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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.)
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?
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).
In fact, while public school teachers are typically not paid during the summer(whether this counts as "vacation" or "unemployment" depends on how much they are paid the rest of the year and/or who they've married); but it is pretty common to have at least a subset of admin and support staff on site year round. Some of it is just salary padding fluff, I'm sure; but there is a lot of real work to do at a school over the summer.
Schedules get made up(well, usually), buildings get cleaned and repaired, IT projects that would be too disruptive for the year(or take too much of the IT staff's time when they also have to deal with user support) get done, pallets of textbooks, paper, lightbulbs, etc. get moved about.
I'm not too surprised by this story, really. You see errors at least as flagrant in much higher profile corporate and government projects, so it isn't like IT deployments crashing and burning is all that uncommon, even among people with deep pockets who should know better. In a school, you've probably got a more or less bare bones staff of IT, who spend most of their time doing basic support, working with some horribly crufty abomidation from a vendor who deserves to die for their programming sins; but also has years of experience building software that caters to the specific needs of school systems(Sure, anybody, right down to that 15 year old who just discovered LAMP and sourceforge, could build a better frontend, and better DB backends are given away in the backs of "learn linux for morons in 10 minutes" books; but software that promises to automatically send out report card notifications to parents in a manner that correctly navigates the laws for information disclosure/nondisclosure when you have one or more divorced/separated/custodial/noncustodial/court-appointed-guardian/whatever parents in the picture? Not so common). It's more or less a matter of time before something bad happens.
Both of my kids are in Prince Georges County public schools. They are both in the science and technology magnet program at Eleanor Roosevelt HS. Two years ago, they used mygradebook.com for teachers to use, and it was a breeze to check on grades, see what assignments were due (and what assignments were missing), etc. It was an easy sytem to use, and worked well. Last year ERHS was forced to use the SchoolMax system. It was a disaster. So I'm not surprised that the problem was caused by the SchoolMax software.
A pair of entrepreneurs were giving a talk at my university about their successes and failures in the start-up phase of their company.
They had been spending about 18 months straight building a class scheduling program, and had gotten it to work, but they felt their four day run time was way too long to market, and couldn't figure out how to improve the speed and were about to give up. They were using an old version of the university's students, teachers, student's course wishes and rooms.
At a party at the university one of them was talking to someone from the school's administration and after a couple of drinks they got to talking about the work he was doing, and he mentioned the 36 hour run time, which made the administration guy look quite surprised, as they were used to having a two week run time on their current system, which they were happy with, as it was one of the fastest on the market.
Now, this anecdote was somewhat old at the time, but his point was "a product may seem worthless to you as an outsider of the industry, but that doesn't mean it isn't better than what's available". My point is that these type of scheduling takes a long time to complete
Heh, you don't have to tell me. I grew up in Upper Marlboro, and did all my schooling in the PG County School System. Back when I was in middle and high school (in another decade), it was fairly routine for me to have to sort out some kind of heinous scheduling snafu at the beginning of each year. Given that I was out at the edge of the area covered by my high school, bizarre bus schedule errors were almost guaranteed, as well.
The most spectacular goof-up while I was there was the time they refused to close schools one morning, when a blizzard was rolling in. After freezing to death at the bus stop, waiting for our late bus, we had a grueling trip through white-out conditions to the school. The Beltway looked like some kind of post-apocalyptic nuclear survival horror movie, littered with snow-covered jack-knifed tractor trailers and wrecked cars. By the time we finally reached the school building, we were told that school was canceled. However, we could not simply turn around and go home. Oh no. Instead, the bus was obligated to go back to the first school on its evening routes, to pick them up and take them home, first. We were the last school on the evening routes. So, needless to say, the bus didn't even show up to take us home until stupid-o-clock at night, when we should have been going to bed.
1. A LOT of parents treat school like a babysitting service and couldn't stand the thought of their precious little snowflake sitting around at home unsupervised. Something tells me there would be more than a few angry parents (and probably some lawsuits, unfortunately) if the students were sent back home without advance notice.
2. A LOT of public school administrators treat school like a prison and would much rather see thousands of students sitting around all day on a gymnasium floor than release them back to their comfortable homes while the administrators slaved away at fixing the scheduling problems. Also, sending them home would be like admitting there was a real mistake whereas making the students sit around idle is just a temporary setback.
I swear to FSM, my daughter will never see the inside walls of a public school.
