Slashdot Mirror
Texas School District Drops Embattled RFID Student IDs; Opts For Cameras
The Northside Independent School District (NISD) of Texas, has decided to drop their controversial student RFID card plans and settle on hundreds of cameras to monitor students. Apparently, the technology wasn't quite the attendance silver bullet administration thought it would be, as Slate's Will Oremus discovered. 'Northside Independent School District spokesman Pascual Gonzalez told me that the microchip-ID program turned out not to be worth the trouble. Its main goal was to increase attendance by allowing staff to locate students who were on campus but didn't show up for roll call. That was supposed to lead to increased revenue. But attendance at the two schools in question a middle school and a high school barely budged in the year that the policy was in place. And school staff found themselves wasting a lot of time trying to physically track down the missing students based on their RFID locators. "We're very confident we can still maintain a safe and secure school because of the 200 cameras that are installed at John Jay High School and the 100 that are installed at Jones Middle School. Plus we are upgrading those surveillance systems to high-definition and more sophisticated cameras. So there will be a surveillance-camera umbrella around both schools," Gonzalez said."'
Surveillance and regulations are innefective, education is the way to go. It fails with drugs, it fails with guns, and of course, it will fail to do anything to increase attendance in a middle school.
You mean, what the entire tech community said was going to happen, happened? Kids found ways around their stupid requirements and made them look like fools while some contractor got away with tons of public money?
It's like we need to establish the "If an average 5 year old can find holes in it" rule from the evil overlord list for public institutions.
And so if one silver bullet doesn't work, let's try another!
IMO, if students don't show up for roll call too often, you talk to them. Then you talk to their parents. Motivating them (children AND parents) is your job. Treating them like money cows, not so much. Likewise, you don't automate roll call*, as some schools have tried. It's about the children, so treat them like they're human. At least, that's my apparently unAmerican[tm] view of things.
* The roll call administration is something different again. But the actual call is to be done by person, thank you.
I'm still not sure of the problem they are trying to solve.
Sounds like someone's due for a promotion.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
The lens through which we could be seeing this issue is facinating. We on slashdot see "Texas" teachers and we probably think they're retard conservatives. While, generally teachers in conservative southern states are viewed as crazy-ass liberals. It must be hell teaching in Texas, regardless of a teacher's ploitical leanings.
1. 1984?
2. Parents in the area didn't want children as much as they thought they did?
3. Lazy parents?
4. No discipline?
5. ?????????
If the schools are focused on increasing revenue, something along the way is horribly broken.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
If you need cameras to track your students, you don't have a low enough teacher to student ratio, which means the teachers don't know the students well enough to know whats going on with their students.
But teachers are expensive, stupid, and incompetent.
Of course Texas loves teachers to be that way, that gives them even more leverage to cut $ out of the public school systems.
Why not have cameras? I'd like to have audio recordings too. I see some real benefits besides the attendance issue. Kids should not get the same rights as adults and keeping a closer eye on teachers as well. I imagine it may increase everyone's productivity and civility.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
It's called video analytics...
If the school system was doing a proper job and education was engaging and felt worthwhile then attendance would not be a problem.
I would say they are spending the money in the wrong place. Working on the curriculum and staff training would be better, but the system cannot blame itself for the failing so blames the students.
*sigh* if only the education system could actually be intelligent and learn from the past.
You see this with a lot of schools. They become massive unmanageable compounds.
If the school is so big that you can't find your students in a reasonable amount of time even though they're on campus then your school is just too damn big.
Beyond that, there is a huge issue in our education system with putting the burden of attendance on the school or the teachers. How exactly is it the teacher's responsibility to make sure the students are in the class room? That is either the responsibility of the student or the parent. And if the student fails to show up or the parent fails to deliver the student... Fine. Find another school because you're expelled.
"But But, that will leave exceptionally stupid and disruptive children without even a marginal education."... And? So we should screw up the whole education system and force teachers to go play hide and go seek with various students just to raise an F- student up to a D- student? Not worth it.
