Ask Slashdot: Why Aren't Schools Connected?

rtobyr writes "We use the Internet — E-mail, Facebook, Twitter, and blogs to communicate with colleagues, friends, and family. When I was in Iraq with the Marine Corps, we used e-mail (secured with encryption and stuff, but e-mail nonetheless) to communicate the commanding officer's order that a combat mission should be carried out. My third grade daughter produces her own YouTube videos, and can create public servers for her games with virtual private network technology. Yet here I am trusting a third grade girl to deliver memos to me about her educational requirements in an age in which I can't remember the last time I used paper. Teachers could have distribution lists of the parents. The kids' homework is printed. Therefore, it must have started as a computer file (I hope they're not still using mimeograph machines). Teachers could e-mail a summary of what's going on, and attach the homework files along with other notices about field trips or conferences that parents should be aware of. Teachers could have an easy way to post all these files to the Internet on blogs. With RSS, parents could subscribe to receive everything that teachers put online. If teachers want to add to the blog their own personal comments about how the school year is going, then all the parents would see that also, and perhaps have the opportunity to comment on the blog. It seems to me that with the right processes, the cost and additional workload would be insignificant. For example, instead of developing a syllabus in MS Word, use Wordpress. Have schools simply not paid attention to the past decade of technology, or is there a reason that these things aren't in place?" It seems odd that primary schools in at least the U.S. don't use technology to communicate with students much. My younger sister went to a private school that made reasonable use of Blackboard, but that seems to be the exception.

Comments

Poor people exist

[Anonymous Coward]

"Have schools simply not paid attention to the past decade of technology, or is there a reason that these things aren't in place?"

Poor people exist. And attend school. And there's an odd notion that we shouldn't make things even more unfair for them than they already are.

Re:Poor people exist

[rjstanford]

And access would cost another $20/month in a world where (gasp!) many kids are going to school without breakfast and are relying on the school district to provide them with lunch, since their parents simply can't afford it.

Those people are, however, notoriously underrepresented on slashdot.

Re:Poor people exist

[Obfuscant]

And access would cost another $20/month in a world where (gasp!) many kids are going to school without breakfast and are relying on the school district to provide them with lunch, since their parents simply can't afford it.

That is amost certainly the nail in the coffin of the electronic notifications to parents system. Imagine the "social stigma" if a teacher sent email notices to most parents, but had to give Billy and Marcia printed notices because their families are too poor to have the Internet and can't get email? Or if Roger is a bright kid and he tells the teacher that his parent's email address is a gmail address he controls?

That, and if it is a notice that requires a signature of a parent (field trip authorization, etc.) it will have to be paper anyway.

Re:Poor people exist

[AngryDeuce]

Which obviously ignores the fact that people were capable of getting excellent educations for thousands of years without any of this electronic gadgetry.

Perhaps you could fill the gaps? Shocking, I know...

Re:Poor people exist

[hawguy]

"signature of a parent (field trip authorization, etc.) it will have to be paper anyway."

No, there are many ways to electronically sign things.
The point of a sig. is not that they can trace the ink back to your pen but that the design is not easy to copy.

How do you positively validate the identity of a parent in a household where the student is the most computer literate (and perhaps the only English speaker), thus responds to all of the parent's email? Give the parent a secureID dongle and hope they don't share the PIN with their much more computer savvy child?

Re:Poor people exist

[SJHillman]

No, his daughter is on drugs. Which poor people have, so everyone is allowed to have them!

Re:Poor people exist

[Sir_Sri]

Not just poor people.

Not everyone can use e-mail. My mother, who would get custody of my children if I had any and something happened to me can't manage e-mail. She can cook and clean and drive, and she doesn't have Alzheimers, and has a decent pension income, but computers and e-mail are simply too complicated for her. Programming her VCR is too complicated for her. When I lived in the same city as she did, she could sort of manage, if I came by every day or two to help her out, but now that I'm 4 hours away it's simply not realistic.

If anything in that situation it would be the kid running the computing in the house (as happened even when I was in high school). Neither my mother nor father got to the point of using e-mail at home, although my father used e-mail at work and picked it up in his retirement, my mother, not so much (divorced).

Computers are any or all of expensive, complicated and insecure. Poverty is certainly a major issue, on both ends, running reliable IT systems isn't cheap, and if your e-mail system is down for the day does that mean you're not 'effectively communicating with parents' or some other regulation? A lot of guardians for children lack the capabilities to effectively manage any sort of electronic communication, and by extension that may make the system insecure. Paper isn't secure either, but e-mails to parents is the sort of thing begging to be hacked by some industrious students.

