Why Hoboken Is Throwing Away All Its Student Laptops
wnyc.org
wnyc.org
Schools decided they needed to lock things down so much slowed down the laptops. If a child is looking at things they shouldn't in class they should be disciplined by the teacher, not having software do the teachers job that they can google how to get around. get a fucking proxy for one. if they're that concerned, whitelist sites (however that would be a major major pain in the ass).
some minor expenditure on setting up a standard image and a school network supporting PXE rebuilds would at least solve some of these issues. (got a virus? hit f12 to rebuild. little johnny lost his work? little johnny just learnt the value of backing up his data.).
getting a decent router and having administration of a approved mac list (yes they can be spoofed but it's a hurdle that most ipad using parents/etc wouldn't do). or just changing the password every term goddamit.
they also bought cheap, bad notebooks, why are they not surprised that the lifecycle is short?
frustrating reading things like this but it's not surprising.
Argh. This reminds me of the many problems that stem from schools buying books and lending them to the students, which I think is madness. Have students buy their own books, and subsidize the students directly if they're poor, using vouchers or something. Kids are much more likely to look after books/laptops/whatever if they're answerable to their parents for the cost.
Eg, from http://kennedymiddleschool.weebly.com/textbook-replacement-c... : "The parent, guardian, or other person having custody of the student to whom the instructional materials are issued shall be liable for any loss, abuse, or damage in excess of that which would result from normal use of the materials."
The same holds for library books. Eg, http://www.christina.k12.de.us/pulaski/library/ "Please be aware that if your child takes out a book and either loses it or damages it, the school district requires that the book be paid for or worked off. This can affect whether or not your child receives a report card."
Also, textbooks can last for many years. http://www.rcsnc.org/departments/curriculum_and_instruction/... for example uses a 5 year depreciation schedule. Wouldn't your proposal mean either that parents are paying about 5x more than they should, or introduce new overhead costs of creating a secondary market for parents to sell used textbooks to other parents?
Which is part of the problem. Shit, in 2008 my geography books still included maps of the Soviet Union!
Schoolbooks may be ridiculously expensive, but given their longevity they pale in comparison to laptops. Even if a laptop is well-treated by students, the maintenance required for an average-sized school is ridiculous. And that's assuming that operating systems don't have to be replaced or licenses have to be renewed....
The photocopied map workaround sucks, but at least it works. A broken laptop doesn't.
Well, sure, but think of the benefits for textbook publishers. It'd be like extending the college textbook market down into grade school.
Part of my interest in this stems from my surprise at learning that my wife saved a few thousand $ by buying almost all her college textbooks from the UK, despite the high shipping fees. Too bad this wasn't an option for law books :-/
See http://www.lib.umich.edu/files/SPOTextbookBackground.pdf for some background information.
One reason for the high price is that the text book publishers have a short revision cycle. If the book chapters and page numbers change a bit every couple of years, and especially if the problem sets change, then there's little resale value.
Another is the bundling of workbook material (just like I pointed out for Ireland), even though most instructors don't use that material. This also makes it harder to resell the book.
As it says: "What makes students’ textbook purchases even less responsive to price increases than any other commodities is that many faculty members choose and assign their textbooks with little regard to the cost of the textbooks"
As I pointed out, the increase in freedom of choice by Irish instructors caused similar reductions in resale value of primary and secondary school text books in that country.
As I mentioned in another comment I grew up in a place where textbooks are much, much more affordable - I believe that a lot of this has to do with parents being exposed to the actual book prices every year, rather than the books being purchased at the institutional level and the costs passed on to taxpayers.
Here's a report on school text books in Ireland: https://www.education.ie/en/Publications/Education-Reports/S...
It's from 1993, and exists because curriculum changes in the 1960s-1980s meant that the books, which in "the early part of the century served students for generations, in some cases up to the 1960s", were now more freely selected by the teachers, while the parents pay the bill.
Some quotes:
"Between 50% and 80% of books sold in certain subjects may be recycled. The volume of recycled books in circulation makes the cost of the annual book bill to parents difficult to estimate."
"It is the conclusion of this Report that book rental schemes offer the most practical method of curtailing the cost of school books to parents in Ireland."
