Slashdot Mirror
Bug Means High School Students' Schedule Errors May Last Days
Hugh Pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that thousands of high school students in Prince George's County missed a third day of classes Wednesday, and school officials said it could take more than a week to sort out the chaos caused by a computerized class-scheduling system as students were placed in gyms, auditoriums, cafeterias, libraries and classes they didn't want or need at high schools across the county and their parents' fury over the logistical nightmare rose. 'The school year comes up the same time every year,' said Carolyn Oliver, the mother of a 16-year-old senior who spent Wednesday in the senior lounge at Bowie High School. 'When I heard they didn't have schedules, I was like, "What have they been doing all summer?"' When school opened Monday, about 8,000 high school students had no class schedules and were sent to wait in holding spaces while administrators tried to sort things out." (More below.)
One must know which classes to ditch.
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
I remember talking to the admin at one of the colleges I attended. We asked them how they did their scheduling. The rumor was that the Dean would lock himself in a hotel room with a map of the school, the student list, the course catalog, and the teacher list, and 3 bottles of whiskey for a long weekend.
After which, he would take a weeks vacation while everyone marveled over the new schedules.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Seeing Prince George's County's name listed there comes as no surprise.
High school is a waste of time anyway, and the first week of HS especially so. They weren't going to be learning anything anyway.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I understand that there might be some concern with unleashing all these teenagers on the unsuspecting public, but after all they have been home all summer, so making them stay there for another couple of days while they get all this sorted out doesn't seem like that big of a deal. Nothing good can come of packing a bunch of teenagers into one room with nothing to do (and especially no air conditioning!). At the high school I went to, there would have been at least 2 fights on the first day of such an arrangement, and it would have gone downhill from there.
Oh yeah, and don't most schools have their administrators, and usually the teachers, report in at least a week before school starts? Wouldn't that have been a perfect time to conduct audits and make sure everything was ready for the students to arrive?
Damn you, COBOL!!!!
Hmm get a bunch of people including teachers and do it by hand. If you can't do it by hand , give the software to a bunch of computer science students and have them work out the bug, it's not hard.
Well, let's see.... At the top of the list is not working because they aren't paid over the summer.
This is a particularly annoying version of complaining about inferior service when, in fact, you are the one who funds that service.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Prince George's County "Upper Marlboro Schools" is a complete clusterfuck. You should see their purchasing department, they will quote for the city of "Mpper Marlboro" and give the shipping and bill to for a building completely unreleated to the billing or shipping address, and then have it deliver to one of the 500 cities in the district. They never, ever include shipping costs and the shipping address is wrong half the time. Do I have a beef with UMS? Noooo not at all.
moox. for a new generation.
My wife teaches Journalism at a low income high school in Dallas. A few days before school started she was worried about scheduling and so were her coworkers since an online system they're suppose to be using had no schedules in it. Her first day was met with 60 kids in one of her Journalism class, only 5 had orginially signed up. This is a very poor school ripe with gangs which have to be kept apart but with the scheduling farked all the kids were all mixed together. She was in tears on the phone with me worried that if a fight broke out she wouldn't be able to get out of her room since she has to cross the entire class to get from her desk to the door. Her school won't let her carry a concealed weopen, I want her to carry my pistol but I'm afraid if she gets caught with it there would be criminal charges filed.
The second day she submitted about 200 schedule changes to the counselors and had managed to get her class size down to 40. Any known bad kids she just told to leave her class, they just leave school and never come back (the first week or so is the worst then the trouble makers just stop showing up).
Today she showed 1/2 her students a video and tried to teach the other half, I'm guessing she'll do the same tomorrow but switch halves.
As of right now next Monday is declared a "do over first day of school" and the schedules are promised to be fixed. No one believes it though.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
'When I heard they didn't have schedules, I was like, "What have they been doing all summer?"'
Enjoying their vacation?
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
My daughter "selected a sewing class because she is interested in fashion design, but the school selected a basic piano class"
What kind of high school is THIS? We were lucky to have basic computer classes when i was in high school. Sewing and piano? Spoiled bastards.