Any meaningful test can be failed. If you cannot fail a test then it isn't a test. Life is full of tests. Will you get a job? Will you form some sort of life long relationship with someone else? Will you support yourself? Will you take care of your health? etc. The same is true in your professional career and the same is true in your education. Tests. Which you pass and fail. And not showing up to class is a failing grade.
End of story. Does that mean the school loses money due to poor attendance? Sure. But that's an accounting issue. Calculate things AFTER attendance not before. Then you don't lose anything. Or at least set your attendance projections at something more realistic. Scale back your projections by whatever percentage you over shot last year and you'll probably be closer to the ACTUAL attendance this year. What is the big problem.
You are not going to be able to save every kid. Stupidity is incurable. Get over it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Treat students like prisoners.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Unless they implant the RFID chips, one kid will turn up for class with 30 RFID chips in his pocket!
How has nobody mentioned this yet? Kids will show up for school if the stupid teachers unions wouldn't throw a giant fit every time a school tries to fire a teacher that every student hates because they're a complete asshole. Schools shouldn't even have good and bad teachers. Bad teachers should just be fired. I love how my high school had a "principal reviews the teachers in-class" semi-annually policy. Talk about a stupid waste of time. They know the principal is sitting there watching so they act different and the principal is only looking for teaching quality, not their personality. If they want a real opinion of teachers, ask the students and then fire accordingly.
The problem to school attendance is a societal issue. texas' abstinence only education perpetuates a cycle in which unfit or unwilling parents are needlessly encumbered by raising a child. working two jobs and barely making rent, the prosects are low when faced with ensuring your child doesnt starve to death and attends school on a regular basis.
through policical will, we've slashed education funding to the lowest levels in 30 years. We shouldnt get the luxury of complaining about low school attendance figures when evidence suggests there are arent enough teachers let alone truancy officers to ensure attendance.
the increasing police presence in most schools also reinforces a schoolhouse to jailhouse track for kids that need help the most. one or two run-ins with the cops and most kids just quit going entirely assuming the system is rigged against them.
Dont get me wrong, RFID is a glorious technology. We should use it instead to track politicians in the pursuit of determining where they get off neutering a public service that is intrinsic in becoming a functional human being, let alone model citizen. Maybe a few well placed tags can determine at what point our duly elected officials secure kickbacks for more cops in schools. Line their pockets with some and lets try to figure out what tribal leader is pushing them model legislation for doling cash to religious institutions disguised as legitimate schools
Good people go to bed earlier.
Insert 1984 reference here. Looks like it was off by 30 years. 2014 not 1984.
The younger you get them used to it, the better.
No sig today...
You could fund based on population within the district. Could even further break it down by # of children in the district. That could get painful as census data gets out of date.
Basing funding on anything except attendance creates a strange conflict where the district wants the fewest students possible.
In both cases, authoritarian idiots are attempting to force
order on a bunch of inherently uncontrollable people.
And those uncontrollable people have all the time in the world
in which to devise methods for circumventing the authorities'
attempts to control them. Because the human being is generally
capable of ingenuity, all such attempts to control are doomed to
failure.
However, if you can give people something interesting to do, and
they enjoy doing it, you don't need to worry about controlling them
because they will control themselves. And this is why many prisons
have things like weights for weight lifting, libraries, and even bocce
courts and pool tables. Those who complain that the prisoner is somehow
"not being punished" because there are such forms of entertainment are
clueless fools who would change their positions quickly if they were themselves
incarcerated.
Now, back to schools :
If the school has good teachers and gives students interesting things to work on,
the students won't tend to misbehave for the most part and there will be no need
for surveillance cameras. The bottom line is that if such things are necessary it
is the school which is failing the students, rather than the students which are
failing in school.
=
Fortunately, it's Texas, which means that they aren't actually missing out on education by skipping classes.
They might even be learning useful things, rather than the Texas brand of propaganda.
And so if one silver bullet doesn't work, let's try another!
How is drinking Coors Light one after another a solution to this problem?
They have become a meeting ground between the excesses of left-wing (political correctness, affirmative action,everyone-a-winner) and right-wing (security paranoia, ra-ra patriotism, and anti-science agenda) ideologies, where security contractors are better funded than the teachers. The end result is pabulum for a curriculum where mind-numbing mediocrity is held up as an achievement.
