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Predicting H.S. Dropouts With Pervasive Databases
rhadamanthus writes "As seen on the Houston Chronicle: 'With a new computer database available at every campus this fall, teachers can keep a virtual eye on every student and identify those at risk of leaving. For the first time, educators can look up a student's attendance, discipline, immigration status, grades, and test scores at one source and use that information to predict dropouts. ... "All students will know someone is watching them, tracking them, and is interested in their success," school board member Laurie Bricker said at a press conference today.' Hooray for surveillance in the HISD."
Somebody sure is watching and tracking individual students, but they're definitely not interested in the student's success -- collecting all this data together and using it to generate mass "trends" will likely end up in having various kids who are doing well being sat down and had a talking-to by the school's guidance counsellors about not dropping out, merely because they don't fit the trend. Same thing happened with kids who may fit the "school shooter" profile.
There's no excuse for this data collection -- but hey, schools and prisons are the two places where new privacy invasion is tried out before being installed in mainstream society.
instead of surveilance, they could just use the market. Say maybe a government-funded futures market on who's going to drop out...
Heaven forbid that a student get out of the wretched public school system and actually try to take his/her education in her own hands.
Public school, while good for some, has held me back due to the lack of qualified teachers, and terrible textbooks. Those of us who want a real education get nothing out of it.
Basically this looks like they're beefing up their data controls, and centralizing existing data - as opposed to invasively gathering more data and infringing on privacy. What exactly is the problem, then???
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Get those kids used to the fact that everything they do will be under a government microscope.
Will kids that grow up in a situation like this mind at all that it doesnt really end when they leave HS for the 'real world'?
I can understand the fact that schools do need to track such information, but my question is do they erase the data afterwards? I really don't want those records floating around after A. I graduate, or B. I do drop out.... granted I've allready graduated, but this is for the people who will be going into this system.
I am full of goo... black evil goo
Anyone else read this as "and is waiting for them to drop out"?
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Come on guys. It doesn't take a giant computer and wonderous code to tell which kids are likely to drop out of school. Anyone that cares to notice could say. If teachers and parents don't care enough now to notice, a big blinking computer light isn't going to help any.
I can see the dialogue going like this:
Teacher: Our extensive data indictates you may be thinking of dropping out--
Student: FUCK YOU, BIG BROTHER! I'M OUTTA HERE!
Wow, a lucrative publishing contract! I don't have to be evil anymore. --Meteor
They didn't mention race as one of the features in the equation, even though there is (unfortunately) by no means an equal drop-out rate among the various races represented in US schools. Is this to sanitize the article, or is race really ignored in the database (surely making its predictions less accurate than what would be possible)?
I can speak to this a little bit, as I actually used to teach high school...
You see, schools make money based on the number of students that attend every class period. If a student drops out, that's less money the school is getting. The school at which I taught went nuts looking for dropouts. School-wide PA announcements were made regularly asking if anyone had heard from various students, or even seen them around town. They don't care if the kid is in class getting educated... it's all about the money.
Also, if too many students dropout, your school gets flagged as low performing and you lose money that way, too. Any tactic the school can use that is inexpensive and provides an easy, scattershot approach to keeping as many kids in classrooms as possible will be used.
The great thing to administrators is that they can keep the kids in class, get all the money, and they still don't have to spend it on teachers. School administration generally uses budget surplus to control departments and hammer teachers into submission or force them into retirement.
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
Sounds like they're not collecting any information they haven't always had -- just putting it together into a predictive model. And unlike some of the poorly-thought-out "school shooter" type of models, this is (a) predicting an event with a high enough prior probability that it might work decently (from a Bayesian perspective), and (b) targeting kids for extra help instead of punishment. At least if they end up implementing it the way they say they will.
Student Attendance: Frequent Mental Absence ...
Discipline: KUNG-FU, Monkey Style
Couldn't resist...
Ya know, it's funny. We here on slashdot are always talking about privacy at home and at work, but when it happens to a group of people that we consider to be in a lower status (eg in high school instead of college), we are all for the big brother concept.
I'm going to give an example, but let me put it in perspective first. In school, you don't get paid. It's not your job. It's your daily life. You meet new people and make friends there. For the sake of being evenly sided I won't go into saying that you're forced by society to go there. This compares nicely to an adult's social life and what places they frequent, so let's go from there.
This would be the same thing as the owner of the (insert hangout place here, club, diner, bar, etc) having a declared record of everything you do thewre, when you do and don't go, where you're from, what you like to do with your time, and assorted other things. Said owner then uses said information as demographics to, instead of changing the service to suit whatever new styles might be going in and out, predict when you are going to leave and give you a small reason to stay. Nothing so great that you want to stay, just barely enough so you don't check out the competition.
