peanuts even in a constrained Docker on Raspberry Pi.
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Mucking around in the snow is just part of childhood. Learning about it is just as important of one more day being stuck inside annoying mum, dad, and teacher.
Christ, here at least, the last time it snowed enough to play in it, but not enough to close the schools, the teachers just took the kids outside to have a *cough* outdoor learning day *cough* (mess about) anyway.
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Letting kids have a day off is not a bad idea. But another major part of this is just how hard it is to pivot. I'm a school teacher. Pivoting to a remote lesson with 24 hours notice is a massive amount of work. Give a teacher a three or four days to prep for a remote day and we'll slide it in naturally. Tell someone less than 24 hours before that the next day is going to be remote, and it is unlikely to go well.
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Weather forecasts just aren't that good. Oh, sure - it's easy to predict with remarkable accuracy how big a storm will be and how much snow will fall. But where it will actually happen can be off by hundreds of miles from just the previous night's guess.
Why would a test be an artificially easy scenario?
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It's funny that you mention accuracy. Up here in MA, my area was predicted to get 6-10" as of Monday morning's forecast (for Tuesday). The forecasters were seemingly quite confident, enough so that most schools in my area declared a snow day by Monday afternoon. Monday evening rolled around and the forecast dropped to 1-3". As of this afternoon, my back yard has maybe 1" of snow.
This was a wasted snow day. That said, snow days a special for kids - a surprise gift that they should be able to enjoy. Le
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Say what you will about them, Chromebooks really excel for remote learning. You just bring 'em home, punch in your home wifi password and they work exactly as they do at school.
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Assuming that the curriculum is already set up for a primarily-Google-Classroom paradigm, on a subject that lends itself to self-pacing, with lessons already integrated into the online environment, where the intent for the current topic required neither group participation (beyond what IRC-with-attachments could provide) nor tangible objects...then yes, Google Classroom is great for remote learning.
For anything that requires an actual-teacher to actually-teach, it sucks. "Tell me and I'll forget, show me an
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They're easy to admin, but that's about it. Google Classroom is absolutely awful, as is integration with the third-party services schools use for things like annotating PDFs (how students write on scanned worksheets). Basic features like submitting assignments is also needlessly complicated as it seems to be more about training students to use Google's services than anything else.
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It wasn't tested at load or scale, it's not a hard question to answer. The bigger issue is why wasn't it tested at scale and load? Simulated user login is fairly simply, and doing network load testing is fairly simple, so basically multiple people dropped the ball. The issue with dropping the ball, is you're playing T-ball, and you still struck out!
Don't confuse simple with easy, because while doing the load and scale test is simple, it still requires knowledge, skill and ability, making it difficult t-
Doesn't IBM make automated performance testing tools under their Rational product line? Why aren't they eating their own dog food?
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They might, I'm not sure, but the school board(s) can run the tests. If you really want to be sure about the results, develop an in house test platform, using GO or Rust (or anything else you like), and have fun. You don't need a ton of horsepower, but if you want to crank the dial to 11, rent some ultra-high performance cloud hardware and let the test platform loose.
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Because those things cost money and the first thing NY politicians do with a budget is to see how much they can cut to benefit themselves.
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I used to live in the country north of Toronto. Bussed to school. We had 3 to 5 snow days a year, when it would drift up to our waist.
Hasn't been a snow day in maybe 15 years now. Today, there is no snow whatsoever on the ground. Hasn't been for weeks. I have never seen anything remotely like this in my 1/2 century in the area. Normally we still have a little bit of dirty corn snow in the ditches and such well into April. It's all gone. Every flake. Since January.
Seems like they're fixing the wrong problem.
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So did IBM absolutely fuck up the deployment despite having hard numbers on max capacity requirements or did NY Public Schools, like every client, be stupid and cheap and underfund the capacity they needed?
One can make a compelling case for either scenario but neither explanation pulls out ahead. -
A lack of accountability. This is a recently former NYC schoolteacher's opinion (my relation). No one will lose their job over this, maybe a slap on the wrist.
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Every time I hear these three letters or the other three letters being used in any project along with other consultants from Infosys or WiPro or Deloitte then I pretty much know that the whole thing is going to be late while being overpriced and completely non-functional on the go live date.
So many experiences with large corporate projects and deployments and so many of the same results. And then local folks have to be brought in to fix everything that's broken or start from the beginning and get rid of the
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