Related to this thread: "Students were found to treat books with vastly different degrees of care within areas, schools, and classes, whether they owned the books or rented them." So no, ownership isn't a key factor in how the books are treated.
Oh! Here's a more recent report ( http://www.barnardos.ie/assets/files/Advocacy/2012-School-Co... ), with details about the current cost breakdown. Regarding books, "[t]he majority of parents are spending ... over €250 for a secondary school pupil." "An ongoing criticism by parents has been the inability to pass books on between siblings due to new editions being prescribed by the teacher." "The reliance on workbooks as a pupil resource is also often criticised by parents as being wasteful and expensive because they cannot be reused. "
This suggests there is a non-trivial overhead to the secondary school book market in Ireland. (The hope is that the new the Code of Practice for the publishers may change that a bit.)
Even more info: http://www.labour.ie/elenasecas/news/13983441786294822.html from April 2014 reports that "20% of primary schools do not currently have book rental schemes" and that a new €15m School Book Fund will provide seed capital to start them (the 1993 report talks about the need for such a fund). As a result, they expect to "see the average book costs per child fall from about €100 per year, down to just €20."
This fits with my estimate of a 5 year depreciation schedule.
All of these suggest that purchasing books in Ireland is not "much, much more affordable". However, I can't find equivalent numbers for other countries, so I could be wrong.
Still, I get the idea that it isn't as rosy as you paint it.
BTW, why do so many Irish schools require a school crest on their uniform? How do they justify that extra cost?
I would stand by my point about textbooks being more affordable in general, though. Compare introductory level university books on amazon.co.uk vs. amazon.com - I bought a lot fewer new programming books after I moved to the US because the ones were so expensive. If you look on the UK site you'll see books priced similarly to the US, but you'll also see 'international editions' of the same book which cost only about 25% as much, and it is this pricing you'll find in a typical bookstore. The only quality difference I've noticed is that paperbacks are more common over there, whereas American buyers seem to prefer hardbacks.
BTW, why do so many Irish schools require a school crest on their uniform? How do they justify that extra cost?
Heraldry is still culturally important even though we don't formalize it any more since we became independent from the UK. The patches cost only a few euros and and parents would typically buy them already attached to the sweaters/jackets, which are typically on sale as part of a package deal for the whole uniform (eg 3 pants and shirts, 2 sweaters, 1 tie, 1 jacket).
You'd probably save more money by abolishing the requirement for neckties, but when I was at school wearing a tie was still considered a requirement for being 'dressed'. The first year I was at the secondary school the uniform involved a round-neck sweater and open-collar shirt in the appropriate colors, but they switched to the more traditional v-neck sweater, shirt and tie to satisfy parents who thought the uniform wasn't dressy enough compared to those of the other schools'.
I realize this seems like a bizarre expense but then I wonder why so many US schools have illuminated signage and heavily designed sports logos, semi-pro sports facilities and so on. different priorities I suppose.
In the US, the same cost is 0, so is €250 is a lot less affordable than that, yes? (This $0 isn't quite true; in high school English class we would have to buy some of the books we were reading. These were relatively cheap paperbacks.)
Based on the 1990s report, it seems your experience of the Irish school system, based in the 1980s, is not really applicable. The increase in teacher choice of the teaching material has changed the market quite a bit because in your time the resale market was larger.
"The patches cost only a few euros" -- certainly, though the addition of a crest also serves to limit the clothing market. My question was how the school justified the extra cost. I assumed it was to establish a sense of school esprit de corp, but you suggest it's more a "that's the way it's always been" issue.
The "semi-pro sports facilities" for US high schools are usually voted on by the local community, since it calls for a tax raise for the funding. Is the crest requirement voted on by the parents? I thought it was determined by the school staff.
The illuminated signage I know of for schools seem primarily to provide messages to parents who drive and drop off the children at school. I don't think Ireland is a much a car-oriented country as the US.
"Heavily designed sports logos"? Are you talking again about college sports logos? I thought most high school logos were designed locally, and often either by the parents or the students. Many of them are outright copies of college and professional sports teams, which has gotten a few of them in licensing trouble.
This may be changing as some high schools are now seeing their logo as something to trademark and license. See http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/preps/2010-12-06-high-... and http://fox2now.com/2014/06/13/parkway-school-district-to-lic... . As far as I'm aware of, this is a small minority.