I worry that sitting here and reading the articles which turn up in HN each day that I am getting a very particular impression about life in America. Between this and Kiera Wilmot I feel genuinely horrified.
Am I just seeing outliers here? Am I seeing frightening trend where children are needlessly criminalised (Kiera) or willfully (even if well intentioned) manipulated (my interpretation of this survey debacle)?
Other things I see include judges imprisoning children to increase revenues in private prison systems they have shares in.
I went through public school here, and never suffered through anything worse than the general pettiness that is endemic to teachers and school administrators. There are problems with the American school system, but these outliers are not those problems. Heck, I remember in high school there was a huge protest over attempts to introduce minimum dress standards (e.g. no wife beater shirts, no spaghetti straps) in which the teachers participated in the protest.
And I don't see how this is an example of kids being "manipulated." At best this is an example of a school district not consulting its lawyer before giving a well-intentioned survey. The purpose was to try and identify kids who needed additional psychological support, not get kids to cop to their drug use so they could be prosecuted.
And you know what? It's not even clear the teacher was factually correct here. The school administrator argued that once the surveys were filled out, they would become student records (which are protected by a law called FERPA). I haven't done a close analysis of the issue, but if FERPA kept the documents from being obtained by the police, there was no 5th amendment privilege against incrimination because there was no real and tangible threat of disciplinary action. Moreover, there was no "custody" by the police which would invoke certain requirements for the purposes of the 5th amendment.
At best, the teacher was teaching his speculation about what is still unsettled law as actual fact about the 5th amendment.
1. FERPA information can be released in a "health" or "safety" emergency.
2. Records created by a designated official for the purpose of referring violations to police are not subject to FERPA.
3. Institutions have relatively broad power to designate people as school officials with legitimate educational interests, and thereby to designate who may receive FERPA-protected records. Some sources recommend to schools that they designate police or security personnel as "school officials with legitimate educational interests" for this reason [a].
1. FERPA information can be released in a "health" or "safety" emergency, but only for the immediate duration of the emergency, and only to "appropriate parties." Moreover, FERPA has a specific carve out for disclosing student health records to parents in the case of drug or alcohol abuse. Read together, the provision can be interpreted to imply that drug use is by itself not a "health" or "safety" "emergency" because otherwise the specific carve-out would be superfluous and statutes are interpreted to avoid making any parts superfluous.
2. Right, but this survey was created for the express purpose of evaluating student psychological health, not for referring violations to police.
3. The same advice notes that police with access to private student information can only disclose that information pursuant to FERPA. Moreover, in the case law there is an emphasis on keeping the separate "hats" of student resource officers separate.
> The purpose was to try and identify kids who needed additional psychological support, not get kids to cop to their drug use so they could be prosecuted. (Quoted from your prior post.)
One of the reasons I replied is to show that, regardless of the stated purpose of the survey, the FERPA rules appear to favor of the school even if they should decide to use the survey for other purposes. From my reading, FERPA may very well not protect these kids from a school's decision to ultimately convey this information to police.
My concern is not with the intention behind the survey. I believe that the intention was very good. My concern is the idea that a teacher reminding students that they are not under any obligation to complete the survey represents manipulation. Teachers are in a position of real power, there are a great many situations where are expected to do what their teacher tells them. It really is very important to be allowed to remind students of those situations where they don't _have_ to obey.
I think that the legal considerations here are a distraction. I think (and I am assuming here) that the teachers actions were largely driven by his conscience. And the simple fact that arguments about this tend to circle around debates over the constitution, and other legalities, make me more worried about the United States than anything else.
I'm failing to understand, are you saying the survey was manipulation or the teacher reminding the students of their fifth amendment rights?
How would debates about the US Constitution and its laws make you worried about the US? These are likely the same discussions and debates that many people from many different countries have over their local issues and/or laws. How is the US any different?
I may have chosen the wrong word with 'manipulation'. I think that the school administration is unhappy that the students were told they could reasonably choose not to fill in the survey. What makes me feel uneasy here, and why I used the word manipulation, was that this choice _was_ available to the students but the school felt that informing them of this fact was inappropriate. This, in my mind, amounts to manipulation or at least a form of exploitation of the fact that most young students feel they are obliged to do as they are told.
Now, in this case the survey wasn't very sinister in itself. But the reaction of the school, to a teacher telling students that they could choose not to take this survey, is.
With respect to your second question. I think that in this case there is a fundamental question of how we expect people to treat the children who are in their care. I think that a debate around the complex legal aspects of this case tend to distract from this real central concern. Whether constitutional law was applied correctly here would not change for me one way or the other whether I felt comfortable with the school treating my children this way.
Well, now that I know the context I wouldn't necessarily disagree with your usage of manipulation. It seems to fit to me.