Send the programmers and administrators to detention!!
I suspect the schools don't run the scheduler until a few days before school actually starts - Teachers can die (happened my senior year), quit, not show up for work, classrooms may be unavailable for many reasons, etc... On top of this, they don't actually know how many students are going to show up until registration closes (typically a week before class starts).
Her school won't let her carry a concealed weopen [sic], I want her to carry my pistol but I'm afraid if she gets caught with it there would be criminal charges filed.
...because "Teacher Kills Student During Class" is just such a terrific headline.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
When school opened Monday, about 8,000 high school students had no class schedules and were sent to wait in holding spaces while administrators tried to sort things out."
Mooooooo...
1. Install hidden cameras all over high school gym interior.
2. Lock 200 hormonal teenagers in that gym together with nothing better to do for hours on end.
3. ???
4. Profit!
http://xkcd.com/327/ That fuckin' kid. :|
I guess I have this idealistic vision of what should happen here. Conregate the students and ask, "Who's took Algebra last year?" Take the first 20 (okay, 30) student who raise their hand, lead them to math class. "Who's in 9th Grade and hasn't had English yet?" Lead another group away. "Who took chemistry....? Biology...?" I know, it would never be that easy, but I still have some idealistic vision that a group of adults could really teach something; after all, the teachers are just as much victims of this as the students.
Also, keep in mind, this is Prince George's County -- a jurisdiction that in the 1970s capped property taxes at then-existing levels, and allowed only minimal increases since. Combine that with a high population of at-risk students, large pockets of poverty, serious struggles with drugs and crime in the community -- and you have a recipe for disaster. At some level, the people of Prince George's County get the educational system they pay for. And they are cheap, so the fact that they don't have the computer resources that they need is entirely par for the course (sadly).
Words by John Taylor Gatto, 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"The second lesson I teach is your class position. I teach that you must stay in class where you belong. I don't know who decides that my kids belong there but that's not my business. The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class. Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered has
increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human being plainly under the burden of numbers he carries. Numbering children is a big and very profitable business, though what the strategy is designed to
accomplish is elusive. I don't even know why parents would allow it to be done to their kid without a fight.
In any case, again, that's not my business. My job is to make them like it, being locked in together with children who bear numbers like their own. Or at the least endure it like good sports. If I do my
job well, the kids can't even imagine themselves somewhere else because I've shown how to envy and fear the better classes and how to have contempt for the dumb classes. Under this efficient discipline the class mostly polices itself into good marching order. That's the real lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your place."
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
"The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
That method you propose is pretty efficient. I would extend it to take names of students leftover and then they could get into trouble for trying to avoid classes.
This is what happens when we adopt and embrace technology as a method to solve all our problems. Computers are nothing without the right people to maintain them. (They're sociotechnical systems, you cannot have one without the other)
I do wonder how complex a scheduling system is: does anyone have any experience in writing this kind of software? Isn't it a variant of fitting objects into space in the most efficient way?
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
In Japan the classes are assign by the actual teachers working on a giant wall sized matrix. If you ask me, It is much easier to be able to see such a large picture all at once. Something that computing technology still can not do unless we get wall size touch screens cheap.
Everyone had the opportunity to learn some good lessons though:
1. Never count on any public institution to do the right thing. If you don't have a schedule at least 2 weeks before school starts, start making serious noise.
2. Never, ever, believe a software product vendor.
3. Don't procrastinate. There really is -no- reason why those schedules couldn't have been generated and reviewed 2-weeks before school start. Sure, there might be some minor adjustments due to changes, but not 20% of your student population.
4. If it crashed 4 times the previous year, don't count on it NOT to crash. Have contigency plans.
Except for the huge, and very large libertarian bias John Gatto has. Generally, he makes two assertions, that things are better in a more libertarian system(quite arguable, and very much wrong), and that the school system is designed to produce good workers(This one is fairly obvious to most geeks, so not really arguable.). If he had made his second assertion, without the huge libertarian bias, he may have made some significant changes. To support his libertarian bias, he looks at people like Benjamin Franklin, Abe Lincoln, etc, trying to make the implicit statement that it was like this for everyone, and that these men are products of the more libertarian lifestyle they lived. Except he's wrong. He tries to argue from the specific, that this true for the general case which... is quite wrong.
