Peg Robertson read the article in the Denver Post in which the president of the Colorado Education Association praised inBloom and said that it would provide great learning tools.
Peg is a teacher and parent in Colorado, and she is a leader of United OptOut. She is opposed to inBloom. Here she explains why.
Read her article in its entirety.
Here is the core of her critique of the teacher who supports inBloom:
“She fails to mention that inBloom can share student data with for-profit vendors to allow them an opportunity to tailor their educational products to students’ needs. She fails to mention that “personalized learning” too often means hooking children up to computers with software programs – which is really depersonalized learning.
She fails to mention that federal privacy laws were weakened to allow for-profit companies access to student data without parental consent, and that Jefferson County schools are not allowing parents to opt out of inBloom. This despite the fact that inBloom has said they will not be responsible if the information leaks out either in storage or transmission.
She fails to mention that inBloom is collecting 400 data points on each child – including the most sensitive information: names, addresses, test scores, grades, economic and racial status, as well as detailed special education, immigration and disciplinary records. These data points could create a detailed profile and follow your child throughout his/her educational career; this could indeed narrow your child’s opportunities within school and after graduation.
One must ask, why do they need all these data points about our children? inBloom has also said that starting in 2015, states and districts will have to pay from two to five dollars per student for putting their most sensitive data on an insecure data cloud and offered up to vendors. inBloom is also considering charging the vendors for access to the data – which is comparable to selling children’s data or renting it out.“
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Do people here object to sharing student data with researchers in schools of education? Most studies would be published and available for corporations to read and use in designing products.
Would it be important to know if the research is supported by a grant and who is paying for the grant?
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Answer to Question #1. Let corporations read the research and then proceed with their product design.
Answer to Question #2. Yes
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In the past, even when our students took a sensitive and anonymous survey involving drugs or sex, parent permission had to be obtained. I was taught in grad school, that if I collected student materials for research or for sharing, such as examples of their writing, I had to obtain written permission. As a parent, I would allow this, especially if my child’s ID were kept anonymous, but I definitely have a problem with corporations having access to data about my child and especially about selling it.
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See ny times link at the bottom. Klein was pushing this educrap exactly one year ago. I commented and here is a slightly revised version which I need to mail directly to him. Notice his quote about teachers embracing or accepting his snake oil:
He added, “I’m candid that if this isn’t embraced by teachers in America, it won’t work.”
Dear Mr. Klein:
I am an educator and a parent and I don’t embrace anything being promoted and sold by you or Murdoch. You do not care about children, teaching and learning. You care about profits, profits, profits.
Stay away from our children. I don’t trust anyone associated with a company that hacked into the cell phone of a missing, murdered 13 year old.
I will collect and track student results the old fashioned way. I will get to know each of my students as individuals with dreams, strengths, goals and opinions. We will create individual portfolios with writing samples and journal entries. We will read fiction, non fiction, memoirs, news articles, essays, short stories, poems. We will share ideas, opinions and create long term projects: research, book trailers, original plays, book blogs, etc.
As a teacher it is my responsibility to be data informed NOT data driven. I promise you I will not waste time staring at a computer, tablet or wireless device.
Instead I will look at my students and see and hear them. So, I will tell you know I take a pass on your “digital learning tools” and instead I will use my brain, my instincts and my 27 years of teaching experience to guide me,
something the faux reformers (you, Rhee, Bloomberg, Gates) know nothing about.
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/news-corporation-forms-new-brand-for-education-division/
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Well-said, Linda. Your students are lucky to have you as their teacher.
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I think the big problem here is that this “so-called union leader” doesn’t mention that she has received grants from Gates. Gates is buying our off our union leaders starting with the top dog–Randi Weingarten. This is horrible and I doubt she isn’t telling her own Colorado teachers the truth unless of course they are doing their own research on this. She also belongs to TURN (Teachers Union Reform Network) that has gotten $2million from that Gates foundation so that it can promote CC, teacher eval plans, etc.
