Ask Slashdot: Why Aren't Schools Connected?

rtobyr writes "We use the Internet — E-mail, Facebook, Twitter, and blogs to communicate with colleagues, friends, and family. When I was in Iraq with the Marine Corps, we used e-mail (secured with encryption and stuff, but e-mail nonetheless) to communicate the commanding officer's order that a combat mission should be carried out. My third grade daughter produces her own YouTube videos, and can create public servers for her games with virtual private network technology. Yet here I am trusting a third grade girl to deliver memos to me about her educational requirements in an age in which I can't remember the last time I used paper. Teachers could have distribution lists of the parents. The kids' homework is printed. Therefore, it must have started as a computer file (I hope they're not still using mimeograph machines). Teachers could e-mail a summary of what's going on, and attach the homework files along with other notices about field trips or conferences that parents should be aware of. Teachers could have an easy way to post all these files to the Internet on blogs. With RSS, parents could subscribe to receive everything that teachers put online. If teachers want to add to the blog their own personal comments about how the school year is going, then all the parents would see that also, and perhaps have the opportunity to comment on the blog. It seems to me that with the right processes, the cost and additional workload would be insignificant. For example, instead of developing a syllabus in MS Word, use Wordpress. Have schools simply not paid attention to the past decade of technology, or is there a reason that these things aren't in place?" It seems odd that primary schools in at least the U.S. don't use technology to communicate with students much. My younger sister went to a private school that made reasonable use of Blackboard, but that seems to be the exception.

Poor people exist

[Anonymous Coward]

"Have schools simply not paid attention to the past decade of technology, or is there a reason that these things aren't in place?"

Poor people exist. And attend school. And there's an odd notion that we shouldn't make things even more unfair for them than they already are.

My son's special needs teacher

[Marxist Hacker 42]

communicates with us primarily by e-mail, but is still required by federal law to have some things on paper.

Equal Access

[rjstanford]

As long as some people didn't have (or didn't want to use) electronic access, the school would have to have processes in place to handle paper-based communication. The good news is that paper-based works for everyone; as long as they have to do it that way for some, they can do it for all "for free" as far as process cost goes (which is not insignificant).

The alternative might save money (might not), but would require teachers either having to figure out each parent's preference independently, or to do all of their work twice for each student (again, not an insignificant amount of time they're spending on overhead).

Schools are Afraid

[RichMan]

See the elementary school teacher who used a school issued PC and accidentally shower her grade school class porn. She lost her teachers license, the school had a lot of explaining to parents to do. The anti-virus on the PC was out of date and had become infected from some other site.

Given the nature of modern parents allowing connectivity out of school is always going to be scary for teachers and schools.

What they could do is provide lessons, plans, updates and communications from the school to parents. This still has some risk of the school web-server getting owned, but is a lot less than the risk of one of many-many machines doing something wrong.

Insider

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in IT in a large school district. 1. Capital costs. It's easy to keep paying administrators and teachers to keep pushing paper around. It's hard to pay for new computers, new network infrastructure, and new employees that know how to set it up and use it. 2. Security. You need to be careful with children's identifying and private information. This is easy to do wrong, and expensive (see 1: new employees) to do right. And it has to be done right. 3. Even when you can do it, you still need to provide the paper versions, because some parents won't/can't use the computer versions. So why pay to do it twice (see 1)?

Re:Schools are Afraid

[SuricouRaven]

She very nearly got a few decades in jail for it, too - the school district decided to throw her to the mob as a scapegoat, rather than admit their own incompetent IT management.

Patience

[parlancex]

I work in K-12 education as a systems analyst and at least in Alberta where I am situated the change is coming. It isn't as easy as flipping a switch though, there are a lot of barriers in the way of this kind of progress; privacy and security concerns, limited funding for information technology in school jurisdictions, limited funding for professional development for staff to take advantage of this kind of technology, the Old Guard, etc.

Believe me when I tell you for the most part we are with you, but it takes money that nobody wants to pony up, and time that nobody seems to have.

Look at the community and not the school.

