Robert D. Shepherd, curriculum writer and author, left the following comment following Andrea Gabor’s post about the data collecting and data mining business called inBloom.
He writes:
“There were 55,235,000 K-12 public school students in the US in 2010. At $5.00 apiece for inBloom, that would amount to $276,175,000 a year. And if inBloom had a large existing database, it would become a monopoly provider. Switching from it would be next to impossible.
But that’s just the beginning. The whole point of gathering this real-time data on student responses is to link it to online adaptive curricula, with inBloom 2.0 as the gateway, the portal, for delivery of that curricula–
serving up the mind-blowingly inane online worksheet on the schwa sound to little Yolanda and the Powerpoint-like online worksheet on the foil method for factoring to little Kwame. The fans of this online adaptive curricula are the sort of people who think that all learning can be reduced to bullet points on a screen.
At any rate, when the inBloom database becomes the portal for curricula, that’s when the big bucks start rolling in, from inBloom’s “partners,” like Murdoch’ and Klein’s Amplify, for example. And inBloom has made it VERY clear from the start that that’s their plan. That’s the “promise” of having such a database.
Quite a promise.
In short, inBloom is a strategic powerplay for the education market.
I dearly hope that people will have the sense to stop this Orwellian operation before it sinks its data-gathering tentacles into our nation’s children.
Think of it, a nationwide portal for delivery of curricula, a gateway with inBloom as toll-taker.
As Arne Duncan’s office put it, “The new standards are about creating a national market for products that can be brought to scale.”
Bill Gates earned his billions by selling a small amount of stuff to practically EVERYONE.
It appears that inBloom has a very similar long-term business model.
It gets even worse. Read the Department of Education’s Report on “Promoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance: Critical Factors for Success in the 21st Century.” This report envisions hooking kids up to real-time monitors of their affective states and feeding THOSE into the database as well so that grit, tenacity, and perseverance can be measured continually.
This kind of thing goes WAY BEYOND Orwell’s Telescreens in 1984. The whole concept is sickening.
And Arne Duncan’s Department of Education is serving as the facilitator for the creation of this Orwellian Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth (Minitrue).
You have to give it to these guys for cooking up such a diabolical strategic plan. And almost no one seems, yet, to be hip to what this national data-gathering is really about over the long term. Such plans could be carried out only if people weren’t really paying attention. So far, that’s worked well for the, ahem, “reformers.” We have new NATIONAL “standards” even though most U.S. citizens have never heard of them and haven’t a clue what they are, what’s in them, who paid for them, who created them, what consequences they will have for curricula and pedagogy, and so on. All that new standards and testing stuff was done with NO national debate and with no vetting.
I’m sure that the inBloom folks were hoping for the same here. And the truly frightening thing is that their hopes might well be fulfilled.
Totalitarianism can come about through violent revolution. It can also come about because no one is paying attention.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
@Shepherd.. your words are so true and even more so .. extremely HAUNTING! My hope is that now that common core has raised the ire of middle and upper class parents, that somehow this will be the spark that ignites the flame. I hope that they will join hands with the parents of title one students who have long endured the pernicious effects of a stilted test-oriented “do or die” curriculum under RTTT. Common core as it is being implemented nationally for title one students is just one more way they are learning to hate learning. And now the middle and upper class echelons are feeling this too. How can low ses parents join in with middle and upper ses parents to stop the trampling of our rights as US citizens???? This is what I wonder….
Gates funded “TeachScape” is also an online teacher data-mining website cloaked as a way to improve teaching. Teachers appear to be unaware of the ramifications.
Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine” in action, except that having run out of unprotected “other” countries to plunder, the corporatists have turned their sights inward on the youngest and most vulnerable portion of our own population! Frightening for both its insidious arrival and potential harm. Even Orwell might have been surprised.
Except we are paying attention; and parents have beaten back inBloom in 6 out of 9 states so far. And we are working hard to beat it back in 3 remaining states: NY, IL and CO.
How can a New York City public school parent take their children off the InBloom data linking.?The DOE gave the information to them without my permission
John, contact Leonie Haimson leonie@att.net or Sheila Kaplan of EdNY.
