Stephanie Simon has written a startling story about the corporations that are collecting information about your child. This is known as data mining, and it usually occurs without the subject’s knowledge or consent. One such corporation called inBloom went out of business because of parent concern about privacy. But there are many others doing the same work with less scrutiny.
She writes:
“The NSA has nothing on the ed tech startup known as Knewton.
“The data analytics firm has peered into the brains of more than 4 million students across the country. By monitoring every mouse click, every keystroke, every split-second hesitation as children work through digital textbooks, Knewton is able to find out not just what individual kids know, but how they think. It can tell who has trouble focusing on science before lunch — and who will struggle with fractions next Thursday.
And she adds:
“The amount of data being collected is staggering. Ed tech companies of all sizes, from basement startups to global conglomerates, have jumped into the game. The most adept are scooping up as many as 10 million unique data points on each child, each day. That’s orders of magnitude more data than Netflix or Facebook or even Google collect on their users.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/05/data-mining-your-children-106676.html#ixzz330lA3nOm
“Even as Congress moves to rein in the National Security Agency, private-sector data mining has galloped forward — perhaps nowhere faster than in education. Both Republicans and Democrats have embraced the practice. And the Obama administration has encouraged it, even relaxing federal privacy law to allow school districts to share student data more widely.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/05/data-mining-your-children-106676.html#ixzz330knxyRj
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I went to the Politico article and skimmed it. The comment section was full of trolls arguing Bush v Obama. That argument is absurd. Obama is a corporate Dem.; really a Republican. Recently, I read about how the Nazis worked with IBM to quickly identify the Jews and other “undesirables”. They were quite efficient and effective in their use of personal data too.
Answer: Your state and your district.
And this will become increasingly so until we stop it.
Edwin Black wrote a great book called IBM and the Holocaust. See also his breathtaking book about the eugenics movement in the United States before the war: War against the Weak.
Yep. This requires a complete rethinking of privacy law, perhaps on a constitutional level. Focusing on FERPA or individual companies or contracts is like trying to combat rising ocean levels by focusing individual water molecules.
I feel sorry for them being tracked every minute of every day in school. I don’t think it’s a good deal for them. So they find out they do poorly on multiplication before lunch. They probably knew that already.
It has the potential to be really grim and joyless for them, with not much payoff as to value to the individual kid.
We are headed toward Gattaca, where rights and status are awarded pre-birth, depending on one’s pedigree.
Where is Gattaca?
It’s a movie.
And the companion question to the post:
Who is MINDING your child’s data.
Our children put a lot of stuff out there with all the constant social media.