From NYC Parent blog (by Leonie Haimson):
Wireless Generation, owned by Murdoch/run by Joel Klein, Wins the $4.9M Contract to develop the software that will be used to report & analyze results for the new #CommonCore Assessments – both the interim and “summative” exams being developed by the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium for 25 states (blue states in map below.)
Wireless is also developing the software/ infrastructure for the Gates-funded Shared Learning Collaborative, which is collecting confidential student & teacher data in states throughout the country, including NYS, & planning to turn this information over to for-profit commercial ventures, without parental consent, to help companies develop and market their “learning products.” The information will include among other things, names, addresses, grades, test scores, disciplinary and attendance records, and learning disability status.
The SLC has now named a new CEO, Iwan Streichenberger, who is going to direct SLC’s transition from a project to a nonprofit enterprise; to “ manage the technology and related services.”
Streichenberger was formerly the Chief Marketing Officer of a for-profit company called Promethean, where he was “responsible for product development, marketing, and sales strategy for the education technology company’s newest division.
He says he will “look forward to telling the story about the transformative technology we are building and how we are working with our industry partners to help education technology achieve its potential for students” and will be speaking about this at the SXSW Edu conference in Austin Texas March 4-7.
Here we go.
Wireless Generation Wins Contract for Common Assessments
By Jason Tomassini on November 29, 2012 12:00 PM | No comments
As the two consortia developing assessments around the Common Core State Standards move closer to the tests’ adoption, for the 2014-15 school year, they are starting to award contracts that will shape how the assessments look and operate. On Wednesday, the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium announced that the software used to report and analyze results from its assessments will be developed by Wireless Generation, the education software company.
Wireless Generation will partner with Educational Testing Service (ETS) on the contract. The terms of the contract were not disclosed, but the Request for Proposal stipulated the project could not exceed $4.9 million. Smarter Balanced’s projects are funded through a four-year, $175 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education.
The reporting system will be used for the common assessments students will take in Smarter Balanced’s 25 member states (you can view those states in the map below). The system will collect data from interim and summative assessments given to students and also track their progress toward college and career readiness, as determined by the individual standards. The data will be available to administrators and teachers as well as parents, according to a news release from Smarter Balanced. Schoolwide and districtwide reports will also be available.
The entire system will be open source, which means other computer programmers can build applications using the software’s source code. For instance, Moodle is an open source learning management platform that is used as the framework for companies like Moodlerooms.
Early next year, the public will have a chance to provide input on the system requirements. You can read the Request for Proposal here, and Wireless Generation’s winning proposal here, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Some important notes regarding Wireless Generation. News Corporation, the international media conglomerate implicated in a widespread phone hacking scandal last year, owns 90 percent of Wireless Generation, which is part of the company’s new Amplify education business. Since the acquisition, for $360 million in November 2010, concerns over possible connections between Wireless Generation’s data operations and its parent company have arose. In response, Wireless Generation has pointed out that its data operations are independent from News Corp. and the company has always complied with the many laws governing student data, including the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. In August 2011, the company did lose a $27 million contract to develop assessment tracking software for New York state education department because of the scandal embroiling News Corp.’s newspaper division.
(Larry Berger, a co-founder and executive chairman of Wireless Generation, serves on the board of Editorial Projects in Education, the nonprofit corporation that publishes Education Week.)
In somewhat related news, the Brown Center on Education Policy, at the Brookings Institution, released a report Wednesday on the cost of state assessments around the country, including a recommendation for states to join testing consortia in order to lower costs. Read more about it here.
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
The nightmare will only get worse and worse if people don’t wake up soon …
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!!!
Click to access ED-Data-Jam-Materials.pdf
People know, but their government no longer works for them. Politicians are paid-for suit monkeys that weave into and out of elected, appointed, and created office- serving primarily their financiers. We’ve seen it with these practically self-appointed education leaders that (by no coincidence) end up under the podium of Murdoch or Gates (ala’ Police Acedemy I) , and spread their demon seed into policy and PR. As much as right-wing media clowns whine about liberal, mainstream media being “in the bag” for so-and-so, against big business, innovation, competition..(all things that mean profit and American Exceptionalism, and so on) media is virtually silent on the News Corp, Wireles Generation, Murdoch, Klein, Gates, connections.
The data will be available to administrators and teachers as well as parents, according to a news release from Smarter Balanced. Schoolwide and districtwide reports will also be available.