The sad reality is that Arne Duncan changed the FERPA (privacy) regulations in 2011 so that parent permission was no longer needed to release your child’s personal data to third parties.
I still don’t understand how Arne Duncan could have had the authority to do that. FERPA is a LAW–Arne is not Congress.
I have posted this chilling comparison in a few other places but feel compelled to do it again. I am extremely concerned.
IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation by Edwin Black (2001)
This is an unimpeachably researched and thoroughly documented work, produced after a gargantuan undertaking across continents, detailing the collusion between Thomas Watson and his IBM, which had a virtual monopoly of punch card technology (and the cards themselves), and the Nazi frenzy for identifying Jews (going back generations) for the purpose of annihilating them.
From the frontispiece:
“Only after Jews were identified—a massive and complex task that Hitler wanted done immediately—could they be targeted for efficient asset confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, enslaved labor, and, ultimately, annihilation. It was a cross-tabulation and organizational challenge so monumental, it called for a computer. Of course, in the 1930’s no computer existed. But IBM’s Hollerith punch card technology did exist. … IBM and its German subsidiary custom-designed complex solutions, one by one, anticipating the Reich’s needs. They did not merely sell the machines and walk away. Instead, IBM leased these machines for high fees and became the sole source of the billions of punch cards Hitler needed.”
page 321
“[Rene] Carmille [“a mysterious French military technocrat”] had been working for months on a national Personal Identification Number, a number that would not only be sequential, but descriptive. The thirteen-digit PIN number would be a manual ‘bar code’ of sorts describing an individual’s complete personal profile as well as professional skills in great detail. For example, one number would be assigned for metal workers, with a second modifying number for brass, and then a third modifying number for curtain rods. Tabulators could then be set to whisk through millions of cards until it located French metal workers, specializing in brass with experience in curtain rods. Those metal workers could also be pinpointed in any district. The system mimicked a concurrent Reich codification system that assigned a descriptive bar code-like number to every product and component in Germany. Carmille’s number would ultimately evolve into France’s social security number.”
pages 323-324
“On October 11, 1941, Carmille formed the National Statistical Service, … Carmille stated, ‘The new statistical service would have a different point of departure, namely to establish files for individuals.’ He added, ‘We are no longer dealing with general censuses, but we are really following individuals.’ Carmille made clear, ‘the new organization must now be envisioned in such a way that the information be obtained continuously, which means that the updating of information must be carefully regulated.’”
What possible benign use could there be for having personally identifiable, sensitive data on every child from pre-K through college and beyond?
Thank you once again, Robert, for thoroughly analyzing the extremely serious situation we find ourselves in. I especially agree with your characterization here: “serving up the mind-blowingly inane online worksheet on the schwa sound to little Yolanda and the Powerpoint-like online worksheet on the foil method for factoring to little Kwame.” Their idea of personalization is mindless impersonalization. This is unacceptable.
My younger child attends pre-k program that receives some funding from the NYC DOE. They recently placed a Pearson survey called the Early Screening Inventory parent questionnaire in her mailbox without explanation. It asks many intrusive developmental questions. Does anyone know anything about this survey and how the data gets used?
inBloom appears to be the Trojan Horse in the Common Core Movement. While most folks are kept busy arguing over peripheral issues related to the standards, e.g. who developed them, whether they are legitimate, if they are developmental appropriate, or whether they are “state” standards at all; the real question, and the only one that really matters, is: who owns the data?
Exactly. I am glad that there are others who understand this. What is happen is truly frightening, truly Orwellian.
p.s. I highly recommend the book: Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier http://www.jaronlanier.com/futurewebresources.html
great book!
“Totalitarianism can come about through violent revolution.”
It can also be challenged and overthrown by the same means.
The Illinois Federation of Teachers convention just ended. Many of us from Chicago were delegates (including Sharon and I). One of the 38 resolutions we voted on was to lobby to remove Illinois from those states that utilize InBloom. The fight now has to be legislative, since school districts may become InBloom users without parents and teachers knowing much. The Chicago Board of Education voted to put all 400,000 Chicago students into InBloom without even voting. It was done as policy by the “CEO” (currently Barbara Byrd Bennett, who is completing her first 12 months in office this month…).