First, I would say I agree with your thought on how people should treat our children. I guess I would explain the reason the constitutional discussion is very relevant in this case because the laws define how the government may treat the citizens. In this case the students are citizens and the school is the government entity. The school asking the students to fill out a survey that could possibly be used to incriminate them in some form of crime is a potential violation of the students' fifth amendment protections.
If the school in question were a non-government entity, such as a private school, then there is no worries over fifth amendment protections. At that point it's more like what you say, a privacy and courtesy issue. The student in that private school could refuse to answer the survey but there might be consequences of that choice, such as being expelled from the school.
Either way, a person has the total right to not say anything at all for any reason regardless of who asks, unless compelled to do so by a court of law. Even then, in the US and I'm sure many countries, there are restrictions on what the court can compel you to say which leads us back to the fifth amendment.
> I think that the legal considerations here are a distraction.
To the extent that a teacher undertakes to teach something, he should do it correctly.
Remember the background context of this: there was notice and opt-out opportunities provided to parents in advance of the survey. The teacher then undertook to tell students that they had a right not to fill out the survey, not withstanding their exercise of the opt-out opportunity, as if it were a fact.
There was an opt-out notice sent via email to parents, at least several of whom claimed not to have received any such notice. The students were not given any opt-out opportunity.
> The teacher then undertook to tell students that they had a right not to fill out the survey, not withstanding their exercise of the opt-out opportunity, as if it were a fact.
It might come as a shock, but the students also have their own rights. Being a minor does not mean all of one's rights are subjugated to authority figures. Students do have 5th amendment rights.
Students have rights, but it is well-settled that they do not have the same rights as adults. The Bill of Rights applies to schools, but cannot be applied wholesale to minors. There is an analysis where the rights are fitted in to the unique requirements of the school context. The only precedent I'm aware of in the context of the 5th amendment is J.D.B. v. North Carolina (2011), which found that a uniformed police officer who questioned a student on school grounds about a robbery should have given the student a Miranda warning. It's a huge leap from that to conclude that school administrators can't ask about drug use on a survey in a non-custodial setting.
Minors have largely the same rights as adults. There are reasonable restrictions on those rights, but the default is not "no rights with a few exceptions". It's "all rights with a few exceptions". For example, schools are allowed to place some restrictions on students' speech, but they cannot forbid speech unreasonably (e.g. cannot require pledge of allegiance; could not force students to remove black armbands protesting Vietnam War).
And no one said the school can't ask about drug use. But the students can refuse to answer.
The teacher then undertook to tell students that they had a right not to fill out the survey, not withstanding their exercise of the opt-out opportunity, as if it were a fact.
It is a fact that they don't have to fill the survey out. Whether you want to use the 5th Amendment or something else as an argument to support that, is irrelevant. Bottom line, as a student, you absolutely have the right to wad the survey up, throw it in the trash and say "fuck this". Yes, you may get detention, or suspended from school, but no one has any authority to use force to compel you to fill out a frickin' survey.
What we need here, are more people who are willing to spit in the face of so-called "authority" and take back a little bit of their own power and sovereignty. Just because "they" told you to do something, does not mean you actually have to do it.
Edit: To elaborate more on this, per rayiner's comments, let me add this: I believe the bit about the teacher telling the kids they can skip the survey due to the 5th Amendment protection is approximately correct, given the context. That is, it's a potentially viable legal argument and certainly not something one can dismiss out of hand. Given that the class wasn't a law-school class, that level of approximation strikes me as totally reasonable.
The more interesting point, however, is that whether or not the 5A applies here is kind of irrelevant, since there's a bigger issue at stake. And that is what the 2nd paragraph above is getting at. Forget the Constitution, forget the Bill of Rights, forget the SCOTUS, etc.... none of those things grant us rights. Ultimately, we have the rights we are willing to demand, and willing and able to defend, and that's regardless of what some "authority" figure tries to sell us.
You implied it was okay for the teacher to talk out his ass about the 5th amendment because someone needs to tell kids to "spit in the face of authority."
Fact: There is a 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Fact: The kids have a right to not fill out the survey.
Debatable, but not a settled point either way: Whether or not the aforementioned 5th Amendment protection specifically applies in this situation.
As you can see from all the other discussion on this HN forum, whether or not the 5th Amendment comes into play here is subject to debate, and it's hardly an unreasonable position to take, to suggest that it does apply. Stating that is not even close to "disinformation" or "talking out of his ass".
It's also important to note that these kids weren't taking a class to prep for the bar exam, and you wouldn't expect the same level of precision regarding this topic, from this teacher, as you would from a class and a teacher focus on that topic specifically. To some extent, ALL middle-school teachers and high-school teachers, and some college professors, are "talking out their asses" when teaching about the Constitution, and history related to laws and legalities in this country... but we don't run around accusing them of spreading disinformation for teaching at the level of generalities.
