A Stitch in Haste

Be sure to review this Wired piece about an alarming incident in California:

Parents of elementary and middle school students in a small California town are protesting a tracking program their school recently launched, which requires students to wear identification badges embedded with radio frequency, or RFID, chips.
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But students and parents, who weren’t told about the RFID chips until they complained, are upset over what they say are surreptitious tactics the school used to implement the program. They also question the ethics of a monetary deal the school made with the company to test and promote its product, using students as guinea pigs.
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The system consists of a photo ID card affixed to a lanyard and worn around the neck. Embedded in the card is an RFID chip that contains a 15-digit number assigned to each student. As students pass beneath a doorway scanner on their way into a classroom, the scanner records the number and sends it to a server in the school’s administrative office. The server translates the digits into names and sends an attendance list to the teacher’s PDA, identifying all of the students who walked through the door. The teacher then visually verifies that the names on the PDA list match the students in the classroom.
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[T]he parents of [two students] told the school, which includes grades kindergarten through 8th grade, that their children wouldn’t participate in the project. The school sent a letter threatening disciplinary action if students didn’t participate.
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School officials could also quickly identify anyone who didn’t belong on campus if they weren’t wearing an RFID badge. But the main draw is a more efficient and accurate way to track and verify attendance in order to receive state funds.
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[An administrator] said the school properly notified parents about the test, as the law requires, and got no complaints. He said the school held an open board meeting to discuss the test and posted public notices describing the essence of the test, but could not say where exactly the notices were placed. … A week after receiving parent complaints, the school scheduled a gathering to demonstrate the technology and answer questions, but notified parents only a day in advance.

Now, if I were a parent I might consider tagging my own children for their safety (Diamond has a microchip surgically implanted). And perhaps a school-based RFID system is a great idea — I don’t know.

But I do know that children aren’t the property of the school district and shouldn’t be used as guinea pigs to test a program whose primary motivation is not safety but money.

We seem to moving further and further away from the principle that students do not “shed their constitutional rights … at the schoolhouse gate” (Tinker v. Des Moines School Dist., 393 U.S. 503 (1969)). And what of the right of the parents to notice and a hearing when a major new policy, one that implicates students’ rights, is being implemented? In an era of emails and websites, let alone photocopiers, how can the educrats say with a straight face that parents should just “go to the school board meeting”?

As the ACLU puts it:

Articles about controversial subjects written for student newspapers are censored. Lockers and backpacks are searched without reasonable suspicion. Minority students are disproportionately shunted in lower track programs. Majoritarian religious practices are officially sanctioned by teachers and school administrators. Female students are excluded from certain extracurricular activities, and gay students are intimidated into silence.

Indeed. And don’t forget censorship in school libraries and humiliating strip searches.

Now of course the hyper-anarcho-libertarian would say “if we didn’t have public schools, then we wouldn’t have these problems.” And to an extent that’s true. But given that we do have public schools and will continue to have them for the foreseeable future, then can we at least make sure that the rules — constitutional rules more often than not — are actually followed and that educrats develop a mindset of “better to err on the side of constitutional caution”?

Just as rights aren’t shed at the schoolhouse gate, neither should common sense be.

MAJOR UPDATE: The project has been scrapped.

Related Post:
“Lost Enforcement”: Youngsters Arrested, Handcuffed for Crayon Drawings

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