Bug Means High School Students' Schedule Errors May Last Days 443
Hugh Pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that thousands of high school students in Prince George's County missed a third day of classes Wednesday, and school officials said it could take more than a week to sort out the chaos caused by a computerized class-scheduling system as students were placed in gyms, auditoriums, cafeterias, libraries and classes they didn't want or need at high schools across the county and their parents' fury over the logistical nightmare rose. 'The school year comes up the same time every year,' said Carolyn Oliver, the mother of a 16-year-old senior who spent Wednesday in the senior lounge at Bowie High School. 'When I heard they didn't have schedules, I was like, "What have they been doing all summer?"' When school opened Monday, about 8,000 high school students had no class schedules and were sent to wait in holding spaces while administrators tried to sort things out." (More below.)
As a Maryland Resident.. (Score:1, Informative)
Seeing Prince George's County's name listed there comes as no surprise.
What have they been doing all summer (Score:4, Informative)
Well, let's see.... At the top of the list is not working because they aren't paid over the summer.
This is a particularly annoying version of complaining about inferior service when, in fact, you are the one who funds that service.
School doesn't work like you think. (Score:5, Informative)
I suspect the schools don't run the scheduler until a few days before school actually starts - Teachers can die (happened my senior year), quit, not show up for work, classrooms may be unavailable for many reasons, etc... On top of this, they don't actually know how many students are going to show up until registration closes (typically a week before class starts).
Re:Send the kids home? (Score:5, Informative)
Wouldn't that have been a perfect time to conduct audits and make sure everything was ready for the students to arrive?
I'm guessing you haven't worked in a public school? Two years ago I got my classroom assignment 3 days before students showed up. My co-worker had 1 day. Instead of curriculum planning, we spent the time running around the halls trying to find desks for students, the teacher's manuals for our books, get appropriate keys, etc.
Oh, and we also had a part time counselor in charge of 300+ students' schedules at our school and another 300+ at our neighbor school. A student shows up who hasn't registered? The secretary will put her in some temporary classes until a week later when the counselor can actually review her transcript and place her accordingly.
No one is sitting around that week. There's a thousand jobs that need to be done, but the districts keep cutting support staff and putting it on the shoulders of teachers and counselors. I wouldn't be quick to blame anyone in that school building.
Re:What have they been doing all summer (Score:2, Informative)
Actually I believe in many areas, schools are funded by property taxes, which not everyone pays.
Either you own your own home, in which case you pay property taxes, or you rent, in which case your landlord uses part of your rent money to pay his property taxes. In Canada, only the homeless, and natives on reserves, don't pay property taxes.
Re:Schedules are important. (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe you've missed the huge argument over school vouchers and all the parents who'd like nothing more than to end socialized schooling for their kids? Of course, that does get to the point. Few would argue against having a governement option for health insurance, even assuming it will end up sucking and only poor people will use it (I'm a fairly hard core libertarian, but you can't escape the logic: diseases are contagious). There's pretty strong objection to having government-only health insurance, because it will end up sucking and no one will want to use it.
Every government program I can think of that doesn't suck badly has two things in common: a limited amount of money changing hands, and a limited amout of power over peoples lives.
Most of the debate, false information, prorganda, and shouting over this health care issue stems from a failure to distinguish clearly between "government option" and "government only" on all sides, including a fairly outspoken set who argue "pretend government option, but really governemnt only once we fool the voters". Fear of that last part seems to really be fanning the flames, and with the recent history of congresscritters voting on bills they haven't actually read, that last bit is a reasonable fear.
Re:Schedules are important. (Score:1, Informative)
Every government program I can think of that doesn't suck badly has two things in common: ... a limited amout of power over peoples lives.
You apparently never served in the Marine Corps.
I work for K-12 as an admin (Score:3, Informative)
And I'm here to tell you, it's downright scary what idiots and idiot programming is foisted on to K-12. While we've never reviewed the SchoolMax software, most of the software I see is "enterprise unaware": EG: no common credential store, little or no real testing, glaring flaws, and most have no concept of interoperability.
My favorite vendor excuse is "It's your network", followed by "No, you can't virtulize this, it has to run on it's own hardware and it can't have other services running." I laugh because our network outperforms most major ISVs (I used to work at one as a second job), and as far as virtulizaion, I've asked venors "why not?" and the answer is never technical, it's always "because we don't support it". 9 times out of ten, the support driods working on something never twig to the fact that their application is running just fine on a virt serv and has been for YEARS. But clue them in, and INSTANTLY the problem is the virtulization, not a bug.
The other thing that makes me laugh is that when you ask how much a license is, it's never "how many CPUs?" or "How many boxes", it's always per student, even if it would only be used by a single classroom, they want to license it for the entire student population.
In over 15 years of working K-12, I can count on one finger the number of vendors that I didn't think were complete idiots, fools, and/or scammers.
Re:Schedules are important. (Score:2, Informative)
...that they don't want to pay in to the government-run system....
Except that in case of the schools funded by property tax, those that send their kids to private school or home schoolers still have to pay into the system even though they never make use of it. Anytime the government does something where lots of people are directly involved, they generally screwed it up.
Strawman (Score:3, Informative)
There's pretty strong objection to having government-only health insurance, because it will end up sucking and no one will want to use it.
Nobody (not even Obama or Hillary Clinton) is suggesting government-only healthcare, so I'm not sure what your point is. The healthcare proposals are about a hybrid system.
Re:Schedules are important. (Score:3, Informative)
First, this is one of those bills that passed the house on a party line vote without reading it and a democrat representative making fun of the calls to read it because it would take two days and two lawyers to figure it out. It's not something that will be rehashed over and over again in comity.