Equal Access

[rjstanford]

As long as some people didn't have (or didn't want to use) electronic access, the school would have to have processes in place to handle paper-based communication. The good news is that paper-based works for everyone; as long as they have to do it that way for some, they can do it for all "for free" as far as process cost goes (which is not insignificant).

The alternative might save money (might not), but would require teachers either having to figure out each parent's preference independently, or to do all of their work twice for each student (again, not an insignificant amount of time they're spending on overhead).

Re:Equal Access

[mariox19]

This is a good part of the reason. Schools can't exclude some students, and so disseminating things electronically would make twice as much work for a teacher. But there is another thing going on, too. My girlfriend is a teacher. She used to teach middle school. She wasn't required to post homework assignments online, but there was at least a tiny bit of pressure to do so. She refused, and for what she thought were sound pedagogical reasons.

We live in an age of irresponsible children and helicopter parents. If an assignment is on the board and a middle schooler has to copy it down and keep track of his assignment book, he's learning something. He's forming a habit. That little boy or girl is learning to take responsibility for himself. Moreover, the parent will have to keep tabs on his or her kid, and ask about the homework assignments. In this way, the parent is contributing to the child's moral development. Now, I realize that this is considered a loaded term in our politically correct society, but responsibility is a matter of character, and building character is one of the things that goes on in school, and is certainly one of the things parents ought to encourage the development of. If a parent, instead, spends every evening looking up on the Web to see what the kid's homework assignment is, that parent is not being a parent but a valet.

In short, there's an argument to be made for not putting assignments and other things on the Web.

Re:Equal Access

[dunng808]

This is precisely the kind of reverse logic that inspired me to start the Open Slate Project. Many teachers confuse the process of doing school with learning. Both my sons regularly received low grades in courses they should have done well in, because they failed to turn something in on time. Think about that. What does "Math - C" really mean? That the student is average at math, or disorganized?

I too am disorganized, and forgetful ... and a lousy speller. That is why I purchased an Apple Newton, back before there was Palm Pilot. Once I saw how that tool transformed my life, I knew every high school student ought to have one. From there it was a small step to imagining class activities automatically downloaded onto the students' slates. Homework uploaded at the click of a button, located on the worksheet. Continuous status visible to the parents. And more ...

The argument that poor families cannot afford it does not hold water. In the Open Slate Project, students build and maintain their own slate computers, a modern day version of shop class.

Why has the project not been successful? Resistance to change. What IT has made it into schools is mostly as a course, like "keyboarding," or, like my sons, a student initiative. My younger son took notes on a Palm Pilot connected to a folding keyboard, then uploaded them to his iMac at home for editing. There were selective teachers who understood problem with a jammed backpack and lost worksheets, and were happy to have him submit homework by mail. They were the exception.

I thought home schoolers would be more receptive. They, as a group, are even more conservative, and are likely to condemn any and all use of IT in education.

I still think it is a good idea. I would like to hear from any of you who agree.

Schools are Afraid

[RichMan]

See the elementary school teacher who used a school issued PC and accidentally shower her grade school class porn. She lost her teachers license, the school had a lot of explaining to parents to do. The anti-virus on the PC was out of date and had become infected from some other site.

Given the nature of modern parents allowing connectivity out of school is always going to be scary for teachers and schools.

What they could do is provide lessons, plans, updates and communications from the school to parents. This still has some risk of the school web-server getting owned, but is a lot less than the risk of one of many-many machines doing something wrong.

Re:Schools are Afraid

[SuricouRaven]

She very nearly got a few decades in jail for it, too - the school district decided to throw her to the mob as a scapegoat, rather than admit their own incompetent IT management.

Two main reasons I don't

[Ginger_Chris]

A) You can't assume every child and parent has access to the internet or computers. I work in a fairly normal catchment area of the UK and I'd say there are around 10% of families that fit into this category.

B) Too many excuses. You set homework online or through dedicated software and the pupils come back with 1001 excuses - "broadband wasn't working", "I couldn't download it", "it was in the wrong format", "printer was out of paper", "I've got it on memory stick and it still needs printing" All easily check-able and solve-able individually but not if you have 30 students. Give a child a piece of paper with homework on it, and if they lose it it's their fault (they could have come and collected a new sheet before the lesson), and if its not done it's their fault. Much much simpler.

Look at the community and not the school.