What is this obcession with attendance? Who gives a crap if the student is there or not? If a minor misses role call, the faculty calls and tells the registered contact. The parent or guardian deals with it if necessary. If you are learning the material and are capable of passing the tests...stay the fuck home for all I care. This is something that has always bothered me. Oh, you score in the top 1% of the class on the tests....but you missed 10 days....you fail. I have the same problem with homework. Oh, you demonstrate mastery of the subject, but you didn't do this huge mass of pointless homework....you fail. Even in college they pull this crap.
"we can still maintain a safe and secure school because of the 200 cameras that are installed"
I guess my school was a deathtrap, because it had zero cameras and zero RFID chips.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
I'd hate to send my kids to one of these public cattle farms where kids are taught they are simply a commodity - a taxpaying commodity for the government, really.
Shitty parents. Good districts have good kids with parents who care. Bad ones don't. Yet we constantly blame bad teachers. Since when is it the teachers primary responsibility to track down truent students? Parents should lay down the law if their child has a bad attendance record. My kids know this and their attendance is near perfect. My dad didn't give shit and I barely made it through school.
I worked for a public school years ago for a semester.
They wanted me to use my personal laptop, which was fine with me, so I asked them if I could connect it to their network. They said yes, so I plugged it into the Ethernet jack. There was no DHCP. I went to check one of the other computers, and they had statically-assigned IP addresses. I asked the school IT person if I could have an IP address, and she said "You have to go through central office to get an email account." I said "I don't want email; I want an IP address." She again said something about email, and clearly didn't know what an IP address was.
So I plugged in my laptop and fired up a packet sniffer to find an unassigned one, and noted in passing that I'd have been able to read the principal's email had I chosen to.
These are not the kind of people who are going to get video analytics anywhere close to right.
Just leave the kids alone, the kids who want to go to class will go to class and the kids who want to skip will skip almost no matter what. Tracking kids won't inspire them to go to class, what would inspire kids is interactive lessons, engaging teachers, interesting classes and an inviting atmosphere, not tracking them like it's going out of style.
Most of the stories I hear about schools is another prison like policy being implemented. Why not just drop the pretense and combine prisons and schools and be done with it.
That's Rick Perry's philosophy: We need no book lerning, just faster roadways (and more money in his pocket).
I want the concession for the Guy Fawkes masks in Texas.
Have gnu, will travel.
Alcohol... the cause of and solution to all of life's problems
And school staff found themselves wasting a lot of time trying to physically track down the missing students based on their RFID locators.
So let me get this straight:
Physically tracking down students based on their RFID was too time-consuming, so now they're going to track them down by viewing the video feed from 200 different cameras instead. Because looking through all that video feed of the students' faces will somehow be more efficient than submitting queries to the RFID database? Or that cameras will be more effective because students would never think to evade them by looking down as they walk?
This is just another example of the general problem that education professionals have with their ill-conceived desire for collecting massive amounts of data. For example, they love mass-testing of students, but they always forget that simply publishing a report with a mean and standard deviation doesn't do jack -- in order for testing to be useful, they have to decide what they're actually going to do with those numbers besides just wringing their hands over them. (Fire the poorest-performing teachers? The unions won't allow it. Change the funding formulas? The politicians won't allow it.) After decades of testing fever, the educational establishment still doesn't have the first clue how to translate all that data into useful action. No doubt this systemic incompetence is also responsible for their poor judgment in deciding that they "need" massive amounts of tracking data (either RFID or video-feed) in this case.
Well, Coors Light is Alcohol and Hops in a water solution. Is there any reason to believe that this solution isnt related to the problem?
"His name was James Damore."
If attendance is down, the reason is that students perceive classes as low-quality and not worth their time. Improve teaching and the problem goes away. Trying a prison-style surveillance system instead is not only morally reprehensible, it does address the wrong problem. No surprise there, school administrators belong to the most stupid and most disconnected-from-reality people that are still smart enough to achieve literacy.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"We're very confident we can still maintain a safe and secure school because of the 200 cameras"
And this will deter the next shooter from shooting up a school - like how ?