Has there been a formal vote of the Chicago board?
LIKE! I went to a meeting on inBloom last fall when it was still called something else..it was a crazy. There were people who wanted to create start ups for education connected to inBloom and then a handful of education technology professionals (me), they were on us like vultures trying to convince us how great this was all going to be. I left after 2 hours….there was no way I was buying giving all our children’s information to Murdoch and Gates!
Great news, George!
You are absolutely right Dr. Shepherd. Parents and teachers have to start paying attention to this not so hidden attempt to monopolize student data and curriculum delivery. Every state needs to pass privacy legislation to kill the Duncan/Gates octopus before it’s tentacles and suction cups start squeezing the life out of our public schools.
It is important for Illinois advocates, activists, union members and teachers to get the word out to parents in the 35 inBloom districts; the list of districts has been publicly available for quite some time here: http://www.isbe.state.il.us/racetothetop/PDF/RttT-LEA-map-and-list.pdf
For whatever reason, in Illinois there has been less activism, discussion and debate among parents and in the media about the risks to student privacy than any of the other original inBloom states, but hopefully this is changing with the IFT resolution and the growing involvement of PURE and More than a Score. I will be in Chicago speaking about inBloom on November 21.
Yes, let’s really give it to them. How about we begin by removing our vocabulary from their grasp. Education, curriculum, teaching, affective as it relates to deep human emotion…none of this will be used to describe what they are up to. Instead we will label it as required for the opening of hearts and minds. Uploading this child information anywhere is absolutely chilling. And the most possible end to this will only arrive once parents of every class and color join as one to say Absolutely NO!
Our Public School System and the Edmund Fitzgerald have one thing in common, but hopefully that is all they have in common! We now have a National Public School System called Common Core which was implemented without any research showing it is going to work or any Pilot testing done to even give us an idea of how it may turn out in regard to student success or improvement in outcomes. This is what they have in common as the naval architect, Raymond Ramsey, a member of the design team for the Edmond Fitzgerald stated later. “The Fitzgerald’s long ship design was developed without the benefit of Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation Principals” and he indicated that the Fitzgerald was NOT seaworthy at the time the ship sank to the bottom of one of the Great Lakes! Is this the Goal behind the Common Core, to sink the Public School System so we privatize ALL schools for Greater Corporate Profits. Let us hope this is not the second thing the schools have in common with the Edmond Fitzgerald! Anyway,
I thought this all started with TIMMS and comparing how we are doing with
Finland, Singapore, or Germany? Do any of you know how many tests are given to students in countries like Finland or Germany? I talked with some students and teachers from those countries and found out. Finish students do not take a single standardized test. I wonder how they evaluate their teachers? Germany limits the number of tests each semester to three for high school students. These tests include classroom tests and any type of “standardized” test, so if a teacher gives three unit tests a semester, the maximum has been reached and no “standardized” test could be given. The students and teachers said most of their work is judged by their class participation, both oral and written. They also indicated they get graphing calculators issued with their math textbooks and are expected to use them when needed including during a Test. When are we going to start to do what these successful countries do for our students? Please. Learn from a Real International Education Expert.
Finland’s Pasi Sahlberg is one of the world’s leading experts on school reform and the author of the best-selling “Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn About Educational Change in Finland?” In this piece he writes about whether the emphasis that American school reformers put on “teacher effectiveness” is really the best approach to improving student achievement.
He is director general of Finland’s Centre for International Mobility and Cooperation and has served the Finnish government in various positions and worked for the World Bank in Washington D.C. He has also been an adviser for numerous governments internationally about education policies and reforms, and is an adjunct professor of education at the University of Helsinki and University of Oulu. He can be reached atpasi.sahlberg@cimo.fi.
By Pasi Sahlberg
Many governments are under political and economic pressure to turn around their school systems for higher rankings in the international league tables. Education reforms often promise quick fixes within one political term. Canada, South Korea, Singapore and Finland are commonly used models for the nations that hope to improve teaching and learning in their schools. In search of a silver bullet, reformers now turn their eyes on teachers, believing that if only they could attract “the best and the brightest” into the teaching profession, the quality of education would improve.