[flogger]

Education has historically been slow to change. As an example, it was a technological breakthrough in schools to get VCRs in each classroom in the 90's. To communicate with students, the student needs to know how to check email/facebook/twitter/blogs/etc. However each one of these tools is blocked in the school I teach. Students are not allowed to email, no one is allowed to facebook, tweet, blog, etc. Why not? Because the media has shown that every teacher is a perv who uses facebook/twitter/blogs/emails to stalk students in order to molest them. While I know this isn't true, and the slashdot crowd knows this is not true, average Mom and Dad watching the latest Foxnews/CNN feed gets this idea that teachers use these communication tools for evil. Word got out that I collected students cell phone numbers. (I wrote a script to send an sms before tests, quizzes, due dates, etc.) As a result a district wide policy was put in place stating that teachers are not to text students under any circumstance.

Why this fear mongering? Lawyers. The district is afraid that a parent will sue and so the entire educational environment is stifled in the community.

I use Moodle extensively and have set up accounts for parents to view lectures,take quizzes and participate in discussions with the students. it is great. I email with the parents, I set up a blog which parent have the option to subscribe to vis RSS feeds. The parents are slowly getting into the habit of checking the child's grades online....This has been slow going though. I first started posting grades and assignments online ine the mid 90's... it is just now gaining steam... Just like it took the VCR to become commonplace, it will take 15-20 years to get current communication technology in the schools.

Look up common core standards... New "rules" of educations pushing "21st Century" digital learning standards...

"Reply" is the problem

[CorporalKlinger]

I think the problem may simply be that teachers perceive they will lack the time to answer questions / comments they receive from parents via email if they open this pandora's box. I know a similar feeling is present in much of the health care industry and other "social service" sectors. The more available one is via "always on" technology, the more time one will have to spend on addressing communications conveyed via this additional medium. Businesses see it all the time - think how much time each day the stereotypical Dilbert-like employee must spend on emails compared with time spent addressing paper memos and phone calls alone (which still exist today) prior to the advent of email. Teachers fear their already strenuous schedule will become even busier. It takes a lot more time for a parent to pick up a phone or write a letter to contact the teacher... and I think that's how a lot of teachers like it.

Re:"Reply" is the problem

[Knave75]

It takes a lot more time for a parent to pick up a phone or write a letter to contact the teacher... and I think that's how a lot of teachers like it.

I agree completely. The very act of picking up the phone and finding the correct number to dial filters out 90% of the parent calls, of which 99% are of no value to the student. Even when parents email me, I give them my phone number and ask them to call.

Also, I would never "comment" online. Anything written has to be extremely factual and to the point. Anything I write to a parent, I write under the assumption that this piece of communication could end up in court somewhere, and I word it appropriately. On a phone call, the parents will hear the unvarnished truth, I almost never sugarcoat. An email message however will contain much as much jargon, waffling, and ass-covering as I can fit in the 4 or so sentences I'm willing to write.

For example, I'm willing to write a parent to say that Johnny got a 43% on his last test, but I will never write that Johnny got that 43% by texting his girlfriend in class and not completing his homework. If they want to find that out, the parents have to call. Why is that? Johnny's parents will point out that homework is not part of the curriculum, the texting is irrelevent, and that clearly I am punishing Johnny for not completing his homework and because I have some weird problem with cellphones, being a luddite like all teachers. Then they will appeal the mark to the superintendent, claiming that I have a clear bias against their son as evidenced by the email I sent them, and threaten legal action.

The previous paragraph is a true story, happened to a coworker. Parents turned a failure into a pass.

So yeah, I very rarely write to parents due to logistical (can't answer all parents, serves as a good filter keeping away those that don't really care) and legal (written stuff is dangerous) reasons.

Also going to cost a lot of money to do right

[Sycraft-fu]

And nobody seems interested in spending a lot of money on schools. IT in primary schools is some of the most pathetic I've ever seen. They do a completely shit job of it and a large part is lack of funding. When there aren't enough people, isn't enough cash for good systems ans software, is it any wonder you can't attract people who are good at it and that they can't do their jobs well?

So first big money increase is that the schools have to overhaul their IT. They need a lot more of it and higher quality. If the system is going to be critical and required, it'd damn well better be implemented and supported properly. You can't say "Well just go find something online for free," when it is something critical to the success of the school.

Support for people using it, both teachers and students, would be massive too. I know every parent likes to think their kids are real clever with computers but here's a newsflash: They aren't. Regular kids know how to use them in the same way regular people know how to drive a car: They know the minimum necessary to make it work and lack any advanced problem solving skills. I can see that shit every time I play an online game and have to give people support in making Ventrilo or Teamspeak work. Here are people who like computers enough to play online games, and they still don't know enough to make a voice chat app work properly.

