New York established a privately funded “Research Fellow” group to implement the Race to the Top agenda of Common Core implementation and testing. This group was funded by the Gates Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the chair of the Regents, Merryl Tisch.
“Two of the charities bankrolling a controversial $18 million education fellowship program also gave millions to a data company to which the state Education Department plans to send personal student information, despite parents’ objections.
The charitable foundations, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, are major contributors to inBloom, Inc., the data company. The two charities and other entities underwriting the fellowships support rigorous standardized testing for the purpose of assessing teachers, the Common Core curriculum, and student-data collection.
Referring to the privately funded state-education research program, which oversees the work of 23 fellows, New York State United Teachers president Richard Iannuzzi told Capital, “In many ways, it goes back to the very fundamental question about the role of government in a democracy and the need for a system of checks and balances. … All of that is effectively circumvented when private structures are used to significantly influence public policy, and that’s what’s happening here.”
One might well wonder, if these foundations and donors wanted New York to have a research capacity, why didn’t they make a contribution to the state so that these employees are public employees, not a privatized group?
Critics are angry about the ties between the Gates-funded group and inBloom, the massive data collection project funded by Gates and Carnegie. The spin on inBloom is that schools and states “need to know” everything about every student, and that private and confidential information about every student should be put into a data “cloud.” At the moment, the data project is free, but it will not be free in the future. Critics say that the cost to the state in the future will run into the millions. Another concern is that the student data may be hacked or made available to vendors who market their products directly to children. At present, the only two states that have agreed to place student data into inBloom’s possession are New York and Illinois.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I believe it’s a mistake and I hope others believe the same. I will not allow my child to take these tests any more because there names are publishable or stored for some unknown future reference? Sounds “fishy” to me? I am not liking the sound of any of it. My child will not be participating in it. Big business looking to push everyone down just so they make more money under the guise of helping education? Really? Come on, we are all not that stupid.
The corporate boondoggles (privatization) are closing in on destroying the public sphere completely! This was known in another era(one with more official ideology) as Fascism.
There is also another enormous danger here. Juvenile records are sealed, so that no one can penalize juveniles for the crimes they commit when they are underage, In Bloom potentially smashes that confidentiality and makes juvenile offenders at risk.
What do you call philanthropy that insists on inflicting its solutions upon you, whether you want them or not?
Michael Elliott: someone wittier than I coined it “malanthropy.”
Someone else labeled it “vulture philanthropy.”
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Here’s the deal with inBloom.
Gates has long believed that the future of education lies in what is known as “comptuer-adaptive testing and curricula.” The idea is that
You make up a list of standards.
You test to see what standards the kid is or is not proficient in.
You deliver to the student online lessons on those standards for which the student has not yet demonstrated proficiency.
Teachers become unnecessary or become, at most, facilitators. You can have very high teacher-to-student ratios if the teachers’ only jobs are to make sure troubleshoot the students’ computers and answer questions when kids are having trouble with some aspect of an online computer-adaptive lesson.
Now, if you want to do computer-adaptive curricula on a large scale, that is, nationally, you have to have a single set of standards. Otherwise, you are faced with the difficult problem of having to adapt your online tests and curricula to the differing standards of fifty different states. There are many difficulties in doing this. The difficulty, there, is that standards in different states are often incommensurate. Standard A in State x might reference concepts or skills p, q, and r. Standard C in state y might reference concepts or skills p, q, and s. A single standard in state x might be very general and cover concepts in many standards of state y.
So, again, if you want to roll out national computer-adaptive curricula and make a LOT of money doing that, you have to have a single set of standards. AND you need a single database where all the student responses go because you need to track a students’ proficiency levels with regard to the standards across different online instructional programs.
So, Gates paid to have the national standards created and promoted, and he paid to create inBloom, which was to become the national database of student responses with which computer-adaptive curricula would work.
Why? Well, Gates believes that computer-adaptive curricula has advantages. It is individualized. It knows exactly where kids stand vis-a-vis the standards. It reduces the amount of overhead involved in education because, currently, after the cost of facilities, almost all of the rest of the cost is salaries and benefits. So, Gates believes that switching to computer-adaptive curricula would vastly improve learning. And, incidentally,
there can only be ONE national database of student responses, and all curricula would have to use the data in that database in order to decide what lessons to deliver up to what child, so the database (inBloom) is a NATURAL MONOPOLY. It’s the one part of the system that everyone has to use, and you can leverage that monopoly position
TO MAKE AN ENORMOUS AMOUNT OF MONEY.
How? Well,
by charging a per-student fee for access to the database (something inBloom says that it plans to do fairly soon),
by charging any educational materials developer who wants to access the database, and
by selling one’s own curricula that accesses the database.
One could make many billions in this way, over time. The beauty of the plan, from a business point of view, is that it creates, in the educational materials market, the equivalent of what the operating system was in the personal computers market–the monopoly position that can be leveraged–the part of the system that everyone has to use and that everyone has to pay to use.
