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Schools Are Deploying Digital Surveillance Systems

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Re: Schools Are Deploying Digital Surveillance Systems

#91

Post by [deleted] »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #82
panzagl wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our it could have earlier identified you as 'at-risk', and led to more positive interventions in your education. You fell through the cracks, that's hardly an optimal outcome.

>and led to more positive interventions in your education You mean actions that are arguably beneficial on paper but in practice amount to the school telling the at-risk student to respect my authority ? That stuff never works in practice when the party the at-risk person doesn't respect/care about is the same party or has sufficient/control or incentive alignment with the party doing the intervention.

[deleted]

Re: Schools Are Deploying Digital Surveillance Systems

#92

Post by jdietrich »

GrinningFool wrote: post #71
jdietrich wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Bullying is an all day every day thing with children. Kids tease each other, they call each other names, they occasionally get into fist-fights, but that's not necessarily bullying. Bullying is systematic and targeted harassment; it is entirely right and proper that we should not tolerate it. If a kid is a bully, he's an asshole. He shouldn't necessarily be expelled or even necessarily suspended, but someone needs t…

> but someone needs to make it crystal clear to him that his behaviour is unacceptable and will not be tolerate We've been working with the school following 'proper channels' for some ongoing incidents, and it hasn't been effective even though the school acknowledges the problem and that it is with the other kid involved. All this focus on bullying is great - but it feels a lot like lip service. They spend huge amoun…

>We've been working with the school following 'proper channels' for some ongoing incidents, and it hasn't been effective even though the school acknowledges the problem and that it is with the other kid involved.

All this focus on bullying is great - but it feels a lot like lip service.

Claiming that you don't tolerate bullying is very different to making it clear to the bully that you don't tolerate bullying. A lot of "zero tolerance" policies are really zero tolerance for the appearance of a bullying problem - we'll do literally anything to cover it up, including forcing the victim out of school, but we don't really care whether it's happening.

> We recently told our son that he's welcome to hit back when someone starts bullying him physically - he may get in trouble at school, but we'll support him at home. When 'proper channels' don't work, there's not a lot of options remaining.

Fair and reasonable. A lot of school administrators won't see it that way, but there's a valuable lesson to be had in the value of self-respect and the questionable integrity of many authority figures.

>If they're not (and honestly, I don't think they can - they have limited people, and their primary goal is teaching)

Anecdotally, I think it's a problem of willpower more than manpower. A lot of teachers (and particularly administrators) are far too willing to take the easy option. I was taught by many people who would go out of their way to intervene when they suspected bullying, but many who were all too willing to turn a blind eye if it earned them a quiet lesson or a quiet lunch break. Not all teachers are heroes and I don't expect them to be, but there's a fundamental issue of leadership and culture. If the principal cares more about standardised test results than the wellbeing of his students, that will poison the entire culture of the school.

Re: Schools Are Deploying Digital Surveillance Systems

#93

Post by treis »

homonculus1 wrote: post #83
treis wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>OK, I think we really need to investigate protecting the privacy of our youth. This is effectvely acclimating our children to minimal privacy as enforced by authoritarian organizations. There's no privacy when you post things publicly on the internet.

Semantics distract from the point at hand. There's no privacy when you leave your house either, but you still expect people (including school administrators) not to follow you around recording your actions and statements. There is a reasonable expectation to /not be stalked/ even when conducting yourself in an otherwise public setting. Calling this "privacy" is a loose application of the word, but we never really had…

Why are you posting things publicly on the internet if not for other people to read them? If that's the case, what does it matter if a member of the public ends up reading it based on some filter?

That's the difference compared with someone stalking a person. We don't generally go out into public to allow others to follow us.

Re: Schools Are Deploying Digital Surveillance Systems

#94

Post by esaym »

danmg wrote: post #64
esaym wrote: post #23

Ah Clute, Texas. Howdy from Brazosport class of 2002! This is the second article mentioning this area on HN I've seen in the last 3 years or so. The first one mentioned Brazosport as the dropout capital of the entire USA. So I doubt anyone within a 100 mile radius of there has ever heard of HN (but waiting to be proven wrong). Edit: I guess to add more context. This is probably an example of a small, underfunded, sch…

The school district I graduated from, around the same time, hired some consultant who used Brazosport, TX as the role model on how to improve their NCLB related standardized test scores. It did not turn out well.

Brazosport (in the mid 1990's) had very good scores on the standardized tests. But that was literally all they taught. And this was the TAAS test which had very little content in it.

Re: Schools Are Deploying Digital Surveillance Systems

#95

Post by panzagl »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #82
panzagl wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our it could have earlier identified you as 'at-risk', and led to more positive interventions in your education. You fell through the cracks, that's hardly an optimal outcome.

>and led to more positive interventions in your education You mean actions that are arguably beneficial on paper but in practice amount to the school telling the at-risk student to respect my authority ? That stuff never works in practice when the party the at-risk person doesn't respect/care about is the same party or has sufficient/control or incentive alignment with the party doing the intervention.

So you're saying you were beyond all influence so they just should have left you alone? At that point they should have expelled you- did you ever think of the damage you were doing to the rest of the school population by your actions?

edit- did not realize you were not parent poster, though I think this holds true.

Re: Schools Are Deploying Digital Surveillance Systems

#96

Post by xfitm3 »

cr0sh wrote: post #66
Maximus9000 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm thankful this kind of stuff didnt exist when I grew up. If I had a nickel for every time I've heard an adult say this phrase lately, I'd be rich! Did adults used to say this phrase 30 years ago? What are we doing to ourselves and our kids?

