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The city is giving IBM an $80 million contract to create a supercomputer to track public school students. Accrding to the Daily News, computer's program will be called "ARIS" - "Achievement Reporting and Innovation System" - and will be able to track a student's biographical details, education needs, education history, test scores, etc., and provide up-to-the-minute information. From the News:
The [interim tests student take will] measure whether kids have mastered specific skills, such as multiplying fractions or distinguishing fact from opinion, at different times of the year.Teachers union head Randi Weingarten said, "You can lower a lot of class sizes with that money - or buy a lot of supplies." It does seem extravagant to invest in an $80 million computer system when many teachers must buy supplies with their own money, but we suppose that's how the Bloomberg-Klein Department of Education rolls. Mayor Bloomberg said, "Every child in this city deserves a quality education and we will spare no expense." Oh, right, but not necessarily a bus ride to get the quality education. ARIS will be running by this September 2007 and parents will have access by September 2008. And the DOE says it did get 19 bids.Teachers will be able to see an entire classroom of results at once. Principals will be able to see an entire school.
Parents eventually will have access to their own kids' data plus summary facts about their child's school, the results of parent, student and teacher surveys and details about how their school scored on annual reviews.
Much of the data will be folded into letter grades that soon will be assigned to all 1,400 city schools.
The City Council is not happy with the mayor's plan to give more principals autonomy of schools. Last September, Mayor Bloomberg empowered principals to run their schools without supervision from superintendents. City Council members don't think there's enough evidence that the mayor's plan worked, but the NY Times calls the $80 million super computer a "major step...toward holding principals accountable for the results in their schools."
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Will you quit it with the busride stuff - just because people don't listen to schedules and ignore warnings and then complain to the press doesn't make the DOE guilty of anything.
NO, don't like it? get your own blog.
that was the coldest week of winter and that's when they implemented their plan.
It was poorly thoughtout, no matter what you think.
IBM is good at this stuff, they got their start in 1933 and through WWII helping the Nazis track Jews for confiscation of assets, and deportation to concentration camps. Just the right people to "track" our public school kids.
How much computing power is really needed for this? It sounds like a computer that'll keep track of grades and does basically no processing. Nothing but a 80 million dollar filing cabinet.
yeah, sp, this is what IBM has been planning ALL ALONG!
The plan could have been better, true - but we're talking about tens of thousands of kids most of whom were given a logical way of getting to school, had their parents remembered the notices they were given. Moreover, the planners couldn't have known about the weather because, hey, it's the weather and they're not gods. All in all, it represented to me more the detachment of parents from the DOE rather than the DOE's detachment from parents. There really was no excuse for not knowing about the change - something news reports glossed over. Again, the DOE can only be responsible for what kids do from the moment the buses pick them up to the time they drop them off.
SP - if you're implying this system will be used to, what, round up all NYC school kids and gas them... well, I don't know what
SP, another idiot that tries to find connections where there are none. Take your pills and go get some fresh air. Anything that will get you away from the computer.
And let's not forget out enlightened European friends like the French that helped round up Jews before the Germans even asked them to. Or the British for not giving out more visas to help Jews flee Germany. In fact, Europe is pretty much to blame for the Jews forming Israel - they were desperate to get away from a continent of anti-semites. So really, all the problems in the Middle East are Europe's fault.
Basta, that doesn't explain why kids from the same building, going to the same classroom, were on completely different schedules, or why buses were taking three hours to get kids home from school or small children being given metro cards and a good luck.
basta,
because getting kids to school an hour late is clearly logical.
Skynet looms over us all...
HAL
Hello, Dave, have you found out
the trouble? There's been a failure in the
pod bay doors. Lucky you weren't killed.
Do they get a free metrocard for signing up?
Wow, I have struck a nerve with the angry asshats on this site. I was simply noting how creepily coincidental it was that IBM was selected for this project given their history. Anyone with half a brain and a sense of ethics might get the chills at the thought of people, especially kids, being tracked like chattel, but that's too much to expect from you I see. And thank you #7 for your deep yet succinct insight into history. You are truly an fine intellectual. It's nice to see you sum up the whole of the Middle East's problems so easily.
basta,
I knew about the change. I filled in the forms.
Our first indication of a change in plans was when the bus didn't show up. Ten days later it started showing up again.
Until you have actually dealt with the DOE you can't believe that so many idiots could work for one agency.
"IBM is good at this stuff, they got their start in 1933 and through WWII helping the Nazis track Jews for confiscation of assets, and deportation to concentration camps. Just the right people to "track" our public school kids."
what's awesome about the poisoning of the well is that it can be used for nearly anything; for example, the founder of planned parenthood was a racist and eugenicist - no wonder planned parenthood spends so much money outreaching to poor and minority areas! it's a genocide!
see how easy that is? (believe it or not this is a common pro-life trope because the appeal of this fallacy runs super-duper deep.
additionally, we're already tracked like chattel. it's called the social security number. fica, etc, voila!
This is a big fat welcome mat for the city's juvenile hacker community.
This sort of school management system has been implemented in many of the nation's largest urban school districts including Chicago and Philadelphia...basically it helps track student performance and-among other things- can allow for teachers to address the specific needs of individual students...NYC is the biggest public school district in the country but still I wonder if they hadn't chosen a custom solution if they may have saved a little of the $80M...
Fuck both sides on this.
The problem is that an MBA consultant is not paid if/when their amazing plan works. They use faulty information to create incomplete solutions.
Stop paying people to design systems. Pay them to manage systems. Pay them to collect accurate information. pay them to properly, effectively, and efficiently communicate not to top officials but parents and kids.
No one will understand how this works, what it is supposed to accomplish, and why it is not working.
Fucking waste. Not for IBM. They'll bank regardless.
You could build a system like that for only 2 or 3 million dollars if you used off the shelf technology and used linux and open source software... IBM is ripping off the city.
It may seem like a lot of money, but if i understand what they're buying this is a long time coming. The DOE's existing centralized administrative computing system (ATS) is extremely antiquated (and by the way, also an IBM-based system, although whether IBM was involved in it's actual design or just provided the equipment is something I do not know).
Without knowing real numbers, I can tell you that it has cost them a huge amount of money over the years as it is the kind of setup that required specific (not generic) computer terminals, and special wiring to anywhere one of those terminals was going to be set up, effectively duplicating the networking efforts required for wiring the schools. And since these machines are not hooked up to the school's main networks, they each came with their own (big, expensive) printers. I think that these specific limitations may have been overcome in recent years, but i'm sure it cost them a lot of money to adapt their aging system to do so.
As a result of this system, almost every new test and evaluation system foisted upon the teachers comes with a new and even-more-horrible-than-the-previous website to enter scores and order tests and view results and etc (several close relatives of mine are teachers).
As for a linux/open source solution, IBM is easily the biggest pusher of linux/open source setups for this kind of thing. it wouldn't be that surprising if that's what they proposed. I can't really speak to the accuracy of the price estimate, but a system like this is a ridiculously huge job: you have to track an ever-changing number of data-points on an ever-changing, gigantic population; provide write access to a select but widespread group (teachers and school administrators, each of whom has completely different permissions over what they can do); and provide read access to an even more select and more widespread group (parents). This is a huge job and there are really only a few companies that could possibly do it.
of course, having said all of this, they'll probably go overbudget and spend 90 million dollars on something even worse than what they had before and be stuck with it for 30+ years.