In this brilliant and frightening post, Andrea Gabor connects the dots that lead from your child’s personal, confidential information to a data cloud where marketers can hack into everything they want to know about your child.
Whose money is behind it? One guess.
Who is making money and providing the service? One guess. This is not a trick question, nor is it multiple-choice.
This is the future, folks. New York and Colorado and a handful of districts have agreed to turn over all the information about the children–your children–to inBloom.
Arne Duncan facilitated the release of private data to outsiders without the consent of parents by changing the regulations for FERPA, the federal law that forbids the release of your child’s personal data. Unless parents raise a ruckus, your district and state will give this information to inBloom without your permission, and without your knowledge. You knew there had to be a good reason that Race to the Top includes many millions for states to build data “warehouses.” Did you think those warehouses were for nothing?
What will bloom from this massive data gathering project?
Whatever it is, it won’t help your child. It will help some corporation that wants to sell something to your child or your district.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Education on 2013 is all about $$$$$ and Politics
I am sick and tired or people…WHO HAVE NEVER BEEN IN A CLASSROOM IN THEIR LIVES…. telling and dictating to teacher,,,,,,, how to do TEACH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The actual common core standards have been taught since the beginning of time..
However, teachers were told on a Friday..(in August 2012) (in my county) what standards they were to teach on Monday..opening of school)
Though the teachers begged all summer to get the standards so they could plan…and flocked to the workshops…they received zilch until the Friday before school opened on Monday..
Teachers were in a Panic….
In the workshops offered in the summer, the teachers listened to the most boring department of education people telling why these standards were necessary!!!
and…that numerous tests would be given…..hundreds…actually..
The threw the standards at the teachers and told them to teach this crowded curriculum without any outlines…..none….
They gave them too much to teach in two 9 weeks….ridiculous….and told them to say only positive things about the ccss or their obs and evaluations were in grave danger…Who cares?/ Not one teacher I knew…The teachers had their lawyers and were ready for the Dictating Testing Hierarchy!!
The curriculum was and still is in chaos….Always better the second year because once that one test has been given…you had better believe teachers are looking for clone questions for use in their classrooms..yep..it is called teaching to a test..and that is exactly what is happening….You do not have time to teach…You have time only to test and check and retest and check and test and check and it goes on endlessly..
These are the facts ….and when I see the people on tv that are talking this and that about how wonderful these ccss standards are…I want to so fire them from their Political Plastic roles as Counterfeit Educators..
I do not think I even addressed the above article but I vented and I feel better because all of what I say is the truth!
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Amazing yet horrifying post by Neanderthal100.
So sorry faculty and students had to endure and continue to endure. No education in sight and definitely no Education Nation, now that it is “sponsored by Pearson”.
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“. . . Political Plastic roles as Counterfeit Educators.”
TAGO!!
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http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/kindergarten-tough-multiple-choice-tests-article-1.1481197
I guess they have to maximum data collection per student so the bubbling is starting in K! This is outrageous! the DN is far from perfect, but at least they publish some articles against the new norm in education.
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It’s very important to remember that there are also very good reasons to count people and understand demographics, and quite possible to do so without violating rights and privacy. The Ontario Human Rights Commission has created a toolkit that explains and demonstrates that very idea. http://www.ohrc.on.ca/en/count-me-collecting-human-rights-based-data
When it comes to collecting using student and teacher data, this is a job for educators—no one else will do. http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/knaer/
Demographic data collection, done properly, can lead to increased equity and access to a better education for all.
http://knaer.wordpress.com
-rcf
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I agree there is a place for quantitative analytics and I was privy to the extensive cleaning that was required for early NCLB data in order to make it useful at all. I could imagine that better data could reveal “clusters” of students who are progressing more slowly, or clusters of students who are progressing faster than would be expected given community demographics. It would also be possible to show the effects of policy changes on student test scores.
The major problem I have with all of this is that everything we ask about the success of our educational system would hinge on test scores. So, you gotta test those kids regularly and uniformly to get robust data.
A reasonable person has to stand back and ask whether the cost to children is worth it? Do we really need to poke and prod these young people, reduce their intellectual development to test scores, in order to understand if our approach is working? I can see how in time it might be possible to eliminate certain tests because we would be able to see that the 3rd grade test is highly predictive of outcomes on the 5th grade test (for ex.). But even if the number of tests is reduced, half a generation will probably pass through the system by then.
Using the data this way puts the cart in front of the horse, so to speak. SES will still correlate to test scores. Sending kids to test prep factories might obscure this connection a bit but it will still be there. We should all be fearful that the American public will fall for that scheme rather than dealing with inequality comprehensively.
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These testing results show the US as last in the world. Is it time for the private sector and the Feds to get out of education and return education the the States http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-24433320
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“These testing results show . . .”
