The first thing that jumps out is Sweden has a national identity system, BankID. The APIs appear to be protected using those credentials. With that in mind I have two questions:
1. Who owns the data?
2. Should public funds be used for the creation of private APIs that manage the data?
The answer to (1) has consequences for (2).
I think many HN readers, including myself, and certainly these parents would argue that the data is the property of the parents. If you see the data as being the property of the parents then you would see the APIs as being the means for retrieving and manipulating your data - data that's protected by this national BankID identification.
It appears the school system believes the data is their data, and not the parents' data. Therefore retrieving the data through any other means than the "official" app is a potential data breach.
So who is right? Think about the data we manage on behalf of our customers, for example. Who owns that data? What rights do our customers have in accessing and managing that data?
This is a really interesting case and hopefully will force the answer to these questions.
(I am Christian Landgren, cofounder of the project)
You are right, the city believes they have ownership of the data, mainly because they fail to understand that they aren’t showing data in an app, but rather publishing data in an API. In Swedish law, once you have released data from a government, the receiver have the right to do whatever they want with the that data (as long as it isn’t violating any other laws).
The city in this case is responsible to check that the data is safe to share publicly and once they have- the data is not theirs. This is regulated in the constitutional law regulating free speech which goes back to year 1766.
This means that they can’t really apply the same logic as a private company can when publishing data in their api. A private company can still keep license over what can be done with the data they publish. A city can not do that because of these constitutional laws.
> You are right, the city believes they have ownership of the data, mainly because they fail to understand that they aren’t showing data in an app, but rather publishing data in an API.
Christian, it's not about the data and has never been. The data is a legal tool they are using.
The municipal administration is trying to save face. It's layers and layers of non-technical bureaucrats who have to justify their salaries.
A few talented software engineers running in circles around some multi-million dollar contract they gave to a large offshored operations with probably close to a hundred individual programmers doesn't look good for them at all.
That's an interesting angle - the government published the data via an API and therefore the data is now public and so as a result these other laws you mention come into play. Fascinating! Please keep us posted as to how this progresses.
Is there any way to write an app that doesn’t “publish the data” by this definition? It seems like publishing was not their intent, and furthermore they were not legally allowed to “publish” personal data.
For example if their system includes an app that lets you see your students grades and disciplinary issues, presumably you would not want that published. Is it simply impossible to build an app with such data in Sweden now as it would be “published”?
Edited to add: and just to be clear, I am fully supportive of this use case. Just trying to understand the restrictions better.
Hi, congrats on the app. I was curious about one thing in the article - why would the city pay to license the app when it is open source? Do you anticipate that this would be cheaper for them than them paying one of their overpriced contractors to build and publish an "official" version, given how much they spent on a CRUD app?
But there is no API here. The article makes it clear that you were intercepting client-server communication not meant to be used by third parties in order to write your own client. That it could be used as an API doesn't matter since the intent wasn't to create an API.
I could do the same thing and write an app for, say, the tax agency by scraping its website but it would be a legal gray area.
I feel like focusing on who owns the data is unnecessary.
If there is an API that grants access to data by passing in a valid auth token, then it doesn’t matter if it’s called from a SPA app or postman or curl.
As long as you are using the public API and haven’t forged an auth token then it doesn’t matter how you call the public API.
Agree. Who cares about the client implementation?! You sent me the data, I decide how to process and render it. Otherwise we can sue people for having a black and white screen, using a text-only browser, a custom stylesheet or even for closing their eyes when the TV commercials are on.
> In some cases, people’s personal information could be accessed from Google searches.
SEO providers should take a note here.
> It warned parents to stop using the app and alleged that it might be illegally accessing people’s personal information
If your API allows data extraction, it probably isn't a fault of any client. Perhaps they meant that creators could steal credentials. A problem with any software.
I think this digital child managing system sounds moderately dystopian to be honest. I would have hated to give my parents access to anything like this. Kids will of course learn from how their parents behave...
An open API is a must in my opinion, but the rest of the App should be open source too.
That said, I don't really see the Swedish strategy as a model for other countries to follow. You don't need to give children chromebooks to learn. These are skills they have already mastered far better than their parents. They will learn about domain specific apps and there are indeed some really good ones, but such platform can also limit creativity because they are essentially sandpits. Depending on age that might be appropriate, but kids may have greater ambitions than their parents.