AccountKiller
Typical school board maneuver. Install $500K RFID system, presumably with associated kickbacks. Next year, claim that system doesn't work and camera system needs gazillion-dollar upgrade.
If the schools think using cameras to automatically identify students is going to be cheaper or work better... I doubt it. Students in hoodies, hats, or sunglasses are going to play hell with face recognition software, not to mention partial occlusions, bad angles, shadows, and poor illumination. That means many (most?) kids will go unrecognized or misrecognized, and miscounted.
Add to that the inevitable bright idea that they also look for unfamiliar faces and then sound an alert when a stranger is seen lurking on the premesis... I foresee many false alarms.
Are these school administrators dimwits? Don't they first *test* a cool new idea before adopting it? Or maybe in Texas they can afford to waste taxpayer megabucks...
Yes, they were. This was in '04, granted. But yes -- they were using hubs.
How do you define 'need'? One of the points I keep hearing about is that the various laptops/tablets schools issue out are actually cheaper than the textbooks they would otherwise have to provide.
Now, I don't know about the specifics on how it works out, but if it works out that a physical textbook of the quality you need for primary education - hardbound, quality binding, full color pages, and such averages out to $200, times 5 classes, that's $1000. Depends on how long a school can keep it's books. My old school system often kept them for a decade. Anyways, if you can get a sweetheart ebook licensing deal, you buy a $400 device to read the books on and pay $50 per book, that's only $650, a substantial cost savings that gives you things like electronic searching and notetaking, ability to write reports right on the device(though if you only have a single monitor it'll suck for referencing what you're writing), etc...
I'd argue that, aside from storing grade information, teachers should have the least need for a computer in a classroom.
I don't read AC A human right
Uh, and what's a good teacher that the students like: The one that grades fairly but fails students who don't perform, and who teaches evolution over religion?
In a some places that's going to be considered a "bad" teacher, both by parents and many students, whereas the teacher that has mostly movie days is probably going to be fairly popular.
Drinking any quantity of Coors will solve nothing, not even sobriety.
IMO, if students don't show up for roll call too often, you talk to them. Then you talk to their parents. Motivating them (children AND parents) is your job
You mistakenly assume every kid has a parent (or parents, if they're lucky) who actually care about the welfare of the child. I teach at a large high school that is 60% Hispanic, 50% or more on free lunch. I can tell you that most of these students don't have parents that you can just call and say "Little Hector wasn't at school today, can you please explain to him the importance of class blah blah blah?" These parents are out working, many working 12-16 hour days. They don't have the time nor the inclination to get involved with the child's education process. Many of them have never themselves graduated from high school.
The point being is that parental contact is not the panacea that you make it out to be, especially when you are teaching young people who basically survive on the streets and don't have the traditional family structure from which you and I were lucky enough to come.
Fortunately, it's Texas, which means that they aren't actually missing out on education by skipping classes.
They might even be learning useful things, rather than the Texas brand of propaganda.
Why is this labeled "troll"? Texas, after all, is the state where candidates successfully run for school board on a party platform opposing the teaching of critical thinking (to say nothing of evolution.)
IMO, if students don't show up for roll call too often, you talk to them. Then you talk to their parents.
The problem there, though? The kids have learned not to care, and the parents actually get offended when the school dares to question why Billy didn't show up for class (no doubt with some excuse including at least three words from the list "peanut", "gifted", "gluten", "red dye", and "thimerosal")
My parents getting that same call would have meant I'd wish I died from a peanut allergy instead.
More to the point, though: "We're very confident we can still maintain a safe and secure school because of the 200 cameras that are installed" pretty much says it all. Fire that useless sack of buzzwords immediately, because he clearly doesn't belong anywhere near teenagers doing their damnedest to test the limits of their captors.
Free hint: My highschool had exactly zero cameras, and worked perfectly smoothly thanks to a very simple concept - At any given time (other than the five minutes between classes), you belong in one place, and you don't belong anywhere else. If you don't go to class, the teacher notices. If you go somewhere else - Any faculty in that location notice. If you go behind the gym to smoke - The vice principal will catch you. No cameras or RFID tags required.
