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.)
Big deal (Score:4, Insightful)
High school is a waste of time anyway, and the first week of HS especially so. They weren't going to be learning anything anyway.
Send the kids home? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh yeah, and don't most schools have their administrators, and usually the teachers, report in at least a week before school starts? Wouldn't that have been a perfect time to conduct audits and make sure everything was ready for the students to arrive?
Re:Send the kids home? (Score:4, Insightful)
Deprived of instruction or deprived of instruction days? It seems to me that we're more concerned with "days" than "instruction."
Re:Send the kids home? (Score:4, Insightful)
Even worse, we are more concerned with 'instruction' than 'learning'.
Re:What have they been doing all summer (Score:2, Insightful)
That might be a valid complaint if, in fact, we paid for these schools voluntarily. Anyone who pays taxes (most people) pays for schools, whether they like it or not. Failure to pay those taxes will result in the police coming to kidnap you and lock you in a cage. Failure to comply with the demand to be locked in a cage can result in serious injury or even death.
I can't speak for Prince George County - but many places the school system is paid by property taxes.
And they don't lock you up for failing to pay property taxes, they make liens against the property that are paid when the property is sold. (and if the liens are large enough, they may be able to force the property to be sold depending on the locale)
No cages, no injury, no death.
Re:What have they been doing all summer (Score:5, Insightful)
What does this teenage-Randian rant have to do with the parent comment? The article asks what schools were doing all summer, and the comment is that they were not working, because they weren't employed. Your argument that they shouldn't have ever been employed because omg RON PAUL isn't actually relevant to that point.
Re:Big deal (Score:5, Insightful)
the major draw of high school isn't so much learning more as it is socializing with other teens.
Yup. Gotta love socializing with teens. It does wonders for your maturity when you have to interact with adults...
Incidentally (previous paragraph was sarcastic, btw), I was homeschooled. It's interesting to me that "no social life!!!!11" was one of the major "what, you were homeschooled?" reactions when I went to a junior college for two years. It would appear that "learning" takes second place to "fun" and "social life." Apparently, education is secondary to teenage social skills when it comes to business after college.
This is all Robert's fault. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What have they been doing all summer (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually I believe in many areas, schools are funded by property taxes, which not everyone pays.
When it comes to property taxes, if you want the government-run police to enforce your government-issued deed to your home (on land whose ownership chain rests on some sort of government conquest), I don't think you have much philosophical basis for objecting to paying up. If you want to play the property game, ante up and pay your taxes.
And think it's awfully rare for them to point guns at you for back taxes, unless you're engaging in some sort of fraud. They just seize your bank accounts. If you don't have enough in your bank accounts, they might seize stock assets (in corporations created by government charter) or real estate assets (see above). But the days of capitation taxes, where the government comes along and says "pay me $20 a head or go to jail", are long over.
Re:School doesn't work like you think. (Score:2, Insightful)
No, I'm saying it makes no sense to do a job in June that will have to redone at least once (if not more) in August.
Re:Schedules are important. (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess reading the summary is hard, where it's stated they spent $4.1 million on the system. And if you look at the linked website for the company, it looks to be a private company based in Arizona, not anywhere near where the district is.
So... Yay?
Re:Big deal (Score:3, Insightful)
I know your post was satire I just fond it to be a convenient time to voice my own opinion.
I never said it was a good thing, just that it is generally an appealing concept to most teens. For me high school was a waste. I was never that much into socializing with my own age group so that aspect of high school did nothing for me. As for actually learning things worth mentioning, that only really started in college. Most of my friends didnt bother with HS much but instead took most of their worth while classes at the local college and frankly it did them a lot of good.
That is probably one of the most important reasons why most of the population is under-educated/ignorant of things they really should know.
Re:Schedules are important. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Schedules are important. (Score:4, Insightful)
But parents DO have an option for school. They can put their kids in private school or they can home school. The vouchers are just a way of saying that they don't want to pay in to the government-run system.
Similarly, if the health care system were optional, people could get their own private health care. But they wouldn't expect vouchers toward it.
Re:Schedules are important. (Score:5, Insightful)
On the specific subject of vouchers, the obviousy right answer is for everyone to divide the cost of the fixed overhead for schools, but for parents to have the option of a voucher for the per-student cost. That works out well for everyone, so you'll never see it in action.
Re:Happened in Dallas ISD too (Score:5, Insightful)
That is some seriously fucked up shit.
If your wife's life is that valuable to you (and I don't doubt that it is), the solution is not to throw firepower into the mess, it's to get her out of it. I fully support the second amendment but brining a gun into any school, not matter how "low-income," is about the dumbest thing I've ever head.
Re:Schedules are important. (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, the scheduling was fine until they replaced the government system they'd been using with a privatized system.
But, hey, don't let mere facts get in the way of your political opinions. I understand you might not have time to read even the summary when you have to be worried about Obama replacing your doctor with someone willing to kill your grandmother.