And I'm here to tell you, it's downright scary what idiots and idiot programming is foisted on to K-12. While we've never reviewed the SchoolMax software, most of the software I see is "enterprise unaware": EG: no common credential store, little or no real testing, glaring flaws, and most have no concept of interoperability.
My favorite vendor excuse is "It's your network", followed by "No, you can't virtulize this, it has to run on it's own hardware and it can't have other services running." I laugh because our network outperforms most major ISVs (I used to work at one as a second job), and as far as virtulizaion, I've asked venors "why not?" and the answer is never technical, it's always "because we don't support it". 9 times out of ten, the support driods working on something never twig to the fact that their application is running just fine on a virt serv and has been for YEARS. But clue them in, and INSTANTLY the problem is the virtulization, not a bug.
The other thing that makes me laugh is that when you ask how much a license is, it's never "how many CPUs?" or "How many boxes", it's always per student, even if it would only be used by a single classroom, they want to license it for the entire student population.
In over 15 years of working K-12, I can count on one finger the number of vendors that I didn't think were complete idiots, fools, and/or scammers.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
or humors
proven stupid
fail
But why are many of the people protesting against government run health insurance on Medicare, and express a high level of satisfaction with it? Same with Medicaid. Same with the US Postal Service (Obama's ignorant quip not withstanding), which I've certainly found easier to deal with than Fedex? Not to even delve into how we (in general) trust the government for security, domestic and abroad, collecting taxes without paying the head of the IRS one out of every ~$700 tax dollars every year (actual number for the CEO of United health care of US health care expenditure)?
Off the top of my head, I can't think of a national situation where there's a private company providing a better service than a public equivalent (and this is ignoring the contract asymmetry where Enron is allowed to criminally game the market and the state can't abrogate the contracts, yet the private firm can just say "oops, but our owners have limited liability" and declare bankruptcy.. which abrogates their current contracts). I have a feeling this was different in the 70's and 80s, that government was really a lot less efficient than it is now, or else I doubt Reagan would have had such pull. But I was born just around when Reagen was first elected, and in my adult life the vast majority of the arbitrary, caustic and inefficient bureaucracy that I've encountered has been in the private sector.
While the surest means of preventing excess is a lot of people paying attention to politics, and being vocal... the idea that the current proposals are generating so much vitriol while Bush's Medicare 'reform' that prohibits negotiating drug prices with pharmaceutical companies sure has the appearance of an irrational double standard.
I had mod points yesterday, but not today. The post above was a very informative post. Nice contribution.
I live just north of atlanta, in my high school i had weeks before I was put in the right class.
Every semester.
There's pretty strong objection to having government-only health insurance, because it will end up sucking and no one will want to use it.
Nobody (not even Obama or Hillary Clinton) is suggesting government-only healthcare, so I'm not sure what your point is. The healthcare proposals are about a hybrid system.
... and then they built the supercollider.
"The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real."
Perhaps, at one time, this statement could have been true. Perhaps it is official schooling that has brought about the change.
However, I can tell you for sure that dumb people *do* exist in mind-numbingly huge numbers.
This 'mass dumbness' *is* real and it is scary.
It almost seems that as a species we are heading to less and less intelligence.
Brain power requires energy. If you can get away without using your brain you can be more efficient. Its evolution at work.
MMOs are a great example of this...
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
What kind of company is this? Their website is a wreck, the login system to the support site doesn't even work, by that I mean you can provide any credentials and it'll let you in. Once inside, there's nothing there!
