16 ms·
Parents built a school app. Then the city called the cops
- fersarr 5y ago"if you build the API, the app will come"
- sidpatil 5y agoDupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29106398 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29106398
- dang 5y agoWith comments from the project founder!
- ed25519FUUU 5y agoIn the USA it’s a hot issue right now whether the schools work for the parents, or whether the schools have autonomy from parents. I read articles like this (and others) and I feel we’ve swayed too far into the “schools are autonomous” side of things. I want it to swing back.
- syshum 5y agoSchools should never be autonomous, but I dont believe they should be considered to work for parents either Schools should work to produce well rounded educated productive citizens for the community. That includes the parents, but also includes childless citizens, businesses, etc. The politics of both parents, AND teachers have muddled the true mission of what a school should be. I would like to see schools return to actual education, and less politics.
- arcanus 5y ago> Schools should work to produce well rounded educated productive citizens for the community. Agreed, but who defines this? Parents deserve input, as key stakeholders and as taxpayers.
- dredmorbius 5y agoStakeholder != Owner Yes, parents have a role. Yes, parents have a stake. They are not exclusive in this.
- ed25519FUUU 5y agoIs there a better definition of who “owns” a school other than the public tax payers?
- aspenmayer 5y agoThe public is everyone, citizen or not, taxpayer or not.
- dredmorbius 5y agoParents are a subset of taxpayers. Taxpayers are a subset of stakeholders. (Few childres are taxpayers, for starters, at least not in any significant capacity. They are a primary, but still not the sole nor determinative, stakeholder.)
- nostromo 5y ago> Schools should work to produce well rounded educated productive citizens for the community. No. Children are not a commodity, to be molded by the needs of the state by the educational industrial complex. Children are people. Their own interests should be paramount. Not those of the community, the state, or even the parents. (The parents are generally more trusted because they have their children’s best interest at heart more often than the bureaucracy does.)
- sroussey 5y agoI know enough people thrown out of their home for being gay that I hesitate on the idea that the parents are the most trusted (which is why I like the way you phrase it — more trusted). There are a lot of cooperating and competing interests at play, which is how it should be.
- syshum 5y agoTheir interests are best served by becoming educated productive members of society. This feel good, utopia, idea that children have no need to be concerned with learning a skill set, or learning how to be productive members of society (which yes means often working for companies) is part of the moronic political drivel that "education reformers" and teachers unions are pushing that are causing the American schooling system to fall behind the rest of the world. Lets start teaching hard science, math, etc. Lets start grading with red ink again, and Lets stop with the participation trophies and the like
- afavour 5y ago> Their own interests should be paramount There’s a limit, though. If we followed this to it’s logical conclusion then vocational training in schools would be limited to firefighting and pilot training. At a certain point kids can’t lead you in the right direction because they don’t know where they’re going yet. Guidance is in their interest even if it goes against their desire at that point in time. > Not those of the community, the state But most kids have their education free at the point of delivery, paid for by the community and state. So it’s inevitable they have a say in things. If you don’t want that then homeschooling or private schooling is a viable option.
- _3u10 5y agoI think school choice is the ideal middle ground. Schools can offer a variety of ways to teach and parents can pick from them / start their own school and provide another offering. One size fits all is bound to cause problems as our society becomes more diverse and accepting.
- treeman79 5y agoThat’s promoting school choice. (Which I support) A very political topic. As one side is very against it
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- aspenmayer 5y agoIt seems like the same folks who advocate for school choice are pro-vouchers, which logically follows, even if I disagree, but also anti-funding reform for public schools. It seems like some wealthy folks want to have access to good quality schools at the expense of less wealthy folks, but with many layers of abstraction and misdirection. I wish we would fund schools directly and fairly, instead of how we do it now via local property taxes. This results in wealthy areas with wealthy schools, which is fine, but those schools have disproportionately higher spending per student than lower income schools in poorer areas.
- _3u10 5y agoIn Canada we use that model for funding schools, it’s set by the province on a per student basis with adjustments for special needs. In BC private schools get (or used to get, govt changed recently) half of the funding of public schools. I don’t know if the issues are to the same degree, but they certainly exist. That said I vastly preferred the poorer school where we got to wear hats to the rich area school with more rigidity. It’s funny too as in my area the private expensive Christian schools would shuffle off their pregnant teenage moms (the rates were alarming) off to the poor school that had the teenage mom program. So to me education solves a lot more problems than income for sure.
