The knowledge level on those staff's is often near 0, they operate with wonky budgets (here is a gazillion dollars for ipads... no money to maintain them or the rest fo the systems), and are just making do the best they can.
The IT staff at one complained to me the librarian at one elementary school kept changing things on them. In reality she had a clue and they couldn't even operate rudimentary role based access type system to stop her.
This is a function of how schools are funded in the US. This is the system you asked for through voting and tax policy (maybe not you, but you being the broad citizen).
Living inside the beast for my entire career - We have just enough funding to keep the doors open, and remain staffed at a minimal level. Additional funding, above what we can raise through local taxes, ALWAYS comes with an asterisk.
So we can get access to $50,000 supplemental funding this year, awesome. But we have to buy I-pads. Nevermind that literally every other piece of technology in the building is windows based. Oh, and we cannot spend that on infrastructure upgrades to the wi-fi system to support the extra capacity. And it has to be spent in six months or you lose it.
It's the way we're funded in the US. It isn't necessarily a function of the schools or the staff therein. Those people are generally trying to do their best.
It's the shit system and it needs to be burnt to the ground.
This is a function of how schools are funded in the US.
Not just schools. A lot of government-related sectors.
Transit is a big one. Back when I used to follow this sort fo thing, I would see a lot of municipalities turning down federal grants because the money could only be spent on buses, trains, an related infrastructure; and the towns and cities didn't have the money to pay for the people involved.
Maybe when self-driving vehicles become common, this won't be so much of a problem anymore.
Several years ago, one of our competitors implemented a public-facing web-based form for a local ISD. When the form loaded, the user was prompted with two pieces of info: a student's last 4 digits of SSN and their birthdate. The form then performed an AJAX request to the server, which did a DB lookup and pulled in ALL the transcript data of the matching student record to send back to the front-end.
Said competitor then presented this "solution" at a vendor conference and bragged about how amazing and easy to use it was and how the parents loved it because they no longer had to call the school to request transcripts yadda yadda. When casually asked about security/privacy concerns, their engineer basically said "well, how likely is it that an unauthorized party will know both a student's birthdate and the last 4 digits of SSN? Probably not very."
It's not a U.S. thing. It's a state thing. Not every state funds its schools through real estate taxes.
Nevada, for example, is funded by sales taxes, ad valorem property taxes ("property" as in things, not houses and land), gambling taxes, federal money, estate taxes, and mining taxes.
Comments
School's in particular are horrible.
The knowledge level on those staff's is often near 0, they operate with wonky budgets (here is a gazillion dollars for ipads... no money to maintain them or the rest fo the systems), and are just making do the best they can.
The IT staff at one complained to me the librarian at one elementary school kept changing things on them. In reality she had a clue and they couldn't even operate rudimentary role based access type system to stop her.
This is a function of how schools are funded in the US. This is the system you asked for through voting and tax policy (maybe not you, but you being the broad citizen).
Living inside the beast for my entire career - We have just enough funding to keep the doors open, and remain staffed at a minimal level. Additional funding, above what we can raise through local taxes, ALWAYS comes with an asterisk.
So we can get access to $50,000 supplemental funding this year, awesome. But we have to buy I-pads. Nevermind that literally every other piece of technology in the building is windows based. Oh, and we cannot spend that on infrastructure upgrades to the wi-fi system to support the extra capacity. And it has to be spent in six months or you lose it.
It's the way we're funded in the US. It isn't necessarily a function of the schools or the staff therein. Those people are generally trying to do their best.
It's the shit system and it needs to be burnt to the ground.
This is a function of how schools are funded in the US.
Not just schools. A lot of government-related sectors.
Transit is a big one. Back when I used to follow this sort fo thing, I would see a lot of municipalities turning down federal grants because the money could only be spent on buses, trains, an related infrastructure; and the towns and cities didn't have the money to pay for the people involved.
Maybe when self-driving vehicles become common, this won't be so much of a problem anymore.
Don't forget contractors.
Several years ago, one of our competitors implemented a public-facing web-based form for a local ISD. When the form loaded, the user was prompted with two pieces of info: a student's last 4 digits of SSN and their birthdate. The form then performed an AJAX request to the server, which did a DB lookup and pulled in ALL the transcript data of the matching student record to send back to the front-end.
Said competitor then presented this "solution" at a vendor conference and bragged about how amazing and easy to use it was and how the parents loved it because they no longer had to call the school to request transcripts yadda yadda. When casually asked about security/privacy concerns, their engineer basically said "well, how likely is it that an unauthorized party will know both a student's birthdate and the last 4 digits of SSN? Probably not very."
...yeah.
That thing where US schools are paid for by property taxes is so gross. Talk about a policy designed to maintain inequality.
It's not a U.S. thing. It's a state thing. Not every state funds its schools through real estate taxes.
Nevada, for example, is funded by sales taxes, ad valorem property taxes ("property" as in things, not houses and land), gambling taxes, federal money, estate taxes, and mining taxes.
http://ftp.ccsd.net/directory/budget-finance/pdf/Funding_K-1...
...and don't forget Erate dollars. Can't fund redundant systems, etc. https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/universal-service-progr...