So I am only implying that it's OK for the teacher to "talk out of his ass" to the extent that everybody talks out of their ass most of the time. So I guess I'd say you're being overly pedantic, IMO.
Dryden didn't have time to hire a constitutional lawyer and hash out all the nuances on how the 5th amendment does or doesn't apply. He believed it did. To me it's pretty clear that it should apply here.
If we're all going to restrain ourselves from asserting what we think our rights are we might as well all give up.
The problem is Dryden's gut feeling gets the gist of the rule wrong. The gist is not: "you don't have to tell the government anything that might make you look bad." The gist is: "You can't be forced to testify at a witness against yourself in a criminal proceeding." The further away you get from that core scenario, the less likely the 5th amendment is going to apply.
You're right, Dryden didn't have time to hire a constitutional lawyer. But he shouldn't be teaching his gut feelings as constitutional law. He could have just said: "I don't think the school can make you fill out this survey, so feel free to opt out."
And yes, I realize I'm being horribly anal retentive here. I was taught a lot of misinformation and oversimplifications as a public school student.
There's more to it than just whether the teacher was right or wrong, though. Let's suppose that he was wrong, that there is no 5th Amendment issue (the school board gave some reasons why that would be true, which are described in the article). Even so, why reprimand the teacher? Why not just release a statement saying that the teacher was incorrect in saying that there is a 5th Amendment issue involved (giving the reasons why), and leave it at that? Then the teacher could discuss that with his class; was he right or wrong? The students could actually debate the question and learn something--they might even learn the lesson the teacher was really trying to teach, which is, never take any authority's word without question--always consider the possibility that they might be wrong.
Instead, the school board is teaching the students a very different lesson: that our society is run, not by reasoned debate, but by arbitrary exercises of power.
I don't disagree with your point or agree with the school board's actions. This story contains two things that drive me nuts: 1) teachers talking out of their ass; 2) school administrators being petty assholes.
Suppose the government sent you a non-anonymous survey inquiring about your various activities, ostensibly for the purpose of shaping national health care policy, but not explicitly disclaiming the option of using the responses for other purposes? Do you believe the 5th would shield you from admitting to crimes in this case?
You are getting it wrong (disclosure - I do not live in the US).
Everything you read in the news is outlier in a sort. With 30 million kids in tens of thousands of schools you are guaranteed to get a few cases of something "stupid and abusive from the administrators" daily. After all - a normal school day with no events hardly makes a headline. And with the power of the internet some local news get much more national visibility than decades prior.
Same is with TSA - you will hear of something bad daily, but a lot of people pass checks without problems.
You have to aggregate the news about school authorities, police and federal behavior over a very long time to try and find some meaningful trends (there seem to be some, and not comforting at least)
>Everything you read in the news is outlier in a sort.
Indeed. Otherwise it wouldn't be news. Anything you see in the news is automatically not worth being afraid of. Your life will be ruined by something mundane, car accidents, cancer etc.
A good example of this irrational fear of what's in the news is the recent studies showing that many people in the US think the crime and/or murder rate is up when in fact it's down.
Too many times I see people from other countries, and the US too come to think of it, assume that every street corner in the US is a scene from a wild west movie with everyone shooting it out because someone said the wrong thing. Well, maybe parts of Chicago.
I guess they get this from what they hear on the news from the US and their own countries. Seems to me that today is likely the safest I have ever been in my lifetime in the US.
As you say, my biggest fear for myself and my family is a car accident.
"Anything you see in the news is automatically not worth being afraid of."
That's true on average, but, for example, if your child happens to live in one of the school districts that's run by irrational, power-hungry administrators, then you do have something to be afraid of.
Those are extreme examples of normal stuff, and that have been normal since schools (not educational institutions) were invented.
The idea for schools (with that name) came from Prussia (ie: Germany when they had a king), they noticed that their soldiers were not keen in defending their government, not patriotic, and fled from the battlefield upon hearing gunfire.
Someone then invented the "Prussian Model" of education, that was named "Volksschol" (pronounced volks school), that had as objective to make children believe more into the government and turn into adults more willing to go to war for it and even impose its beliefs on other countries.
The EUA (and several other countries) quickly copied the system, all of them (including Prussia original) making it mandatory, and to the people made the justification that it was for the good of the children (and who would refuse? school in greek means "leisure", and how would you dare refuse your children to have fun with other children, learn and get some social skills?), but internal government communication always made clear the intention was prepare kids to war, the report made to the US used some phrases (I do not remember the exact quote) like: "It might be harmful to children, but we can teach them to defend republic always."
And of course, none of this is lost to the UN (that state that is a human right to mandatory schools exist, and that those schools should teach about UN as institution to foster peace and about UN interests).
