[1] http://dailycaller.com/2012/11/22/christian-student-wins-rep...
As much as I dislike it, most of the times when you are on someone else's playground, you have to play by their rules. When the govt. comes at you saying "internet needs to be censored because who will think of the children", making up another "think of the children" argument has more mass appeal than talking about how free and open is good.
> Like most state-financed schools, the district’s budget is tied to average daily attendance. If a student is not in his seat during morning roll call, the district doesn’t receive daily funding for that pupil because the school has no way of knowing for sure if the student is there.
So if this is all there is to it, why not just have a swipe-in and swipe-out at the main gate? If a student has swiped-in, he has entered the campus. Swipe-out will be just an assurance that the student didn't swipe-in and leave immediately. And is some students are concerned that it's still a smart card and can be used for tracking, or they really don't want it on religious grounds, have a biometric system(thumbprint or retina). That will be cheaper than giving everyone an RFID card.
Not by a long shot.
The simple reason they don't have kids swipe in and out is because they simply won't do it. You can get employees to do it because they are paid. Not only that, but it would create foot-traffic jams at exits.
RFID is just a better solution that is equivalent, from a data gathering standpoint, to the solutions you put forward.
Aren't thumbprint scanners commodity hardware now-a-days? Say a school has 700 students. It's 700 RFIDs vs may be 20 thumbprint scanners.
> The simple reason they don't have kids swipe in and out is because they simply won't do it. You can get employees to do it because they are paid. Not only that, but it would create foot-traffic jams at exits.
As for kids not doing it, doesn't US schools have any attendance norms? Schools in India have generally a 75% attendance norm.
I used to work in an office with a headcount of 20000. Though people came in at different times, I am pretty sure the number of people who came in at 9 is greater than number of students in an average school. Swiping in and out didn't create any jams.
> RFID is just a better solution that is equivalent, from a data gathering standpoint, to the solutions you put forward.
Data gathering is what I am, and looks like the student is opposed to. I see anything more than ensuring that the student came in is a serious violation of privacy. The solution I proposed was in response to school's excuse of ensuring attendance to get funding. Ensuring attendance and tracking at all times are two very different things.
It's too bad they aren't my kids -- I'd just let them homeschool on the computer all day.
Also, I don't think kids "learn" anything about communication, dealing with people, etc in public school settings. They all devolve into tribal hatemachines filled with bitterness and animosity for one another. They aren't learning how to be good people in that situation. I acquired all of my social skills after school hours with friends that lived near me, because in school every child is a vile vindictive monster if they can get away with it. That should be clear! They don't want to be there, and the vast majority were like me in hating the process.
I was surrounded by middle class white people very similar to myself, with a few black people here and there. No Asians, no Hispanics, etc. And yet strangely I wasn't confused or inadvertently insensitive when I eventually did encounter people of other ethnicities. What is there really to learn there, other than don't be a dick?
A few of the items in your list apparently assume that being homeschooled also means never seeing any other humans outside your immediate family, which is preposterous. There are always extracurricular events, church events, family friends, neighborhood kids, etc.
The worst item on your list is "learning how to learn." I smiled when I read that, because of the implication that doing busy work every evening is preferable to self-motivated browsing of Wikipedia and the Internet. I contend that the opposite is true.
> And then there's the fact that self-schooling really is quite ineffective when compared to being tutored properly, and utterly dependent on the student being able to grasp difficult concepts without outside help...
Of course I agree with that, but it's essentially a tautological statement due to the inclusion of the word "properly." The fact is, of the dozens of teachers I had in public schools, there were maybe 3 that actively helped me understand a difficult concept. There are easily twenty times that number of people who have actively helped me understand difficult concepts in programming, mathematics, philosophy, and computer science via my self-initiated communication on the Internet (mostly via forums and IRC).
The reason is that the school's funding is based on the number of kids marked as in attendance in first period.
So your suggestions wouldn't work for what they want to accomplish because they need to locate a student anywhere on campus at any time so they can send someone to that location to find them.
The article reads:
But with the RFID tracking, students not at their desk but tracked on campus are counted as being in school that day, and the district receives its daily allotment for that student.
They are counted as being in school; they don't have to be at their seats per the article. Won't swiping in serve the same purpose? If somebody is swiped in, he is counted in.
Low tech, but it worked.
The reason internal passports would be unconstitutional in America would be that the restriction of freedom of movement is not a power delegated to the federal government. That's why in the BoR it has words to the effect "this is not an exhaustive list of your rights."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012)
...Although if the device only tracks around the school and not 24-hour...that's another layer to be considered. Very complicated matter from a legal standpoint. As for my personal ethics, I'd tell my daughter to take it off.
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
In other words, the people have rights other than those in the Bill of Rights. Courts have determined a number of rights that are not in the Constitution, among them the right to privacy, often based on the fact that people have reserved that right and not been denied it in the past. Some people, for instance, believe that, while the individual right to bear arms is not in the Constitution, there is a strong Ninth Amendment case for it[1].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_keep_and_bear_arms#cit...
I believe that's what anglers fight over.
(It's Roe v. Wade, as in Richard Roe, John Doe's old friend, a classic fake name used by the courts for various purposes. In this case, it was used to protect the identity of the woman seeking the abortion.)
It's interesting to note that "Jane Roe" of Roe v. Wade revealed her identity just a few days after the trial ended. She later became a high-profile pro-life activist.