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Page 5 of 9

The Bizarre Consequences of "Zero Tolerance" Weapons Policies at Schools

Zachary’s offense? [He’s six years old.] Taking a camping utensil that can serve as a knife, fork and spoon to school. He was so excited about recently joining the Cub Scouts that he wanted to use it at lunch. School officials concluded that he had violated their zero-tolerance policy on weapons, and Zachary was suspended and now faces 45 days in the district’s reform school.

[…]

“Something has to change,” said Dodi Herbert, whose 13-year old son, Kyle, was suspended in May and ordered to attend the Christina district’s reform school for 45 days after another student dropped a pocket knife in his lap.

[…]

The Christina school district attracted similar controversy in 2007 when it expelled a seventh-grade girl who had used a utility knife to cut windows out of a paper house for a class project.

The problem, of course, is that the global rule trumps any situational common sense, any discretion. But in granting discretion those in overall charge must trust people below them who have more detailed situational knowledge. It’s CYA security—the same thing you see at airports. Those involved in the situation can’t be blamed for making a bad decision as long as they follow the rules, no matter how stupid they are and how little they apply to the situation.

Posted on October 15, 2009 at 7:34 AM • View Comments

Corrupted Word Files for Sale

On one hand, this is clever:

We offer a wide array of corrupted Word files that are guaranteed not to open on a Mac or PC. A corrupted file is a file that contains scrambled and unrecoverable data due to hardware or software failure. Files may become corrupted when something goes wrong while a file is being saved e.g. the program saving the file might crash. Files may also become corrupted when being sent via email. The perfect excuse to buy you that extra time!

This download includes a 2, 5, 10, 20, 30 and 40 page corrupted Word file. Use the appropriate file size to match each assignment. Who’s to say your 10 page paper didn’t get corrupted? Exactly! No one can! Its the perfect excuse to buy yourself extra time and not hand in a garbage paper.

Only $3.95. Cheap. Although for added verisimilitude, they should have an additional service where you send them a file—a draft of your paper, for example—and they corrupt it and send it back.

But on the other hand, it’s services like these that will force professors to treat corrupted attachments as work not yet turned in, and harm innocent homework submitters.

EDITED TO ADD (6/9): Here’s how to make a corrupted pdf file for free.

Posted on June 9, 2009 at 6:46 AM • View Comments

British High Schoolers Write About CCTV in School

If you think that under-20-year-olds don’t care about privacy, this is an eloquent op-ed by two students about why CCTV cameras have no place in their UK school:

Adults are often quick to define the youth of today as stereotypical troublemakers and violent offenders— generalisations which are prompted by the media— when in fact the majority of students at our school are as responsible and arguably better behaved then the majority of adults. Some commentators insinuated that we overheard adults talking about rights and repeated it. That notion isn’t worth the space it was typed upon. We are A-level politics students who have been studying civil liberties as part of the curriculum for the last two years. Sam campaigned for David Davis when he resigned over the issue of civil liberties and spoke at speakers’ corner about the issue. The criticism of our campaign only serves to illustrate the ignorance of adults who have surrendered within only the last few years our right to protest in parliament, our right to go about our business without being stopped and questioned by police about our identity and our affairs, and our personal privacy.

Eroding standards in schools and deteriorating discipline are down to a broken society and the failure of the education system. The truth is that we are whatever the generation before us has created. If you criticise us, we are your failures; and if you applaud us we are your successes, and we reflect the imperfections of society and of human life. If you want to reform the education system, if you want to raise education standards, then watching children every hour of every day isn’t the answer. The answer is to encourage students to learn by creating an environment in which they can express their ideas freely and without intimidation.

Posted on June 8, 2009 at 1:38 PM • View Comments

Update on Computer Science Student's Computer Seizure

In April, I blogged about the Boston police seizing a student’s computer for, among other things, running Linux. (Anyone who runs Linux instead of Windows is obviously a scary bad hacker.)

Last week, the Massachusetts Supreme Court threw out the search warrant:

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Associate Justice Margot Botsford on Thursday said that Boston College and Massachusetts State Police had insufficient evidence to search the dorm room of BC senior Riccardo Calixte. During the search, police confiscated a variety of electronic devices, including three laptop computers, two iPod music players, and two cellphones.

Police obtained a warrant to search Calixte’s dorm after a roommate accused him of breaking into the school’s computer network to change other students’ grades, and of spreading a rumor via e-mail that the roommate is gay.