You're wrong. I taught for five years, so let me set the record straight:
Most teachers have their salary spread over the entire year. The first two years I taught, I got a check every 2 weeks, whether or not school was in session. The last three years, they dumped a lump-sum into my bank account at the end of June. Still, this doesn't make a lick of difference. The teachers don't make the schedule - that's the duty of the administration, who IS paid all year. Generally, they sign a 220-250 day contract, which means they work through most of the summer.
Once upon a time, when I was a new teacher, we got a new principal and a new head of guidance. They were tasked with scheduling classes for the school over the summer. Because they were new, the district shelled out something like $10k to send them to a 3 day training session put on by the maker of the scheduling software the district had purchased.
They packed their bags, and flew out to the resort where this was happening. They attended the first day of the training, and it was very easy stuff. Stuff they already knew. So they blew the other two days off, and had themselves a nice vacation.
Fast-forward to the end of the summer, and the principal had deleted two weeks of work on the schedule by accident, the classes were all fucked up, and nothing was working. On the first day of school, there were all sorts of issues, and it took a week or two to hammer it all out.
And by "hammer it all out", I mean, "Schedule Calculus and Physics at the same time, so students have to choose. Schedule AP English and AP History at the same time, so students have to choose. Schedule chemistry classes and labs a period apart, so the teacher is forced to break instruction into tiny bits, and rush through minimal labs."
For three years, my school went through a nightmare of scheduling. When they got rid of the horrifically incompetent administrators, it got much better.
How much do you want to bet that the administrators in charge of scheduling this district went on a vacation instead of a training session for the software?
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
If you have six classes of Math students, then you need six Math classes and you need to find the teachers for them. If a teacher dies/whatever, you still have six classes of Math students. Yes, the administration may have to scramble to find a replacement teacher, but that doesn't affect the scheduling of classes: substitute new Math teacher in place of dead Math teacher.
>>My point is that these type of scheduling takes a long time to complete
The problem is a lot harder than most people think.
The issue isn't 180 kids wanting to take math. It's 180 kids that are taking wildly different class loads, but are all at the same level of math, and so need to be grouped together somehow into 6 classes, assigned only to teachers which are qualified to teach that class, but not teaching another class during the same time period.
If we ran our schools Japanese-style, with everyone taking the same classes together, the solution is simple: rotate your teachers through each of the classes - the kids stay in one class, but the teachers circulate.
But our college entrance requirements are so strict now, optional classes are now absolute constraints on the problem. Student A MUST have Precalculus, Sophomore English, American History, Science 3-4, and French 3-4, and wants to take Journalism 3-4 during period 4 during 2/3rds of the year and Volleyball during period 6 at the end of the year. Whereas student B needs chemistry, Sophomore English, French 3-4 (which only has enough students for one class, so they must all be scheduled together), AP US History, etc. This is combined with constraints put on the system by individual teachers (teacher C is a teacher on special assignment, and so can only work periods 1-3, teacher D is our only journalism teacher, and can only teach the newspaper class in Period 4).
If I recall correctly, the scheduling problem (or at least some variants of it) is NP-complete.
My step son does (goes to public school) he's eight years old in third grade and goes to school to play fun exciting games and get stickers for writing one broken sentence and then comes home in the afternoon to learn.
His mother and I have butted head *numerous* times with his teacher, counselors (counselors in primary school...why?) and principle a few times about the fact that he and half is class are functionally illiterate and the school doesn't seem to be in the least bit concerned about it. This is after we pulled him out of another public school because of the same problem. That is no interest in teaching children to read, write and do maths. It's *all* "social" and not even what I would call "social" as some of the things they learn are decidedly anti-social.
Apparently social skills and self-esteem building are more important than the fact that he can't read books that me and his mother could read in first grade. We do our best with him but given that we only have him for two hours a night and are already considered "overly strict" and "pressure" parents by his school for trying to teach him ourselves (reading, writing and maths) for a few hours on afternoons and weekends there's not much else we can do as long as he's in that system.
He'll be out of the public system at the end of this year though. After spending his summer holidays with a tutor he'll be going straight into a private school to repeat the third grade.
So I'm with you my own children (18 months and six months) will *never ever* see the inside walls of a public school building. As it is I'm already responsible for one damaged child because of the mistake of trusting the state school system.
I weep for this generation of public school children - the first in some larger untested social experiment.