I opened the following email and at first I thought it was a prank or, as another reader put it, an article taken from The Onion. See what you think:
—–Original Message—–
From: Leonie Haimson
To: nyceducationnews ; paa news
Sent: Fri, Jun 8, 2012 10:08 am
Subject: [nyceducationnews] Gates Foundation: one more step into the dystopian future with electronic bracelets for students & teachers
Gates Foundation experimenting w/Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) bracelets in teacher eval project
See Susan Ohanian, excerpt below:
http://goo.gl/KBXtO
Look up “effective teaching” on Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grants. Here’s one of the awards.
To: Clemson University
Purpose: to work with members of the Measuring Effective Teachers (MET) team to measure engagement physiologically with Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) bracelets which will determine the feasibility and utility of using such devices regularly in schools with students and teachers [emphasis added]
Amount: $498,055
Think about that!!
NOTE: The emerging field of neuromarketing relies on biometric technologies to determine a participant’s emotional and cognitive response to certain stimuli. In the case of neuromarketing, this stimulus is anything from a television commercial to an internet advertisement. There are six primary biometrics used to gather data on physiological responses to marketing…
So Gates wants to apply it to effective teaching.
The Affectiva Q Sensor is a wearable, wireless biosensor that measures emotional arousal via skin conductance, a form of electrodermal activity that grows higher during states such as excitement, attention or anxiety and lower during states such as boredom or relaxation.
Here’s a paper on the topic: MobiCon: Mobile Context Monitoring Platform for Sensor-Rich Dynamic Environments
Smart mobile devices will be the central gateway for
personal services in the emerging pervasive environment
(Figure 1). They will enable a lot of personal context-aware
applications, forming a personal sensor network with a
number of diverse sensor devices, placed over human body
or in surrounding spaces. Diverse sensors act as the useful
tool for the applications to acquire users’ contexts1 , i.e.,
current status of an individual or surrounding situation that
she/he faces into, without their intervention [42].
Wikipedia says neuromarketing is a new field of marketing research that studies consumers’ sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective response to marketing stimuli. So the Gates Foundation joins Google, CB S, and Frito-Lay in looking for ways to measure consumer reactions to products.
Put a Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) bracelet on every kid in the class and you can measure teacher effectiveness in keeping their attention.
Maybe the next step is for the bracelet to zap them with electric current when their attention wanders.
And then the next generation will be the Galvanic Skin Response bracelet on every teacher–to zap her when she veers from the Common Core curriculum. Then. . . bring on the drones to eliminate such teachers.
Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters
124 Waverly Pl.
I needed A reality check, so I googled “galvanic skin response” and added “Clemson.” up popped the following link:
Home/Clemson University
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Clemson University
Date: November 2011
Purpose: to work with members of the Measuring Effective Teachers (MET) team to measure engagement physiologically with Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) bracelets which will determine the feasibility and utility of using such devices regularly in schools with students and teachers
Amount: $498,055
Term: 1 year and 2 months
Topic: College-Ready Education
Region Served: Global, North America
Program: United States
Grantee Location: Clemson, South Carolina
Grantee Web site: http://www.clemson.edu
What can I say? Shades of Brave New World.
Which district will be first to put the bracelets on their students and teachers? Will charter school students have to wear them, or only children in public schools? Who will pay for them? Will schools raise money by selling the data to Amazon and Google and other data-mining corporations? Have we lost all common sense?
Diane
Is this the future? http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/flashpoints/theater/images/clockwork_big.jpg
God help us!
How bad will the situation have to get before American teachers start behaving like Australians?
http://stager.tv/blog/?p=2762&cpage=1#comment-92387
How do Australians behave?
Bill and Melinda Gates are engaging in all kinds of “scientific” experiments on the “little folk” through their malanthropic foundation.
There’s the GMO they’re pushing on the continent of Africa, along with their business partner, Monsanto:
http://www.alternet.org/world/155376/frankenfoods%3A_why_is_the_gates_foundation_helping_monsanto_push_genetically_modified_food?page=entire
There’s the geo-engineering they’re experimenting with, including “cloud whitening” in order to (ostensibly) mitigate the effects of climate change:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/may/14/bill-gates-cloud-whitening-dangerous
What if Bill and Melinda Gates are as wrong about GMO in Africa and cloud whitening around the world as they were about their small schools initiatives?
What will the fall-out for people in Africa and around the world be?
Bill and Melinda do not seem to care about that. And their mostly favorable press coverage doesn’t seem to ask those questions either.
Back in January, Timesman Nick Kristof hosted a Q&A with Melinda over Gates Foundation initiatives to combat poverty.
http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/melinda-gates-answers-questions-part-ii/
Kristof helped the Times provide a platform for Gates Foundation advertising for all their initiatives, not once pushing back against the propaganda Melinda was slinging.