EDIT: fixed word that commenter pointed (I knew the greek meaning in portuguese and translated that to english... pardon me for the lost in translation meaning)
I have alternative theory - it is a bit wacky but bear with me - by giving basic literacy, proper grammar, math, history and reasoning skills we create a class of people that can enter the economy easily, can create a lot of value added and develop their full potential. By giving roughly the same start we could also do a lot to diminish the class separation.
Calling Prussia - Germany while they had a king is just wrong.
And the think with UN- it is helpless organization, kept that way, and forever will be. It is even more pathetic than League of Nations.
But there's a lot of conspiratorial libertarian agenda in your comment.
American schools existed before that (and were called "schools", it's a very old word), they were just influenced by the Prussian model. The part that Americans liked was the view that all were entitled to an education in a public school system with a universal educational curriculum, thus democratizing education. As it was adopted they modified it to suit American ideals and needs.
Also, school (technically σχολή/"scholé") in Ancient Greek means "leisure." Since learning and study were leisure activities, the term evolved in Greek and Latin into the word for learning in the ancient world, while the English term "school" has meant a place of learning and study since the Middle Ages. Arguments from etymologies are virtually always the flashing red light of terrible history.
This teacher is as middle America as it comes. I actually went to that school although I had a different teacher for history unfortunately. Some of this is a personality conflict as Mr. Dreyden was always a boat rocking kind of guy. Some of this is ineptitude by the school district. They weren't always the most organized bunch, and certainly not accustomed to the level of scrutiny they have now.
I don't think that the district was looking to harm to any student, but there is definitely a culture of paranoia in that particular town and within the schools. The town is located next to a small city that has had drug and gang problems in the past. As such, they've taken (often misguided) measures for years to try to prevent problems from creeping over the town line. This would be one such attempt.
The real root of many of Batavia and really all of America's internal issues are uneducated attitudes towards drugs and the drug trade. There is a huge black market going on all over the nation because of the drug laws and it fuels petty crime on up to organized crime. It brings about new 'Education' initiatives as well as a focus on school security that makes for untrusted environments. It also makes it quite easy to put children in jail for profit. All the while more and more parents call for more and more laws because they hear horror stories of loosing Junior to a drug habit. These problems will continue to pop up until we change the underlying problem.
It's basically random, depending on where you live. (Another thing that hasn't changed since Paul Graham was in high school.[0]) I think that the shitty things you see on places like HN are on an upward trend, but it's always been kind of bad. If you want to get an education into how long this sort of thing has been going on, try one of the reddit threads that pops up every so often with a title like "Did you ever get expelled? What for?"
Yeah, I actually went and checked that out after posting. By then though noprocrast had kicked in and I couldn't fix it. I'd append the relevant post here, but somebody already did it to the OP.
Something happened in the past 10-20 years where teachers became the scape goats of the failing American education system. It might be related to the attacks on their unions and the privitization of education. I'm not totally sure. But regardless of your opinions on education privitization teachers are not regarded with the same reverence in American society that they once were.
I can see both of those being true in previous years and today if one cares to look at what's going on. I can even provide an example.
My older daughter has problems with math. She doesn't like it and doesn't want to do it. Therefore, most of the problems she has with it I relate to her more than her teacher. I view it as a problem for both us as parents and her teacher to figure out ways to motivate her to try harder and to discover what problems she may have that we can work on.
On the other hand, she's a really good reader. She loves to read books and often does so without any outside motivation. When we moved to our current school district my daughter was tested for reading on a computer using software she had never seen before and was rated as a poor reader. We disagreed with this result and told the teacher that likely the problem lay with the system that she had never seen before. In her previous year in another school and at home she's a self-motivated reader that is slightly above average for her age group. The teacher stuck with the results and placed her in a lower reading group, where she quickly outpaced the other students in the group. Thankfully, after a few months, she was moved up into an appropriate group for her reading level. In that case I fully fault the teacher in that because she went with an automated system telling her what to do, didn't do an informal test of her own, and ignored her parents on the matter. Later the teacher even suggested that the sudden and large improvement in her reading was due to their reading programs at the school. The conspiracy theory part of me thinks it was intentional so that her reading scores would show a huge improvement through the school year.
You do have to keep that cartoon in mind as a general kind of thing because otherwise it suggests that there is no such thing as a bad teacher.
Something happened in the past 10-20 years where teachers became the scape goats of the failing American education system.
The reason for this is simple deduction. If you believe teacher quality is the primary drivers of educational outcomes and outcomes are not as you desire, it must be caused by low teacher quality.
(Personally I don't accept the premise that teacher quality affects educational outcomes much, but my views are way outside the mainstream...)
Your views are likely outside the mainstream in the same way Alex Jones' views are outside the mainstream. Your "simple deduction" would better be labeled "uneducated guessing based on nothing".
The reasons behind the dramatic decline in the American education system are obvious and known very well to any public school teacher: "No child left behind".