Botsford said the search warrant affidavit presented considerable evidence that the e-mail came from Calixte’s laptop computer. But even if it did, she said, spreading such rumors is probably not illegal. Botsford also said that while breaking into BC’s computer network would be criminal activity, the affidavit supporting the warrant presented little evidence that such a break-in had taken place.

Posted on June 2, 2009 at 12:01 PM • View Comments

Lessons from the Columbine School Shooting

Lots of high-tech gear, but that’s not what makes schools safe:

Some of the noticeable security measures remain, but experts say the country is exploring a new way to protect kids from in-school violence: administrators now want to foster school communities that essentially can protect themselves with or without the high-tech gear.

“The first and best line of defense is always a well-trained, highly alert staff and student body,” said Kenneth Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, an Ohio-based firm specializing in school security.

“The No. 1 way we find out about weapons in schools is not from a piece of equipment [such as a metal detector] but from a kid who comes forward and reports it to an adult that he or she trusts.”

Of course, there never was an epidemic of school shootings—it just seemed that way in the media. And kids are much safer in schools than outside of them.

Posted on April 29, 2009 at 5:57 AM • View Comments

Cell Phones and Hostage Situations

I haven’t read this book on the Columbine school shooting and massacre, but the New York Times review had an interesting paragraph about cell phones in a hostage situation:

Fuselier is one of the people Cullen spotlights in his retelling in order to clear up the historical record. Some of the confusion generated by Columbine was inevitable: Harris and Klebold started out wearing trench coats, for instance, but at some point removed them, giving the illusion that they were four people rather than two. The homemade pipe bombs they were tossing in all directions—down stairwells, onto the roof—only seemed to further the impression that there were more of them. And then there were the SWAT teams: students trapped inside the building would hear their rifle fire, assume it was the killers and report it to the media by cellphone, complicating the cops’ efforts to keep them safe. “This was the first major hostage standoff of the cellphone age,” Cullen notes. The police “had never seen anything like it.”

Posted on April 27, 2009 at 6:57 AM • View Comments

A Rational Response to Peanut Allergies and Children

Some parents of children with peanut allergies are not asking their school to ban peanuts. They consider it more important that teachers know which children are likely to have a reaction, and how to deal with it when it happens; i.e., how to use an Epipen.

This is a much more resilient response to the threat. It works even when the peanut ban fails. It works whether the child has an anaphylactic reaction to nuts, fruit, dairy, gluten, or whatever.

It’s so rare to see rational risk management when it comes to children and safety; I just had to blog it.

Related blog post, including a very lively comments section.

Posted on January 27, 2009 at 2:10 PM • View Comments

Teaching Risk Analysis in School

Good points:

“I regard myself as part of a movement we call risk literacy,” Professor Spiegelhalter told The Times. “It should be a basic component of discussion about issues in media, politics and in schools.

“We should essentially be teaching the ability to deconstruct the latest media story about a cancer risk or a wonder drug, so people can work out what it means. Really, that should be part of everyone’s language.””

As an aspect of science, risk was “as important as learning about DNA, maybe even more important,” he said. “The only problem is putting it on the curriculum: that can be the kiss of death. At the moment we can do it as part of maths outreach, maths inspiration, which is a real privilege because we can make it fun. It’s not teaching to an exam. But I actually think it should be in there, partly to make the curriculum more interesting.”

Reminds me of John Paulos’s Innumeracy.

Posted on January 26, 2009 at 1:55 PM • View Comments

"Nut Allergy" Fear and Overreaction

Good article:

Professor Nicolas Christakis, a professor of medical sociology at Harvard Medical School, told the BMJ there was “a gross over-reaction to the magnitude of the threat” posed by food allergies, and particularly nut allergies.

In the US, serious allergic reactions to foods cause just 2,000 of more than 30 million hospitalisations a year and comparatively few deaths—150 a year from all food allergies combined.

In the UK there are around 10 deaths each year from food allergies.

Professor Christakis said the issue was not whether nut allergies existed or whether they could occasionally be serious. Nor was the issue whether reasonable preventative steps should be made for the few children who had documented serious allergies, he argued.

“The issue is what accounts for the extreme responses to nut allergies.”

He said the number of US schools declaring themselves to be entirely “nut free”—banning staples like peanut butter, homemade baked goods and any foods without detailed ingredient labels—was rising, despite clear evidence that such restrictions were unnecessary.

“School entrances have signs admonishing visitors to wash their hands before entry to avoid [nut] contamination.”

He said these responses were extreme and had many of the hallmarks of mass psychogenic illness (MPI), previously known as epidemic hysteria.

Sound familiar?

Posted on December 19, 2008 at 6:56 AM • View Comments