[flogger]

Education has historically been slow to change. As an example, it was a technological breakthrough in schools to get VCRs in each classroom in the 90's. To communicate with students, the student needs to know how to check email/facebook/twitter/blogs/etc. However each one of these tools is blocked in the school I teach. Students are not allowed to email, no one is allowed to facebook, tweet, blog, etc. Why not? Because the media has shown that every teacher is a perv who uses facebook/twitter/blogs/emails to stalk students in order to molest them. While I know this isn't true, and the slashdot crowd knows this is not true, average Mom and Dad watching the latest Foxnews/CNN feed gets this idea that teachers use these communication tools for evil. Word got out that I collected students cell phone numbers. (I wrote a script to send an sms before tests, quizzes, due dates, etc.) As a result a district wide policy was put in place stating that teachers are not to text students under any circumstance.

Why this fear mongering? Lawyers. The district is afraid that a parent will sue and so the entire educational environment is stifled in the community.

I use Moodle extensively and have set up accounts for parents to view lectures,take quizzes and participate in discussions with the students. it is great. I email with the parents, I set up a blog which parent have the option to subscribe to vis RSS feeds. The parents are slowly getting into the habit of checking the child's grades online....This has been slow going though. I first started posting grades and assignments online ine the mid 90's... it is just now gaining steam... Just like it took the VCR to become commonplace, it will take 15-20 years to get current communication technology in the schools.

Look up common core standards... New "rules" of educations pushing "21st Century" digital learning standards...

Wow. I could write a book

[RetiredMidn]

My wife is a first grade teacher in the school system I and my children attended. (I graduated high school in 1972, so technology had a whole new meaning back then.) I have volunteered for many technology-related projects, including a committee overseeing a complete overhaul/rebuild of the schools, so I have some first-hand experience with this.

There was a big national (sorry, U.S.) initiative in the 90's to get every classroom connected to the Internet. I participated in several "Net Days", or something like that, where we volunteers ran Cat5 through ceilings and musty basements and punched down net drops In every classroom of every school in our town.

After that initiative, finding net-capable computers to hook up was a problem (two of my wife's four classroom computers were formerly our home Macs); most school systems are stretching their budgets to put teachers (and mandated special Ed aides) in the classrooms and keep textbooks current; technology is a luxury few systems can afford.

Don't even get me started on staffing to maintain systems and networks. Most school systems get by with less than a tenth of what a comparable sized company would expect to have in place for IT support.

As someone pointed out earlier, there was a time not that long ago where you could not assume every home had a computer with decent access to the Internet, and you could not make it the primary means of communication without excluding too many people.

For a while, my wife paid out her (our) own pocket to maintain a web presence.

Things are improving; our town is using a system called X2 for web presence, report cards, communication, etc. But refer back to the support staffing issues. There is no real support; the system is maintained and updated by marginally technical personnel for whom this is a secondary responsibility (after, say, actually teaching), for a miserly stipend that works out to less than minimum wage if calculated by the hour.

I know some people who wish schools did a better job at this would be willing to spend the extra tax dollars to support it, but you'd be amazed at how many want more for less.

Among the problems:

[rickb928]

1. The middle school I left behind in Maine has students from 17 different countries, speaking 28 different languages. Unicode is not so well supported as we hoped it would be.

2. Many parents cannot even read their own native language, and their children translate for them. Surpisingly, their children are largely honest about what they bring home.

3. For parents that drift from one ISP to another, changing email addresses are normal. Forcing them to Gmail presumes they trust any single authority. Many come from places where the government will kill you for talking about something, and it need not even be subversive. Using Gmail scares them just because it is ubiquitous.

4. Parents who can't read also tend to not go to libraries, nor be able to type in their login name and password. Go figure.

It's a big world out there, even in America. Email is not yet universal, and I propose that we recognize that the parents that most need to be involved in their kids' education are also less likely to have it.

Re:Poor people exist

[cpu6502]

Another thing to consider, besides poor people, is the real world experience. And in that real world people still use a lot of paper. I'm in a technology company, but still using paper for notes, and printouts of documents for review or hand-outs during meetings.