Education was on the decline as far back as I can remember. In the 90s, New York City's public school system was embroiled in scandals -- overcrowding, converting bathrooms into classrooms, illiterate teaching assistants, illiterate high school graduates, etc. This was long before No Child Left Behind (and in fact, NCLB was meant to address the concerns people had about American education), and it was not unique to New York.
NCLB is a bad law, but it is not the cause of our education problems. Teachers like to point to it because it is an easy scapegoat and it allows them to evade all responsibility.
Teachers like to point to it because it's destroyed any chance we had of fixing the issue.
And the issues previous to the law were appallingly bad salaries. There are some people who love teaching so much they would do it even though they earn probably 40% of what they could be doing with their credentials. But not as many as we need.
Sprinkle in the problem of parents blaming teachers for bad grades instead of kids and it all gets worse.
> If you believe teacher quality is the primary drivers of educational outcomes and outcomes are not as you desire, it must be caused by low teacher quality.
Wrong. If you believe teacher quality is the primary driver of educational outcome then anything effecting teacher performance could effect those outcomes. It does not follow that only teacher quality plays the only role unless the teachers are completely empowered.
People generally respect professionals more when they have the choice of shopping for the professionals who fit their needs. You would respect plumbers less if every time you needed a pipe fixed, you were assigned a plumber by your "plumbing district" and the plumbing district received revenues from your taxes whether your pipes leak or not. Teachers should take advantage of the opportunity to be treated like real professionals by supporting education reforms that give learners (and the adult guardians of minor learners) more power to shop for providers of education.
(By the way, I can tell that I am a good bit older than you are by the short time frame of your comment. Commentary about government-operated oligopoly schools not being staffed by teachers who are able to do their best for the learners in their care goes back many more decades than you guess.)
Something that HAS changed about teaching, as an occupation, in the United States in my longer lifetime is that now women have many more employment opportunities besides schoolteaching. When a woman can become a medical doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer, she may decide to take her talents into other labor markets besides the labor market for staffing schools.
Again, I think if schools were more client-responsive, because learners had more power to shop, that would change management practices of schools and allow schools to reward better the teachers who do the best work. A teacher who does a good job is worth her weight or his weight in gold.
But the incentives in the current system, in which most schools get the bulk of their revenues from taxes, results or not, don't set up incentives for schools to value teachers who do well as schools should.
Yeah, I have the impression this is true in a number of places. It does appear to be particularly pronounced in the US (from the view from my bubble).
I worry that reducing the respect given to teachers will result in fewer outstanding people choosing teaching as a career path.
From the smattering of events I noted above I do get the impression that teachers are operating scared. That they perceive that they are reluctant to make judgement calls that involve any kind of bureaucratic risk (as in the Kiera case). That zero tolerance approach seems to be a symptom of this fear and I have a lot of sympathy for both the teachers and the students. Its seems like a real shame :(
Perhaps we're supposed to revere them ("reverence", really, like for the Baby Jesus?), but I'm not so sure we ever did. The 19th- & early 20th-C fiction I read as a child that included teachers, seemed full of examples of "one-room schoolhouse" teachers who were routinely physically attacked by students and parents, widely derided by less-violent community members, and frequently paid late or not in full. (I'm sorry I don't have access to my childhood book collection at this time so I don't have any cites.)
I can see how respect would contribute to the goal of education at younger ages, but in high school the successful teacher will have more resources upon which to draw than just "reverence".
It varies from district to district though. In most districts I would assume things move along just fine and has been that way for years. In some districts teachers resign in protest because of the constraints placed on them due to emphasis on standardized tests which forces them to alter their teaching plans to the detriment of the students. In other districts teachers go to jail for allowing students to cheat on standardized tests or skip the middle-man to do the cheating themselves.
Much like most things in life, sometimes teachers deserve the criticisms they receive and sometimes they don't.
Personally, I feel the most likely culprit is a combination of the government and education administrators.
It's not an American phenomenon, most people who care about education (parents, students and educators alike) in Spain believe exactly the same thing. We haven't (yet) undergone a massive privatization of our education system, so privatization is not the core issue.
(I think this is the result of many factors conspiring to undermine the ability, energy and willpower of parents to be truly engaged with their kids' education, but that's material for an entire book)
They are 'outrage posts' - stuff that gets attention because it makes you angry.
I do not think they are very healthy for the focus of this community because the number of outrageous injustices in the world far outweighs the number of good posts about startups and hacking. Also, they attract pretty much anyone because it's not hard to have an opinion about them, whereas "Clojure vs Erlang for a distributed system" is likely to attract a far more restricted group of people.
To me it feels much as you have described. These sorts of incidents, while the extreme cases are still rare, are increasingly common. And separate from the extreme incidents, the overall culture of infantalizing children feels quite harmful. I am expected not to send my children four houses down and across a street at the light to play by themselves at the park. My children are 10 and 7.