Why not the students whose data is being tracked by Rup? I’m also guessing that the data may be shared with 3rd parties (?) and due to recent security breaches with Rupert and other companies; perhaps some hackers in Eastern Europe or at the mall down the road.
So far, Project ALDER (Advancing Longitudinal Data for Education Reform http://alder.orvsd.org) consolidates this data with that from Teachers Standards & Practices Commission.
The Department of Employment has signed a data sharing agreement, though higher education is working out these kinks.
A cradle through grave database.
I have gotten my son’s electronic educational records from the Oregon Department of Education. First in the state. Perhaps first in the nation.
On a CD with complicated file formats.
https://district.ode.state.or.us/search/page/?id=185
Our upper class white son has had this code 4 times since 4th grade: “W8” Left to Earn a GED: Left to Earn a General Equivalency Diploma certificate but did not complete.
Imagine how many other “drop-outs” are incorrectly coded…
Discipline records and health records will explode with the growing data collection through ceds.
https://ceds.ed.gov/elements.aspx?v=3&ex=(Draft)
No worry with Murdoch in control!
Wondering how long before Joel Klein is arrested? He was hired by Murdoch to make this exact scenario happen. Influence peddling.
Probably never. DOJ doesn’t seem to prosecute people or white-collar criminals unless you chip steriods.
Is “wins” even the proper word? Winning implies competition between two or more contenders. Were there any other contenders, or was this just a hand-over?
What an Orwellian nightmare we are creating!
Oh, don’t get your drawers twisted, your drivers license, voter registration and selective service are all public information , instead of complaining go be a subcontractor on the project
And what do drivers licenses, voter registration and selective service all have in common? Oh yeah, you have to be at least 16 (18 for the last two). Do you perhaps see a wee bit of difference between this and using children’s data to exploit them?
Nyemah, more than your drawers will be twisted. Privacy will become a nostalgic memory.
Robert, you are correct. This is a nightmare in the making.
2+2=5
Public education is now nothing more than a cheap commodity to be bought, traded, sold, and advertised like some kind of new shampoo. It is now all about the money and anybody who says otherwise is simply fooling themselves. The corporations ruined the financial and housing industries and now they are going after education and the prison “industry”. They have dipped their finger in the military but seems like their mecenary armies did not fold out so well. (Think Blackwater, now called Xe) Charter schools are the new private armies and we’ll see how that finalizes in the next decade or so. In the meantime, time to get those checkbooks ready for all the corporations that want to sell the latest worthless curriculum that is being shoved down the throats of the non-informed public.
thanks Diane; this is from the NYC Ed list, not the blog. Here is more from the Gates press release:
“Streichenberger’s immediate tasks will include securing a variety of vendor partners and helping the first group of pilot districts in New York, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Illinois and Colorado better integrate their technologies. To date, the SLC has signed on 11 education technology partners, including PBS, Global Scholar and Clever.
“As an experienced education technology executive, Iwan brings a critical understanding of how vendors, developers, teachers and administrators work together to identify the right technology solutions,” added Stacey Childress, chairman of the board at SLC. “Iwan’s leadership and passion will provide a huge benefit to our pilot districts and also be a key factor in making the shared services available to more school systems in the coming years.”
Leonie, do you know what the Massachusetts districts are?
Sorry I did not see this before; the MA district is Everett. If you have contacts there pl. let me know at leonie at att dot net; thanks!
Someone needs to call an antitrust lawyer. Oh wait… this is being rigged by an antitrust lawyer.
Murdoch is a man whose minions hacked into and deleted voice mails on the cell phone of a murdered child, in order to milk a story.
He is a man who has done probably more than any single person alive to degrade public discourse and civic life in the US and Great Britain, and his company is going to be given this personal information?
It boggles the mind to think of how this information will be mined and monetized, and the abuse it will be put to.
And it’s not only legal, but is being pushed by the highest offices in the land.
Reblogged this on Transparent Christina and commented:
No worries, no fix in this at all.
Thank you Obama and Duncan for helping these corporatist privatizer thiefs. When are people going to wake up that Obama is not the friend of education? This is ridiculous. It is so easy to see what is going on if you drop your ideology. Democrats are now really republicans. Education is the one thing they do not fight about. As some of my republican friends taught me “When there is big money there is no party.” Very simple and to the point. Another friends grandfather taught him this “I hear real good, but I see a whole lot better.”
