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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."
Just saying.
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?"
Hey, why not just embed the RFID tags in them subdermally, in their ear, like cattle? There must be a fair bit of expertise for that sort of thing in Texas.
In other news, the last kid in John Jay High School to figure out they could just leave their ID card in their locker and stay in bed all day was mercilessly mocked and bullied by his peers.
I guess I should RTFA, but:
I don't know what that means...
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...
The relevant data: did they learn valuable skills?
The irrelevant data: did they attend every class, and take three (3) or fewer dumps a day, numbering fewer than 15 minutes each and not more than 42.3 minutes total?
Our society is in love with metrics, but in its mad dash, produces lots and lots of data that is actually not relevant to the task at hand.
If they said they were using these RFIDs to figure out exactly when and where pedophiles are snatching their kids, I might consider that relevant data, but emphasizing attendance is a surrogate for emphasizing learning.
Tie the RFID chip to a rat, and leave out rat treats on the floor in your favorite classes. You'll get a perfect attendance award.
(Adults are dumb.)
Somehow I think the students have turned in the product and are no longer the consumer in this case.
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This doesn't seem unreasonable does it? When the kids are at school, the staff are in loco parentis, and so keeping tabs on the little bastards doesn't sound crazy. After all if one of them goes AWOL and turns up in a suitcase, the school's likely to be sued.
Of course if it's being used for data collection for behavioural profiling or resale, that's another matter, but if it's just for "this kid was here earlier but didn't answer roll call, where the hell is he?" or "it's recess and we need to get a message to this kid, where the hell is he?" that seems fine.
Steve Hernandez, whose daughter is a sophomore, objects to the tags, saying they are similar to the "mark of the beast."
"My daughter should not have to compromise (her) religion just because Northside Independent School District wants to get paid," Hernandez said.
are used in their parents badges when they go to work. Its how they open doors and clock in. Recalling from my youth, kids have had ID badges since about 1996, theyve had to be visually verified in most cases before you can leave the lobby and enter your class at the start of the day. somehow the texan that wrote this article thinks by saying "electronic chips" and "children" in the same sentence, im supposed to get outraged.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Let's see here... You don't use capitalization and make use of sentence fragments. Sure, I'll believe that your teachers didn't care!
We are entering an era where children are raised more to the standards of "society" (i.e. government) than the parents themselves. My kind -- people who dare to think for themselves and reject coercive authority by default -- aren't wanted or needed in this kind of world. It probably sounds cynical to some people, but I think it's best that my genetic line ends right here. Good luck to the rest of you who continue the human race -- you're going to need it.
Me and my co-workers have RFID-enabled badges to access our workplace and PCs, and it leaves logging trails for sure. No-one around here seems to be in an uproar about it.
Of course, here they have proprietary company property to protect.
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.
..I laud this public school's initiative to make sure that they are tracking attendance. Obviously it's primarily about funding in this case. But it also provides documented evidence of whether kids are in class or not. This information can (and should) be passed on to parents.
Also, in Iowa back in the 1990's our Governor (R) had proposed a change to the state's welfare system called "learnfare". The idea was that a family's welfare check depended on the child's attendance in school. They received 100% of the check for good attendance and were penalized for poor attendance. The idea was that they wanted kids in 3rd, 4th, 5th generations of welfare families to get a good education and not be the next generation on welfare.
Now obviously school attendance doesn't necessarily mean good grades, or caring about your future. But still, it was a step in the right direction.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Kids will never think of having a friend hold their card while they go off to do whatever it is kids do nowdays.
The problem here is that if your kid's school tracks your kid this way on the school campus, your kid likely won't have a problem being tracked that way all the time when they are an adult. Schools are at least as much about social engineering as they are about education. So, unless your attitude is "I got mine, screw my kids." you should be outraged at a school trying to do this.
Capitals are the oppressors of the lower case. The lOWER cASE has as much rights as the Capital Case.
What his teachers tought him is that all are characters are equal! What you are trying to say is that some characters are more equal than others. Shame on you.
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.
This was the most important line in the article:
"The article said the Northside Independent School District receives about $30 per day in state funding for each student reporting."
This is the only reason anything gets done at a public school EVER.
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
in Germany, we worry about educating the children, if they don't want to be there then so be it. We also train children to be more independent.
Examples with photos!
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.
That's why it *is* important for parents of today...to be against this type of tracking....if kids today think this is normal...well, it then becomes the norm.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........