You have to remember that America is a large country. With so many people there are more likely to be these outrageous events that draw a lot of media attention.
> Am I just seeing outliers here? Am I seeing frightening trend where children are needlessly criminalised (Kiera)
Zero tolerance means that often police are involved much earlier than they need to be, and for minor things. This is a political area, and so care needs to be taken when reading the following stories.
Here's a young child who took Lego toys to school, and who was threatened with suspension. Luckily the principal called the education board who recommended confiscation of the toy and no further action (http://gothamist.com/2010/02/03/student_nearly_suspended_ove...)
We don't always know the full story. For example, there might be more to the story of a child suspended for 10 days (reduced to 2) and given psychological assessment after she wanted to play with bubbles. (http://gma.yahoo.com/blogs/abc-blogs/kindergartner-suspended...)
My two & a half year old child plays with cars. Sometimes he drives them along and crashes them into walls, with impressive "crash!!" noises.
I have no idea where he gets this from.
We know he is playing, and that he has no concept of what a real car crash is like, or that car crashes involve pain and suffering. We would never ever discipline him for this, and we'd be horrified if anyone else thought it deserved disciplinary action. (Hitting another child with a car while yelling "CRASH!" is different!)
I wonder if this is just guns and knives?
I grew up in a world with Action Man when he had real guns and tanks; and comics like Commando or 2000AD.
"And students cannot incriminate themselves because, even if the district shared the information with police, police can't prosecute based on that, he said. They are only allowed to arrest students if they are harming other students, such as in a fight, or if the student is in possession of drugs or alcohol, Barshinger said."
I'm not saying that the school had anything but the best intentions, but It does give them a bit of a head start in targeting certain pupils should the school wish find a reason to remove a few bad apples.
And we're all just taking his word for it, and it's not the only potential for abuse of this information. Why should we trust the school or the private company is handling these non-anonymized surveys properly? What's the chain of custody?
Could these surveys ever come up in any kind of background check?
The administrator that said this is naive. Admitting to a crime is self-incrimination regardless if it can be held against you or not. Maybe the county or school system won't hold it against you but what stops the state or feds from prosecuting you?
You should always talk to a lawyer before admitting anything incriminating.
I find this whole deal very amusing because I suspect that most answers on this survey is wrong. I think we are not giving the students enough credit. I know that I was given surveys like this when in high school and I never answered them correctly, nor did any of my friends. Although the issues with punishing the teacher who is looking out for students is a problem, we should also be looking at why this survey was given in the first place. It seems like a complete waste of money and time by the school district.
saying that the first news report sounded like John Dryden is an unusually thoughtful social studies teacher, and that he was just relating the general concepts that he is hired to teach his students to a real-world situation facing the students. Even after reading the follow-up report submitted to open this thread, I'm not at all sure that Dryden was trying to undermine the survey process. Here's a key passage from the middle of the story submitted here:
"Dryden, a social studies teacher, told three of his classes that they had a Fifth Amendment right to not incriminate themselves when they took a social-emotional learning survey April 18. Some of the 34 questions asked students about their drug and alcohol use, as well as about their emotions. Their names were on the surveys, as it was intended to identify students who could use help, according to school district officials. Those whose answers raised red flags were called in to the school's student services workers, including social workers and counselors.
"Barshinger said there was no Fifth Amendment issue, for several reasons. Once students' names were on them, he said, they would have become student records and subject to student privacy laws. And students cannot incriminate themselves because, even if the district shared the information with police, police can't prosecute based on that, he said. They are only allowed to arrest students if they are harming other students, such as in a fight, or if the student is in possession of drugs or alcohol, Barshinger said.
"Board president Cathy Dremel, speaking on behalf of the board, said Dryden 'mischaracterized' the efforts of fellow teachers and administrators, some of who had worked on a committee for a year to find a survey instrument that would assess students' risky behavior.
"'The board will not support any employees giving students false impressions about those who come here every day' to work for their best interests, she said."
I am a lawyer by training. I don't actively practice law currently, but I stay alert to the law related to K-12 education, which was my motivation for studying law. In my experience, school district officials are often VERY BADLY advised on what the law is, and their default assumption is that they can do what they want, and hide what they are trying to do from parents who have the actual legal authority to guide their children's educations. I wouldn't take these kinds of statement from the district superintendent or from the school board president as the last word on what the legal consequences of the student survey might be.
I think another Hacker News participant said in the earlier thread that he lives in the district and would report on what he observed at the school board meeting about the survey. I'm not completely sure that this latest news story, which fills in more details that weren't reported in the first story, settles the issue of whether or not teacher Dryden's behavior was appropriate under the circumstances.