A google for SchoolMax returns:
SchoolMax Sucks Facebook Group (Students): http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=66046055790
(Year 2009-2010 Week 1: 3392 Members)
First comment:
"Every year,our scheduling coordinator at Roosevelt Mr. Horn starts working on entering schedules into the system from February to July. He enters the schedules into a computer program called "The Scheduler." Every year, The Scheduler is only able to automatically enter the schedules of about 75% of the students; the other 25%, which is about 600-700 students, have scheduling issues that the program can't fix on its own. When this happens, the program leaves the schedule in the system incomplete and moves on to the next one. This is where Mr. Horn comes in. Mr. Horn, from July to August, sits with The Scheduler and works out the remaining 25% of the students' schedules. By the time school starts back up, he has most of the students' schedules worked out. The remaining students go to the auditorium and wait for their schedules to be finished; the average student's schedule takes 5-10 minutes to be entered into the system.
Now, this year, the county wanted him to use SchoolMax for Eleanor Roosevelt's scheduling. The program, which he was only able to start using in May, was able to get 77% of the student's schedules in. However, SchoolMax, not being able to work out the remaining 33% of the schedules, removed them completely from the system instead of leaving them incomplete. Because of this, Mr. Horn had to enter and work out the missing schedules from scratch. They didn't want him doing this over the summer, however, because they were working on the program, which apparently required it to be down the entire time. Now, instead of Mr. Horn getting to work in late June/early July, they allowed him into the program on August 7th. This left him with 17 days to attempt to do what usually takes him more than two months. In addition, SchoolMax's scheduling program is incredibly slow compared to The Scheduler. Instead of 5-10 minutes for a schedule to be registered in the system, it now can take up to 45 minutes.
In conclusion, the No Child Left Behind Act left behind about 631 students yesterday at Roosevelt."
http://www1.pgcps.org/WorkArea/showcontent.aspx?id=98146
LOL..
Who would give this company 4 million dollars?
Einstein once said, ""The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education."
"
I have two complaints.
Use of the words "good", "bad" or "evil" is almost invariably the result of oversimplification.
I work with a non-profit that uses a vendor called Skyward to supply SMS to all the schools in the area. I used to think Skyward's product was pretty lame, but they have never had a problem like this. Not even close. If Skyward pulled a boner like this one, even people at my organization (who just support and administer) would get all kinds of fired.
This happened to my sisters' school in Fort Worth also. I just figured it was the FWISD screwing around, not some software bug.
When I went to school, we NEVER had this problem.
All of our equipment was 1950's and '60's era stuff (remembering the labels when I was in grammar school in the early '90's):
-It was more reliable: Didn't break down, except for the occasional burned-out lightbulb.
-More durable: Made of steel. You could treat it very roughly and it didn't break.
-Easier to use: No passwords, fumbling with the network, dead/broken remote controls, plugging in cables (Just one POWER plug), just to use an overhead projector.
-More economical: An overhead bulb is LOADS cheaper than a new digital projector bulb. And the whole unit is cheaper to replace.
Most of the technology in schools today is full of fancy bells and whistles that do largely the same thing, with few improvements over the old RELIABLE equipment that schools used to have.
ALOT of the equipment we had was made by Eiki, and it was SOLID, unlike the fancy crap they make nowadays. The tech schools have now offers a questionable advantage over the amount of time and work it purports to save.
A LITTLE OFF-TOPIC BUT: Does anybody here remember the smell of the Ditto machine? Ahhhhh..... They days.....
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Okay, anything with MAX in its name is doomed to failure.
Be seeing you...
i thought that the primary reason was, er, slavery.
Fail.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
A couple of years ago when my daughter showed up for middle school orientation, all of her 6th grade class had been given slips of paper with the WRONG locker combination.
Mayhem ensues. One can easily imagine that schools aren't experts in tasks like this, although you can certainly argue that they should be. Probably some poor teacher with half a clue about technology was assigned the task of distributing locker combinations, and no one bothered to check before the slips were handed out. Ultimately there's no accountability for stuff like this so the situation is not likely to change any time soon.
I used to work for a board of education doing IT. They buy these horrible, complicated programs, don't give the people any training or even enough time to do the scheduling and then stuff like this happens. It all boils down to the usual bull; the Board sits in there board room arguing about the budget and all they really care about is making themselves look good. So people and projects that need money get lost in the shuffle.