It's kinda crazy. We say this - but I suspect we are a minority. Simply because "we" (some of us - not I) are parents of kids in these systems, but there are other parents of our age with kids in these systems who like them just fine - and I suspect there's more of them. Otherwise - why would "we" let these systems exist, if "we" are glad they didn't exist back when "we" were in school? I also suspect that those pare…

I believe we’re witnessing fear mongering at work.

Re: Schools Are Deploying Digital Surveillance Systems

#97

Post by jdietrich »

cr0sh wrote: post #73
jdietrich wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Bullying is an all day every day thing with children. Kids tease each other, they call each other names, they occasionally get into fist-fights, but that's not necessarily bullying. Bullying is systematic and targeted harassment; it is entirely right and proper that we should not tolerate it. If a kid is a bully, he's an asshole. He shouldn't necessarily be expelled or even necessarily suspended, but someone needs t…

> If a kid is a bully, he's an asshole. He shouldn't necessarily be expelled or even necessarily suspended, but someone needs to make it crystal clear to him that his behaviour is unacceptable and will not be tolerated, otherwise he'll grow up to be an asshole and raise his kids to be assholes. It's not entirely clear that this is true all the time. I was reading a reddit thread the other day where the subject turned…

My words were slightly carelessly chosen, but I think it's reasonable to say "...otherwise he's highly likely to grow up to be an asshole and raise his kids to be assholes". Some people do grow out of it, some people do learn decent behaviour of their own volition, but that's far from guaranteed. I do wonder what proportion of those people who "grew out" of being a bully actually got away scot-free and just changed their ways ex nihilo, and what proportion realised that they were gradually becoming a pariah and decided to sort their act out.

Conversely, I can't think of many people who were genuinely kind and decent children but grew up to become nasty thugs; the only examples that spring to mind involve severe trauma or brain injuries.

Re: Schools Are Deploying Digital Surveillance Systems

#98

Post by bilbo0s »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #77
bilbo0s wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now the school has committed child pornography by copying these photos from the student's device... This is where the law gets kids in way more trouble than is really necessary. There's a little known provision in most child porn laws that exempts people reporting child porn from charges. But think about it, to get that protection, you must report. So they surreptitiously lift the pics from a kid's phone, and then…

There's a little known provision in most child porn laws that exempts people reporting child porn from charges. That doesn't fix the problem. If they're bulk downloading photos from a phone, then most of the photos are going to sit there unexamined. Later on, looking for something else, somebody will stumble upon those photos and discover that they've been sitting there for months or years. But the school hadn't been…

I don't think you're quite getting how a lot of these monitoring systems work. They actually have AI's, (more like expert systems), reading your messages and viewing your images in as close to real-time as possible. These alerts are automated. There is rarely a common sense applying human in the loop...

and that's the problem. Humans are not even engaged in the process until the alerts have gone out. That's not cool. I mean, sure, they get around the problem you bring up, every image is going to get looked at super quickly, but the solution is worse for society than the problem. (At least it is in my opinion.)

So those photos would never sit on the service provider's servers for that long without being examined.

Re: Schools Are Deploying Digital Surveillance Systems

#99

Post by danmg »

esaym wrote: post #94
danmg wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The school district I graduated from, around the same time, hired some consultant who used Brazosport, TX as the role model on how to improve their NCLB related standardized test scores. It did not turn out well.

Brazosport (in the mid 1990's) had very good scores on the standardized tests. But that was literally all they taught. And this was the TAAS test which had very little content in it.

Yeah. They forced us to do things like, having seniors in the AP literature class spend 15 minutes of class doing a worksheet on how to use a dictionary.

Re: Schools Are Deploying Digital Surveillance Systems

#100

Post by esaym »

Noos wrote: post #81
esaym wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Public school is important precisely because it is public. It gets the kid out to realize society exists and to deal with it as it exists. Perhaps your public school was better than mine, but what I was conditioned into socially while in high school did not line up at all with "the real world". At the age of 20, after many months of deep thought about my life's direction, I literally realized I needed to throw out e…

You don't know the opposite though. The kids that fail are barely educated; they may have fourth grade level math. They end up indoctrinated totally by their parents worldview or unable to function with others. They have no real way to connect with others because there isn't even the shared topic of "public school sucks." CEO isn't an option for them; hell a life apart from their parents barely is. I think people rom…

>You don't know the opposite though.

I've seen good and bad products from both public and non-public. So I don't know what you mean by opposite. The worst case was my own friend's brother whose mother pulled him out of public school after he failed the fourth grade for the 2nd time. She said the school was "full of mexicans" and she'd just teach him herself. But she never did anything... He has been arrested many times for selling drugs, which he did because he could never get a "normal" job as he had no ID or birth certificate (his mom lost all that). Thankfully through prison he learned how to read and do math and he was given a prison ID card which can be used in place of a birth certificate to get an official ID card from the DMV. But he's' still not doing too well... But that's the worst case, and his brother that graduated from public school isn't doing much better.

The point I make is, the parents should know what is best for their own children and they should have their children's best interest in mind. Sure, some don't and or can't but they still need to have options. But as a society of sovereign individuals, this is what we allow. To overreach this area through government regulation will just end up with a loss of rights and a poorer ending (that has already been played out in other countries of the past)

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