I am a high school teacher, and I've been working with at-risk students my entire career. I have always paid attention to the surveys I am asked to administer to students.
If I were asked to administer this survey, I would have the same red flags. A survey asking these kinds of questions, with names on them, is pretty serious and students deserve to know what is going to be done with the results of such a survey. They also need to know they have the right to make their own decisions about how much personal information to share.
As a teacher, I would expect this kind of survey to be pretty heavily front-loaded. So either the administration did not prepare staff well enough about administering this survey, or this teacher was not paying attention when it was discussed ahead of time.
Many people in education are afraid of being perfectly honest with students. We need more openness in education, not less.
Fellow lawyer here. I'm not a criminal attorney, but I agree that the superintendent's word shouldn't be taken as the last word.
Although he might be strictly correct as it pertains to police not being able to prosecute based on the surveys alone, they certainly could subpoena the survey results if a student were to get in trouble in the future. A student's statement could be used against him for another related or even unrelated crime.
Imagine being on the stand and the prosecutor pulls out this sheet and says, "you just said you've never used any drugs before, but this survey you filled out says that you did. Are you lying now or were you lying then?"
It seems it would be admissible as non-hearsay because it's a statement of a party opponent under FRE 801.
The skepticism is mostly inappropriate in the context of public education. It is the purpose of public school educators to help their kids, and that often requires disclosure of information that would not be required of an adult in the same situation.
It is the purpose of public school educators to help their kids
Well, that's what they say. Looking at the way that the public school systems are run -- the way they fight school choice, the way they fight merit systems, the way they resist all efforts to measure teacher competence, the way they fight firing criminally bad teachers -- it seems that the purpose of public school educators is to protect their jobs and power base.
It's no coincidence that the NEA is the largest union in the country.
Naturally, there are some great teachers out there... but if you're going to generalize, at least cover the most obvious purpose of those you're generalizing. As a whole, the public education system itself is a self-serving disaster.
No, the purpose of public school educators is to EDUCATE. Disclosure of such information is NOT required for the educational process. These attempts to improve the process by probing and influencing behavior outside the classroom grossly oversteps appropriate boundaries.
The information being demanded (and, where possible, anyone advocating not complying is being punished) is subject to naive, ignorant, bigoted, and biased interpretation by people not trained, hired, nor authorized (by parents) to interpret that information, yet those same people are empowered to act on their interpretations with severe consequences up to and including "reprogramming"[1], expulsion, and prosecution. Some of the information revealed seems persuasively permissible ("are you currently a user of illegal hard drugs?"), but many are subject to gross misinterpretation of answers ("have you ever consumed alcohol?" "yes", not explained as in fact a tiny amount a few times during Communion at church). The context is inappropriate and veiled, the answers viewed without parental permission, a permanent record is made, and "anything you say can be used against you in a court of law".
tl;dr - none of their business. Teach the subjects assigned; don't pry unless there is objective reason to do so. What my kid is doing outside the classroom is my problem.
[1] - someone taught my niece that "gun" is a "bad word". She won't fess up to who, and I have reason to believe it's her "educators". In a culture where owning & using them is common family recreation & survival, this crosses the line.
Never has it been deemed necessary to educate a child by making him put into writing his misdemeanors. Ever.
If you want to educate a child or a minor, please please please talk to him personally. If you cannot do this, you are not going to educate him.
And never in your life ask him to write anything wrong about himself. Even less with his name on it. It is a useless exercise which can only have ill side-effects and help nobody.
Really? Data that you don't control has effectively become a permanent record. On the one hand we say that any information on kids is private, and on the other it's being handed to third parties, and we all know that you can never really take that back. Sharing information about your crimes or abuses with the State or corporations is something that you will certainly regret in a couple of decades.
I don't think there's anything about education that requires the sort of information they were requesting. I think it's a perfect occasion for skepticism. In fact, I think public anything is a good occasion for skepticism.
> It is the purpose of public school educators to help their kids
Let's assume this statement is true, and public school educators are all saints who would never use the survey responses against their students in any way.
How do you know that only public school educators will have access to the information?
What if the surveys are sent back to the survey company for scanning, so that company now has the results as well? What if the information is stolen, leaked, or hacked, and posted on the Internet for anyone to read?
How do you know that some ambitious prosecutor who's looking for easy targets won't just find a lax judge who'll sign off on a subpoena of the survey results? School officials refusing to comply with a subpoena and going to jail to protect their students in this situation seems to be squarely in the realm of fantasy. Before you say something like "it is the purpose of prosecutors to serve the interests of justice, so they would never do crappy things," please read about Aaron Swartz. And really, by some definition, enforcing anti-drug laws in the most cost-effective manner may be an optimal use of a prosecutor's time.