Kristof never did bring up the fact that Microsoft, the company owned by Bill and Melinda Gates, uses slave labor in Asia to make its products.
That’s odd, since the propensity of huge conglomerates like Microsoft (and Apple, and Sony, and HP…) to use slave labor in Asia to squeeze costs on their products is a huge contributor to worldwide poverty, and particularly poverty in Asia, the area of of the world Kristof and Gates were focusing on.
I guess old Nick didn’t want to offend the great Ms. Gates.
No wonder the Gates Foundation gets away with their “experiments”.
The press almost always acts as an unpaid public relations bureau for the Foundation.
Little scrutiny, much praise from our Fourth Estate for the Gates Foundation.
I am grateful for my fellow ‘reality based educator’s’ post and the excellent point it makes. This educational discussion platform hosted by Dr Ravitch is indeed a fine one. And yet commentators are taken into a fraudulent discussion around what Melinda Gates has said or didn’t say while bothering to find the sources and the research she has been referring too. This diversion in discourse symbolizes for me the form of discourse we have in the United States even when done within a very progressive and activist platform. Instead of addressing the illegitimacy of the Gates, and the fact that they have the say – for they are multi billionaire so we should listen – rather then majority of people in this country is the real issue that has to be addressed.
The cult of business and business people, the perception of those who made billions under crony capitalism as the smartest is a major problem in the US.
Until people would start questioning the validity of the system, and the corrupt skewed authoritarian power structure, nothing will be changed. As long as people are looking into the meaning of things that The Gates and other anti democratic oligarchs say, and actually believe that they have some sort of positive intentions but are misguided, no change will occur.
One has to take nothing as given, the structure of education under crony neo conservative top down rule has been written by people – with narrow greedy set of interests – and can be abolished by people, just as the political plutocracy can be taken down.
The Gates are well known abusers of human rights, as pointed out by my fellow ‘reality based educator’ and a recent report that I have already brought forward mentioning a program of “working students” .Students in slave labor for the Gates in China. Those students – that are dear to the Gates almost as American students – work in factories for 16 hours straight seven days a week.
http://www.globallabourrights.org/reports?id=0034
those criminals – the Gates – portray themselves as the super heroes we were waiting for to save our education system. They seem to like authoritarianism sadistic cruel environment in which people obey and fulfill their function as submissive parts in the crony capitalistic machine the Gates are running. This is what seem to be what they are envisioning to our youth as well. Plutocrats who are looking to create society in which no one is able to question their grip on power and the great disparity they created. The GSR story posted here is yet another piece of evidence of the sinister cynical exploitative mentality of the Gates. It a brave new world.
Sureal!
It is most definitely time to leave teaching. I don’t know if I can survive the 6 years I need to survive to reach my ‘full retirement’ age. This is NOT why I became a teacher, and 26 years ago, I never imagined a world like this one.
I agree, retirement here I come!
Not of retirement age yet. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t thought of leaving the system, many times. And I don’t know how much more I’m willing to take, or at what point I become complicit in its failings.
It’s time to stand up teachers! This is a sickness! I can’t believe this madness.
In a prior response, I suggested that citizens read The People Shapers, by Vance Packard. It is available under old or used book (yahoo etc). I also suggested B. F. Skinner’s, Beyond Freedom and Dignity. These books were written several years ago, so one can only wonder how “big brother” has progressed. Now we know part of what the Gates Foundation and other vested interest are about from this information. Interested citizens may also want to read Science and Human Behavior by Skinner. All I can say is “Bless the Beast, and Save the Children”.
You know, you all shouldn’t be so quick to reject this. You are only positioning yourselves as outside of the conversation. Let’s be real and not so idealistic and ideological. When you get emotional everyone stops listening. This is the direction things are going in and we are helpless to do anything about it. This kind of measurement is inevitable. I mean, we need some sort of accountability measures and the ones we have now are just not precise enough, subject as they are to the vicissitudes of human relationships and the pressures of unions. Those who argue that teachers are not engaging their students have a really good and important point. And everything we have ever suggested or done before regarding student engagement is meaningless and ineffective. As consumers of our educational products, parents and students have a right to data about the value of that product. Things being as they are, and given the competition for resources, we need to think of how to make the best of a bad situation. We should get a seat at the table so that when they use these measures in schools we can have some say about the levels of galvanic skin response that will be considered effective and which kinds of teacher behaviors will be evaluated in this way. We need to write the grants, maybe partnering with the Skinnerians cross campus, so that we are the ones using galvanic skin responses to measure the practices we know are important. (And don’t tell me that you will not work with a Skinnerian, that is exactly the kind of stubborn ideological position that makes people think educators are just interested in their own careers.) It is better to learn to work with people and not be so angry. In this way we can go along with the inevitable increasing surveillance by the corporate state while reserving some tiny sliver of a lying story about our souls to tell ourselves when we are waiting at death’s door.
