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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

Why are questions asked of students copyrighted so as to not allow any visibility to parents? If I had a child required to answer potentially incriminating questions at school I would want public scrutiny, otherwise this becomes a kind of secret inquisition.

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Here is how I see it possibly played out.

* School district sees all these school shootings, news reports of troubled teens, suicides, bullying and how badly it reflect on the district.

* School district employs below average intelligence administrators who are easily manipulated and controlled by contractors, lobbyists, salesmen, suppliers. Either an administrator or one such salesperson from the test administration company came up with the idea of providing these proprietary tests.

* Tests are touted as an easy, spray and pray instrument "just give them this test for which we'll charge $500 a pop and you'll easily weed out ones who (wink wink) need help."

* This is how the school district solves its paper problem, computer problems, fixing the cracks in the asphalt in the parking lot problem. They are approached by salesmen and given gifts and dinners and are sold "solutions".

* The more overpriced and expensive the solution the more sleeker the sales pitch. "You don't want to end up like Columbine, OR DO YOU?" maybe stuff like "What if Columbine happened here, could you tell the parents that you DID EVERYTHING YOU COULD?" and so on.

* It is not that hard to scare these people into anything. At best it was a plain ol' sales pitch. At worst there were shady deals going on "We'll buy your son a new car if you buy this package"

* Test instrument comes with strict copyright rules (not that unusual for psych and personality test packets), disclosure rules, but I don't think that is that uncommon.

* Administrators buy in. Cha-ching for the testing company and all is well, ...

* Except for one teacher who actually is doing his job and applies his subject to the real world. So we have this story.

* Now I wonder how frequent this stuff is and how many other school districts are doing this, but which don't have teacher like this who like to "stir the pot".

>School district employs below average intelligence administrators who are easily manipulated and controlled by contractors, lobbyists, salesmen, suppliers.

So if the corruption is the problem why they don't get questioned by the Police?

The problem here is the definition of corruption. It's the same problem on Capitol Hill. You agree to "listen" to my "problems" and "solution" in exchange for a campaign contribution or some such nonsense. It's just legalized corruption.

Corruption is not necessary for this to happen; the administrators could also be scared or otherwise convinced as described above (but without gifts etc.) into buying the "solution" without thinking everything through.

There is moral corruption and legal corruption. They can go through all the legal channels (just like lobbyists in US congress do) and still act morally corrupt and shady.

Promises of gifts, expensive trips, retreats to exotic islands, scholarships for family members, all kinds of other perks can be used to help facilitate deals with vendors.

If my daughter answered that she was using drugs on a survey, with her name on it, which was then publicly released, it could have serious ramifications. That information could do serious harm to her future prospects if anyone grabbed the data and started making hiring decisions. Or grabbed the data and started blackmailing. If I had a daughter, anyway.

Frankly, the schools shouldn't have that information, it's dangerous. While it can save lives, it can end them just as easily.

Interesting take on it. I attribute this more to their incompetence and plain 'ol stupidity. I imagine people who can think better in general don't aspire to be school administrators. Some teacher perhaps love teaching kids and are dedicated, administration and bureaucracy attracts a special breed of people... and let's just say that these are not usually the brightest either. But what they have learned and do well is protect themselves. The constant threat or funding withdrawal from the govt, the threat of law suits, the threat of reputation if say a student goes "mental".

They have nightmares of being on the stand in court and asked questions like "are you sure you did everything you could to prevent the disaster?"...At least this is probably how testing and psych screening company sold them the packet.

Now their stupidity is also a blessing. If just someone could manipulate them into being afraid of your scenario. Being sued for collecting too much private info about its students. What if they get hacked or someone breaks into the office and steals all those answer sheets with all kinds of strange confessions? Law suits from parents is supposedly this dark deep evil always lurking in their minds. Just need to re-frame the problem so that they see collecting data = increasing risks of getting sued and voila, temporary win.

As a side note, someone on Reddit mentioned taking a similar test (but supposedly anonymous, I say "supposedly" as teacher often can tell the students by handwriting). and putting the most outrageous answers they could in the boxes, mostly for fun. I realized I would have probably have done back then the same thing, just to mess up their statistics. What if didn't end up being anonymous, it leaks and now it is attached to my name for life. Good luck explaining every employer who runs background checks.

> I imagine people who can think better in general don't aspire to be school administrators.

People who can think better in general don't say stupid things like this.

The purported reason is because the survey was designed by a private company who claims the survey to be their intellectual property. Similarly, if a school screened a controversial film, a parent could not ask the school for a copy of said film, because the school doesn't own the intellectual rights to it.

This is a microcosm of what happens when public institutions, whose records and dealings are considered to be part of the public record, uses private contractors. Other public instituions have used this to deny access to what is usually a citizen's right to know: e.g. public worker salaries being maintained by a private payroll company.

For a while, this included the text of some laws! My understanding is that got overturned, though (thank goodness).

It was not the text of some laws. It was engineering standards incorporated into certain building codes. The laws were like: "buildings shall follow ASME x.y.z" (to use a software analogy, it would be like requiring something to conform to POSIX, a standard the text of which is not freely published).

Eh.

Here is a freely published copy of the POSIX standard:

http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/

Regarding the "text of some laws", there was actually a story on HN about the city of the District of Columbia asserting copyright to their laws and making it only available via a private company:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/mar/31/ignorance-of...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5251797

Is this distinction interesting in some way I'm missing? If the engineering standards are mandated by law, they are effectively law themselves, so I would assert that "the text of some laws was restricted by copyright" holds. Referring to external standards was the mechanism in the cases I was thinking of, to be sure.

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