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My mother worked grading standardized tests. It was a hellish job for many reasons (limited breaks, etc.) One question she had to grade was essentially, "What
by VikingCoder 7y ago
My mother worked grading standardized tests. It was a hellish job for many reasons (limited breaks, etc.)
One question she had to grade was essentially, "What's something you want your teacher to know about you?"
It was an essay answer, and she was supposed to grade it on grammar, etc. Just the mechanical aspects of writing. (The real question explained the details more, but that was the core of the question.)
She saw answers that would make you weep.
"My daddy touches me."
"I haven't eaten today. I don't know when I'm going to eat again."
Stuff like that.
And my mother was going to be the only human who ever saw their responses. Their teacher had no chance to see their responses, just my mom.
So she goes to her supervisor and asks, "What can we do to help these kids?"
The supervisor said there was nothing you can do. Just grade the answers.
- rhexs 7y agoOr...report it to the police? I’d gladly risk my job to do the right thing in that instance.
- sjg007 7y agoThey should be mandatory reporters at least in the USA.
- CobrastanJorji 7y agoSchool contractors are mandatory reporters, but I suspect that may not qualify.
- garmaine 7y agoThese would not be school contractors.
- ineedasername 7y agoWhy not? The school contracts with the testing agency that does the grading. Seems like a contractor relationship?
- garmaine 7y agoSchool contractor is someone who is hired by the school district on via a contractual relationship. Think temporary teachers, or custodian staff. It’s not a transitive relationship to every employee of every company who has some sort of contract, however small, with a school.
- DoctorOetker 7y agoevery relationship however transitive or small, is a relationship too! (Dr. Seuss)
- ineedasername 7y agoSo you're arguing that only individuals can be a contractor? That wouldn't make much sense, not only because such relationships are rare in schools. Most common are contractors that have been outsourced something like food service. The law would make no sense if it included practically no one. It would mean a company that provides, say, temp staffing within the school, and those temp staffers saw abuse, they too wouldn't be required to report. I have a hard time believing a court would rule the definition to be so narrow. Both the common language understanding of the term and legal literalism would point against that. There's no transitive property here. We're not talking about contractors hired by contractors hired by contractors. We're talking about a contractor and its employees. There is no way for it to exercise this reporting requirement save through it's individual employees.
- dredmorbius 7y agoDepending on the state, yes, they are, for 11 states. https://www.childwelfare.gov/topics/systemwide/laws-policies/statutes/manda/ https://www.childwelfare.gov/topics/systemwide/laws-policies...
- aidenn0 7y agoHand-graded standardized tests are usually anonymized.
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoSomeone could track back the number to the testee, they need to get their grade at least.
- fucking_tragedy 7y agoIt takes a five minute phone call with the company's legal department or a warrant to find out who the kid was. Either way it would need to be escalated to involving law enforcement.
- VikingCoder 7y agoWhat my mom saw had an ID number on it. No other demographics. And she was grading from multiple states. So do what? Contact her local police? With a written accusation from a child? Is that enough to get a warrant to force the company to release the demographic information? And people don't work at a job like that because they want to. They work there because they need the money. Everything she took in and out of there was monitored, too. So it's not like she can go to the Xerox, and walk out of there with a copy. It's beyond dehumanizing. For everyone. The kid, the people who work there.
- rhexs 7y agoYes, contact the local police so an investigation can get started. Yes, that’s enough to at least report it.
- mrep 7y ago> So do what? Contact her local police? > With a written accusation from a child? Is that enough to get a warrant to force the company to release the demographic information? Absolutely! My girlfriend works as a counselor at a school and she is required by law to report all serious abuses by parents.
- inimino 7y ago> So do what? Contact her local police? Collect or photograph all the evidence, record every conversation with supervisors, escalate as much as possible internally, then contact local police, and at the same time go to the media. Don't quit, but if necessary let them fire you and then sue. None of this is easy.
- hanniabu 7y agoWhen escalating I'm sure it'll be effective to say it'll be an interesting story for the news and how the incident is being blocked by supervisors that encourage child abuse.