- IggleSniggle 5y agoSchools should work for kids. Period. They often don’t, but let’s keep our focus. Schools need to collaborate with parents to work for kids. Parents need to collaborate with schools to work for kids.
- indymike 5y agoAs a parent of five kids, I think the problem is in many districts, the schools do not want to collaborate with the parents. In fact, it seems like whenever possible, the schools do things to make it harder for parents to collaborate, especially on actual education: * Objectives are rarely published so parents can understand what is being taught. * Common core math makes it impossible for parents who did not learn common core style calculation to help their children with math. * Textbooks are not allowed to leave the classroom.
- falcolas 5y agoTragedy of the commons - enough parents don't see their kids as anything but perfect to dissuade teachers from wanting to talk to the parents about issues their little darlings have. That said, > Common core math makes it impossible for parents who did not learn common core style calculation Is false. I didn't learn common core as a child, but I was able to pick it up as an adult. There's a lot of good resources online. Tip: It's how most of 'us' do mental math, spelled out and codified. Rough estimates refined in further steps.
- indymike 5y ago> Tip: It's how most of 'us' do mental math, spelled out and codified. Rough estimates refined in further steps. I'm a nuclear engineer by education and stuggled with doing computations using common core methods. I can only imagine how most people who didn't pick a profession that involved advanced math fare when faced with doing long division common core style.
- samus 5y agoWhy should pupils be barred from learning math and science just because the parents did not enjoy sufficient education? It's one of the core tasks of the school system to ensure that pupils do not suffer disadvantages from their parent's educational background.
- laumars 5y agoThis isn’t the US though. It’s Sweden.
- alistairSH 5y ago[flagged]
- effie 5y agoIt's just not extremely religious parents, and comparing them to Taliban says a lot about you. And who should dictate what kind of material school teach? Who should decide that this is benefitial to children and that is a harmful propaganda? Parents should have a say, because they are well, parents.
- falcolas 5y agoAnd many parents are idiots. Society - our buffer against loud individuals - should have the say.
- effie 5y agoConcerned parents are part of that society, so you are really saying they should have a say as well.
- alistairSH 5y agoAttempted insurrection in January. Texas SB8. Various anti-trans policies. Conjured up CRT bogeyman. The list goes on and on. If you don’t see parallels between fundamentalist Christians in the US and other religious extremists and their authoritarian leaders elsewhere, I don’t know what to say.
- effie 5y agoWhat, did you just associate concerned parents throughout the country to people at Capitol in January? Not all concerned parents are fundamentalist Christians.
- uselesscynicism 5y agoCritical pedagogy isn't a bogeyman, and normal people are tired of being gaslit by people who believe every conspiracy theory Rachel Maddow propagates like you do
- downWidOutaFite 5y agoThe problem is parents want to pass on their own brainwashing down to their children. Like teaching creationism or that slaveowners were good people. Creating more brainwashed citizens hurts all of us.
- ed25519FUUU 5y agoYou should attend your local PTA meeting if this what you think parents are trying to pass down.
- thebooktocome 5y agoHaving known a couple librarians in my time, there seem to be an unlimited number of ‘concerned parents’ trying to get books that upset them banned, including for the reasons listed by the grandparent above.
- alistairSH 5y agoYoungkin just won the governors mansion in Virginia in part because the CRT boogeyman got uneducated suburban moms all riled up. Literally, that demographic swing from hard left last year to hard right this year.
- pjbeam 5y agoSo you're sure that the brainwashing the state picks is the correct version?
- downWidOutaFite 5y agoGenerally yes when they leave it to the professional educators. The problem is when politicians start meddling like all the conservative laws in response to the current CRT panic.
- krony 5y agoOn a much smaller scale, a bad school app experience is the main reason why I built an Alexa app for anyone in our district to easily ask Alexa for the lunch menu daily https://github.com/jeffsheets/alexa-papio-lunch-menu/ https://github.com/jeffsheets/alexa-papio-lunch-menu/ Pretty common for school district apps to feel antiquated and hard to use. Definitely a disruptible space.
