Crapaganda.com

Radio frequency identification — the same technology used to monitor cattle — is tracking students in the Spring and Santa Fe school districts.

Identification badges for some students in both school districts now include tracking devices that allow campus administrators to keep tabs on students’ whereabouts on campus. School leaders say the devices improve security and increase attendance rates.

“It’s a wonderful asset,” said Veronica Vijil, principal of Bailey Middle School in Spring, one of the campuses that introduced the high-tech badges this fall.

But some parents and privacy advocates question whether the technology could have unintended consequences. The tags remind them of George Orwell’s Big Brother, and they worry that hackers could figure a way to track students after they leave school.

Identity theft and stalking could become serious concerns, some said.

“There’s real questions about the security risks involved with these gadgets,” said Dotty Griffith, public education director for the ACLU of Texas. “Readers can skim information. To the best of my knowledge, these things are not foolproof. We constantly see cases where people are skimming, hacking and stealing identities from sophisticated systems.”

The American Civil Liberties Union fought the use of this technology in 2005 – when a rural elementary school in California was thought to be the first in the U.S. to introduce the badges. The program was dismantled because of parental concern.

Just last month, another district in California used federal stimulus money to buy tags for preschool students, drawing national attention and outrage.

Yet, the program has been quietly growing in the Houston area.

Recovering funding

Spring has been steadily expanding the system since December 2008. Currently, about 13,500 of the district’s 36,000 students have the upgraded badges, which are just slightly thicker than the average ID tag to allow for the special chip.

Chip readers placed strategically on campuses and on school buses can pick up where a student is – or at least where they left their badge. The readers cannot track students once they leave school property, said Christine Porter, Spring’s associate superintendent for financial services.

The biggest benefit so far has been recovering attendance funding at middle and high schools. Every day, the district uses the tracking system to check on the whereabouts of students counted absent by classroom teachers. Oftentimes, the student is somewhere else on campus, allowing the district to recover $194,000 in state funding since December 2008.

The technology easily pays for itself within about three years at secondary schools, Porter said.

Students haven’t complained much about the new badges. Most are used to being electronically monitored; their campuses have had surveillance cameras for years.

“It feels like someone’s watching you at all times,” said Jacorey Jackson, 11, a sixth-grader at Bailey Middle School. Read more »

The United States was the only country producing  nuclear weapons until 1949 when the USSR tested its first nuclear device.  The perception of safety generated by US weapons superiority waned.  Soon the public began to think  that the US was more vulnerable than it ever had been.

The Federal Civil Defense Administration prescribed duck-and-cover exercises as a safety measure in case of a Soviet attack.  Quickly every American citizen, from children to the elderly, practiced to be ready in the event of nuclear war.

The movie Duck and Cover was produced for school showings.  It was thought that the main dangers of a nuclear explosion were from heat and blast damage.  It wasn’t until much later that we learned that the majority of damage from nuclear weapons is long term radiation contamination.  No amount of duck-and-cover will stop radiation poisoning. Sorry for the false hopes.

Watch Duck and Cover – US Federal Civil Defense Administration (1951)

School-issued laptops are becoming more and more common these days, but thanks to the action of one high school, students and parents might have second thoughts about bringing them home. The parents of a Pennsylvania high school student, Blake J. Robbins, have filed a lawsuit against his school district after discovering that school officials had allegedly been remotely accessing the laptop in order to take webcam photos of the students at home (via BoingBoing). There are a number of unanswered questions about this story, but if true, it could mean serious penalties for the Lower Merion School District.

According to the complaint, the school in question (Harriton High School) had issued laptops equipped with built-in webcams to every student so that they could have “24/7 access to school based resources” and the ability to work seamlessly between school and home when it comes to research and projects. In November of 2009, however, Robbins was disciplined by the Assistant Principal of his school, Lindy Matsko, for engaging in “improper behavior” in his home. At that time, Matsko cited a photograph from the built-in webcam on the laptop.

Robbins’ father Michael supposedly confirmed with Matsko that the school has the ability to remotely activate the webcam “at any time it chose to view and capture whatever images were in front of the webcam.” Needless to say, Robbins’ parents were outraged at this development, as neither the school nor the district had told parents about this capability. As a result, the Robbins have filed a class-action lawsuit against the district, charging it with interception of electronic communications under the ECPA, theft of intellectual property under the CFAA, violations of the Stored Communications Act, violations of the Civil Rights Act, invasions of privacy, and violations of the Pennsylvania wiretapping and electronic surveillance act.

Reporters tried to get clarification from Harriton High School about its laptop policy, but were told that no one at the school would be willing to discuss it. Merion School District has not responded to our requests for comment either.   As such, we’re left speculating as to what else could have happened to led up to this seemingly surreal series of events.

Read more at: Parents: school used webcam to spy on our kid at home (Ars Technica)

*Update: School District Halts Webcam Surveillance (Wired)

This is the transcript of a talk given by Daniel Quinn, to an audience of homeschoolers .  Quinn first caught my eye with his novel, Ishmael. Several friends of mine had read the book and spoke highly of it. Later, when I began studying modern schooling, I discovered this little gem. Enjoy!

I suspect that not everyone in this audience knows who I am or why I’ve been invited to speak to you to day. After all, I’ve never written a book or even an article about home schooling or unschooling. I’ve been called a number of things: a futurist, a planetary philosopher, an anthropologist from Mars. Recently I was introduced to an audience as a cultural critic, and I think this probably says it best. As you’ll see, in my talk to you today, I will be trying to place schooling and unschooling in the larger context of our cultural history and that of our species as well.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with my work, I should begin by explaining what I mean by “our culture.” Rather than burden you with a definition, I’ll give you a simple test that you can use wherever you go in the world. If the food in that part of the world is under lock and key, and the people who live there have to work to get it, then you’re among people of our culture. If you happen to be in a jungle in the interior of Brazil or New Guinea, however, you’ll find that the food is not under lock and key. It’s simply out there for the taking, and anyone who wants some can just go and get it. The people who live in these areas, often called aboriginals, stone-age peoples, or tribal peoples clearly belong to a culture radically different from our own.

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-John Taylor Gatto

Perhaps the greatest of school’s illusions is that the institution was launched by a group of kindly men and women who wanted to help the children of ordinary families — to level the playing field, so to speak. Let’s see what’s really behind these illusions:

THE MAKERS OF MODERN SCHOOLING

The real makers of modern schooling weren’t at all who we think.
Not Cotton Mather
or Horace Mann
or John Dewey.

The real makers of modern schooling were leaders of the new American industrialist class, men like:
Andrew Carnegie, the steel baron.
John D. Rockefeller, the duke of oil.
Henry Ford, master of the assembly line which compounded steel and oil into a vehicular dynasty.
and J.P. Morgan, the king of capitalist finance.

Rich white men like these, and the brilliant efficiency expert Frederick W. Taylor, who inspired the entire “social efficiency” movement of the early twentieth century, along with providing the new Soviet Union its operating philosophy and doing the same job for Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany; men who dreamed bigger dreams than any had dreamed since Napoleon or Charlemagne, these were the makers of modern schooling.

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