Tim Cushing reports:
The Northside Independent School District (NISD) of Texas, best known for being sued by a student over its mandatory RFID card policy, is dropping the technology that originally landed it in the courtroom.
These chipped student ID cards were deployed to track students in hopes of bumping up the district’s attendance numbers — thus increasing its share of funding tied to daily attendance. Despite the court deciding in its favor, declaring the cards didn’t violate the students’ privacy or “right of religion,” the district has decided to abandon the RFID tracking system. Apparently, the technology wasn’t quite the attendance silver bullet administration thought it would be, as Slate’s Will Oremus discovered.
Read more on TechDirt.
Although I would have preferred a court found it privacy-invasive or that the school board had recognized the error of its ways on privacy, I’m glad to hear they’ve dropped the program. Of course, having 200 cameras on a high school campus still raises serious psychological questions about what we’re teaching students in terms of accepting a surveillance state.