Hopefully this woman will be voted out.
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LIKE!
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There’s a wonderful illustration in Donald Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things of a control panel in a nuclear power plant. The engineers who designed the panel, being the sort of folks who like things orderly, created rows of identically machined levers, with little name plates at the base of each telling its function: This one raises fuel rods x, y, and z. This one lowers them. The folks who run the power plant, understanding more about the potential for human error, have gone out and purchased some beer taps (Budweiser, Heineken, Guinness, etc), and have placed these over the levers so that they can tell them apart from one another.
Technologies, Donald Norman tells us, have certain affordances. They inhibit certain behaviors and encourage others. We’ve all had the experience of encountering a door that looks as though it should be pulled when it is actually supposed to be pushed and vice versa. A door can be designed so that the design itself screams “push me” or “pull me.” Now, the problem with turning over functions to technologies is that one has to presume that one knows, beforehand, what the affordances should be and what consequences those affordances will have. There are people in the world, of a technocratic and totalitarian/authoritarian mindset, who presume to be able to imagine, beforehand, exactly how things should be. Learning, for example, can be fully specified, beforehand, as some particular list of items (skills, concepts, world knowledge, whatever), and technologies can be created to instruct people in those and to test them to make sure that the instruction has been effective. And, beforehand, one can know what the affordances of a technological system are and what behaviors these will inhibit and encourage. But the consequences typically cannot be fully envisioned beforehand, and sometimes those consequences will be horrific.
Let me give you two examples.
Example 1: A couple decades ago, lots of businesses around the country spent billions creating customer relationship management systems (CRM systems). The idea was that all information about a customer and that’s customer’s interactions with salespeople would go into a centralized database, and managers could use this database to keep track of precisely what salespeople were doing. Now, before such systems were created, most salespeople carried around a little book in which they made notes about their customers. Importantly, that information was private. It belonged to the salesperson, and only he or she had access to it. Because a salesperson could always to a new company and take that information with him or her, the notebook of customer information EMPOWERED the salesperson. Salespeople were very much aware of this. A salesperson’s little book—his or her contacts and customer information—was what he or she built over a lifetime of work. Salespeople are not stupid. They know that if the information from the little book is going to be, instead, in a centralized database at the company, then the salesperson himself or herself is OF MUCH LESS VALUE TO THE COMPANY. Anyone—a younger salesperson, for example—could use that information. And so salespeople resisted CRM. They put the minimum information that they could into the CRM systems, resented the time they spent doing this, and continued to keep the really valuable stuff—the gold—in their little books. The CRM designers hadn’t thought about the affordances of their systems—how those affordances inhibited salesperson empowerment and autonomy, those key motivators, and encouraged reporting by salespeople of unreliable, incomplete information—garbage in.
Example 2: A huge growth industry in the world in the past few decades has been the creation of what technocrats euphemistically refer to as “customer self-service portals.” In the old days, if you wanted to know something about a company’s products or to get service of some kind, you called the company and talked to a person. Now, you use a customer self-service portal. You call and interact with an automated telephone system, or you go on the net and find the information yourself. This looks great for the company. It no longer has to pay those people who answered phones. It can eliminate a lot of jobs. It can push the work that those customer representatives used to do, and the cost of that work, off onto customers. But, of course, there are many downsides. First, customers become frustrated and alienated and angry because it’s often impossible for designers of such systems to imagine, beforehand, what a particular customer’s need or want will be. And second, when millions of people lose those jobs, they no longer earn money with which they can buy the company’s products. I recently had an experience with one of these systems. My daughter was in a fire and had a tracheotomy as a result. We were sent home from the hospital with a machine for cleaning the tracheotomy tube in her throat because mucous would get stuck in there, and if it were not cleared, my daughter would be unable to breathe and would die. On the side of the machine was an 800 number, in big type, to call in case of emergencies. Well, the first time we went to use the machine, it didn’t work. We couldn’t figure out why. So I called the number, and I got a phone decision tree: “If you are calling about x, press y. If you are a p, press q. . . .” and so on. Ten minutes later, with my daughter choking and unable to breathe, I still had not reached a technical support person who could deal with this particular problem with this particular machine. I hung up and figured it out myself. Fortunately. My daughter could have died because of that “customer self-service portal.”
