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.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Just think George Orwell and you have it. We are now a fascist country by definition. The definition being “Government run by corporations.” This is exactly what we are. They feel as though there is a divine right to know all about everything you do. What does this have to do with privacy? We are a lawless country on top of that. If you have the money there is almost nothing you cannot do and who cares about the law. LAUSD constantly breaks the law and no one cares. Whether it is eliminating illegally the District Advisory Council (DAC) which creates a situation whereby LAUSD has no legal right to collect the Title 1 money for the last few years and yet they collect it to illegally firing teachers without their due process rights and by illegally charging them with crimes never committed or not providing public information requests (6250 et seq.) and preventing recording of public meetings (Brown and Greene Acts) they just do it and pay no price. In 2010-11 when comparing the ADA from the state website for LAUSD and the LAUSD Superintendents Budget the difference is 72,000 students. How can this be? Actually, it is fraud.
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I don’t know about all the details cited, but I will certainly agree with the first 2 lines.
Reminds me of the story in Chicago this week (12/11/2012) where the nephew of Mayor Daley was finally charged with involuntary man slaughter after 8 1/2 years.
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Yesterday the big news story was how the FTC was tracking down and investigating firms that sell cell phone apps and how these firms were violating the privacy of children.
With “MyData” children can violate their own privacy.
Here’s a heads up folks. WIth the government, data never dies. It is forever.
Now, does anyone want to speculate how that data may one day predicate whether students will get or qualify for student loans? I’m also wondering, (sadly I’m a cynic) whether the rate of interest may someday be tied to one’s data (score). I guess this really confirms that it’s all about the data.
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You hit it on the nail her, Mark. The “MyData” button is a booby trap. Data mining minors and beyond.
I encourage anyone to do as I did and use FERPA to obtain your child’s electronic educational records. I found errors in enrollment
*2 years where my son was not in the system
*4 times where he was coded from 4th through 8th grade as a “W8” Left to Earn a GED: Left to Earn a General Equivalency Diploma certificate but did not complete.
An upper class white kid.
So they are collecting all this flawed data to drive decision making?
High-stakes testing takes on new meaning when citizen stakeholders are the ones who suffer from data errors and data breaches.
Ask your school district’s chief information officer whether he/she knows what happens to the data. You will likely find out, as I did, that they don’t know. Also, they are told they need to collect more and more data or else no $$$.
That’s leverage!
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I’m thinking that the government would want to know about the universities per what President Obama had said about these next four years would involve higher education. This had already started with the Pearson/testing nonsense that was going on in Massachusetts, I believe, whereby an education professor was fired over her/her students’ refusals to adhere to a Pearson evaluation program.
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