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If you read the article, what the school is trying to accomplish is to locate students that are on campus but not in class for first period to force them to show up in first period.

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.

> If you read the article, what the school is trying to accomplish is to locate students that are on campus but not in class for first period to force them to show up in first period.

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.

When I was at school we had a paper register which was ticked off by the teacher every morning. Anyone found wandering around school during registration would have been punished.

Low tech, but it worked.

A biometric system is cheaper than RFID readers?

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.

> A biometric system is cheaper than RFID readers? Not by a long shot.

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.

Thumbprint scanners are inaccurate unless you get into the high-end range. If there is a commodity fingerprint scanner for that many students, they could install a single button and get equivalent data.

Why not use the RFID tags to "swipe" in and out (e.g. just have a reader at the entrance), rather than tracking their exact location across the whole campus?

Upvoted. Readers at the entrances sounds like a good compromise.

That is exactly what this is. It is not tracking exact location. They are talking about readers at entrances and exits.

Sadly reporters and all the privacy people forget to mention this. They make it seems like they are tracking their EXACT location.

>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.

It's too bad they aren't my kids -- I'd just let them homeschool on the computer all day.

I do hope you realize there's a ton more to successfully homeschooling your kids than just letting them on the computer all day...

Is there? I definitely learned a lot more from sitting on my computer at home than I did from public schools.

Perhaps your idea of knowledge is limited.Communication skills? Dealing with people different from yourself? Dealing with people you actively dislike? Conflict resolution? Dealing with a power hierarchy? Learning how to navigate complex administrative systems and bureaucracies? Learning how to learn? Learning self-discipline? 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...

Not going out of my way to defend the superposter since he worded himself into a cornere, but if someone were to be teaching oneself online that is learning to learn and learning self discipline.

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.

But I didn't learn a lot of those things from public school either.

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).

Besides the points laid out below, homeschooling isn't merely teaching your children what you think they need to know. My experience has only bee with Michigan and Texas, but in those two places the government requires that homeschooled students report to approved testing facilities every so often for standardized testing to prove that the teacher is covering the materials that are mandated to be taught.