"I think this digital child managing system sounds moderately dystopian to be honest"
I disagree, I have 2 kids in elementary school and it is very useful to be able to look up what the kids have scheduled for the day to determine what to dress them in, see what's for lunch and if I need to pack them something if they won't like the available option. Most importantly though its very helpful to look up what homework / tests are due as the kids tend to not manage this so well themselves. It also allows me to check their grades. Its not so much a "child managing system" as a way for the parents to be empowered to ensure their kids are doing well and what is going on in their school lives. As a parent, my kids are my responsibility, any tool I can use to be better at that is a good thing.
As I said, as a kid I would have hated this. I don't think kids benefit from this kind of overbearing parenting in the long run. Better than being neglected, I guess. Perhaps this is useful for very young children, but knowing myself I would have broken out of there as quickly as possible.
I'm not against the app, but the use cases you gave sound like things the child needs to learn to do. If they have gym, they need to be responsible for remembering their stuff. If the cafeteria has food they don't like, maybe they learn to develop new tastes that day. And most importantly, I'd they have homework or tests that are due, the child should 1000% be solely responsible for this.
As you mention, I guess it can be a useful tool for a parent to keep their kid on track, because yeah obviously they're learning and they'll be forgetful. But IMO it would also make it too easy for an overbearing parent to prevent their child from learning important life skills, thinking they're helping.
Back when I was in school we had a schedule, for the semester. That worked perfectly well for me and my parents. Our kitchen had a pin board with these schedules pinned to it. After a month or so we all had a new schedule internalized anyway. As for food, we had a cafeteria which served warm meals, usually at least two different options, and various other things like sandwiches, along with two "kiosks" where the janitors's wives sold some more snacks and sandwiches. And there was a supermarket across the street. I never had a packed lunch, ever, simply because there was no need for it. If I really hated the hot meals of the day, I would get a sandwich. We kids didn't really keep to the schedules anyway, we sometimes went early or stayed late to make use of the table tennis, foosball (or "kicker" as it's called in Germany) or billard tables, or play board games (our school had a sizable collection of these), or play soccer (or "football" as it is called correctly) outside on the school's fields. Mom's only order was to call her (from a pay phone inside the school) if we stayed longer than 1h, so she didn't need to worry (dad was at work). Pickups weren't a problem in this system, as we would always take the public bus or bike when it was warm enough. Our school had something like 1200-1500 students, and about only 30-50 were dropped off and picked up by parents regularly, simply because they lived in some tiny villages somewhere with shitty bus service.
Homework and test prep was supposed to be managed by the students, not their parents, anyway, but most classes had just printed exercises and/or a sheet of what to expect in tests, so parents could always just check that. Test were also in about the same weeks of every semester, so my parents might not have known the exact dates unless they asked and I told them, but they knew that tests were happening. My parents kept interest, asked me how it was going regularly, if I needed help with something, when the tests are and what my results were, and so on. I think so it makes a big difference in the kid's experience if the parent asks them, or if the parent essentially goes over their head and consults some online resource.
I personally was too proud to want help with school work from my parents from an early age on, and even felt that it only slowed me down; I wanted to be outside with my friends not slowly working through the homework as a team exercise. My grades were good, so my parents let me do my stuff. My sisters (they are twins) needed some help in some areas (they are very likely partially dyslexic), and got it.
Should the grades of a student change abruptly for the worse or remain at a low level, teachers would just call up parents and discuss the situation and suggest ways to improve, and the semester reports had to be signed by a parent anyway, and that signature had to be presented at school.
This was mid to late 90s by the way, my mid and "high" school time.
In elementary school my parents were still more hands-on, of course.
I too find "digital child managing systems" rather dystopian, enabling parents to micro-manage their kids even more, which I am convinced is not good for the kid's overall development. There has to be a balance between the parents need to care for a kid (and the care a kid actually needs, of course) and letting the kid grow up, and I feel such systems push that balance too much away from teaching kids self-reliance and let them make minor "educational" mistakes on their own.
Then again, I of course realize that each kid has it's own needs, and some need a fair bit of micro-management at times.
>what to dress them in
May I ask, how old are your kids?
Sounds like they are still young, if you dress them?
Then of course, more micro-managing makes more sense.
The younger the more care kids need.
I'd also say that a school denying access to this information should rightly expect pointy and sharp questions coming at them. Parents being part of the education system shouldn't come as a surprise to a school. It would be like hiding the school timetable.