I posted my observations from last night in the other thread. Overall what impressed me was two things:
- Dryden's supporters came from everywhere on the political spectrum
- Kids were really smart and really amped up about their rights
Sadly, I was pretty sure Dryden's censure was a forgone conclusion while watching the administrators stare blankly across the room while people poured their hearts out.
Yeah, the smarter kids know that their best option is to not volunteer that kind of information, which ensures that the survey only represents the fraction of the students who are naively trusting of the school administrators.
Source article actually points out that the teacher didn't do anything wrong in the warning, but that the warning was unnecessary and that the survey instrument was designed to protect students and give them a less risky way to get help than by talking to the police.
If the survey designers had communicated with the "administrators" of the survey (the teachers and aides), this whole flap could have been avoided.
What I was wondering is this: Are there any good tutorials teaching kids their basic rights of freedom/privacy?
With the right framing this could become really popular ("How to avoid your parents snooping on you"). I guess most kids have some phase of freedom-seeking and I would be happy to donate to a campaign encouraging this mindset even more.
Teachers should probably not dispense legal advice, but school admins should not take on the role of pop psychologists.
Were I a parent, I would expect the school system to secure my permission to ask my child questions of a personal nature. Which I probably would grant after a discussion with my child.
To me the act of disciplining the teacher makes the very case they're alleging that he portrayed. I.e., "the administration around here is kinda jumpy and will crack down on the slightest appearance of infraction--even if the right course of action is unclear or controversial."
Sec. 1061 Student Privacy, Parental Access to Information, and Administration of Certain Physical Examinations to Minors.
The No Child Left Behind Act contains a major amendment to PPRA that gives parents more rights with regard to the surveying of minor students, the collection of information from students for marketing purposes, and certain non-emergency medical examinations. PPRA has been referred to as the "Hatch Amendment" and the "Grassley Amendment" after authors of amendments to the law. Now, school officials may hear the law referred to as the "Tiahrt Amendment" after Congressman Todd Tiahrt, who introduced the changes regarding surveys to the PPRA. The statute is found in 20 U.S.C. § 1232h and the regulations (not yet updated) are found in 34 CFR Part 98.
U.S. Department of Education Surveys
Subsection (a) of the legislation was not changed. Subsection (b) added an additional category (see bold below) and made minor changes to the existing seven categories. This provision applies to surveys funded in whole or part by any program administered by the U. S. Department of Education (ED). PPRA provides:
-that schools and contractors make instructional materials available for inspection by parents if those materials will be used in connection with an ED-funded survey, analysis, or evaluation in which their children participate; and
-that schools and contractors obtain prior written parental consent before minor students are required to participate in any ED-funded survey, analysis, or evaluation that reveals information concerning:
1.political affiliations or beliefs of the student or the student's parent;
2.mental and psychological problems of the student or the student's family;
3.sex behavior or attitudes;
4.illegal, anti-social, self-incriminating, or demeaning behavior;
5.critical appraisals of other individuals with whom respondents have close family relationships;
6.legally recognized privileged or analogous relationships, such as those of lawyers, physicians, and ministers;
7.religious practices, affiliations, or beliefs of the student or student's parent; or
8.income (other than that required by law to determine eligibility for participation in a program or for receiving financial assistance under such program).
Subsections a and b of PPRA generally apply when a survey is funded, at least in part, by any program administered by the Secretary of Education.
Can written parental consent be twisted to mean silent consent from not replying to an email? I remember a cookie law in EU that had some harsh consent requirement being turned to mean "silent consent by continue staying on the website". Maybe the act of letting the kid continue go to school was interpreted as consent.
I was speaking about consent forms with a physician friend of mine. We came to conclusion they are complete bullshit - you could always get them for whatever you want by just abusing the information asymmetry and framing the questions.
I doubt that there forms are much more than legal covering ass.
Depending on the place in the US by asking - don't you want to know if your kid is surrounded by gays/muslims/junkies/conservatives/random boogiemans/ in school - just sign here you probably could get them easily. So it is a weak protection at best.
Is there any chance that this survey was ED funded? If so then I'd like to see the school hit with the fact that the materials have not been made available for inspection by parents, and the fact that there are many parents who never gave written consent.
Many/most of the comments here reflect a general mistrust towards the administration, questioning motives or competence.
I've been the parent of a troubled kid. In that time, I worked closely with our school administration, who could not have been more helpful and smart.
If I lived in that school district, I would welcome efforts to address drug/alcohol/emotional issues. Maybe the survey wasn't perfectly done. But I don't see evidence that anyone was actually harmed by it.
In my experience working with sensitive information, educators have generally done the right thing, for the right reasons.
Am I just seeing outliers here? Am I seeing frightening trend where children are needlessly criminalised (Kiera) or willfully (even if well intentioned) manipulated (my interpretation of this survey debacle)?
Other things I see include judges imprisoning children to increase revenues in private prison systems they have shares in.
How does it feel to actually live there?