Those testing results show absolutely nothing that has any validity whatsoever as the whole process is so riddled with error (as shown by Wilson) that any “results” are, as he says “vain and illusory” or in other words (from thesaurus.com):
false
hallucinatory
misleading
unreal
whimsical
barmecidal
chimerical
deceitful
delusive
delusory
fallacious
fanciful
fictional
ficticious
fictive
flotsam
imaginary
mistaken
ostensible
pipe dream
sham
suppositious
untrue
To understand why, read and comprehend what Noel Wilson says in “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at:
http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
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inBloom is another for-profit reform boondoggle created by Gates, Klein, Duncan and Murdoch that will bite the dust. Reformers and taxpayers will never recover development costs since educators and parents don’t want or need intrusive databases that serve to facilitate child and family data for manipulation by corporations and hackers.
Was Klein held accountable for his ARIS/Wireless Generation disaster in NYC? Are Gates, Klein, Duncan, Bloomberg and Murdoch handing over their own children’s and grandchildren’s private information to inBloom?
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My district has signed up for BloomBoard to track teacher evaluation data. I see that they are a partner to inBloom and received Gates money as well. How secure is the data at BloomBoard? Are the same concerns to apply to this data dump as well? We have a staff meeting today and I plan on raising my concerns there, but I wonder if we have any recourse if the same abuse is to happen with teacher data.
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The UK trial of Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson, former Murdoch employees will begin on October 28. They face charges related to phone and e-mail hacking and conspiracy.
How will the trial impact inBloom’s profits related to mining child and family data without parental consent in the US? Why didn’t the New York Times disclose Murdoch’s ownership of inBloom, Amplify, and Wireless Generation in Natasha Singer’s October 5 article? It’s known that New York Times reporters worked with Guardian reporters “in cracking open the massive phone hacking scandal in Rupert Murdoch’s British media empire.”
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2011-07-20/lifestyle/35238199_1_hacking-case-hacking-story-world-editor-andy-coulson
“Two newspapers on opposite sides of the Atlantic were instrumental in cracking open the massive phone-hacking scandal in Rupert Murdoch’s British media empire. And they might not have been able to do so without a little Anglo-American cooperation.
The New York Times and the Guardian newspaper both landed major scoops on the story that propelled the latter to global status. Reporters from the two papers mostly worked independently, competing against one another to get to the bottom of corruption at Murdoch’s News of the World tabloid and within the British police force.
But the story might not have happened at all without a phone call early last year from Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger to his counterpart at the Times, Bill Keller.”
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George – Absolutely the same abuse will happen with teacher data! It is only a matter of time I am sure.
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What a great article. One thing though, $2-5 per student/year. Something does not add up. What is their business model? Where else are they depending on revenue from as it certainly is not from districts paying that small amount. There is always a hidden agenda with these “Masters of Corruption.” Obama and Duncan are now our Fascist Leaders into oblivion. What else would you call people who take away our rights, start wars and overthrow governments at will and create more terrorists to keep the military industrial complex in control? Facts and reality are what they are not what we wish it is or was. Look at why N.Y. City schools have had so many problems even with over $22,000/student. Kline and friends are now profiting handsomely with Murdoch and News Corp. at our expense. This is how corruption runs.
George
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George, there were 55,235,000 K-12 public school students in the US in 2010. At $5.00 apiece, that’s $276,175,000 a year.
But that’s just the beginning. The whole point of gathering this real-time data on student responses is to link it to online adaptive curricula, and inBloom 2.0 becomes the gateway, the portal, for delivery of that curricula–serving up the online worksheet on the schwa sound to little Yolanda and the online worksheet on the foil method for factoring to little Kwame. That’s when the big bucks start rolling in.
I dearly hope that people will have the sense to stop this Orwellian operation before it seeks its data-gathering tentacles into our nation’s children.
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Think of it, a nationwide portal for delivery of curricula, a gateway with a toll-taker.
As Arne Duncan’s office put it, “The new standards are about creating a national market for products that can be brought to scale.”
Bill Gates earned his billions by selling a small amount of stuff to practically EVERYONE.
Same model.
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It gets even worse. Read the Department of Education’s Report on “Promoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance: Critical Factors for Success in the 21st Century.” This report envisions hooking kids up to real-time monitors of their affective states and feeding THOSE into the computer as well so that grit, tenacity, and perseverance can be measured continually.
This kind of thing goes WAY BEYOND Orwell’s Telescreens in 1984. The whole concept is sickening.
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Capitalism at it’s WORSE.
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couldn’t agree with you more on this one.
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Only one area in which the government is collecting private data on U. S. citizens. AND too few people are cognizant of the danger to ALL U. S. citizens with this intrusion into our private lives and way too few are speaking out against it.