Usual common sense caveats still apply: Privacy and authentication are still valid aspects but not to block those who could reasonably expect to successfully authenticate, eg a parent of a kid in school.
> its very helpful to look up what homework / tests are due as the kids tend to not manage this so well themselves
How do you expect they'll develop these sorts of self-starter skills and mental models, besides experiencing things like the (comparatively low-impact!) consequences of not handing in your 5th grade homework....?
Hopefully you're going full parabola and also providing disproportionately strong incentives to do the "right" behaviors, because otherwise it's as likely they'll succeed as they'll become sand through your tight grasp.
> I think this digital child managing system sounds moderately dystopian to be honest.
I think you misunderstand the point of the system. It's much more mundane than that. The system just replaces paper notices going home with kids and getting lost in their book bags, looking phone numbers to report you child out sick, etc. It's not brave new world, it's simply replacing paper and phone tasks with an app.
Yes! I recall all of these kinds of things being available and used when I was a child well before cell phones existed. Photocopied calendars. Sheets of paper a reticent child would carry around to their teachers for weekly reports. Report cards. Teachers calling parents when more attention was needed.
> I think this digital child managing system sounds moderately dystopian to be honest.
A lot of the reactions and rebuttals to this comment are from HN childless people, whose perspective is their memory of being a child age 12-17, talking past HN people with children, whose perspective is about their kids age 5-12. At one end of the range you are educating about drugs and sex and good decisions, on the other end of the range you are worried about clean butts and walking across busy streets.
The method of CREATING an older child who can be an independent and functional adult is by "MICROMANAGING" early-on so they develop good habits (especially good habits of independence!). And I am a Montessori parent which is fairly radical compared to the normal US system.
Such devices are part of their strategy for digitization as is this school app. Sweden spends a decent amount of money on education.
But if look at a purely educational value any notebook beats a tablet aside for art. Purely technical knowledge is also better gained in more open environments. Depends on age I guess.
There are different schools of thought, some people would rather have the kids home-schooled or completely different like Montessori, Steiner... so maybe the critique comes from that direction.
This is all information that the parent would have anyway. Lunch isn't private information, the curriculum isn't private information, tests and homework as well isn't private, its just that it was all a shit ton of minutia that typically didn't get memorized by any individual.
Part of being a parent is helping your child navigate and learn about the world. Having this sort of information - what are the details about what this institution is offering on a daily basis - sounds invaluable.
> I think this digital child managing system sounds moderately dystopian to be honest. I would have hated to give my parents access to anything like this. Kids will of course learn from how their parents behave...
I don't really disagree but we are in an era where children's academic outcomes are based entirely on parental involvement. Scratch any surface of any under-performer lightly and the cry will go up "The schools can't be blamed for poor parenting!"
I think we rarely acknowledge that this is a recent development. Ask most Gen-Xers ( me ), ask boomers, ask greatest generationers if you know any. "How involved were your parents in your schoolwork?". You'll probably get a blank stare - "None?".
I suspect it started with the "Asians are going to beat us" panic from the 80s. They were killing us in math scores and if we weren't careful we'd all be working for them someday. In retrospect the danger was exaggerated.
Now, however, heavy parental involvement is required for kids to succeed. If the kids don't finish their homework - could it be that they are getting to much homework? Nah, it must be bad parents. If they can't pass the tests, could it be their teachers have not prepared them? Nope - the parents should have been spending their evenings going though flash cards.
It only exacerbates the difference between that haves and have nots. If you don't have a parent who can devote time every day to overseeing your education, you're out of luck.
Every edutech platform I've ever had to use (UK, with 3 kids going through school) is an abomination, the whole sector needs disrupting. My current nemesis is Iris Parentmail [0], a convoluted jumble of javascript that presents the user with a challenge - try to read the apparently important message the school has sent you before Parentmail crashes your browser. If the message is particularly long, then there's an end of level boss where you have to try to read the whole thing before the laptop gives you third degree burns. HNers, please, disrupt the hell out of this sector because it's nothing but chancers, consultants and chancer consultants.
Why aren't you equally as mad at the personnel at your child's school? It's one thing for a national or semi-national rollout of broken enterprise junk, it's another thing for your child's instructor to go along and demand that you use this broken system instead of providing reasonable affordances (e.g. low-tech, paper-based notices/forms that get sent home with your kid).