So this wouldn't be some magic thing that would just work. It would require a lot of infrastructure, support, and development and that costs money. Now in the end it very well could be worth it. Maybe it saves money in the long run, by replacing more expensive labour intensive things. Maybe it doesn't save money, but the increase in quality of education make it worth it. Either way the problem is you have to fund it first. Since people are not hot on providing extra funds to education, that is a non-starter.

Re:Public libraries exist

[LurkerXXX]

The nearest library to the house where I grew up is 10 miles away in another city. You assume the poor folks in the neighbourhood are going to just have to walk that each way every night because because there are no buses or other public transport in the country, and if they can't afford net access, they can't afford the extra 100 miles of gas a week either.

"Serving poor people is not an excuse for failing to upgrade your technology".

Yes it is an excuse when you fail to actually think about what you are talking about, and put a huge extra burden on the poor because of your rather stupid assumptions.

Wow. I could write a book

[RetiredMidn]

My wife is a first grade teacher in the school system I and my children attended. (I graduated high school in 1972, so technology had a whole new meaning back then.) I have volunteered for many technology-related projects, including a committee overseeing a complete overhaul/rebuild of the schools, so I have some first-hand experience with this.

There was a big national (sorry, U.S.) initiative in the 90's to get every classroom connected to the Internet. I participated in several "Net Days", or something like that, where we volunteers ran Cat5 through ceilings and musty basements and punched down net drops In every classroom of every school in our town.

After that initiative, finding net-capable computers to hook up was a problem (two of my wife's four classroom computers were formerly our home Macs); most school systems are stretching their budgets to put teachers (and mandated special Ed aides) in the classrooms and keep textbooks current; technology is a luxury few systems can afford.

Don't even get me started on staffing to maintain systems and networks. Most school systems get by with less than a tenth of what a comparable sized company would expect to have in place for IT support.

As someone pointed out earlier, there was a time not that long ago where you could not assume every home had a computer with decent access to the Internet, and you could not make it the primary means of communication without excluding too many people.

For a while, my wife paid out her (our) own pocket to maintain a web presence.

Things are improving; our town is using a system called X2 for web presence, report cards, communication, etc. But refer back to the support staffing issues. There is no real support; the system is maintained and updated by marginally technical personnel for whom this is a secondary responsibility (after, say, actually teaching), for a miserly stipend that works out to less than minimum wage if calculated by the hour.

I know some people who wish schools did a better job at this would be willing to spend the extra tax dollars to support it, but you'd be amazed at how many want more for less.

Solution looking for a problem...

[bertok]

Schools aren't connected with buzzword compliant social networking crap because there's no reason to think that it would help kids learn! I've worked in an education department's IT division before, and every time somebody tried to push through some sort of "social" or "connected learning" crap it was a total failure. It was underused and pointless. Nobody could ever demonstrate the slightest benefit, but the costs were massive.

Meanwhile, the real problems that could be solved with technology are being ignored. For example, I have this great statistic that shows that the further away a school is from the city centre the fewer books it has per student. That's insane! What does the physical location of a student have to their with the propensity to read? Why should schools in the country have fewer books? If books could be delivered electronically, students everywhere would have equal and fair access to literature, but noooo... the politicians are totally spineless, and don't have the nerve to tell the publishers to provide digital copies of their works. Copyright this, renegotiate that, it's so much effort... so fuck the kids, let the country bumpkins stay illiterate, what matters is that the honourable senator's kids go to a private school with a library that has three floors and subscribes to fifty journals.

The real world

[dbergerson]

It's amazing how educated people got when there were not computers. I got into an argument with my daughter's private school over technology in the classroom. They were arguing over laptops (Mac/PC) and then over formats (Google Docs/Word.) I sat back and said if this is the whole goal of the school to 'bring in' technology, I will be withdrawing my child. They looked at me confused. I told them that if they are that determined about HOW they write the material versus WHAT the material they write is, then they are not educators, but lazy bums. I also argued with a parent who is a very smart guy, very wealthy and very successful. He argued that the education system is broke, that it is terrible, that technology needs to be pushed into the realm. I gave him a simple thought . . . If the education system is so broken, how did you do so well in it? Another parent who runs a nerd company doing PC repairs was arguing that the schools current machines were running XP on Shuttle boxes. He kept arguing how old the OS was. I told him, "If the school upgrades to Windows 7 or Mac OS X, do you think all the students will suddenly get straight A's?" People miss the perspective imo. Would I like to have gotten away from the paperwork nightmare that the school generated and sent to me? Sure. But I realized it made my child have to come talk to me. That act alone, opened up an opportunity for conversation. In essence, I could be a PARENT. When I wanted to find out how she was doing in a class, it was simple, I emailed the teacher directly. I used the old business trick and gave the teacher 48 hours to respond. If they didn't, I sent another notice and CC'd the principal and the board members. I got the answers I was looking for. There are lots of studies out there that have shown that there is no gain for electronic based teaching for the student. There is tremendous gain for electronic based teaching for the owners of the school. This is no different. There is a LOT to be said about the ability for a student to have interaction with a human teacher and human students.