“Teacher effectiveness” is a commonly used term that refers to how much student performance on standardized tests is determined by the teacher. This concept hence applies only to those teachers who teach subjects on which students are tested. Teacher effectiveness plays a particular role in education policies of nations where alternative pathways exist to the teaching profession.
In the United States, for example, there are more than 1,500 different teacher-preparation programs. The range in quality is wide. In Singapore and Finland only one academically rigorous teacher education program is available for those who desire to become teachers. Likewise, neither Canada nor South Korea has fast-track options into teaching, such as Teach for America or Teach First in Europe. Teacher quality in high-performing countries is a result of careful quality control at entry into teaching rather than measuring teacher effectiveness in service.
In recent years the “no excuses”’ argument has been particularly persistent in the education debate. There are those who argue that poverty is only an excuse not to insist that all schools should reach higher standards. Solution: better teachers. Then there are those who claim that schools and teachers alone cannot overcome the negative impact that poverty causes in many children’s learning in school. Solution: Elevate children out of poverty by other public policies.
For me the latter is right. In the United States today, 23 percent of children live in poor homes. In Finland, the same way to calculate child poverty would show that figure to be almost five times smaller. The United States ranked in the bottom four in the recent United Nations review on child well-being. Among 29 wealthy countries, the United States landed second from the last in child poverty and held a similarly poor position in “child life satisfaction.” Teachers alone, regardless of how effective they are, will not be able to overcome the challenges that poor children bring with them to schools everyday.
Finland is not a fan of standardization in education. However, teacher education in Finland is carefully standardized. All teachers must earn a master’s degree at one of the country’s research universities. Competition to get into these teacher education programs is tough; only “the best and the brightest” are accepted. As a consequence, teaching is regarded as an esteemed profession, on par with medicine, law or engineering. There is another “teacher quality” checkpoint at graduation from School of Education in Finland. Students are not allowed to earn degrees to teach unless they demonstrate that they possess knowledge, skills and morals necessary to be a successful teacher.
But education policies in Finland concentrate more on school effectiveness than on teacher effectiveness. This indicates that what schools are expected to do is an effort of everyone in a school, working together, rather than teachers working individually.
In many under-performing nations, I notice, three fallacies of teacher effectiveness prevail.
The first belief is that “the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers.” This statement became known in education policies through the influential McKinsey & Company report titled “How the world’s best performing school systems come out on top”. Although the report takes a broader view on enhancing the status of teachers by better pay and careful recruitment this statement implies that the quality of an education system is defined by its teachers. By doing this, the report assumes that teachers work independently from one another. But teachers in most schools today, in the United States and elsewhere, work as teams when the end result of their work is their joint effort.
The role of an individual teacher in a school is like a player on a football team: all teachers are vital, but the culture of the school is even more important for the quality of the school. Team sports offer numerous examples of teams that have performed beyond expectations because of leadership, commitment and spirit. Take the U.S. ice hockey team in the 1980 Winter Olympics, when a team of college kids beat both Soviets and Finland in the final round and won the gold medal. The quality of Team USA certainly exceeded the quality of its players. So can an education system.I
The second fallacy is that “the most important single factor in improving quality of education is teachers.” This is the driving principle of former D.C. schools chancellor Michele Rhee and many other “reformers” today. This false belief is central to the “no excuses” school of thought. If a teacher was the most important single factor in improving quality of education, then the power of a school would indeed be stronger than children’s family background or peer influences in explaining student achievement in school.
Research on what explains students’ measured performance in school remains mixed. A commonly used conclusion is that 10% to 20% of the variance in measured student achievement belongs to the classroom, i.e., teachers and teaching, and a similar amount is attributable to schools, i.e., school climate, facilities and leadership. In other words, up to two-thirds of what explains student achievement is beyond the control of schools, i.e., family background and motivation to learn.