Barbara, this is very smart parody. You should consider writing for Stephen Colbert. 🙂
Thanks–wasn’t sure if anyone would read through to get it. More than anything, it expresses my deep outrage with all of the complicit educators out there. It is well past time to call them out.
Had me going for a minute Barbara! Scarey part is there and will be more who will be sucked in.
I just read the web links in reality-based educator and Frank Little’s. Thank you! The Chinese student working or “training” in the Microsoft factory may be what we have to look forward to in the USA. One of the major objective in restructuring education was passed in The School-to-Work Act. The standards combine career objectives with :”educational” objectives. Young children are to be trained for the workforce
The new educational system in the USA is almost identical to the old USSR polytec schools, and it appears that China is also using the same system of “training” for their students. Is it possible that the insiders also wish to destroy the unions so they may further promote child labor? I urge all to especially read the web in Frank Little’s comment.
I fully agree with your observations, Ann. The current US scripted lessons which accompany most math and reading series, as well as metered curriculum, scared me when it was first introduced. Why? Because way back when, in my own grade school education, we studied the Soviet educational system. Our wonderful 5th grade Social Studies teacher, Mr Durost, described the characteristics of the Soviet educational system very clearly to our young curious minds…I recall feeling sorry for the poor Soviet children who had no choices like we did. Children who were ‘channelled’ into educational tracks by the state which pre determined the level and quality of education they would receive based upon the needs of the state. What he described to us is so very similiar to the classroom constraints which teachers are painfully feeling and strenuously reacting to today. The use of a test score to determine the sole measure of a student’s learning and simultaneously, a teacher’s worth (to the system) is the major indicator of the “reformers” true intent and purposes….mass standardization of the educational system. We are, as a professional discipline, coming to grips with the horrific truth. We on the ugly slippery slope of mass social manipulation controlled by private corporate elitists and the legislation of their political puppets….our elected officials Unions and bargaining agreements interfer with corporate profits. For that reason unions, from their very inception, unions have always been hated by the profiteers . The corporate world’s massive outsourcing of US labor was/is retaliation for the improved wages, working conditions and benefits unions have secured for workers. as well as retaliation for US government’s inclusion of Unions in their prior policy decisions. That has changed as Washington’s poor judgement is increasingly choosing to allow corporate needs,wants and greed influence not only economic policy but also education, military, foreign and environmental policy as well.. From not taxing the rich to bailouts to privatization liberties. Our students are the ‘worker’ bees of this elitist grand future envisioned and being shaped by corporate America. Mass resistance to their efforts by teachers nationwide can best be managed by their systemmatic eliminating of our solidarity core…our unions. Thus we see the multitude of viscious deep funded media attacks by our government leaders; ie- politicians well funded by the corporate designers. We must stay actively vigilant. (my laptop keyboard is a sticky key nightmare..I apologize for the typo’s)
Besides the dystopian nature of GSR, it doesn’t take an expert in neuromarketing to know it would be every bit as ineffective in measuring teacher effectiveness as many of the Gates’ ideas are. Off the top of my head, here are three reasons this idea is DOA:
1) Students aren’t a blank slate each day they enter class. They bring with them whatever is going on at home, at school, with a boyfriend or girlfriend, etc. Often these things weigh more heavily on a student’s mind than whatever the teacher is doing.
2) Even if kids were a blank slate, our minds wander. We daydream. If a student is engaged in a daydream, the GSR wouldn’t be able to indicate whether or not it was the lesson that so captivated the student.
3) Not everything worth learning is exciting.
The really scary thing to me is that Bill Gates seems to have a very limited and completely uniformed view of student learning, and how we might go about measuring it. In an interview on CNN in November with Fareed Zakaria he said that effective teachers “are constantly looking out and seeing if the kids are starting to fidget” (see http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1201/07/fzgps.01.html) so is it that surprising that he thinks an electronic bracelet can capture mental fidgeting? I wish he would just focus on funding scientists fighting malaria and leave education alone.
absolutely weird and scary
Hmm…does the device also measure whether the students are on drugs? Perhaps some students are spacing out because they did a wake and bake before class, not bad teaching!
“Everybody’s happy nowadays” (Huxley – BNW)
Might this be illegal under the No Child Left Behind Act?
NCLB requires that ONLY proven teaching methods be used in reform programs. This research project ASSUMES that “student engagement” means effective teaching, or some index of it.
I cannot find any research that indicates “engagement” is an indicator of teacher effectiveness, learning effectiveness, nor any other beneficial reaction necessary to learning.