- xkcd-sucks 7y agoIf she did Xerox the disclosures, walked out, and said "please call the cops" when challenged, at least it would be a matter of public record
- empath75 7y ago‘Poor sentence structure and grammar, 1 point out of five. Sorry your daddy touches you.’
- shaggyfrog 7y agoPunch up, not down.
- wesammikhail 7y agoboy do I hate that saying. It literally adds nothing to the conversation!
- dredmorbius 7y agoIt can be a useful heuristic. I don't find it adds much here.
- empath75 7y agoYou really misread that if you thought I was punching down. I was pointing out the absurdity of having to even grade such a thing.
- bendbro 7y agoDo you suspect this is a one off mistake or do you think you make repeated mistakes of this kind? I'm always worried I'm doing some particular thing, interpersonally, repeatedly, but I fail to notice.
- DATACOMMANDER 7y agoThat’s what you’re doing wrong.
- bendbro 7y agoThus aren't you as well?
- harry8 7y agoSome of these will be 100% true as well. But don't make the mistake that there are no kids who go for shock value or are wantonly manipulative when they know it can't come back to them. So how many are true and how many false? I have no clue. Literally none. And no it doesn't make me feel any better about the screams of existential agony even if that were a low percentage. Could be high too.
- fucking_tragedy 7y ago> But don't make the mistake that there are no kids who go for shock value or are wantonly manipulative when they know it can't come back to them. In the US, school funding is based upon standardized test results, and bad results can shut a poorly performing school down. It's drilled into every kid's head that these tests are very important, super strict and if they accidentally mess up, it can ruin their academics, because retesting and regrading are expensive.
- jacobwilliamroy 7y agoAs a kid I would go out of my way to fail those tests. The whole curriculum was designed around them, meaning that even if we did score high, any funding gains would just be put towards training us to take the test. I thought the state was holding the school hostage, threatening to cut funds or shut them down if they ever stopped. We never learned anything about civics or American history. Until I was out of highschool, content regarding atrocities like slavery and the trail of tears was not on the test and that was enough to whitewash the whole curriculum. Standardized testing is to the U.S. what lead waterpipes were to the roman empire.
- lonelappde 7y agoYour school didn't teach slavery? What state?
- stochastic_monk 7y agoIt’s possible that there’s a difference between admitting it happened and an honest portrayal of the institution.
- mynameishere 7y agoI wonder if your mother scored those higher than she might have. And I wonder if that's why such essays were written. Hmm, wonder...
- danharaj 7y agoWhy did you post this?
- dredmorbius 7y agoThe US has federal child abuse mandatory reporting requirement laws which include teachers and school staff and personnel, as well as additional state requirements which vary but include, for 11 states, faculty, staff, and volunteers at public or private higher education institutions. Computer and IT professionals are also covered in cases. Faculty, administrators, athletics staff, or other employees and volunteers at institutions of higher learning, including public and private colleges and universities and vocational and technical schools (11 States). https://www.childwelfare.gov/topics/systemwide/laws-policies/statutes/manda/ https://www.childwelfare.gov/topics/systemwide/laws-policies... https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubPDFs/manda.pdf https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubPDFs/manda.pdf This includes penalties for failure to report in multiple states: https://www.childwelfare.gov/topics/systemwide/laws-policies/statutes/report/ https://www.childwelfare.gov/topics/systemwide/laws-policies...
- DoctorOetker 7y agoso ... nobody wonders about the obvious rammification: then any ML scoring systems ... must detect child abuse signals!
- mlyle 7y agoHey uh, that actually seems valuable. I'd believe that ML could spot abuse that humans miss pretty well from signals like non-overt references in homework and school records, if one could come up with an adequate training set. Much more likely than teaching ML to score reasoned and creative activity in any reasonable way.
- kwhitefoot 7y agoWhat do you think the false positive rate is likely to be?
- mlyle 7y agoDepends upon what false negative rate you're willing to tolerate. ;) And I don't know how good of a signal there is. This is pure handwaving. But this type of thing seems like the exact kind of spooky correlation that ML is good at spotting compared to humans.
- killjoywashere 7y agoTell you mom to take those numbers and the company's name to the police. They can walk back the identification problem.