Over thirty years of systematic research on school effectiveness and school improvement reveals a number of characteristics that are typical of more effective schools. Most scholars agree that effective leadership is among the most important characteristics of effective schools, equally important to effective teaching. Effective leadership includes leader qualities, such as being firm and purposeful, having shared vision and goals, promoting teamwork and collegiality and frequent personal monitoring and feedback. Several other characteristics of more effective schools include features that are also linked to the culture of the school and leadership: Maintaining focus on learning, producing a positive school climate, setting high expectations for all, developing staff skills, and involving parents. In other words, school leadership matters as much as teacher quality.
The third fallacy is that “If any children had three or four great teachers in a row,they would soar academically, regardless of their racial or economic background, while those who have a sequence of weak teachers will fall further and further behind”. This theoretical assumption is included in influential policy recommendations, for instance in “Essential Elements of Teacher Policy in ESEA: Effectiveness, Fairness and Evaluation” by the Center for American Progress to the U.S. Congress. Teaching is measured by the growth of student test scores on standardized exams.
This assumption presents a view that education reform alone could overcome the powerful influence of family and social environment mentioned earlier. It insists that schools should get rid of low-performing teachers and then only hire great ones. This fallacy has the most practical difficulties. The first one is about what it means to be a great teacher. Even if this were clear, it would be difficult to know exactly who is a great teacher at the time of recruitment. The second one is, that becoming a great teacher normally takes five to ten years of systematic practice. And determining the reliably of ‘effectiveness’ of any teacher would require at least five years of reliable data. This would be practically impossible.
Everybody agrees that the quality of teaching in contributing to learning outcomes is beyond question. It is therefore understandable that teacher quality is often cited as the most important in-school variable influencing student achievement. But just having better teachers in schools will not automatically improve students’ learning outcomes.
Lessons from high-performing school systems, including Finland, suggest that we must reconsider how we think about teaching as a profession and what is the role of the school in our society.
First, standardization should focus more on teacher education and less on teaching and learning in schools. Singapore, Canada and Finland all set high standards for their teacher-preparation programs in academic universities. There is no Teach for Finland or other alternative pathways into teaching that wouldn’t include thoroughly studying theories of pedagogy and undergo clinical practice. These countries set the priority to have strict quality control before anybody will be allowed to teach – or even study teaching! This is why in these countries teacher effectiveness and teacher evaluation are not such controversial topics as they are in the U.S. today.
Second, the toxic use of accountability for schools should be abandoned. Current practices in many countries that judge the quality of teachers by counting their students’ measured achievement only is in many ways inaccurate and unfair. It is inaccurate because most schools’ goals are broader than good performance in a few academic subjects. It is unfair because most of the variation of student achievement in standardized tests can be explained by out-of-school factors. Most teachers understand that what students learn in school is because the whole school has made an effort, not just some individual teachers. In the education systems that are high in international rankings, teachers feel that they are empowered by their leaders and their fellow teachers. In Finland, half of surveyed teachers responded that they would consider leaving their job if their performance would be determined by their student’s standardized test results.
Third, other school policies must be changed before teaching becomes attractive to more young talents. In many countries where teachers fight for their rights, their main demand is not more money but better working conditions in schools. Again, experiences from those countries that do well in international rankings suggest that teachers should have autonomy in planning their work, freedom to run their lessons the way that leads to best results, and authority to influence the assessment of the outcomes of their work. Schools should also be trusted in these key areas of the teaching profession.
To finish up, let’s do one theoretical experiment. We transport highly trained Finnish teachers to work in, say, Indiana in the United States (and Indiana teachers would go to Finland). After five years–assuming that the Finnish teachers showed up fluent in English and that education policies in Indiana would continue as planned–we would check whether these teachers have been able to improve test scores in state-mandated student assessments.
I argue that if there were any gains in student achievement they would be marginal. Why? Education policies in Indiana and many other states in the United States create a context for teaching that limits (Finnish) teachers to use their skills, wisdom and shared knowledge for the good of their students’ learning. Actually, I have met some experienced Finnish-trained teachers in the United States who confirm this hypothesis. Based on what I have heard from them, it is also probable that many of those transported Finnish teachers would be already doing something else than teach by the end of their fifth year – quite like their American peers.
