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Texas Schools Using Electronic Chips To Track Students; Parents In Uproar
An anonymous reader writes "Two Schools in San Antonio are using electronic chips to help administrators count and track students' whereabouts. Students at Anson Jones Middle School and John Jay High School are now required to wear ID cards using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology embedded with electronic chips in an effort to daily attendance records. The article said the Northside Independent School District receives about $30 per day in state funding for each student reporting."
Really... parents caring about what the school does? Unheard of.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
It probably means that the teachers haven't a clue who their charges are and that the writer of the above passed through the system despite not attending.
Somewhere in this school there's an Honor Roll student with a couple of dozen ID tags hanging around his neck and a wallet full of cash...
This is how surveillance states gain ground in leaps and bounds over generations. Kids that are GPS tracked by their parents get used to being GPS tracked by authority and as adults, don't mind it or are less likely to *actually* fight it from a state/national authority. Same logic here, with RFID chip tracking.
How hard is it to manually count attendance? You have a degree in education but you cannot to the occasional headcount? After a week you should be able to look at your class and recall the *names* of the faces you do not see and deduct that from your total class size. Don't get me wrong, I love technology, but this sounds like another excuse to spend taxpayer money, in addition to other nefarious motives which will undoubtedly be discussed in this thread.
Please get both of those words out of the discussion. They are neither the consumer or the product. Education is not a product to be consumed.
They are students! They are there to learn, to be curious, to ask questions, make mistakes, and get messy.
I'm stupid why? Because I understand that there is a (huge) difference between Electronic tracking of every movement throughout the day vs pen and paper attendance taking? Excuse me for pointing out the flaw in your logic
Or why not stop paying the schools by the student-days of attendance? Perhaps a more sane method of funding the schools, if you're going to have public schools in the first place, would work.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
I do not know why so many refer to government as if it is this independent god-like entity running around and maniacally laughing as it forces people to do things against their will.
The government *is* the parents. I went to public high school, and went to a district that mandated school uniforms. This wasn't big government forcing it on me; it was my parents' contemporaries. I remember my parents asking at meetings why we needed uniforms (took out individuality, and was expensive!), but many other parents -- not the government -- responded they liked how clean everyone looked, and it kept gang paraphenalia out of schools. Hell, I knew *students* that claimed to enjoy having uniforms because they did not like having to think about what to wear every day.
My point is, do not blame government -- blame the parents. The parents are the ones pushing the standards, and government officials are trying their best (often times anyway) to appease what they think is the majority opinion. My school district holds votes on certain school policies, and it was what parents wanted.
If you are upset about rejecting authority, you should ask why so many parents are so authoritarian toward their own and other children. It is apparently what they want. Personally, I feel this is a phase because of fear of the future in the current economic and foreign policy climate. The youth are not near as accepting as you think. Growing up in this era has given them much different attitudes than their authoritarian parents. They are biding their time until they know for sure how to go about changing it. I would be a little more optimistic.
I hope there is one of those Pinko-Liberal-Commie-Democrat-Basterds teachers on the faculty making the kids read 1984 and Fahrenheit 451.
And who says English Lit is worthless.
When I was young, I thought Fahrenheit 451 was about suppressing books because government was authoritarian.
I read it more recently and realized it was because the people had democratically decided that books were unhealthy and interfered with watching Dancing with the Stars.
Because we need a metric that can be measured with a daily KPI to show progress. This is what happens when you expect to apply "business rules" other places on society not based on monetary results.