But wait a minute, isn't that like invasion of privacy and all those mega corporations tracking your every move to attack you with the ads they want you to see, when they want you to see them? It is. And if you rationalize the use of this system on others, it's only a stone's throw away from coming back to bite you in the ass.
Work sucked, until it became unemployment, when it became slightly more tolerable. -Tet
Schools aren't interested in keeping kids from dropping out for purely selfless reasons. My old high school didn't give a damn what went on as long as you showed up to be counted and didn't drop out. It, like most other public schools, got state and federal funding based on its attendance and drop out rates. I'm sure a few people genuinely want to help, but parading around like philanthropy is your only concern will help people not to trust you.
I graduated a year after the columbine fiasco, and my senior year I too was put on a list. Every time a bomb threat was called in, or 'random' locker search came time... I was on the list. Except for a few incidents in middle school I had a spotless record. The reason was because I stood up to the knee-jerk stupidity of new policy after everyone became afraid of their children. One example is, with the exception of the dock and the main doors, all doors were locked from both directions until an alarm was triggered. We also had to wear ID badges at all times. If we didn't, or interfered with lasers scanning us in the halls, we were suspended for a day. It's really useless, because the two at columbine would have had all the security to get in without a problem. The moral of the story: Most kids don't like being labeled or put on a list and respond poorly to it.
Just my $0.02
From the Houston Chronicle article:
[quote]
District officials also are considering a plan to assign an adult to each student.
[/quote]
I've got news for the district: the plan is already in existance. They're called "parents".
Besides, can you imagine the expense of paying a salary for each person who is watching a single child? Thousands and thousands of salaries for adults!
"Jesus saves, but everyone else in a 10 foot radius takes full damage from the fireball."
I always stayed up until a few hours before I had to go to school last semester. I nearly failed French.
At the same time, I was working on an extremely educational (to me at least) programming project and some web sites.
Would my school's system see my drop in French test scores as a sign of impending doom? Would it correlate that with the departure of Jane Doe, who dropped out due to a pregnancy and accuse me of being the father?
Had I been sidetracked, I never would have had this site of mine on this slasdot article. I wouldn't have gotten a local computer store to invest time/money in my first commercial program.
You can't reduce anything as complex as a human being to mere comprehendable numbers. Anyways, this new system sounds like it'll be great fun to mess with.
(On another note, it's hilarious how schools are scared to put a picture of a student on the school's website without a notorized rights waver, yet they jump at the chance to make a national database of students.)
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
If you dont act a certain way schools and teachers go out of their way to label you.
Theres a whole array of labels, the most popular? ADD, then theres Bipolar, then theres Manic Depression, they basically have a label for anyone who doesnt act in the "normal" way.
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Then when the REALLY invasive stuff happens as they reach adulthood ( and when true rights and freedoms kick in ) they will be used to it and accepting of the practice. Give it 2 generations and it will just be 'normal' to be watched 24/7. Why not RFID tag them while we are at it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
A quick HOWTO in turning a democracy into a plutocratic fascist state:
The outcry was initially the collection of the data. We were told not to worry, it is for private industry's use and, besides, we don't have a constitutional right to privacy in business.
Now the outcry is the use of data mining and aggregation to take the data thus collected and use it to profile our private lives in minute detail, effectively creating a defacto, if hybrid, police-surveillence state. And you dismiss it as "they're not creating any data that's not already there", as though that somehow negates the consiquences of such behavior.
The initial public outcry against the collection of private data on private individuals was right then, and it would be right today were it not for the deafening silence of those who have recognize a battle long since lost.
The public outcry against the sale and exchange of data between private corporations (and government agencies) was right then, and it is right today, even if the number of voices has declined over the years.
And the outcry against aggregating and mining this data to microanalyze our individual lives is justified, appropriate, and dismissed at our own peril. This isn't the start of a slippery slope we're talking about here, this is another in a long series of runs down it we're skiing
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Where is the database I can monitor to provide me with accurate, timely information to predict which schools are failing?
My idea was to keep a virtual eye on every school administrator and identify those at risk of reducing the quality of education at the school. I'd like to be able to look up the measurements of that person's effectiveness from one source and at a glance: test scores, attendence, discipline, and so on for all students that he or she is responsible for.
My idea was not to punish low performing administrators, but identify high-risk ones so that early intervention can be used.
The urban legend lives? Do we really need to pidgeonhole unlikeable kids as stupid kids?
Theres more genious out there than you think. I have friends that are very smart, but the school system didn't work for them.
School needs to change, but not like this.
God spoke to me