For that matter, how do your school systems handle the situation where no one in the household is able or willing to install the damn thing because e.g. you don't own an iOS or Android device, or you have no smartphone at all? Is there an actual legal requirement for you to contribute on an ongoing basis to the bottom-line of select tech companies like Apple and Google in order to participate in public life—as if it's on par with the necessity to pay for e.g. renewing your government-issued ID?
>it's another thing for your child's instructor to go along and demand that you use this broken system instead of providing reasonable affordances
I am not sure, but it might be that the teachers are not only encouraged but required to use these systems?
>you don't own an iOS or Android device, or you have no smartphone at all? Is there an actual legal requirement for you to contribute on an ongoing basis to the bottom-line of select tech companies like Apple and Google in order to participate in public life—as if it's on par with the necessity to pay for e.g. renewing your government-issued ID?
That really became a problem here in Germany, when politicians proclaimed that "digital/remote learning" will safe the day in covid times. Not realizing that a lot of kids, especially in the poor neighborhoods, nor their parents, actually have any capable devices for that. Or fast enough internet (with enough mobile data) to support zoom meetings and such each day.
You should not underestimate the power of “ISO-9000” in European institutions (including schools) and the “necessity” of an official “document trail” of everything.
I lecture at a Uni and it has not reached me yet but am expecting it.
> Why aren't you equally as mad at the personnel at your child's school? It's one thing for a national or semi-national rollout of broken enterprise junk, it's another thing for your child's instructor to go along and demand that you use this broken system instead of providing reasonable affordances
You don't expect people who face no consequences for anything short of criminal conduct to change their behavior. Being mad at civil servants is like being mad at the weather and only slightly more likely to accomplish anything.
Ah the joy of public procurement in Sweden. It's basically an extremely long requirement gathering process where the company the can promise the most for the least amount of money wins. Only problem is that the people ordering this are not the users and they just want to cover their backs, meaning that behemoths usually win because they're more trustworthy.
I was in edu-tech world for a while in Sweden. The most frustrating thing is that even if you have a good product that your users enjoy you will fail because you can't sell it to individual schools. You have to sell it to all the schools in the entire county, which just means that some giant actor will swoop in promise the world for a dollar and then we have this.
The silliest part of the story is that Stockholm decided to build their own system, mostly because of dick-swinging reasons, because the actual needs of schoolchildren and parents across the country aren't that different!
It should be perfectly possible to have the same underlying system across the entire country.
And in a perfect world, there would be some kind of common API for all schools, and a competing app ecosystem where parents and teachers and children can pick the one they like the best.
> The platform is a complex system that’s made up of three different parts, containing 18 individual modules that are maintained by five external companies. The sprawling system is used by 600 preschools and 177 schools, with separate logins for every teacher, student, and parent. The only problem? It doesn’t work.
> The Skolplattform, which has cost more than 1 billion Swedish Krona, SEK, ($117 million), has failed to match its initial ambition.
So JIRA for Schools failed. It's a top down system, where people on top decide to solve problems for all people below, without really knowing how to solve it, or what the problem even is. And then contractors get involved.
People are willing to put up with this if you can press them, e.g. they are at work, they are in the army etc. so they have to put up with it, but it's not going to work for anything else. It attempts to solve everything for everyone, where it's questionable if most of these things are even worth solving. E.g. from the article, what is somebody's child doing in school, what do they need in gym class. You might just ask them, no? There are quarterly or so meetings with the teacher to discuss things, progress, problems? The problem is not that the menus are convoluted, but that maybe most of this stuff is not worth categorizing, not worth having an UI other than a piece of paper.
What is particularly insulting is the needless API/URL changes made in the official app in order to sabotage the efforts of the parents.
The Google Play listing should have had a "Mismanagement Count" prominently displayed that incremented every time this happened. The log, and the time spent, should be in court.
The parents decided to build this front end for free. They did not decide to play hide and seek with the interfaces, and for this they deserve compensation.
So an app for schoolkids is a really good idea. In France the app is built by the (semi-public) post office, it's called "kidscare". teachers can upload photos live, you can set who is allowed to pick up your kids, you can send a notification if your kid is sick etc... not the slickest or most stable app, but miles better than using whatsapp
Our sons preschool (a Montessori school) has something similar. It is really nice. Daily updates on what he did, pictures of him throughout the day doing things, it’s amazing.