Sure, some kids will only 'vote' for the easy teachers, but that can be addressed by using a combined metric - the students have to perform as well as like the teacher for maximum results.
I had a few, sadly only a few, who truly made the material interesting and it be a joy to be in class. And I say this as a kid who would read the whole textbook in the first week of class. I loved learning.
Even kids can generally tell the difference between a good/effective teacher and a bad one. Even kids generally appreciate not wasting their time. The trick is figuring out a survey system that gets them to tell you which teachers are effective.
I don't read AC A human right
I have three words for the people of this school district: 1) Stupid 2) Fucking 3) Idiots
I'm worried about that too, but I calm down when I realize it might backfire. I was sent to Catholic schools from grade school to high school. I'm now convinced the best way to make sure a kid is agnostic or atheist when he grows up is forcing him to study religion in high school from your average high school teacher. Perhaps surveillance states in schools will be the best way to teach subsequent generations that it's a fucking annoying nightmare that should never be tolerated by people who consider themselves free.
I mean, our generations grew up without it, and we're giving a big fat "meh, It's probably a good thing, they say it is" to 1984 coming true. Maybe it's because we never lived it.
Considering that they seem willing to spend money on this without end, perhaps they should just sell the cameras and RFID systems on ebay and pay it out as attendance bonuses to the students. THAT might get them to show up for roll call.
So they don't care about their child because they spend 12 to 16 hours a day trying to provide them food, clothing, and shelter?
Perhaps it is the society that would create conditions where parents have to work that much that doesn't care about the children.
my 12th grade year, i had 45% absence in every class and still pulled a 3.25 gpa that year. If i didn't feel like going to class or school, I didn't. If i decided to go get stoned instead of going to class, I did. And the vice-principal was smart enough to leave me alone because I got good grades. During the beginning of the 12th grade, same school, got kicked out for 3 days for missing too much school. Yes, apparently when you miss too much school, the answer is to make the person miss more school, because that shows them. So to show them, I didn't go back to school for 2 weeks. The vice principal was mad, and I pointed out that having me suspended for missing school is the stupidest fucking thing ever. And I explained to him why it was stupid and that I was caught up in my school work (which he checked and saw that I was). He decided since I was 18 by then, that I could just write my own excuses and to write an excuse everytime i skipped a class or missed a day, and it would be excused.
So while school is the center of education for youngsters, sometimes the youngsters have to teach the teachers/principals reality.
Be seeing you...
I mean, seriously, what do I need either RFIDs or cameras at school? I personally can imagine two uses: checking everyone is here (at least for rfid) and checking none extra is here. Teacher rooms should be secured in a more secure way anyhow (and I don't think schools like that have special facilities that only certain parts of the students can access).
Checking if everyone is here ... are the teachers seriously that overburdened by checking attendance? ... if you are really that concerned, hire a gatekeeper, for the cost of the surveilance system you can probably pay him for ten years straight and that above usual gatekeeper salary, and you hired someone who probably formerly had no job. Heck, you could probably hire _two_ people! _And_ you have the advantage of the people nnot getting onto the premises before you spot them with your puny cameras! Not that anyone in any other country has really issues with people running amock in schools ... and we still have a lower rate, maybe it's like an extra incentive, idk what goes on in people's heads ... but that's off-topic anyhow ...
Checking for other people
You have a problem in a company, you go out and you pay for the best "turnaround" CEO to fix the problem, right? You don't just cut out the CEO and hire the cheapest suit you can manage and think that this will cause companies to do better, do you?
Schools are generally under funded where there is most need of good schooling: at the lower economic levels of your society.
Shrub, Gates, Jobs, et al did not have to get good grades to get a great job: they had parents living in rich areas who were connected by living there to other rich people who could give them a leg-up. Dropping out never harmed Gates.
But those in the low-rent areas are least likely to get such help and therefore need most opportunity in early education to show if they can shine.
Except that is the place you have least spending on education.
If education were even moderately adequately funded, cutting funds may work as punishment, but when there's fuck all to spend, cutting funds only makes things worse.
This is why we are home-schooling my daughter, who was in this school district (but not Johnson Middle School). The others will follow when they reach middle school age. Elementary School isn't too bad, but Middle School is mostly bad indoctrination. And don't fool yourself. Your state is just as bad.
