Parents built a school app. Then the city called the cops
wired.com
wired.com
I've noticed increasingly in the past few years, news article headlines of this exact form: <something good>. Then <something bad>. Personally it often feels like clickbait to the point that the title feels like a disservice to the actual content.
But what I'm interested in is - is this a particular person's style of writing? Or is it actually a trend?
I’m personally a little less convinced that it’s a disservice: in this instance it is an accurate summary of the article, as well as explaining the reasons why you might be interested to read it. The headline could be “The story of some parents creating an app for their school” but that’s actually less descriptive as well as less exciting. I don’t think it’s automatically better.
I see it as the author trying to force a point of view on you.
"Parents reverse-engineered a school app to create their own frontend to parent data and, after being hit with a $4M SEK fine for data privacy issues on the platform already, school officials escalated concerns over it to the police to investigate who eventually cleared the parents of wrongdoing and now the school is working to license the app from the parents so everyone can use it"
Is a much less catchy headline. It's also far more verbose. What parts of you choose to whittle out to create a succinct headline drives people's perceptions of the actual article.
"Parents built a school app that was so successful that the school is now licensing it!"
It's just as true, but, you start with a much different conclusion.
Pretty common for school district apps to feel antiquated and hard to use. Definitely a disruptible space.
But hey, if a district or school menu software company wanted to sponsor it, it could absolutely get done
I read articles like this (and others) and I feel we’ve swayed too far into the “schools are autonomous” side of things. I want it to swing back.
Schools should work to produce well rounded educated productive citizens for the community. That includes the parents, but also includes childless citizens, businesses, etc.
The politics of both parents, AND teachers have muddled the true mission of what a school should be. I would like to see schools return to actual education, and less politics.
Agreed, but who defines this? Parents deserve input, as key stakeholders and as taxpayers.
Yes, parents have a role. Yes, parents have a stake.
They are not exclusive in this.
Taxpayers are a subset of stakeholders.
(Few childres are taxpayers, for starters, at least not in any significant capacity. They are a primary, but still not the sole nor determinative, stakeholder.)
No. Children are not a commodity, to be molded by the needs of the state by the educational industrial complex.
Children are people. Their own interests should be paramount. Not those of the community, the state, or even the parents. (The parents are generally more trusted because they have their children’s best interest at heart more often than the bureaucracy does.)
This feel good, utopia, idea that children have no need to be concerned with learning a skill set, or learning how to be productive members of society (which yes means often working for companies) is part of the moronic political drivel that "education reformers" and teachers unions are pushing that are causing the American schooling system to fall behind the rest of the world.
Lets start teaching hard science, math, etc. Lets start grading with red ink again, and Lets stop with the participation trophies and the like
There’s a limit, though. If we followed this to it’s logical conclusion then vocational training in schools would be limited to firefighting and pilot training.
At a certain point kids can’t lead you in the right direction because they don’t know where they’re going yet. Guidance is in their interest even if it goes against their desire at that point in time.
> Not those of the community, the state
But most kids have their education free at the point of delivery, paid for by the community and state. So it’s inevitable they have a say in things. If you don’t want that then homeschooling or private schooling is a viable option.
One size fits all is bound to cause problems as our society becomes more diverse and accepting.
A very political topic. As one side is very against it
I wish we would fund schools directly and fairly, instead of how we do it now via local property taxes. This results in wealthy areas with wealthy schools, which is fine, but those schools have disproportionately higher spending per student than lower income schools in poorer areas.
In BC private schools get (or used to get, govt changed recently) half of the funding of public schools.
I don’t know if the issues are to the same degree, but they certainly exist. That said I vastly preferred the poorer school where we got to wear hats to the rich area school with more rigidity.
It’s funny too as in my area the private expensive Christian schools would shuffle off their pregnant teenage moms (the rates were alarming) off to the poor school that had the teenage mom program. So to me education solves a lot more problems than income for sure.
Schools need to collaborate with parents to work for kids. Parents need to collaborate with schools to work for kids.
* Objectives are rarely published so parents can understand what is being taught.
* Common core math makes it impossible for parents who did not learn common core style calculation to help their children with math.
* Textbooks are not allowed to leave the classroom.
That said,
> Common core math makes it impossible for parents who did not learn common core style calculation
Is false. I didn't learn common core as a child, but I was able to pick it up as an adult. There's a lot of good resources online.
Tip: It's how most of 'us' do mental math, spelled out and codified. Rough estimates refined in further steps.
I'm a nuclear engineer by education and stuggled with doing computations using common core methods. I can only imagine how most people who didn't pick a profession that involved advanced math fare when faced with doing long division common core style.
In the US we changed how math is taught about 10 years ago. 1 + 1 is still equal to two, but the children are taught an entire new methodology for calculation. I'm a nuclear engineer and had to re-learn how to do basic maths just to be able to help my children when they struggle with basic arithmetic.
To be honest, the new system (called common core) is incredibly complex and emphasizes proof of work over accuracy and understanding. It is supposed to lead to a better understanding of math. In reality, it's just really complex and difficult to learn.
Mathematics education in the United States has been in constant flux since the post-war era. The objections some parents have against “Common Core math” (which, incidentally, is not mandated by the Common Core; that is merely a set of uniform content standards) are the same objections parents had against New Math in the seventies.
My personal opinion is that the US has a bad case of Not Invented Here when it comes to pedagogy (half structural racism, half vestigial anti-communism, half class warfare, and half other things) which is then amplified by inconsistent funding and limited federal oversight.
Even if you burnt every grade school math textbook written after 1950, the problem would still persist.
And on school choice see Milton Friedman: https://youtu.be/SEZnis9-9Gc
She stated the problem very succinctly, but didn't realize that it's the problem.
This happens because the worse the service the more money they get. “We need more funding” is their common cry but the marginal dollar provides zero or negative value as even more corrupt leeches flock to the system to extract all excess dollars.
The behaviour is actually universal. Berlin wastes money on Linux conversion through the same process. Governments are governments wherever they are.
Sweden isn’t this paradise of non-corruption you think it is.
In civil engineering, risk is taken seriously and the cheaper pitches are less-often taken. In IT, decision makers don’t yet understand the risks so they always accept the lowest bid.
That project finished rapidly. The reason for that is that it was important.
Most infrastructure is unimportant. We don’t need it. There is no marginal economic gain to it that justifies the spend (in time, and money) unless accounting for the political support provided by local pressure groups.