My wife is a teacher in Texas and I see how messed up NCLB’s premise of accountability (with no resources) is fundamentally flawed. For example, if a child is profoundly disabled (traumatic brain injury, fetal alcohol syndrome, etc.) the standards are *EXACTLY* the same when it comes to NCLB numbers and being labeled as a failing school.  Good enrollment and attendance numbers means you might be able to pay your teachers. If your population has a high number of special needs kids, know how much extra money you get? Exactly $0.00, though you are legally mandated (federal law) to provide services. You just hope that you have enough ‘normal’ kids so you can afford to give everyone what they need to succeed. You can apply for grants, but without a consistent source of funds, you’re not going to attract quality teachers- those that want to make teaching a career- not just a lark 2nd vocation. (Don’t get me into “Teach for America”- just look at how many TFA teachers actually are still teaching just 2 years later). 

If you happen to be in school district with a good tax base, you are in good shape- if not, you’re just screwed, no matter what they might try to level the field (AKA “Robin Hood”).

There are charter schools that offer valued alternatives to middle and lower class families.  I know a few very liberal families that thank their lucky stars for their charter school.

Every school is different and should be judged on its own merits.

That scenario would require an attacker who wants to kill students from a particular high school, which is a strange motive.

You don’t watch the news much, do you?

the costs of rfid are next to nothing.

Yeah, if you don’t bother paying someone to monitor it.

I’m against this sort of tracking because it’s dehumanizing and school already treat children like criminals far too often (which I honestly believe is a good part of why so many schools are so bad, it has a psychological impat to be treated like that) more than I worry about the information it gathers. The information gathered is likely harmless, the effect of constant monitoring and suspicion is not.

Any sound websites on disabling this stuff properly?

except their (fictional) freedom to skip school

Incidentally, the guys who wrote the US constitution wouldn’t have considered this freedom to be fictional.  Almost all of them would probably be horrified at the thought of 12 years of mandatory schooling. Even the ones who owned slaves if that tells you anything.

I’ll change my mind if there’s a realistic threat here, I just don’t see one yet.

[edit] Removed double negative. Sorry, too little sleep. Damn you, Tigers.

Since I apparently need to spell out everything really explicitly for you, it is dehumanizing to make people wear tracking devices. It is bad to dehumanize children. Thus, the policy is a bad one. Just because tracking kids off-campus is worse than tracking them on-campus doesn’t mean tracking them on-campus isn’t bad.

Kids break stuff. They lose stuff. They forget stuff at home. Short of an actual, honest-to-Satan body implant (in the forehead, prefferably), these things will NOT work as intended, and so the system won’t be efficient because it will produce too many false positive (that is, there will be a ton of kids who read as absent in the system and are actually present).

BUT but but…the interesting thing is that over-reliance on tech will lead to administrators becoming more complacent. They’ll stop showing up at the main door in the morning, because the kids will be beeping in, and more and more teachers will stop taking attendance, and you’ll end up with good attendance stats but no actual idea wether one of your pupils is skipping more and more classes and edging towards dropping out.

Not to mention that expecting (most) school admins to understand, administrate and properly use ANY computer-based system is a fool’s errand.

I’d be willing to bet that the people who most hate this system right now are the lower-level admins and hall monitors. And that’s probably why it will flop : because it sucks as an idea, and the implementation probably does too.

Source : I work in a small European high school and we’re currently transitioning to a computer-based system to track attendance, among other things. It’s pretty neat, but it’s still a headache from time to time.

TL;DR : School admins suck at computers, students suck at not losing stuff : this project is both stupid and doomed (not mentioning creepy as fuck).

So it’s important that the school keep accurate attendance records. RFID tags are a somewhat extreme example — and I’d imagine, because of the relatively short-range of the RFID signal, they’d need to have many, many repeater stations around the school (at all exits, in all classrooms, at regular intervals in hallways) if they really wanted to keep track of a student’s position. And a kid could simply wrap a bit of tin-foil around the tag if they wanted to disappear.

It’s more likely the school would simply have a RFID receiver station in the classroom, and tell the students to tag themselves in when they enter the class. Failure to tag would count as an unexplained absence.