But now, in most parts of the country, that plan is running into opposition, and the opposition turns out to be a LOT more fierce than Gates expected it to be.
cs: “very high teacher-to-student ratios,” above, s/b “low high teacher-to-student ratios,” of course. Sorry. Rushing here.
Robert D. Shepherd: I would only add two brief points.
1), What you describe is not now, nor is it intended to be, applied by the leading charterites/privatizers to THEIR OWN CHILDREN. It is strictly for the vast majority aka OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN. Simply google the likes of Cranbrook or Sidwell Friends or Lakeside School or U of Chicago Lab Schools and the other places where a great many of the leading charterites/privatizers send THEIR OWN CHILDREN.
2), For the vast majority aka OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN, they are to adapt to the one-size-fits-all national standards, a dehumanizing and mind-numbing process. For the leading charterites/privatizers, THEIR OWN CHILDREN will continue to have the fine and performing arts as well as science, athletics of all kinds along with math, education abroad programs and low teacher-student ratios so each individual’s unique qualities can be encouraged and enhanced.
Stimulating rigor for the advantaged few. Intellectual and creative rigor mortis for the vast majority.
Ain’t education rheephorm grand?
😎
It turns out that people don’t think
that software programs are superior to teachers;
that an invariant, one-size-fits all bullet list of standards appropriate captures what the outcomes of learning should be;
that private student data should be turned over to corporations to become a product for them to sell;
that the creation of a monopolistic, centralized gateway for curricula is a good idea;
that it’s a good idea to set up and put into a few private hands a Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth to make all the decisions about assessment, curricula, pedagogical approaches, and so on, formerly made by teacher/educators;
that they like the idea of tracking, in minute detail, everything that people do for the first 18 years of their lives in Big Brother’s national database.
And it turns out that people think you can use computer-adaptive learning, when appropriate, without creating this Orwellian machine, which could so easily be exploited, in the future, for totalitarian purposes. Competing products can have built-in diagnostics and formative tests that do point-of-use diagnosis and feedback without the inBoom TOTAL INFORMATION AWARENESS PROGRAM.
cx: “appropriate,” above, s/b “appropriately
People don’t get it that the national standards, the national tests, the national database, and the incubation of computer-adaptive curricula startups by the Microsoft Foundation are all part of A SINGLE STRATEGIC PLAN for transforming education, disruptively, by bringing about a technological revolution in which computer-adaptive online curricula becomes the primary mode of instruction, replacing teachers and replacing textbooks.
I call this THE PLAN TO POWERPOINT U.S. EDUCATION–to turn all learning and teaching into the checking off of proficiencies on THE LIST controlled by a central committee.
Now, unlike some posters on this blog, I am a huge fan of the use of technology in education. The Internet is the universal encyclopedia, the universal Library of Alexandria. But I know its limitations, too. Read Edward Tufte’s “The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint” for a profoundly relevant, profoundly important discussion of bullet-listing. Think of the difference between the variety and sophistication of a human teacher’s “feedback” and that provided by a software program.
I have no desire to see the creation of the Orwellean database and curriculum gateway. And the future that Asimov describes in “The Fun They Had” sounds to me not like some technotopia but a hell exceeding the imaginings of the writers of dystopian novels.
Tufte wrote something on powerpoint? I guess I will have to check that out as I am preparing a major PPT right now! Thanks for the heads up!
I do hope that some will read my long note about how the inBloom thing is supposed, I believe, to work, given above. There is almost no understanding, around the country, of this. It’s a little complex, and so it’s very difficult to get education reporters, for example, to grok it or to pay any attention. And many people seem not to understand how all the pieces of this deform puzzle fit together.
Robert,
Thank you. You’ve done us all a great service here. I intend to read what you’ve written here, again, when I can more fully absorb it.
The most challenging—and frightening thing about the inBloom database and the long term implications of everything that accompanies it, is its absolutely fantastic, astonishing, incredible nature: It is very hard to believe!
Quite literally, so very hard to believe. This is the stuff of an Orwellian futuristic nightmare. This is the very “far fetched” punk Sci – fi tale, a society where the right’s most extreme paranoid fantasy—an omnipotent, distant and isolated federal government—meets with the left’s worst fear; the triumph of Big Capital, with a handful of corporations having established monopolies in all vital economic markets, and taken almost complete control of all media and communications, now join hands with the state they firmly control to establish a neo-Fascist entity that will eliminate the very idea of a right to privacy in both theory and practice.
Here’s the real challenge as we try to organize against it; when you try to explain all of this to people in some concise and credible manner, they just cannot believe that it’s true.
Some of my fellow parents looked at me as if I was a nut, a wacko, a guy who stopped taking his sedatives.
But as I attempted to convey this information at a PTA meeting last spring, and listened to my own words, even MY first instinct was to dismiss what was coming from my mouth.
I kind of DID sound like a nut! I might have had the same reaction had I been hearing this for the first time.
A significant percentage of my fellow Democrats, liberals, progressives might have believed all of this and more if I told them this was the work of Bush and Cheney.
But they STILL can’t quite believe that anything like this could be coming from President Obama. (And I was right with them, on the same pro-Obama page until sometime in 2011 or so.)
