Via Lee DeCovnick at American Thinker blog, whatever possessed school bureaucrats to come up with this lousy idea?
Northside Independent School District plans to track students next year on two of its campuses using technology implanted in their student identification cards in a trial that could eventually include all 112 of its schools and all of its nearly 100,000 students.
District officials said the Radio Frequency Identification System (RFID) tags would improve safety by allowing them to locate students — and count them more accurately at the beginning of the school day to help offset cuts in state funding, which is partly based on attendance.
Northside, the largest school district in Bexar County, plans to modify the ID cards next year for all students attending John Jay High School, Anson Jones Middle School and all special education students who ride district buses. That will add up to about 6,290 students.
The school board unanimously approved the program late Tuesday but, in a rarity for Northside trustees, they hotly debated it first, with some questioning it on privacy grounds.
I favor the slippery slope argument here. The more this technology is used, the more it is accepted, the easier it will be for it to spread. Will our children be safer if the chip is employed to track their movements on campus? Marginally, yes. The question parents must ask is if it is worth the cost to privacy rights. Besides, if the chip is attached to the school ID, a student can still get themselves in trouble by leaving the ID behind when they play hooky.
There is another argument against the use of chips; the law of unintended consequences. We cannot fully foresee how this technology will be employed or what the consequences to our privacy will be. That should be reason enough to slow down and and wait for our understanding to catch up.
It is a dangerous world. But that doesn’t mean we have to toss out the Constitution in our quest for safety. A healthy balance is still the best option and chips may or may not be part of the solution some day.
I’ve returned to my alma mater 20 years later, for a master’s. I can positively affirm the school–never a liberal one outright–has a more authoritarian feel (more adminstrators, etc) than when I was here, and that the students are more used to these things, because I presume they grew up in the idiotic “zero tolerance” miasma, and because we all know Democrats, who run education, will indulge their inner authoritarian every now and then.
The place is probably just a few years away from possibly becoming a glorified high school, though I am not sure if that will actually happen–just that I can see the potential (potential in an field sense).
Slippery slope is right.
You’re confusing technologies. RFID doesn’t track movement. This is just a glorified magnetic strip, that can only be read from very short range, and can’t ascertain location.
Non-issue.
You put readers on all the doorways.
Not sure why they bother, you could track every student by their cell phones.
It can detect presence, which is presumably the intent. It actually is an issue, because it can spread In use in ways we probably don’t want it to spread. From Wiki:
“School authorities in the Japanese city of Osaka are now chipping children’s clothing, back packs, and student IDs in a primary school.[56] A school in Doncaster, England is piloting a monitoring system designed to keep tabs on pupils by tracking radio chips in their uniforms.[57] St Charles Sixth Form College in west London, England, started September, 2008, is using an RFID card system to check in and out of the main gate, to both track attendance and prevent unauthorized entrance. Similarly, Whitcliffe Mount School in Cleckheaton, England uses RFID to track pupils and staff in and out of the building via a specially designed card. In the Philippines, some schools already use RFID in IDs for borrowing books and also gates in those particular schools have RFID ID scanners for buying items at a school shop and canteen, library and also to sign in and sign out for student and teacher’s attendance.”
Basically, I am not against such tech if you have to wave your card up against a very short range scanner, because it requires an active move on my part. Anything else is a very bad idea. Ranges can grow, and have. Tell me how they can’t.
The only way for range to increase is a very large increase in exciter power. They’d have to want to know whereabouts of kids pretty badly to install what would amount to broadcast transmitters in every school.
OTOH, given the knuckleheads running the schools, maybe they just might try that. The chips would have to be considerably bigger though, or they’ll just burn holes in the ID cards.
Like very issue like this with respect to education and public schools, the real solution is vouchers. Don’t like a school that requires RFID chips, dont send your kids there.
Drip – Drip – Drip.
hope you all hear it before it’s too late. These things always start small but never stay that way.
Some kid should sacrifice a badge, find out where the guts of the RFID are, then offer to take a drill to any kid’s tag to destroy the tracking ability.