Conversely, the teachers from Indiana working in Finland–assuming they showed up fluent in Finnish–stand to flourish on account of the freedom to teach without the constraints of standardized curricula and the pressure of standardized testing; strong leadership from principals who know the classroom from years of experience as teachers; a professional culture of collaboration; and support from homes unchallenged by poverty.
Do you honestly think our educational problem is the curriculum and standards are not rigorous enough for our current students?Please go to your local school and talk with the teachers or read some of the students comments on facebook. If you live in an area of higher socioeconomic means, then your school is performing above average due to many factors such as parent support for learning and checking to see that their children are completing their homework or immediatley getting the help they need. Parents of students who attend “good” schools do not want endless tests that are meaningless to their childrens future and a huge waist of resources that should be used to improve the school learning environment by purchasing needed technology and up to date instructional materials. Maybe the new standards could be helpful, but teachers have a shorter, more limited amount of time to cover more curriculum than before due to earlier testing periods and more testing. Futhermore, how are students held accountable for doing their best on these tests? Is the test result used to help calculate the students grade or do they need a proficient score to earn a diploma or get accepted for college or … If the test has no student accountability component why would they even care about doing well. I would focus on preparing for my immediate class grade to improve my GPA and SAT exams or preparing for a big game or musical performance. I could use this test as a way of getting back at a teacher who is asking me to do more than I want to do because I have other interests. Are only math, science, and English teachers being judged by these tests or is there a test to judge a PE teacher or Art/Music teacher or Elective teachers? I wonder how long it will be before we find no one willing to interview for a math teaching position at a low performing school. I do not see how spending ALL this money on testing is changing anything except creating a National Curriculum and telling low performing schools that they continue to be low performing schools and they need to replace their teachers with better ones. It seems like I have been hearing this same argument for the past 50 years. Yes, I am a senior citizen who cares about real changes that will improve educational opportunities for the students who need an environment that is conducive to learning. Why are we spending money we do not have on schools that are already achieving and trying to have a one size fits all system because this is not why Americans create so many new things and come up with so many new ideas. If we are trying compete with Finland and Singapore, then we need to make serious structural systemic changes to our schools and do what they do or do not do in their schools. NO more football programs or other sports in our high schools and most electives would also have to be eliminated. I am a Finlander, but we live in a much different country in America and we have very different values. When the well-educated parents of public school children start to understand that a large part of schooling has changed from learning and developing critical thinking to preparing students to do well on a test that most people never have time to analyze and use as a resource to improve the educational experience for children, then they will either place their children in a school where real learning is the priority or they will get involved in changing our new system of schooling. I cannot call this system a system for learning because time and testing are not and should never be factors in a learning environment that promotes creativity and critical thinking (testing without student accountability is meaningless). These two goals are what made America great and created jobs, and they do not happen in a specific amount of time because each of us is unique and we do things at different rates. And futhermore, testing has never been shown to improve either of these factors unless the tests are used to diagnose student deficiencies in their prerequisite knowledge needed to expand their understanding using this knowledge. Even then, most school systems do not give teachers adequate time to analyze the testing data so it an exercise in wasting valuable learning time. Critical thinking and creativity are factors that need to be encouraged and nurtured from Pre-K on. To flourish, they need a stress free environment so students can open up their thoughts and dream up new ideas. It seems ironic that many of the people who were allowed to be raised in this type of environment, open, creative, and stress free, are the same people who are now paying for and pushing for a more controlled and structured environment, but not for their own children? What about Bill Gates and Mark Zutterburg? Are these the experts on College Readiness? Really! So we want college students who drop out after a year or two? Really!!!
Thank you for reading and pray for your grandchildren’s future. I know We have been praying for ours way before our friends in Utah asked us to pray and if praying is not your thing, then get actively involved in some other way. Maybe we should all start by READING the new common core standards and MORE IMPORTANTLY LOOK AT THE NEW TESTING QUESTIONS starting in grade 3 and see how many of the 11th grade questions you can answer. This may be an eye opener? REMEMBER, the tests will drive the curriculum and what is and is not taught and how it is taught. The tests will determine the level of difficulty and the amount of time available to teach and learn all concepts and not the students rate for understanding of the curriculum. This means if the student is a “late starter or late bloomer”, then you would be better to place them in a Private School that does not expect ALL students to learn at the exact same pace. Please God Bless America now more than ever or whatever your belief system, someone better be looking out for our children and grandchildren’s future.