The point is that technologies have particular affordances that have consequences that cannot be fully imagined beforehand, and so one must be careful about leaping to adopt them.
A centralized database of student responses and scores tied to computer-instruction delivery systems is a heart and brain transplant. It replaces the hearts and minds of teachers, curriculum designers, and other educators with a pre-envisioned system that will have affordances that will DRAMATICALLY delimit what happens in schools. There’s been a LOT of talk about the privacy issue, but even if that issue could be fully addressed (big IF), we’ve not even begun to discuss
a. the ways in which such systems will limit later possibilities for students, closing certain doors for them that perhaps should not be closed, and
b. the consequences for pedagogy and curricula of the affordances of this system, and those, I believe, will be HUGE.
Even if one assumed that the intentions of the designers of such a system are noble—e.g., that they want to create personalized education that meets every student at his or her zone of proximal development and do not want to turn the nation’s students into do-bots for the Borg—it’s clear to me that the system’s designers simply do not understand how dramatically such a system will affect students’ lives and how dramatically it would change EVERYTHING having to do with pedagogy and curriculum design.
I sometimes think that people who can envision such an Orwellian system and think it a good idea are of a different species, altogether, than I am, that they have an entirely different conception of what it is to be a human being and a learner, that they do not understand, for example, that we are, fundamentally, unique projections into a future that cannot and should not be fully envisioned and specified beforehand.
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I don’t usually read the long ones but very much enjoyed this collection of insights. It’s all very complicated, but the “best and the brightest” always have THE answer that allegedly will address all the complications. Learners are ecologies, not data points. Thanks.
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CNN had a piece on inBloom and didn’t bother to mention who created it or funds it(Gates Foundation). They made the mom featured in the piece look like she was some lone voice (not true). http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/28/technology/innovation/inbloom/index.html?hpt=hp_t3
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Why would anyone in the world trust Rupert Murdoch, Joel Klein and Bill Gates with children’s data? Smart parents across America will push back and deny inBloom access by forming grassroots organizations to inform taxpayers about inBloom’s corporate welfare scheme – using children and teachers for the purpose of funneling profits to shareholders (News Corp).
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Re inBloom: haven’t we heard the phrase “trust us” before?
Let’s see…
An extremely short list: WMD & mushroom clouds to justify a guaranteed successful invasion and occupation of Iraq; financial deregulation is obviously good for everybody; and NCLB and RTTT will work miracles.
To bring Aesop up to date: “Never trust someone in pursuit of $tudent $ucce$$.”
🙂
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Peg fails to mention that Jefferson County was in the process of deciding which data points would be collected and that those decisions haven’t been made. inBloom isn’t currently collecting data on any of the students because they’re still working on the system.
As a Jeffco parent, yes, I have my concerns and I’ve contacted the administration about them. The district personnel have adequately addressed my many questions so far. What continues to frustrate me about this larger discussion is that inBloom will not a one-size-fits all data system; it will be configured to the needs of each district. What happens in Jeffco may not happen somewhere else, and this conversation needs to acknowledge that.
This conversation also needs to acknowledge that corporations *already* have data about your child and no data is 100 percent safe. Most schools *already* have digital records that yes, are subject to hacking and have been for some time. Why no one yelled before is beyond me, but your child’s information has never been 100 percent safe. That’s the reality of 21st-century America. Maybe there are a few families who have never put anything about their children online, not in a tweet, not in a blog, not in comments, not by purchasing something for them on an online website, not by posting a wish list for family and friends who live out of town. Even then, unless your doctor and dentist still use paper-only records, the reality remains that sensitive information is being stored in digital files and those are liable to be hacked. (If you think your paper records are safe, think again. Better yet, look up those stories from the ’90s about identity theft using paper medical records.)
