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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.
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.
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.
Accounting for more students means higher attendence which means more government money I believe. I'm not sure how the cameras are going to help that, though.
Public schools are funded by the state
One of the criterion for receiving state money is attendance
The problem is low attendance, which results in less state money
They're trying to improve attendance in order to increase how much state money they get
Of course, the real problem is that state money is based on income rather than students actually learning anything.
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
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.
That last line should say "attendance" rather than "income". I hate Monday mornings.
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.
I'd say that tying money to attendance is the problem.
That makes attendance a priority for the schools, which is wrong in itself. In a system without spare resources, prioritizing one thing will always mean de-prioritizing something else.
But also, the measuring of whatever criteria are used adds overhead, which already is way too high in schools.
Split the budget in two. One goes to every school based on the building mass and facilities they have. The other for education, and varies based on number of assigned students. If a large percentage of students don't attend, that leaves more money for those who does, which is good - that makes the school more attractive.
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...
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.
You are right, money is the reason, but not how you think. Kids showing up at school -> kids answering present in the roll call -> money paid to the school for a student/day of instruction. What if the kids don't show up? The administration marks them present and still gets the money. Since the administration fudges the records, we needed a high tech way to count the kids that the administrators could not tamper with. It was never about making sure the kids were in school... it was about making sure the school wasn't paid for kids who weren't there. PS why do you think they came up with in school suspension? They get paid despite the student not being in class.
"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.
They're trying to improve attendance in order to increase how much state money they get
I've got a totally unoriginal idea: truant officers.
This problem isn't new: students skipping school is a problem that goes back at least 100 years. The solution involves people empowered to arrest and force truant students to school, fining students and/or their parents if the kid fails to show up, and so on. Sure, that can get expensive, but if you've already decided that you're going to legally require kids to be in school, then you need to use the coercive power of the state to enforce that rule, just like we enforce rules against disorderly conduct.
I am officially gone from
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.
I want the concession for the Guy Fawkes masks in Texas.
Have gnu, will travel.
Um...you do realize the irony of that statement, right?
In private school they're still a commodity - there's just competition for that commodity involved. Around me, there are relatively few private schools, and while there are some innovative programs in some places (as there are in some public schools), mostly it's the same stuff. And more drugs as a bonus. See, with Jimmy bored after school, nobody around, and lots of disposable cash drugs is the ideal idle activity. Oh, he's less likely to get knifed over a drug bust like the worst inner city schools, so most people pretend it isn't happening. But you ask the cops in the area and you'll find there are *more* drugs in the private schools than public. It's just that those kids can always come up with the money to pay their pushers, so there's less to kill someone over.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
*ding*ding*ding* We have a winner!
There will be good an bad teachers in every school. It's a simple fact of life - half of the practitioners in every field are below average. And teaching - with summers off and vacations, and the chance to keep track of your kids before and after school, offers an attractive target for some who aren't exceptionally motivated. There are bad teachers everywhere just like there are bad doctors, lawyers, and engineers. It's still the top 10% that make teaching fabulous. But no matter who you have, if you don't have support at home from the parents, you will never make any headway on education. 5 hours a day for 180 days a year will never make up for the 90% of the time the kids will spend in the rest of their young life.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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.
Without the cameras they can then claim that all of the students attended...
"His name was James Damore."
"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
Interestingly enough, I doubt it'd be any more expensive than the money dropped on technology.
Granted, it wouldn't be as *neat*. But here's an idea; how about instead of just throwing technology at a school and hoping "Magic Happens", we go back to a low tech teaching solution, with computers only introduced to teach specific skills sets ( like typing, word processing, programming, ect.. )? Is there really a need for computers in the classroom ( beyond the teacher's )?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
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.
If they couldn't find the students with RFID tags, I doubt they will with cameras.
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.
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.
Image. Parents would want to put their children in the poorest schools because the dollars per child is higher because most of the kids don't show up.
That was supposed to say Imagine. I also hate Monday mornings.
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.
I'd rather not force people to go to our awful public schools.
1. We don't. Parents who would rather send their child to a private school, or home school their child, are allowed to do so.
2. Whether a law should exist or not is a different question from how a law should be enforced. A law that isn't enforced is usually worse than not having a law at all.
I am officially gone from
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
Take the cost of the cameras, divide it by the number of students and add in 20% of the per-student attendance bonus the school gets from the government. Pay that to each student to show up. Pay less in popular schools, more in less popular ones.
Nullius in verba
That's been tried, in an umber of schools in the US and Europe.
Here's one article: http://stateimpact.npr.org/ohio/2012/02/14/cincinnati-school-pays-students-for-good-attendance/
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.
Sounds like somebody has a case of the Mondays
*ducks*
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.