Secondly, you are completely ignoring Obama's own words when he said skip the live saving treatment and just take a pain pill. I linked to the video, are you going to deny him saying it? He is pushing the legislation, he is the one who said take a pain pill and die instead of wasting money with a life saving surgery. How exactly am I supposed to take that? You can close your eyes, I will be smiling when it's you getting a pain pill instead of a pacemaker. Saying I told you so will likely be overboard, just know that I will be thinking it.
Re:What have they been doing all summer (Score:1, Informative)
And do not forget the NCLB required state reporting. Sure, it is possible to write excellent software from the perspective of the user, but that is hardly the only thing that the districts and ISD's care about. Does it report Special Education, Lunch Programs, Any Other protected statuses, does it have the built in checks to make sure that only people whoa re authorized to look ast a students information can (after all FERPA isn't really a joke) and can it extract the correct reports to the state every time. Sometimes correct state reporting is more important than usability. Though, to be honest i don't expect that SchoolMax is enjoying this as thier competition is probably calling all thier customers as we type.
Alas, sometimes the bad is as good as it gets, for many reasons.
Re:Send the kids home? (Score:4, Informative)
I've heard it mentioned dozens of times before over the last 6 or so years on the Internet but always ignored it as conspiracy rantings. I finally took the time to read John Taylor Gattos "Underground History of American Education" and when I was done walked around in a dazed stupor for a few weeks at the scope of the education "system" and the people and utopian (distopian?) ideals that have gone into building it over the last 100 years.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm [johntaylorgatto.com]
I dare anyone with a child to read it and not feel sick with the new understanding history and ideals behind the system that they're sending their kids into that that book brings.
A choice quote from the first mission statement of Rockefeller's General Education Board one of the biggest movers in the creation of mass government schooling:
"In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple...we will organize children...and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way."
W.T.F
Re:Schedules are important. (Score:3, Informative)
Fire departments: except for 'disaster' stimuluses since 9/11, they are entirely funded at the local (or state) level.
Police departments: likewise, except for post-9/11 and similar funding; again, it makes up a minor part of their operational budgets.
Libraries: almost entirely funded at the local level.
Federal ('public') schools: at least half the funding of the majority of schools comes from local tax payers; the state likewise puts a substantial amount towards schools. Before No Child Left Behind (and similar initiatives), the federal monies were less than 1/3 total funding.
If the federal government ceased to exist tomorrow, most municipality and civil services would continue to exist just fine. In fact, many would be better off, as there'd be less paperwork to cut through to actually meet your mandates of "protect and serve", "educate and inform" and the like.
Re:School doesn't work like you think. (Score:3, Informative)
I suspect the schools don't run the scheduler until a few days before school actually starts
Ouch! That would be a recipe for disaster. (OTOH, as they seem to have had a disaster, perhaps you're right.)
I'm an experienced school timetabler and I can tell you it doesn't (in sane institutions) work like that. The process of producing a school timetable starts in the autumn term of the year before. Producing a decent timetable takes *a lot* of time and concentration, and whilst there are computer programs which can *help*, there just isn't one which will do the whole job for you. Getting everything fitted in takes weeks, and I would generally expect to have the job done by the middle of the summer term. Then you need to publish the new timetable and find out problems from heads of department and staff. Teachers do expect to see (and moan about) the coming year's timetable before they finish the summer term.
This story isn't an example of just software failure - it's an even bigger example of management failure, because there should have been a contingency plan. I've never let a new timetabling system be used without knowing exactly how I'd cope if it failed to do its job. (And I've known one dismally fail to do its job - I'm looking at you Serco Facility.)
Re:Schedules are important. (Score:4, Informative)
Sir, I congratulate you for your insight into this matter, being as you are neither an American or a "conservative". Very few people realize today - even, or maybe especially, Americans - that the US Federal government is more synonymous with Brussels than it is with, say, London or Berlin.
The US was formed with (at the time, 13) sovereign states in the vein of the states of ancient Greece: autonomous in government, civics, and citizenry. But unlike Greece of yore, it was formed with a national government and a constitution with an attempt to retain unity amongst the states - both politically and culturally. They did not want to see the destructive in-fighting that the Greeks experienced, despite their common "Greekness".
Unfortunately, that all kind of snowballed here in the United States 150 years ago when we had that little Federalists vs. Secessionists conflict. That, as well as subsequent and repeated Federal malfeasance, has resulted in a great deal of mistrust in said Federal government. The comparison to Brussels is true to a large degree for many Americans.
Re:Schedules are important. (Score:4, Informative)
They are, essentially, paying over $512 per student for this software.
No, there are 130,000 students in Prince Georges County public schools. So that works out to $31.54 per student.
Re:Schedules are important. (Score:1, Informative)
> Do they? The electric and phone companies are privately-owned, and yet they appear to do a wonderful job.
Except that both the electric grid and the phone system were set up with government funds, research happened with government money, and they're still government subsidized.
> Ditto Intel.
Except that without a set brilliant (D)ARPA programs that freed up VLSI and transistor design in the early days you wouldn't have had your fast machines today. And that majority computer architecture research still happens with government money. It's not Intel that's giving you faster machines, it's the government.
> and look how that has transformed people's lives (on-demand music, videos, et cetera).
Except that the government funded the research that setup the internet, and invested the initial money, and still helps run and regulate it. They funded research into basically every major protocol used today.
> Private industry has done a wonderful job providing the things we need. Why? Because if they don't, they go out-of-business. There's no greater motivator than the loss of one's job.
No way. Private industry will provide enough services to get money. Then all they have to do is make it too hard for others to provide you with better service, though any means they can. That's all. And I'm not saying it's bad, or good; just that this is what happens and you have to be realistic about it. The argument that competition will compel them to provide better and better services holds in some cases, and not in others. Talk to your local, competent, economist.