Re:Send the kids home? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Instruction" isn't in the teacher contract. (I should know - I signed 5 of them before I wised up.) The wording is "student contact days" and "student contact periods".
My school ran into the same thing with snow days. If we had 2/3 of the students in school for more than a half-day, it counted as a "school day", according to the state and the district. If the weather was bad, send the kids to school. If it gets worse, we send them home at noon, and it doesn't count as a snow day, and we don't have to go a day later into the summer.
School is NOT about "instruction". If you think that, you're sorely misled. School is about a few major things:
1) Basic workplace skills. Reading, writing, addition and subtraction, showing up on time, dealing with your boss.
2) Babysitting for parents who at are work.
3) Learning to deal with people.
4) Learning to take tests. (This is the big one!)
One of the things that struck me most, going back into a high school after being out for almost a decade, was that the kids were TOTALLY unable to think. In fact, I went out and a had a few drinks with a woman who was student-teaching in my building. She was working on both a HS and Elementary certification, so was student teaching in both schools. She was told by an Elementary school math teacher that her test was inappropriate, because "The kids aren't used to that. They are used to being told stuff, and the test sees whether or not they remember it. They aren't used to having to think about it and use it." I would have called BS on that, but she had a few drinks in her and was shaking with rage as she recounted that, so I took it as near the truth.
Einstein once said, ""The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education." If it was true then, it's definitely true now.
Re:Schedules are important. (Score:3, Insightful)
But parents DO have an option for school. They can put their kids in private school or they can home school. The vouchers are just a way of saying that they don't want to pay in to the government-run system.
Huh? They do pay into the government run system. It's called taxes.
Re:Big deal (Score:2, Insightful)
You'll do nothing with your fancy book learnin' in the business world without social skills. ... unfortunately.
Re:Schedules are important. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Or is run by a non-American government.
The only reason government-only health care might be a bad option in the US is because it would be the American government running it, and the American government is uniquely and completely dysfunctional when it comes to delivering effective domestic programmes.
Here in Canada we have government-only health care, for all practical purposes: the Canada Health Act makes it effectively impossible to deliver health care services outside of the government system, although we are starting to see more private-care options due to long waiting lists for some procedures in some parts of the country, and the government-run courts have ruled that "access to a waiting list is not access to care."
However, despite the undoubted issues with our system, we live longer than Americans and spend less money per capita on health care than the PUBLIC health care system in the US spends, much less the vastly inefficient and ineffective private system. And this despite being more ethnically diverse and having a much smaller, more thinly-spread population than in the US.
So it is clearly and simply false, a flat-out contradiction of fact, to say that public-only health care necessarily sucks. To believe that is exactly equivalent to the belief that the Sun moves around the Earth. The only way anyone could believe it is as an article of faith, side-stepping all the empirical evidence to the contrary.
I mention Canada's system here because it is the one I'm most familiar with, but their are plenty of European systems that are closer to the mixed public option system the US is talking about, and they all work at least as well as Canada's and some better. But in most cases the public aspect of the system does a good job of delivering basic care. The logically disabled will at this point for some reason always point to the few places with sucky public systems, as if "some public systems suck" in some way disproves the undoubted empirical fact that "many public systems do not suck."
There's very little point in arguing with people blinded by faith, so I doubt merely pointing out raw empirical facts will convince you of anything. But hopefully other people reading will discount your delusional--but mysteriously common--view a little bit more.
Re:Class scheduling is hard work, yo! (Score:4, Insightful)
*beats the slashcode designer to a pulp and thanks the Opera designers for making sure that it remembers the contents of forms when you go back in its history*
It gets more complex as well. For instance, you may have:
* 3 chemistry labs,
* 6 levels of chemistry that requires labwork,
* 400 students
* five teachers capable of teaching different levels of the subject (i.e. <=2, <=2, <=3, <=4, <=6).
And when those teachers also teach 3 other subjects (with no overlaps), the students have an average of 5 other subjects as well, only 20% of the chemistry students share 2 courses, 60% share 3 courses, 15% share 4 courses and the remaining 5% do not share any courses, you might start to get an idea of the problem.
I wouldn't be particularly surprised if you could run the schedule routine thousands of times and not get the same result, making it a sort of Monte Carlo [wikipedia.org] algorithm.
Re:Schedules are important. (Score:0, Insightful)
People don't want to have school vouchers because it's equivalent to taking taxpayer money and giving it to a private school - most of which are religiously-affiliated or religiously-based.
I guess I forget.. (Score:5, Insightful)
But why are many of the people protesting against government run health insurance on Medicare, and express a high level of satisfaction with it? Same with Medicaid. Same with the US Postal Service (Obama's ignorant quip not withstanding), which I've certainly found easier to deal with than Fedex? Not to even delve into how we (in general) trust the government for security, domestic and abroad, collecting taxes without paying the head of the IRS one out of every ~$700 tax dollars every year (actual number for the CEO of United health care of US health care expenditure)?