In short, the premise of the project is completely unproven.
When I taught at an alternative school, I learned that one student’s learning improved greatly if I let him sleep 30 minutes in the first four hours. After a couple of weeks of that, with greatly improved test scores and writing, he confessed to me that he was working an “illegal” warehouse job shift that had him up all night and off duty just in time to drive to class. It hurt his schoolwork but it kept the rent paid on his family’s home.
Galvanic skin response on that kid would have been a measure of ineffectiveness in meeting the student’s needs.
Is there any criminal penalty for violating the “proven research” provision of NCLB? Is there a clause that allows a civil suit?
Ed, they just changed the name. Teachers have been evaluated while using the classical and operant conditioning programs for years. It was called “time on task”.
What grabbed me was this part:
“electrodermal activity that grows higher during states such as excitement, attention or anxiety and lower during states such as boredom or relaxation.”
So, this means that they can’t tell the difference between excitement, attention and anxiety? So all you have to do is keep a class in constant fear and you ace the evaluation? It also can’t tell the difference between boredom and relaxation. So if you’re doing “sustained silent reading,” which is it? Are students supposed to be “on” all the time?
I’m not a teacher, and even I can see that this is a huge steaming pile. But it got them a $500K grant! Nice work if you can get it – and stomach it.
“…a huge steaming pile”. Glad I read all the way through to find that nugget. How true.
This is wrong on so many levels, how does one even start?
It’s like saying that, instead of observing and interacting with our students, to ascertain their levels of engagement, since the 70s, we should have been putting Mood Rings on everyone.
Someone needs to tell Gates that we veteran teachers really do have eyes in the back of our heads: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/inside-school-research/2009/06/study_time_changes_how_teacher.html
This research should be deemed immoral and illegal not handsomely rewarded. Melinda and Bill should go to jail for funding it.
Two more weeks and I leave this crazy landscape, lucky enough to be able to retire after 31 years as a public school teacher. I had assumed this would be a happy time, but now I feel mostly anger – and sadness.
Diane, Leonie, Susan – thanks for fighting back, for the good of our kids.
[…] our Students with Galvanic Response Bracelets? is by Anthony Cody at Ed Week. Just When You Thought It Couldn’t Get Crazier… is by Diane […]
I get this creepy feeling that this is some sort of prototyping experiment for MS latest technotainment initiative. Right now it’s Kinect, and in the future…the game can sense the player’s moods and adjust the game play experience based on the biofeedback.
[…] few days ago, I learned from Leonie Haimson who learned from Susan Ohanian about a grant from the Gates Foundation to Clemson University to conduct research into the uses of a “galvanic skin response” […]
[…] I posted a blog about the Gates Foundation funding research at Clemson University for something called […]
no doubt this will be included inside the RFID that obamacare has listed within it, with full expectations to have everyone “chipped” with the Verisign RFID by 3-23-2013 to be able to participate in this NWO. It will be bidirectional for sure, along with the GPS it must have some means to measure the physiological responses of the body, which likely means it can transmit as well to counter the localized bodies signals… Can someone say Rapture for the un-knowing? Just transmit the local signal strong enough to impede the normal bodies frequencies and instant death aka the rapture might be a side effect. How else could one localize the commentary noted in the bible… two will be working in a field and one will be taken the other left.
[…] Post-NAPLAN Use of a Galvanic Skin Response [GSR] bracelet on every kid to measure teacher effectiveness by how much kids maintain attention. https://dianeravitch.net/2012/06/09/just-when-you-thought-it-couldnt-get-crazier/ […]
[…] Diane Ravitch via Missouri Education […]
[…] Just When You Thought It Couldn’t Get Crazier… (dianeravitch.net) […]
I am wondering if we’ve been had by an elaborate hoax or if this galvanic skin response is real. It is couched in enough scientific gobbledygook to pull some of us in. With that being said, I’d like to have some people go over it more closely.
Having read some of the comments here, I see a mixture of fear (that it’s true) or contempt for a poorly-conceived social engineering experiment.
If this is a true thing, then it’s time (in fact it’s long overdue) that the press get all over Bill Gates like a cheap suit and expose him for his foolish or dangerous ideas.
Not Brave New World… That’s a satire full of doped up consumer clones. No – this is more like 1984 fare…terrifying!
Reblogged this on Abelardo Garcia Jr's Blog and commented:
One word for this post from Dr Diane Ravitch’ s blog…Surreal!!!!
Thank you for your courage in posting this. I’ve added your letter to links from Utah teachers from the press at: http://whyfry.org/gates-foundation-kids-mris-electronic-bracelets-for-teachers-and-kids-to-measure-emotions-focus/