I found that SchoolMax operates the entire county's 4500 teachers and 1000 counselors on what they believe is a single web server, not a cluster as is the norm for applications of this scale. Apparently either the county didn't do its appropriate due-diligence, or SchoolMax sold them a bag of lies, but apparently they thought the system would be sufficient to handle the user load. They'd been having severe problems with it all last school year as well, to the poiunt where these teachers were doubly entering all their grades, attendance, etc onto paper as well as into SchoolMax.
A school system as large as PG county has a responsibility for doing the appropriate research into what products and services it chooses to use. It's a shame that there's such poor leadership and such a knowledge vacuum.
'When I heard they didn't have schedules, I was like, "What have they been doing all summer?"
Duh. Same thing the useless NEA drones will do all autumn and winter and spring. Jack off.
Larry Warman (Lawrence K. Warman, Jr) is turning over in his grave right now.
Tuesday was the third anniversary of his death.
(and before I'm marked off topic -- Larry was the head engineer for the IT department of PG County Schools, and before that was a Vice Principal at Crossland, where among other things was responsible for manually reconciling schedules to avoid conflicts (overcrowding classes, making sure kids weren't in classes they had already taken, etc.))
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Not true at all - we already have a couple of health programs being run by the US government - Medicare and the VA health system are two of the biggest... and both of these consistently outscore private programs in areas like cost, customer satisfaction, and health outcomes. The idea that the US government can't provide quality domestic services is simply a lie put out by conservatives with an ideological axe to grind.
Other than that, I agree completely with the parent post.
No doubt if you look hard enough, you can find various things that the US does better than other countries. But in the big measures: longevity, infant mortality, cost, etc... we're not in the top 10... or 20... or 30. The numbers I've seen are like 37th place in life expectancy at birth and 33rd in infant mortality. And of course we spend a huge amount more than other countries to get these results.
My senior year of high school was marred by a similar glitch. As part of a school internship program, I was supposed to assist the teaching of an AP Computer Science class. I was assigned the standard internship program class (last period of the day so you could leave early), but I was not assigned to the AP Computer Science class.
When the computer system came up with the schedules, the AP Computer Science class was assigned at the same period as AP Calculus, a class that I was taking.
The only way to fix that problem would have been to re-roll the entire schedule for the school.
Needless to say, I ended up dropping the internship.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
I know this is slashdot and I'm supposed to rant about the stupidity of the situation and point out how they wouldn't be in this situation if only they'd...
But last night I had a dream that I'd signed up for a class at a nearby community college and, when I went to the building listed on my paperwork, it was obviously completely wrong. The room was a lot like the library in Breakfast Club only with less books and more open space. There were a few other confused people there, too, trying to figure out where we were supposed to be. It's weird because I haven't had a school dream in years and then this article pops up with kids being sent to holding areas and/or random classes.
http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/
OSS scheduler.
Done.
I may disagree with some of your earlier posts, not much I would argue with in that one. Well except slightly ;)
un-motivated not so good teachers are not unique to public schools. Same with motivated teachers not being unique to private. I also went to public schools, and also got a crappy math teacher that didn't move me on because I was so board, and right after lunch so I mostly slept (but was near the top of the class in exam scores.) Later I did get a awesome math teacher at the same school who kept me interested, despite the ease, and got me back on track. I never got into calculus class in HS because of one 9th grade teacher, but made up for it with summer school before college...
Since some of the smartest people I know have the least formal education, and some of the most worthless people I have worked with went to schools with the best reputations, this shows me that school reputation is not the only factor (likely not even the primary one.) Because even bad schools are overcome by outside motivations, and good schools are worthless without other positive influences and motivations, but no schooling cannot be overcome anymore. As such I would prefer we concentrate on keeping public schools improving, and completely keeping government (including the money) out of the private ones, unless they cause problems.
Sounds like a great opportunity for lots of unconferences. Barcamp Gym, Barcamp Cafeteria, etc.