So, let’s act in our mutual interest with our fellow citizens on the rightist side of the spectrum, because they are far ahead of us in spreading the word on inBloom and all of this—undoubtedly due to their immediate dislike of Barack Obama and anything he advocates.
I feel that if we can unite in a temporary political alliance that benefits both left and right, we’ll all succeed. Together we can stop this corruption called Common Core and “Education Reform” and return control of our schools to our local communities.
And, who knows, working together to defeat this Orwellian Monstrosity called Common Core just might allow us to see each other’s common humanity long enough to stop distrusting and disliking each other.
The left and the right, working together, rationally, in their mutual self-interest, non violently, to maintain control of their schools?
Wow. If I were a member of the Ruling Elite, I’d be shaking in my boots at THAT possibility. As they should be…
Robert,
Thank you for your posts, as always.
I agree, and as KTA stated above…never forget (and I might suggest always point out!) that all this deform, disruption, and other distraction of education is intended for OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN!
These things are not happening at the schools that the elite send their kids to. No CCSS, no standardized testing mania, no teacher rankings based on test scores, no computer adaptive testing and curricula, etc. at Sidwell or Chicago Lab, and the others.
Also note that Harvard and Yale, Brown and Smith and all the elite colleges still have Philosophy majors and English majors. The concept of “you better get a degree in something marketable” is also pushed mainly down toward the masses. The elite are still encouraged to become educated. (And then go get an MBA, of course).
Thanks again, Robert.
I believe this is a violation of law. Where is the RFP? Where are the competitive bids? Since when can public entities create quasi public agencies that do not have tomfollow law. Where is the NYS inspector general? Perhaps it is time to petition the IG.
rrato, the G.W. Bush administration signed trillions of dollars in no-bid contracts for its ramping up of surveillance and police powers and its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And the RFP process in most places is basically a joke. It is CHILD’S PLAY to write a request for proposals in such a way that only the vendor that you have chosen beforehand can meet all its requirements, for example. That’s done ALL THE TIME. Crony capitalism. Tell people that it’s a free market process when in reality it’s a backroom deal.
What I fear is that people will not bother to learn how all these parts fit together. There is a reason why the Gates Foundation is spending a great deal of money, simultaneously, on the creation of national standards, national tests, new computer-adaptive learning software companies, and this national database company (inBloom). It’s all part of a particular vision for the future of education, and, incidentally, it will make a lot of money for its creators. People can’t begin to think at all clearly about whether they want that kind of future until they grok the vision.
Now, I’m all in favor of people coming up with transformative ideas and testing those in the marketplace. But when you add cronyism into the picture–the making of deals between the businesspeople, with their particular plans, and the politicians with the power to FORCE THOSE PLANS ON THE PEOPLE–that’s another matter altogether. Mussolini quite rightly defined fascism as the erasure of the distinction between government and corporations–as the sort of system in which the two become the same entity and enforce their vision on the people. When the state of New York, or any state, tells districts, “You have to participate in this database. You have to use these standards. You have to give these tests,” it is forcing a private entity’s strategic plan on a formerly free people, and many of the folks participating in making that happen–the state educrats and politicians–don’t even understand, themselves, that that is what they are doing because THEY haven’t put the parts together.
Instead, people with power get behind this stuff because they have drunk the Kool-Aid with regard to some part of it (e.g., we need higher standards). The big existing education monopolies LOVE the national standards and national tests because these create, for them, economies of scale that effectively keep out new, smaller competitors, for example, but they, too, are being played by a business mind smarter than any they have.
The data need to be available publicly. Basically, these guys are demanding the power to interpret the data without “showing their work”. I cannot think of any other policy context (economics/labor, health stats, program use, general public opinion) where this would be true. We get the best ideas and policies when – gasp – we create a marketplace of ideas. Others cannot critique and evaluate if they do not have access to the data. So, the marketplace of ideas is closed off.
Robert reminds us “Mussolini quite rightly defined fascism as the erasure of the distinction between government and corporations–as the sort of system in which the two become the same entity and enforce their vision on the people.”
If there are any investigative reporters left who are not paid indirectly by the corporate interests, they should report on the nexus among the NY department of education, the Regents and Joel Klein’s Amplify/inBloom (Wireless Generation) owned by Rupert Murdoch. Today Joel served as a cheerleader for Hirsch’s Core Knowledge scripts on Gotham Schools with Geoff Decker giving his pal Joel a pass.
It’s my understanding that over $12M in federal funds were paid to ED Hirsch’s “non-profit” Core Knowledge Foundation for the scripted “resources” now available for “FREE” on the EngageNY website and are promoted at the same time on Murdoch’s Amplify website. Amplify, EngageNY, Common Core and inBloom will fall like rocks when the school districts and parents refuse to purchase and/or participate in the profit making scheme.
Connect the dots and follow the billions in tax funded federal and state contracts. As a result of the insidious relationships among the reformers, our students are given scripts and high-stakes tests from King and the Regents with one-size-fits-all time allotments for the purpose of funneling billions to corporate insiders.