I don’t understand what a hammer has to do with a story about an app that lets teachers score children by arbitrary teacher-specified criteria (without evaluation by an independent review board) and publish a feed to their parents of the scores with no oversight. Could you explain more?
Application is a tool, teacher is a user of given tool. Headline implies that tool is to penalize children, while in reality it is a decision of teacher. If that app would not exist, children were still penalized.
Tools deserve review and critique to determine whether they are good, neutral, and/or bad for society; and whether their use should be controlled or uncontrolled for societal good. For example, three such judgements as society sees them today from agricultural inventions:
Shovel: Neutral-Good (farming), Uncontrolled (it’s very unlikely you can do much harm to society with a shovel)
Backhoe: Neutral/Good (efficiency), Controlled (heavy machinery can easily kill people and damage infrastructure)
Agent Orange: Bad (imprecise, damaging, disease-inducing), Controlled (considered a chemical weapon with no legitimate societal use)
Why would you expect oversight for something like this? Would you also expect an independent review board to provide oversight for the teacher giving a student a note to bring home that says "your kid went to the bathroom during class"?
Part of the valuable purpose I see in schools is to provide children the experience of living a life apart from their parents, in a setting that offers them carefully-monitored self direction. HN has had several high-scoring front page posts about mistreatments of Amazon’s warehouse workers and contract delivery drivers, in which many suggest they are unable to take bathroom breaks. This is considered to be abusive behavior by many people, and labor laws exist specifically to prevent such abuses as they’ve occurred in the past. Censuring a child for needing to go to the bathroom — literally docking them a Meowmeowbeenz point! — is beyond acceptable. Writing a note saying “your kid seems to go to the bathroom excessively” is completely appropriate, but not what we’re discussing here.
So I think that more oversight should be used in order to prevent teachers with bad and abusive efficiency strategies from, for example, downvoting children for needing to pee.
If pen and paper had been invented in the past twenty years, I would absolutely shine a spotlight on this kind of unexpected outcome from its invention and use by teachers.