Things we *should* be worried about regardless of inBloom or other digital systems:
1. pressure to use more technology and less teachers in the education process
2. tax breaks for companies developing educational technology that further cut tax revenue and in turn require schools to cut budgets even further
3. the ever-increasing reliance on standardization and technology to evaluate students, teachers and schools, with little attention to nuance
There are benefits and drawbacks to what inBloom has proposed. That’s true of ANY technology–your iPhone, your laptop, even your car. What we as parents need to do is talk with and hopefully advise our districts about the information that should and should not be collected, how it will be used and which data points will be available to those in and outside the district. Encouraging districts to set up a committee of parents, teachers and administrators to talk through these issues will be a lot more helpful than the increasing hysteria (Orwell, really?) that seems to dominate this discussion.
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I don’t understand why you think this company even needs your kids data..don’t you trust your teachers to understand and know your children as individuals?
What are the benefits?
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One reason to collect information might be to judge the affectivness of alternative teaching methodologies or organization of schools. I was reading earlier today about the Tennessee STAR experiment about class size for example. Some of the work with the data it generated showed a long term positive impact of small class size on student outcome. To find long term impacts, wee need to collect data over the long term.
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TE, this is one of the more ridiculous ways to use data. What a waste (& probably of money as well as time)! Any educator will tell you that small class size has positive impact on student outcomes–long term, short term, ANY term.
And please, don’t tell us that the data then prompted the state of Tennessee to approve smaller class sizes for all public schools in the state–pure poppycock!
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It is a question of trade offs. Reducing average class size by one student costs about 12 billion dollars. Is that the best way to spend 12 billion or would those resources be better used in some other way?
Actually an economist analyzed the data and argued that reducing class size was the most effective way to spend the 12 billion a year. Perhaps he was incorrect, but there is no way to try and answer this kind of question without collecting the information.
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Lisa,
Share your child’s data, if you wish, but recognize that you don’t speak for other parents who do not wish to share their child’s data.
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In some schools, the parents were not even given any written description of the InBloom and what it meant and how it will be used throughout their child’s education. No choice was given.
Are the elite schools like Sidwell going to use InBloom or other on line data collecting ?
Here is an article on how Murdoch, Bill Gates, and. Big corporations are data mining our schools:
http://www.nationofchange.org/exposed-how-murdoch-bill-gates-and-big-corporations-are-data-mining-our-schools-1367331290
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Some parents in Colorado are drinking Murdoch’s Kool Aid. Parents like Lisa need to wonder why Murdoch’s children’s data and Gates’ children’s data are not included in the for-profit inBloom database if there’s potential for personalized learning and education innovation.
Taxpayers need to ask how many millions in state and federal grants (corporate welfare) have been funneled to Wireless Generation, Amplify, the Shared Learning Collaborative and inBloom?
Money and power motivate Murdoch and Gates. They worked together with Duncan to change laws (FERPA) for their own selfish interests and the financial interests of News Corp’s shareholders.
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I absolutely agree that private and especially sensitive information that could specifically identify and prove potentially injurious to students should not be disclosed. Despite any weakening of privacy laws, this sounds and is in fact criminal. Misappropriating information, especially information that could unfairly prejudice educational institutions and potential employers against a student is unethical.
I am a champion of education reform, including development of educational products that could improve student performance, but means of development of those products should not pose threat of harm to the very students that they’re supposedly designed to help. If the inBloomers are really serious about improving student performance, why not select a few schools to offer products that they’ve developed to improve academic performance, and without compromising student confidentiality. Seeing that any successes or failures of students utilizing their products would also demonstrate the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of their products, exposing any information that might demonstrate ineffectiveness would be bad for business.
Follow my education blog at http://yolandamichellemartin.wordpress.com/category/education/
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