We have many of these in the US. I've used two in daycare. One was amazing, the other is pretty good. Both fall short because of poor use by teachers and faculty.
Its difficult to evaluate the value of the info, if no one can find it because its buried in menus then yes it is useless but that doesn't mean it cant be useful, in general if its worth printing its worth putting on your website.
I don't get the point of non web apps because usually they are just a subset of the website.
Rather its that the goverment funded development resulted in a bad product. People reimplementing it in a their spare time resulted in an even better product.
More likely the MVP covered all the basics that the platform should do. Then all the rest of the legal requirements had to be implemented and that broke it.
Support for secret identities, all the special needs, support for non employees, legal guardians and a million other things which is important for the last 5%.
It would probably be cheaper to give those with special requirements personal support than to write the code for it
Even before the open app came along, people found enormous security holes in the system, because they were essentially operating with security-by-obscurity. It was super embarrassing for the city, they had to close the system for days while fixing it.
The official system has a mobile app, where it takes effort to figure out the API, and a SPA web app, where it is absolutely trivial to see which endpoints it is hitting and how.
And the ridiculousness of the city's defense that it's not open is made greater by the fact that if they had made an open API from the start, security should have been baked in from the start, which means they would have avoided embarrassing security incidents along the way. They already have all the components needed for a proper, public API. They're so close, and yet they're insisting that it's private, and that it's illegal to access their private API.
A long time ago some teammates (prior to my joining the company) had been assigned to work on some VA related health system, turned out they were 8 levels sub contractors, i.e. sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-contractors. Project never shipped.
This was the first thing that jumped out at me as well. I've worked on govt. contracts and when you put >1 contractor on the same project they become competitors. They will sabotage each other in the hopes of winning a larger share in the future. And beyond that they have absolutely no incentive to help each other. Their managers aren't going to pay them to make the other contractors code work better.
Readit News
1. Who owns the data?
2. Should public funds be used for the creation of private APIs that manage the data?
The answer to (1) has consequences for (2).
I think many HN readers, including myself, and certainly these parents would argue that the data is the property of the parents. If you see the data as being the property of the parents then you would see the APIs as being the means for retrieving and manipulating your data - data that's protected by this national BankID identification.
It appears the school system believes the data is their data, and not the parents' data. Therefore retrieving the data through any other means than the "official" app is a potential data breach.
So who is right? Think about the data we manage on behalf of our customers, for example. Who owns that data? What rights do our customers have in accessing and managing that data?
This is a really interesting case and hopefully will force the answer to these questions.
You are right, the city believes they have ownership of the data, mainly because they fail to understand that they aren’t showing data in an app, but rather publishing data in an API. In Swedish law, once you have released data from a government, the receiver have the right to do whatever they want with the that data (as long as it isn’t violating any other laws).
The city in this case is responsible to check that the data is safe to share publicly and once they have- the data is not theirs. This is regulated in the constitutional law regulating free speech which goes back to year 1766.
This means that they can’t really apply the same logic as a private company can when publishing data in their api. A private company can still keep license over what can be done with the data they publish. A city can not do that because of these constitutional laws.
Christian, it's not about the data and has never been. The data is a legal tool they are using.
The municipal administration is trying to save face. It's layers and layers of non-technical bureaucrats who have to justify their salaries.
A few talented software engineers running in circles around some multi-million dollar contract they gave to a large offshored operations with probably close to a hundred individual programmers doesn't look good for them at all.
For example if their system includes an app that lets you see your students grades and disciplinary issues, presumably you would not want that published. Is it simply impossible to build an app with such data in Sweden now as it would be “published”?
Edited to add: and just to be clear, I am fully supportive of this use case. Just trying to understand the restrictions better.
I could do the same thing and write an app for, say, the tax agency by scraping its website but it would be a legal gray area.
If there is an API that grants access to data by passing in a valid auth token, then it doesn’t matter if it’s called from a SPA app or postman or curl.
As long as you are using the public API and haven’t forged an auth token then it doesn’t matter how you call the public API.
SEO providers should take a note here.
> It warned parents to stop using the app and alleged that it might be illegally accessing people’s personal information
If your API allows data extraction, it probably isn't a fault of any client. Perhaps they meant that creators could steal credentials. A problem with any software.
I think this digital child managing system sounds moderately dystopian to be honest. I would have hated to give my parents access to anything like this. Kids will of course learn from how their parents behave...