Thanks Dr. Ravitch for doing your part in one area and yes, ANYONE who knows anything about Rupert Murdoch must be appalled by this man and his power of the media.
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only direct action by teachers will start to really combat this nightmare
1. TEACH TO THE CONTRACT!!! don’t start one second earlier than you’re supposed to, don’t stay one second longer either. Never give up part of your prep or lunch for a workshop or other waste of time. Don’t volunteer for afterschool, weekend programs, clubs etc. Don’t work at home; unless you’re paid for it.
When you run into the inevitable BS “but it’s for the children” , reply that yes, it’s for the children who will be the next generation of teachers and workers who will be screwed the same way and most likely worse, unless we here and now start a war and fight for teachers and workers rights.
if this fails,
2.OCCUPY THE SCHOOLS!!!! or the the only thing you may be occupying is a seat at the unemployment office.
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There were 55,235,000 K-12 public school students in the US in 2010. At $5.00 apiece for inBloom, that would amount to $276,175,000 a year. And if inBloom had a large existing database, it would become a monopoly provider. Switching from it would be next to impossible.
But that’s just the beginning. The whole point of gathering this real-time data on student responses is to link it to online adaptive curricula, with inBloom 2.0 as the gateway, the portal, for delivery of that curricula–
serving up the mind-blowingly inane online worksheet on the schwa sound to little Yolanda and the Powerpoint-like online worksheet on the foil method for factoring to little Kwame. The fans of this online adaptive curricula are the sort of people who think that all learning can be reduced to bullet points on a screen.
At any rate, when the inBloom database becomes the portal for curricula, that’s when the big bucks start rolling in, from inBloom’s “partners,” like Murdoch’ and Klein’s Amplify, for example. And inBloom has made it VERY clear from the start that that’s their plan. That’s the “promise” of having such a database.
Quite a promise.
In short, inBloom is a strategic powerplay for the education market.
I dearly hope that people will have the sense to stop this Orwellian operation before it sinks its data-gathering tentacles into our nation’s children.
Think of it, a nationwide portal for delivery of curricula, a gateway with inBloom as toll-taker.
As Arne Duncan’s office put it, “The new standards are about creating a national market for products that can be brought to scale.”
Bill Gates earned his billions by selling a small amount of stuff to practically EVERYONE.
It appears that inBloom has a very similar long-term business model.
It gets even worse. Read the Department of Education’s Report on “Promoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance: Critical Factors for Success in the 21st Century.” This report envisions hooking kids up to real-time monitors of their affective states and feeding THOSE into the database as well so that grit, tenacity, and perseverance can be measured continually.
This kind of thing goes WAY BEYOND Orwell’s Telescreens in 1984. The whole concept is sickening.
And Arne Duncan’s Department of Education is serving as the facilitator for the creation of this Orwellian Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth (Minitrue).
You have to give it to these guys for cooking up such a diabolical strategic plan. And almost no one seems, yet, to be hip to what this national data-gathering is really about over the long term. Such plans could be carried out only if people weren’t really paying attention. So far, that’s worked well for the, ahem, “reformers.” We have new NATIONAL “standards” even though most U.S. citizens have never heard of them and haven’t a clue what they are, what’s in them, who paid for them, who created them, what consequences they will have for curricula and pedagogy, and so on. All that new standards and testing stuff was done with NO national debate and with no vetting.
I’m sure that the inBloom folks were hoping for the same here. And the truly frightening thing is that their hopes might well be fulfilled.
Totalitarianism can come about through violent revolution. It can also come about because no one is paying attention.
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This goes beyond data mining to keep the info stored in ‘a cloud’ for use in the future, their inBloom selling point in their ads. This data is not only open to free market use to direct products to these, all our, children. The potential for hacking is always there, and Murdoch is an expert at that. And the use for many nefarious things such as sending porn, soliciting by predators, all up for sale to these greed monsters.
I have no doubt that Deasy in LAUSD is considering this deal with the Devil since he keeps hollering we are in a budget hole…but spends our tax money frivelously to suit his overlords Gates and Murdoch and Broad.
As to our National data collection…we have now had revealed to us that data on almost all of our personal lives are being collected. The White House now sends religious directed emails to Catholics, Jews, etc. I sent a long email asking them how this breakdown of religious preference was collected but, of course, got no reply. If this is a result of reading our email, or using surnames, or whatever process, we are well along the way to totalitarianism…a true and active fascist state.
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Time to nip this thing in the bud and stop NYSED and inBloom from violating our rights. Please sign and tweet, forward, post, etc., this children’s data protection and privacy petition. I co-authored it along with fellow mom and privacy advocate Allison White. http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/protect-new-york-state
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