My wife taught elementary school at a lower-income school. The problem of parental neglect usually had more to do with mom catering to the sexual whims or her latest boyfriend than with working long hours to provide for little Hector. There was one single mom who worked her butt off to provide for her kids. Her daughter was doing quite well, because mom showed her an example of hard work, and cared enough to want her daughter to end up in a better place than where she was.
In Africa, some students travel by foot for hours each day just to get to a lousy school where the teachers are likely to beat them, and even rape them if they are female students. My point is that schools have a POSITIVE pressure by many learners ensuring attendance, especially if schooling is seen as providing a societal advantage.
So a lot of that attendance does NOT require thuggish police-state tactics. At some figure (80%+ usually), we start getting a percentage of learners with significant NEGATIVE pressure to not attend. Thuggish measures are therefore about the attendance of a minority of students. Maybe a school gets to 95% with an acceptable level of 'persuasion'. It is what happens next that should concern all of us. When a filthy politician, for some reason or other, states that attendance figure should be 100%, very, very nasty effects kick in.
A reign of terror and oppression is required to coerce that last few percent, and the tactics used will full on the whole student body to certain extent. Zero tolerance. Sexual assault in the form of corporal punishment. Treating young adults like little children. Using the courts to punish pupils and parents for 'wrongs' against the school authority.
The force required to get close to that 100% is out of all proportion to any benefit, real or imagined. And pretty soon, attendance for ANY pupil is not judged by if the pupil attends often enough to benefit significantly, but if a pupil regardless of progress attends according to arbitrary measurements. All too commonly in the USA (and now the UK) missing a few days from school means being disallowed from attending the 'prom'.
In the 'good old days', schools made some effort to get pupils to attend properly, but accepted an achievable figure somewhat below 100% for older years. Getting difficult pupils in at all costs was never worth the effort and subsequent disruption.
In Charter schools in the USA, and Tony Blair's copies, called Academy Schools in the UK, a very different agenda is in play. Many of Britain's Academy schools are run by the same organisation that operates Britain's private prisons, so there is a bit of a clue there. These types of schools are both supposed to provide the thuggish mid-level leaders of the future, but also to train a new type of fully compliant sheeple. An emphasis on uniforms (with constant Army style Uniform checks), arbitrary discipline for discipline's sake, and extreme ESCALATING punishments for minor offences, conditions pupils for a 'brave new world'.
Biometric ID systems, RFID tagging, and cameras EVERYWHERE (well,obviously never in places that would annoy the teaching unions) are the order of the day. Pupils are subject to frequent random searches, under the guise of 'drug' and illicit item control. The motto of these schools is "you can never have too many police-state measures, because it is essential to give those with something to hide something to fear".
where was this exactly? Zip code and school names please. Gonna go meet me some single mommies...
Only I can judge you.
in fairness, the parent poster never said the parents don't care: "They don't have the time nor the inclination to get involved..." Agreed that parents having to work those kinds of hours is a societal problem. I was sort of raised that way, ended up ok, maybe it had something to do with having an adequate number of brain cells.
Only I can judge you.
The subject sentence of the paragraph read:
You mistakenly assume every kid has a parent (or parents, if they're lucky) who actually care about the welfare of the child.
then provided that as an apparent example.
How do cameras make the school "safe and secure"? If anything, it may attract some suicidal nut job who wants his rampage recorded in HD.
By the sounds of it, they're just going to dump a whole ton of money on some vendor who'll set up a proper system for them (clueless on actual requirements mind you, since neither party have a clue) and they'll be stuck with some fancy system that most people in-the- know would drool at but it won't be properly utilised because it's run by clueless shmucks.
Story of my life.
Umm - duh - I remember when the RFID plan was first announced. Many folks just said "How dumb are these people? RFID will allow you to track where the CARD is, not the student." This presumes that a student planning not to show up in class is actually carrying his or her ID card. I wouldn't do that if I was planning to skip a class. So, I could give my card to a friend, leave it at home, stick it in the bathroom, anything, and they still wouldn't be able to track where I was.