An open API is a must in my opinion, but the rest of the App should be open source too.
That said, I don't really see the Swedish strategy as a model for other countries to follow. You don't need to give children chromebooks to learn. These are skills they have already mastered far better than their parents. They will learn about domain specific apps and there are indeed some really good ones, but such platform can also limit creativity because they are essentially sandpits. Depending on age that might be appropriate, but kids may have greater ambitions than their parents.
I swear we just had an A4 piece of paper with my lessons on it on the fridge.
As you mention, I guess it can be a useful tool for a parent to keep their kid on track, because yeah obviously they're learning and they'll be forgetful. But IMO it would also make it too easy for an overbearing parent to prevent their child from learning important life skills, thinking they're helping.
Homework and test prep was supposed to be managed by the students, not their parents, anyway, but most classes had just printed exercises and/or a sheet of what to expect in tests, so parents could always just check that. Test were also in about the same weeks of every semester, so my parents might not have known the exact dates unless they asked and I told them, but they knew that tests were happening. My parents kept interest, asked me how it was going regularly, if I needed help with something, when the tests are and what my results were, and so on. I think so it makes a big difference in the kid's experience if the parent asks them, or if the parent essentially goes over their head and consults some online resource.
I personally was too proud to want help with school work from my parents from an early age on, and even felt that it only slowed me down; I wanted to be outside with my friends not slowly working through the homework as a team exercise. My grades were good, so my parents let me do my stuff. My sisters (they are twins) needed some help in some areas (they are very likely partially dyslexic), and got it.
Should the grades of a student change abruptly for the worse or remain at a low level, teachers would just call up parents and discuss the situation and suggest ways to improve, and the semester reports had to be signed by a parent anyway, and that signature had to be presented at school.
This was mid to late 90s by the way, my mid and "high" school time. In elementary school my parents were still more hands-on, of course.
I too find "digital child managing systems" rather dystopian, enabling parents to micro-manage their kids even more, which I am convinced is not good for the kid's overall development. There has to be a balance between the parents need to care for a kid (and the care a kid actually needs, of course) and letting the kid grow up, and I feel such systems push that balance too much away from teaching kids self-reliance and let them make minor "educational" mistakes on their own.
Then again, I of course realize that each kid has it's own needs, and some need a fair bit of micro-management at times.
>what to dress them in
May I ask, how old are your kids? Sounds like they are still young, if you dress them? Then of course, more micro-managing makes more sense. The younger the more care kids need.
Usual common sense caveats still apply: Privacy and authentication are still valid aspects but not to block those who could reasonably expect to successfully authenticate, eg a parent of a kid in school.
How do you expect they'll develop these sorts of self-starter skills and mental models, besides experiencing things like the (comparatively low-impact!) consequences of not handing in your 5th grade homework....?
Hopefully you're going full parabola and also providing disproportionately strong incentives to do the "right" behaviors, because otherwise it's as likely they'll succeed as they'll become sand through your tight grasp.
I think you misunderstand the point of the system. It's much more mundane than that. The system just replaces paper notices going home with kids and getting lost in their book bags, looking phone numbers to report you child out sick, etc. It's not brave new world, it's simply replacing paper and phone tasks with an app.
A lot of the reactions and rebuttals to this comment are from HN childless people, whose perspective is their memory of being a child age 12-17, talking past HN people with children, whose perspective is about their kids age 5-12. At one end of the range you are educating about drugs and sex and good decisions, on the other end of the range you are worried about clean butts and walking across busy streets.
The method of CREATING an older child who can be an independent and functional adult is by "MICROMANAGING" early-on so they develop good habits (especially good habits of independence!). And I am a Montessori parent which is fairly radical compared to the normal US system.
But if look at a purely educational value any notebook beats a tablet aside for art. Purely technical knowledge is also better gained in more open environments. Depends on age I guess.
Part of being a parent is helping your child navigate and learn about the world. Having this sort of information - what are the details about what this institution is offering on a daily basis - sounds invaluable.
I don't really disagree but we are in an era where children's academic outcomes are based entirely on parental involvement. Scratch any surface of any under-performer lightly and the cry will go up "The schools can't be blamed for poor parenting!"
I think we rarely acknowledge that this is a recent development. Ask most Gen-Xers ( me ), ask boomers, ask greatest generationers if you know any. "How involved were your parents in your schoolwork?". You'll probably get a blank stare - "None?".