Is it necessary for people to continually post the same, long comment over and over again? I know that people want to emphasize things, but less is more sometimes, and I would like to read all of the comments.
LP,
I don’t have a problem with posters posting the same thing (yep, I’m one of them) often as there are many readers who come and go and who don’t follow the blog as some of us do. It allows for more people to see the thoughts/ideas. For me, I’ll read them once or twice and then afterwards just skip the repeated posts.
But there is also another way to view the repetition. And that is repetition works to help drive home the point. Rereading helps to drive home the point and to perhaps get something more out of the reading that one hasn’t before. Notice that the edudeformers have been repeating the same lies non-stop for years now and the general public has a tendency to believe what they hear repeated. Why not repeat our message ad infinitum?
Duane
Good points! Thank you.
Most readers of this blog are educators, so many will be familiar with the young adult novel Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card. For those who don’t know it, here’s the frame: the novel takes place in a future in which the peoples of the Earth have been temporarily united by a common enemy–buglike aliens whose attempted invasion of the Earth was beaten back. The Earthlings are preparing for the time when the “buggers” return, and, as is often the case when people fear an outside enemy, military and intelligences forces have been given enormous power–free reign to do whatever is necessary to prepare for the next invasion.
At one point in the novel, two high intelligence officials are discussing how a photograph of Ender’s brother could have been obtained by the central computer at the battle school that Ender is attending. One official says to the other, “We can’t just go into Guilford Country North Carolina and pluck a picture out of school files. Did anyone at this school authorize this?”
Think for a moment about that. In the novel, the future of the human race depends upon this young man, Ender. But it is taken for granted by the author and by the characters the author created that school records are sacrosanct, that even very highly placed intelligence officials couldn’t just help themselves to school records without going through proper channels.
That used to mean, BTW, getting parental consent.
However, your Secretary of Education rewrote the rules for his buddies at inBloom so that that would no longer be so. In “The Land of the Free,” our children’s records are now for sale by a private company.
Clearly, that is NOT acceptable.
BTW, before someone corrects me on “free reign” as opposed to “free rein,” I am quite aware of the etymology and original spelling of the phrase, but “reign” seems quite appropriate here.
Double credit for the excellent original post and for referencing Ender’s Game! By the way, how did the Vegfest go? I had wanted to go, mainly to meet you, but I spent the day trying to help my son catch up on his homework instead…
We had a wonderful Veg Fest, Cynewulf. About 5,000 people celebrating healthy, plant-based eating. 🙂
Reblogged this on Transparent Christina.
Big data and a lack of privacy are indeed major threats whether it is data from the classroom or the doctor’s office. I hate it when the book I just checked out on Amazon is now in banners on other sites I visit. I hope everybody is as exercised about the data requirements for and privacy issues around the Affordable Care Act as they are about inBloom.
Indeed, Bernie! They very well should be!
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/
Thank you for the information, Robert.
Is InBloom used in Tennessee schools? Some districts have used the TriPOD Survey – see MommaBear’s eye-opening post here – http://www.mommabears.org
Other districts are “applying” for the opportunity to use the TriPOD (SCORE?) survey results as 5% of a teacher’s overall effectiveness score. Teachers have been woefully uninformed, as have parents. As both a teacher and a parent, I want to be aware if what’s happening in Tennessee is somehow related to InBloom – or is it something equally dangerous?
Thanks for any information any of you can provide.
Thank you for this eerily horrid explanation — and the opposite of a “justification” — for a phenomenon I am part of delivering this week, and next, and on and on. As a teacher of struggling readers I am forced to force my students to sit in front of a computer and face a long long test that they have no tools to conquer. Not once. Not twice. But three times this round, with another round looming. I am the tool for this misery as a teacher who has no choice. They are the victims, as children who have no choice. They try and as soon as they learn the test is beyond them, they either absorb and absorb and absorb the message that they are failures as they continue to try, or (being human) (being children) they find little ways to rebel. The computer lab becomes a scene of frustration, with the only “victories,” the little misbehaviors that go unnoticed. Now this author tells us that there are much larger victories behind the scenes — but not for children, or teachers, or learning, but for . . . Big Brother. And now the whole armageddon begins to make sense. Scary sense. “Sense” calling us, indeed, to battle.