Off the top of my head, I can't think of a national situation where there's a private company providing a better service than a public equivalent (and this is ignoring the contract asymmetry where Enron is allowed to criminally game the market and the state can't abrogate the contracts, yet the private firm can just say "oops, but our owners have limited liability" and declare bankruptcy.. which abrogates their current contracts). I have a feeling this was different in the 70's and 80s, that government was really a lot less efficient than it is now, or else I doubt Reagan would have had such pull. But I was born just around when Reagen was first elected, and in my adult life the vast majority of the arbitrary, caustic and inefficient bureaucracy that I've encountered has been in the private sector.
While the surest means of preventing excess is a lot of people paying attention to politics, and being vocal... the idea that the current proposals are generating so much vitriol while Bush's Medicare 'reform' that prohibits negotiating drug prices with pharmaceutical companies sure has the appearance of an irrational double standard.
Re:Big deal (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless you live in rural Iowa or similar, I'm not entirely sure how true this is anymore. I grew up in a suburb 30 mi north of Dallas and we had pretty significant "minorities" of mexican (1st and 2nd generation), asian (1st and 2nd generation, some 3rd generation), pretty decent cross section of your indians, persians, some students from Germany, England and one or two from Sweden (Ericsson has a major campus in the town). This is in Texas, which, other than the Bank of America tower and the Chase bank building in downtown doesn't have a whole lot of cultural ties to the east coast, where you'd expect that sort of diversity. Most of the bread winners are from west coast schools and some of the better universities local to Texas. Most everyone I know dated at least two people who were born out of country or had parents who spoke another language at home. That might be a slightly extreme example, but if it can happen in Dallas, it can certianly happen elsewhere (except Oklahoma, I heard they're getting running water up there in a few years due to federal stimulus money).
Re:Schedules are important. (Score:3, Insightful)
There's also plenty of software where more effort appears to have been put into making things "look nice" compared with ensuring that functionality is correct.
but the software industry is one where the saying about "you get what you pay for" most definitely does not apply.
Or rather it's true, but what you get isn't what you actually want
Re:What kind of company is SchoolMax? (Score:3, Insightful)
The program, which he was only able to start using in May, was able to get 77% of the student's schedules in. However, SchoolMax, not being able to work out the remaining 33% of the schedules, removed them completely from the system instead of leaving them incomplete
Don't you hate it when you can't get 110 % of your work done?
Re:Send the kids home? (Score:3, Insightful)
*Paul Simon, Kodachrome
Re:Schedules are important. (Score:4, Insightful)
I for one can't wait until this "government school scheduling program" is applied to my government-run healthcare system to schedule patients.
Sorry your local government sucks so badly, but mine impressed the hell out of me in 2006 when we were hit by two tornados in one night. There wasn't a single utility pole standing in my neighborhood, and a lot of buildings were completely destroyed. Our power company, CWLP, is owned and operated by the city, and everyones power was back on in a week. Later that spring (or maybe it was early summer) a tornado hit Cahokia, whose power company is Amerin -- a private company. I visited my friend Jeff there a week later, and there were some branches down but it was NOTHING like the complete devastation we had in Springfield. Jeff was without electricity for a full month.
Oh yeah, we have the cheapest and most reliable electricity in the state; CWLP sells power to other power companies, as they had the foresight to have excess capacity. They just added a fourth generator.
Maybe you should elect some different people into office? Maybe elect some people who don't think government is always the problem and never the answer? Because think about it, if government is run by people who think government is always the problem, you're NOT going to have good government.
Re:Schedules are important. (Score:3, Insightful)
As for government healthcare... you can bet that it'll be run to a large degree by the federal government - probably much in the same fashion as the Veteran Hospitals are (ie poorly).
Doubtful. The federal government has always shit on us veterans.
they make a lot of goddamn paperwork, and it takes time to shuffle it
As does any bureaucracy, whether public or private. The bigger the organization, the more bureaucracy. Look at Comcast, or at your insurance company (if it's a large one).
Re:What have they been doing all summer (Score:3, Insightful)
You're wrong.
Really? You mean every school district works the same everywhere? Really?
The rest of your post is good info which goes even further to making my hopelessly lost point, taxpayers don't make education a high priority. Class sizes are huge and most importantly how involved the are the parents? A small minority are involved, but the rest don't make it a high priority for themselves or their children.
And taxpayers funding the schools? Let's raise their taxes to do a better job educating our kids. And that's going over like a lead balloon.
Re:Schedules are important. (Score:3, Insightful)
USA:
Life expectancy at birth: 78.11 years
Canada:
Life expectancy at birth: 81.23 years
source [cia.gov] source [cia.gov]
Re:Schedules are important. (Score:3, Insightful)
All wars in democracies are sold to the people on a different basis than the real reason for that war. This is a normal and natural part of human governance.
It has often been said that the Civil War was a conflit over how to conjugate a verb. One side insisted on "The United States IS", the other on "The United States ARE". The ISs won.