Re:Electronic gadgetry used wrong

[tqk]

Teachers should be able to use technology to teach 50-60 students at a time, all with individualized instruction.

My sister's an elementary school teacher. She can use tech. She's not the bottleneck.

The bottleneck is the school board and the teachers' union. She's been begging the school board all year to get software she wants to use. It finally showed up last week, in March.

Report Cards *could* be damnably simple; radio buttons on a couple of web pages, with a few text boxes thrown in for detail. Instead, it's all done by hand just as it was done 150 years ago, because everybody else thinks it's alright as it is and it doesn't need to be changed. My sister spends close to a month doing report cards, then re-doing the ones the principal sends back.

Add in all the PC !@#$ that teachers have to look out for these days (they don't even want to mention "Christmas" now that there's rampant multi-cult sensitivities to consider). God help her if she gets a "slow" kid whose parents refuse to believe is slow. "MY PRECIOUS SNOWFLAKE IS NOT SLOW, DAMNIT!"

School IT is close to the bottom of the barrel, right next to lawyers' and doctors' IT. School, though, has the added encumbrance of school board bureacracy and a teachers union in the mix.

Hell at the temperature of the Sun's corona.

Re:Electronic gadgetry used wrong

[Moryath]

Blaming the teachers' unions proves you are a fucking retard who listens to too much Rush Limbaugh.

Where you should blame are the fucking Retardicans who demand to have a first-rate educational system while not wanting to pay a fucking dime of taxes to support it.

You want to know why school IT is "bottom of the barrel"? It's because the schools themselves are physically falling apart. Class sizes are 35 kids or larger now, up from 25 a decade ago, despite decades of studies showing that education quality declines with larger class sizes. Most schools have computers that are 6-7 years old and barely holding together, school infrastructure for email and web outreach is likewise a joke, and as likely as not it's all administered by the one tech-savvy teacher on staff who gets a measly 8-10 grand bonus per *YEAR* to spend an extra 20 hours a week trying to hold it all together with duct tape and baling wire.

They can barely convince teachers to keep teaching in the system as it is. Why? Because it's shit wages forever, you have to spend at least 5 grand a year on "continuing education" and take outside classes on your own just to fucking remain certified, you have to spend your own money on any classroom materials other than the books chosen by the curriculum administrators and the chalkboard or whiteboard in the front of the room, and then when the next budget crunch comes around, all the teachers in the state have to take a pay cut and then get blamed for being "the problem", like the fucking Retardicans and that college failout retard Scott Walker in Wisconsin pulled recently.

You want to have schools that teach well and give all kids an opportunity for a good education? LEARN TO BE WILLING TO PAY FOR IT. The US educational system, thanks to the Retardicans, is like trying to pay Yugo prices for a car but expecting you'll get a Lamborghini. NOT. FUCKING. GOING. TO. HAPPEN.

Fact check

[csumpi]

Next time, before spewing all that venom on how the US is not spending any money on education, please check your facts:

http://mercatus.org/publication/k-12-spending-student-oecd

"As we can see, with the exception of Switzerland, the United States spends more than any other country on education, an average of $91,700 per student between the ages of six and fifteen."

How much of this money goes to actually educating the kids after the unions take their cuts, I don't know. But saying that Republicans "demand to have a first-rate educational system while not wanting to pay a [...] dime of taxes to support it", is simply not true.

Throwing more money at the problem won't fix it.

Fix the families. Restore family values. Education and all other aspects of life will follow.

Re:Fact check

[homunculi]

As a teacher in New York state, I can tell you that the Union does not a cut at all. I pay my union dues myself. What European schools do not do is provide a fraction of the special education services that American Schools provide. If you take out Special education costs the per student dollar amount drops precipitously. They also do not provide free lunch and breakfast or in many countries subsidies meals AT ALL. Thirdly, and in my district this is huge, the cost of transportation is ridiculous. We are a rural district with approximately 110 kids per grade but over 300 square miles from which to bus them. New York state just passed a 2% property tax cap which prevents school budgets from going up regardless of whether diesel or gas prices (bus fuel) or heating oil goes up. Moryath is right. If people want a first rate education for their kids they need to be willing to pay for it.