It’s disgusting how the wholesale deform trashing of this huge and hugely important nationwide entity – public education – is going down with complete mainstream media complicity, along with the duopoly’s Wall Street infused blessing.
Obama’s/Dem party’s education reform debacle flies totally under the radar of allegedly “progressive” (Dem party-fan) newscasters, like Rachel Maddow, et al. They NEVER say word one about the thwacking of public education and teachers, their unions, etc. by the Democrats. Rather, Sharpton sells education deform as “the civil rights issue of our time!” Others have the audacity to glibly call it the “National Security Issue of Our Time.” Next, we will hear it is the health issue of our time. Or maybe education reform is needed to solve childhood obesity. If your marinara sauce is crap, once you fire a teacher it will be award winning. C’mon – throw every problem into the education reform pot, dont be shy!
Where do the PTA and PTO organizations stand? I cannot imagine that any would be excited about their children’s private information being sold to marketers. More testing? This is insane. How are we NOT to believe that there is a conspiracy to destroy public education?
It’s always about the money. Follow the money. What a nightmare. The poster was right–education, if one can call it that, is being bought and sold. No wonder people are looking at alternatives. Public education is the Titanic–save yourselves. And I teach in a pilot state–NC.
How is Klein’s involvement not a conflict of interest issue? Is there not a 2 year rule against working for companies that do business with NYCDOE?
Dr. Jose Gabriel Maldonado
Executive Director PRO Educacion y Ambiente http://www.proea.org 917 328-5463 Skype: sparisomaatomarium
If we were to simply change this headline to read “Fox News Affiliate Wins Government Contract”, that alone—and I mean this very seriously—would begin to wake some people up.
Here’s the BIGGEST CHALLENGE in the battle against so called “Education Reform”, A.K.A. Privatization of our schools: Half of the progressive/liberal community is on the side of the enemy—and they usually don’t know it.
We HAVE to hammer home this point: “Education Reform is Right-Wing at its core!” It was thought up by Milton Friedman, the Heritage Foundation, “libertarian think tanks”, and given critical support from politicians like George W. Bush, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Scott Walker, and others like them.
If you go below the surface of obvious sellouts like Cory Booker, you’ll see that enthusiasm for the whole gamut of this “ed reform” fraud—from charters, to vouchers, to teacher and union hatred, to testing mania and more—is highest among the ultra right-wing.
Only a relative handful of “Democrats” support the privatization of education; and they have to be called out early, loudly, and often, to get them to either cease and desist, or we’ll throw them out of our party and their elected offices.
The message is slowly leaking through. In Washington State, at a meeting of the Democratic Party in September, the vote AGAINST charters was 500 to 0. There’s hope yet. We’ll keep going!
Here’s the BIGGEST CHALLENGE in the battle against so called “Education Reform”, A.K.A. Privatization of our schools: Half of the progressive/liberal community is on the side of the enemy—and they usually don’t know it.
Yep!
In Oregon, we have a legislative concept that is going to be introduced regarding student privacy. The best resource is the Electronic Privacy Information Center. The most comprehensive report comes Joel, Reidenberg, Fordham Law School, the Center on Law & Information Policy
Click to access Fordham%20Center%20Report.pdf
This summer, the privacy of 16,000 Eugene School District students was compromised when another student hacked into their computer system. It’s interesting that this student used Google Apps as his platform to illustrate the ease of hacking an electronic database! (See below)
Perhaps a whistle blower in his own right?
After all, the platforms upon which these internet based systems is a treasure trove for Microsoft, Wireless Gen and countless other for-profiteers who are in bed with elected and appointed leaders who like the butter on their bread.
http://projects.registerguard.com/web/opinion/28225865-47/security-identity-social-information-numbers.html.csp
http://www.registerguard.com/web/newslocalnews/28642349-41/computer-district-carlson-youth-eugene.html.csp On June 11, the boy sent e-mails to three district security employees, taunting them with news that he had breached their computer system. He directed them to the middle school student’s district Google Apps account, where he had posted a spreadsheet of confidential information on thousands of Eugene students receiving free or discounted school lunches.
Today, I went to the beach front with my children. I found a sea shell
and gave it to my 4 year old daughter and said “You can hear the ocean if you put this to your ear.” She put
the shell to her ear and screamed. There was a hermit
crab inside and it pinched her ear. She never wants to go back!
LoL I know this is completely off topic but I had to tell someone!