When I worked in the federal Department of Education twenty years ago, I recall getting blizzards of postcards and letters from individuals and groups that were worried that the government was collecting too much information about them or their children. I pointed out repeatedly that the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which was in my tiny domain, did not collect information about individual students or their families. There was no vast federal storehouse of information about people.
Now I am no so sure. A reader just sent this announcement in a comment.
Here is the full comment:
In October, while announcing a series of actions to lower student loan payments, President Obama tasked the US Chief Technology Officer with further leveraging data and technology to help provide students and parents with more comparative information about college costs and college aid, so they can make more informed decisions about where to enroll.
This morning, the Administration announced several public- and private-sector initiatives—including the launch of education.data.gov, the latest in a growing number of data.gov communities—that respond to and even reach beyond the President’s call, in order to unlock the power of education data to make it accessible and useful for all Americans.http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/ed_data_commitments_1-19-12.pdf
MAKE SURE YOU LOOK AT THE WHITE HOUSE COMMITMENTS TO:
The California Department of Education
The New York State Department of Education
The Michigan and Florida Departments of Education
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Pearson
JISC/UK, a technology branch of the UK Government
ETS, in cooperation with StraighterLine
Microsoft
Parchment
Personal
And check out “Data Jam Materials” July 10, 2012
ALL 54 PAGES!!!
http://www.ed.gov/edblogs/technology/files/2012/07/ED-Data-Jam-Materials.pdf
How have we managed to survive all these years without a “Learning Registry” or ”MyData” button?
The data-gathering seems to have no end point. I recently asked someone who works for a higher education association why the federal government was pressuring independent colleges to join the data hunt, and he said that the goal was to ascertain whether a grade in University A was the same as a grade in University B. I wondered why the federal government wanted to know this. He had no answer.