Ditto previous places of employment. The idea that everything should be virtual doesn't exist in any place where I've worked. It is illogical to expect cash-strapped schools to be more advanced than billion-dollar corporations are.

Re:easy

[Dynedain]

I don't think it's a luddite issue.

I think a lot of tenured teachers and administrators justifiably look at the past 20-30 years of computing history in schools. Invariably every 5 years there's been a new cutting-edge way of doing things that completely invalidates previous methods. Transitioning and training the switch between systems is expensive, and often can require advanced technical assistance to accomplish, not to mention hardware/software prerequisites that may not be yet available through the usual provisioning channels.

5 years ago, using Wordpress on a daily basis to make available the kind of stuff the submitter is describing would have been almost impossible for any but the teachers most dedicated to blogging.

10 years ago, publishing this stuff on a daily basis would have been nigh impossible for any teachers who didn't want to learn about HTML and FTP.

15 years ago, publishing this stuff on a daily basis would have been nigh impossible for any teachers who didn't have access to their own webservers.

20 years ago, publishing this stuff on a daily basis would have been nigh possible except in University environments.

We're still in the early days of computing and much of what we see online is essentially experimental. While we definitely should be exposing our kids to this rapid change in the classroom, expecting underfunded institutions to be able to keep their systems and staff on the cutting edge is a laughable pipe dream

Re:Electronic gadgetry used wrong

[Moryath]

You're obviously a retard who never went through school.

Teaching programs aren't a "4 year" program. They have a required 4 year Bachelor's with a required Minor as well, which usually pushes the program above the maximum 4-year hours into 5-year territory. Then there's the minimum 2 years of student teaching that has to be scheduled as well to get certification before they're allowed to be licensed as a teacher.

Getting a Bachelor's in Education (or alternatively, a Math or Science Bachelor's with a Minor in Education) and becoming a certified, employable teacher is a 5 year minimum process pushing 18 credit hours per semester (above 15 is considered overload BTW) or realistically, 6 years.

As for the salary you quoted, you're plain wrong. Teachers don't "work 9 months out of the year", they either have to sign on working summer terms, they have an alternative summer job, or they have a spouse who supports them through the summer. Most of them that don't work summer school spend their time taking the classes required to maintain certification, which is grad level work and eats up a hell of a lot of time.

I know many, many teachers. And for the lies you have told about them you are a worthless, subhuman pile of shit.

Re:Fact check

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL! I wonder how that data was collected? When I try to google Mercatus, the first auto complete is Koch brothers... The idea we spend on average ~$100k/yr/child is hilarious. The real number is ~$10k.

Simple check. There are 12 years between 18-6 ages. The average life expectation is 72 years. So roughly 1/6th of the population is of public school age. There are over $300m us citizens and so there are ~50m school age students. If we were spending $100k/student/year on it would be $5T/year or half the GDP. FAIL! Oh wait, you mean they ballooned the number by adding up all12years together and it's actually only $10k?

http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66

Ok 5% of GDP I'll accept that, but it's well below what many other countries spend so no big surprise.

How much do other countries actually spend?
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.XPD.PRIM.PC.ZS
So we are ahead of Bhutan and Camaroon, but well behind Columbia. Congratulations!

Hmm... actual data that hasn't been so twisted by insane ideology that it at least passes a smell test. Please learn to use the Internet.

Re:Fact check

[homunculi]

As a teacher in New York state, I can tell you that the Union does not a cut at all. I pay my union dues myself. What European schools do not do is provide a fraction of the special education services that American Schools provide. If you take out Special education costs the per student dollar amount drops precipitously. They also do not provide free lunch and breakfast or in many countries subsidies meals AT ALL. Thirdly, and in my district this is huge, the cost of transportation is ridiculous. We are a rural district with approximately 110 kids per grade but over 300 square miles from which to bus them. New York state just passed a 2% property tax cap which prevents school budgets from going up regardless of whether diesel or gas prices (bus fuel) or heating oil goes up. Moryath is right. If people want a first rate education for their kids they need to be willing to pay for it.