- dwrowe 5y agoHello fellow Nebraskan! If you’d extend this to Elkhorn my kids (and I) would think you’re a wizard!
- krony 5y agoHa, maybe! We got lucky that Papillion’s menu has a json feed. If Elkhorn does too then it’s doable. But seems most districts are stuck in pdf files
- laumars 5y agoStill doable. AWS have a tool for parsing JSON files and turning them into a JSON feed: Textract. Given you’d already be inside the AWS ecosystem building the Alexa skill, it would make some sense leveraging that service.
- krony 5y agoOh yeah, for sure possible, I just meant doable in the “easily extend the current pattern in an evening or two” kind of way, ha! But hey, if a district or school menu software company wanted to sponsor it, it could absolutely get done
- todd8 5y agoFor those interested in some of the challenges facing schools and the attempts to improve them, I found this documentary very interesting: Waiting for Superman. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/waiting_for_superman https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/waiting_for_superman And on school choice see Milton Friedman: https://youtu.be/SEZnis9-9Gc https://youtu.be/SEZnis9-9Gc
- CornCobs 5y agoHope this isn't too off topic: I've noticed increasingly in the past few years, news article headlines of this exact form: <something good>. Then <something bad>. Personally it often feels like clickbait to the point that the title feels like a disservice to the actual content. But what I'm interested in is - is this a particular person's style of writing? Or is it actually a trend?
- afavour 5y agoI have no actual evidence but it’s something I’ve observed anecdotally too. I strongly suspect it’s the reality of online journalism: analytics tells you exactly what headline format gets the biggest audience and everyone has discovered it’s this one. I’m personally a little less convinced that it’s a disservice: in this instance it is an accurate summary of the article, as well as explaining the reasons why you might be interested to read it. The headline could be “The story of some parents creating an app for their school” but that’s actually less descriptive as well as less exciting. I don’t think it’s automatically better.
- AdamJacobMuller 5y agoIt's a trend like the "X did Y, that's bad because Z" I see it as the author trying to force a point of view on you. "Parents reverse-engineered a school app to create their own frontend to parent data and, after being hit with a $4M SEK fine for data privacy issues on the platform already, school officials escalated concerns over it to the police to investigate who eventually cleared the parents of wrongdoing and now the school is working to license the app from the parents so everyone can use it" Is a much less catchy headline. It's also far more verbose. What parts of you choose to whittle out to create a succinct headline drives people's perceptions of the actual article. "Parents built a school app that was so successful that the school is now licensing it!" It's just as true, but, you start with a much different conclusion.
- renewiltord 5y agoFor stories like this, 99% of the time it’s a government institution. That’s because the primary purpose of these is to leech money off people to provide an inferior service. This happens because the worse the service the more money they get. “We need more funding” is their common cry but the marginal dollar provides zero or negative value as even more corrupt leeches flock to the system to extract all excess dollars.
- Doctor_Fegg 5y agoIf you're going to extrapolate your experience of US governments to a story about Europe, you could at least localise "marginal dollar".
- renewiltord 5y agoThe dollar is the universal global currency. It represents ,in a synechochal sense, money. The behaviour is actually universal. Berlin wastes money on Linux conversion through the same process. Governments are governments wherever they are. Sweden isn’t this paradise of non-corruption you think it is.
- pitched 5y agoI had this explained once by a civil engineer planning highway work. He said that teams who finish on-time and on-budget charge more. Newer teams less likely to meet requirements charge less to account for the higher risk. So it’s a risk vs. cost curve. In civil engineering, risk is taken seriously and the cheaper pitches are less-often taken. In IT, decision makers don’t yet understand the risks so they always accept the lowest bid.
- renewiltord 5y agoThe interesting thing is that the technology to bypass this problem exists. There are early completion bonuses and late completion penalties. Both were available for the MacArthur Maze in Oakland, California. That project finished rapidly. The reason for that is that it was important. Most infrastructure is unimportant. We don’t need it. There is no marginal economic gain to it that justifies the spend (in time, and money) unless accounting for the political support provided by local pressure groups.
- Johnny555 5y ago“We do not have open APIs, so they have made their own solution,” Hélène Mossberg, the deputy head of digitization and IT at the city’s education division, She stated the problem very succinctly, but didn't realize that it's the problem.