I suspect it started with the "Asians are going to beat us" panic from the 80s. They were killing us in math scores and if we weren't careful we'd all be working for them someday. In retrospect the danger was exaggerated.
Now, however, heavy parental involvement is required for kids to succeed. If the kids don't finish their homework - could it be that they are getting to much homework? Nah, it must be bad parents. If they can't pass the tests, could it be their teachers have not prepared them? Nope - the parents should have been spending their evenings going though flash cards.
It only exacerbates the difference between that haves and have nots. If you don't have a parent who can devote time every day to overseeing your education, you're out of luck.
[0] https://www.iris.co.uk/education/engagement-suite/iris-paren...
Why aren't you equally as mad at the personnel at your child's school? It's one thing for a national or semi-national rollout of broken enterprise junk, it's another thing for your child's instructor to go along and demand that you use this broken system instead of providing reasonable affordances (e.g. low-tech, paper-based notices/forms that get sent home with your kid).
For that matter, how do your school systems handle the situation where no one in the household is able or willing to install the damn thing because e.g. you don't own an iOS or Android device, or you have no smartphone at all? Is there an actual legal requirement for you to contribute on an ongoing basis to the bottom-line of select tech companies like Apple and Google in order to participate in public life—as if it's on par with the necessity to pay for e.g. renewing your government-issued ID?
I am not sure, but it might be that the teachers are not only encouraged but required to use these systems?
>you don't own an iOS or Android device, or you have no smartphone at all? Is there an actual legal requirement for you to contribute on an ongoing basis to the bottom-line of select tech companies like Apple and Google in order to participate in public life—as if it's on par with the necessity to pay for e.g. renewing your government-issued ID?
That really became a problem here in Germany, when politicians proclaimed that "digital/remote learning" will safe the day in covid times. Not realizing that a lot of kids, especially in the poor neighborhoods, nor their parents, actually have any capable devices for that. Or fast enough internet (with enough mobile data) to support zoom meetings and such each day.
I lecture at a Uni and it has not reached me yet but am expecting it.
You don't expect people who face no consequences for anything short of criminal conduct to change their behavior. Being mad at civil servants is like being mad at the weather and only slightly more likely to accomplish anything.
I was in edu-tech world for a while in Sweden. The most frustrating thing is that even if you have a good product that your users enjoy you will fail because you can't sell it to individual schools. You have to sell it to all the schools in the entire county, which just means that some giant actor will swoop in promise the world for a dollar and then we have this.
It should be perfectly possible to have the same underlying system across the entire country.
And in a perfect world, there would be some kind of common API for all schools, and a competing app ecosystem where parents and teachers and children can pick the one they like the best.
So JIRA for Schools failed. It's a top down system, where people on top decide to solve problems for all people below, without really knowing how to solve it, or what the problem even is. And then contractors get involved.
People are willing to put up with this if you can press them, e.g. they are at work, they are in the army etc. so they have to put up with it, but it's not going to work for anything else. It attempts to solve everything for everyone, where it's questionable if most of these things are even worth solving. E.g. from the article, what is somebody's child doing in school, what do they need in gym class. You might just ask them, no? There are quarterly or so meetings with the teacher to discuss things, progress, problems? The problem is not that the menus are convoluted, but that maybe most of this stuff is not worth categorizing, not worth having an UI other than a piece of paper.
The Google Play listing should have had a "Mismanagement Count" prominently displayed that incremented every time this happened. The log, and the time spent, should be in court.
The parents decided to build this front end for free. They did not decide to play hide and seek with the interfaces, and for this they deserve compensation.
I don't get the point of non web apps because usually they are just a subset of the website.
Sure you do. You just don't know it yet.
JackFr's law: With sufficiently angered users of a private API, they will build an better, open API around it.
The official system has a mobile app, where it takes effort to figure out the API, and a SPA web app, where it is absolutely trivial to see which endpoints it is hitting and how.
And the ridiculousness of the city's defense that it's not open is made greater by the fact that if they had made an open API from the start, security should have been baked in from the start, which means they would have avoided embarrassing security incidents along the way. They already have all the components needed for a proper, public API. They're so close, and yet they're insisting that it's private, and that it's illegal to access their private API.
When I was a subcontractor, the most I had to do was 3 (customer and 2 consultancies), and even that was a major hassle.
Big consulting firms involved, billions spent, horrible products shipped.