Did you see this comment to Diane Ravitch’s blog post about the Washington Heights school where 80% of the parents opted their (young) children out of the testing and the test was dropped:
“Rene Diedrich
October 22, 2013 at 8:34 am
It is not huge unless somebody besides the choir here gets the word you been preaching and hears about this school opting out to protect youngsters from clearly abusive test practices. You teachers have a duty to report. My bet is that every teacher who applauds these parents and the principal for performing this small miracle will NOT go to school and be sneaky or subversive as they urge students, parents, colleagues and others to follow this school’s lead. They will not be upfront or frank about this, that is for sure. And what may have been huge on a hopeful morning becomes a vague and bitter ache in the collective memory. Why oh why don’t parents do this?
Well, there are a lot of reasons. They do not even know what goes on is one of them. Who can parents rely on to let them in on this sort of thing? Not students. Not administrators though clearly this one had much to do with subverting things at this school. Not the media, not neighbors and not the district, board of education or unions. Parents have only one real source for information and that is you, the teachers who see their children as often or more often than they do.
Rather than putting mom on edge with a rant about Jr.’s missing homework and tendency to be tardy, why not spread the word ? Tell these parents how five year olds are flung into frustrating assessments and stress is making kids ill in schools where high stakes testing has over run common sense. Not to mention compassion. Where is yours? You may be cowards but I know you teachers are clever.
Get email addresses and send copies of this blog anonomously to these parents and every teacher you know. Convert them all like you were on a mission. I mean, we are on a mission or are we just here whimper in the Ravitch glory and slouch off to be whipped some more?
Do something! You have power, you know risks are part of anything worth doing, and what is more worthwhile than you and the work you do? What is more worthwhile than your students?
Do you really believe the money and power of a few twisted souls can trump that or the truth, which is all about a parent’s instinct to protect her child and the faith she has that you will do that when she has left that child in your care.
Most parents still believe in teachers. When they hear of this and they will (Eventually) they will be outraged. If it is not teachers who tell them sooner than later, there will be too many casualties and too many lost lessons to excuse. Faith in teachers will be revoked and rightly so.
It is all we have going for us, folks.
Parents are in this for the reasons we are.
Never forget this no matter how they hover or little they seem to care.
We are that village it takes to raise any child and these plutocrats will destroy this in flash. If we let them.
Reach out to the parents and parents reach out to the teachers because many of them are in the dark too. We are so much less without each other.”
In some states like California, telling parents to OPT out is a violation of the Ed. Code and therein, a violation of the law and you will probably lose your job as a result! This law was meant to stop exactly what you suggest and the powers to be knew how to prevent this from happening. Retired teachers need to speak out! Parents need to act in the best interest of their children!
I am reviewing our educational databases with our local curriculum director. it has been educational for both of us and I like it when I ask him a question that he has not thought of and he realizes the implications of my question. Imagine my surprise, when he pulled up my child’s record and there was the photo of him taken by LifeTouch. Oh, yes, he said, they give us a CD of all the images. Did anyone ask me? Anyway, I was reviewing the “behavior tab” and the descriptions of when an incident should be included. It really hit home when I realized that the school can report an incident to the state, and this database uses criminal terms such as aggravated assault. So, the schools will upload this “event name” of aggravated assault, putting it in a child’s permanent record, to be shared with every other state agency without ever being criminally convicted. Perhaps even more frightening to me was the “insubordination” event name – or, “not submitting to authority, disobedience”….have we lost our minds?
If you do nothing, then the answer is yes!
If we submit to this, then, indeed, we have.
Time to nip this thing in the bud and stop NYSED and inBloom from violating our rights. Please sign this children’s data protection and privacy petition. I co-authored it along with fellow mom and privacy advocate Allison White. http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/protect-new-york-state