The New York City parent blog reports that there will be Legislative hearings this Friday in lower Manhattan on student privacy, a matter of great concerns to parents (and grandparents!).
“The hearings will take place Friday, Feb. 28 at 10:30 AM at 250 Broadway in Lower Manhattan; livestream here. More info and a form you can fill out if you want to testify is here. See also the RT video interview from NYC parent activist Karen Sprowal on why she opposes inBloom and feels it will put at risk her child’s privacy and security on our blog below; please also sign the MoveOn petition to stop inBloom in New York state here. “
Despite massive objections from parents, New York is the only state that plans to hand over confidential student information to inBloom, which was funded by the Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation, and will be managed by Rupert Murdoch’s Wireless Generation and Amplify.
No one has ever offered a satisfactory explanation about why the federal government, the state, and vendors need 400 data points about every child.
Show up; testify; raise your voice.
Don’t let them have the data about your child.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Hello NY assembly and senate. We will not vote for you if you let inBloom and king and Cuomo have their way? Protect innocent students!
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I hope that in the hearings they will address this issue:
If the curricula of the future are to be computer-adaptive (and that’s the vision that Bill Gates has articulated for U.S. education), and if inBloom controls the national database of student responses to which every publisher of such curricula must adapt its lessons, doesn’t it become, by virtue of that fact, a monopoly? Is it not the case, then, that only companies that work with inBloom play in the computer-adaptive curriculum market? Doesn’t this mean that the state is establishing a prior restraint on free trade in educational materials by creating a defacto monopolistic gateway controlled by a private entity? And given all that, how could anyone possibly think that this Orwellian database is legal?
So, there are other issues than simply the privacy one. That one’s a biggie. Russian television recently ran a piece about how the U.S. had this new system for inuring citizens to continual, total surveillance from day 1. When even the Russians are saying that we’re taking surveillance too far, we’re in trouble.
Stop the Orwellian national database. 1984 was not supposed to be a public policy manual.
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And doesn’t the state’s adoption of inBloom thereby cut out of the adaptive curriculum market any potential players who do not have the deep pockets to work with inBloom? Doesn’t this lead to the further Walmartization of that market?
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“1984 was not supposed to be a public policy manual.”
Well said, sir.
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Excellent point, Bob, about how Gates is maneuvering for InBloom to become a fulcrum for monopolization of the “education market,” among which, in the immortal words of Michelle Rhee, children are the “most valuable assets.”
Why should anyone be surprised? That’s what Gates has always been about: mediocre technology wedded to a ruthless drive for monopoly. His association with Monsanto – privatizing the agricultural gene pool rather than the schools – shows he intends to do the same with the global food supply.
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It should be noted that it is possible to have computer-adaptive curricula (curricula that adapt to the learner) WITHOUT having the Orwellian database. The concept was pioneered by the folks who created programmed learning in the 1950s. You give a diagnostic for initial placement in the learning software, and then you adapt the lessons and activities that you feed to the student based upon his or her performance on lessons and activities in the program. In other words, you use adaptive feedback.
And then you put your program on the market and see if a free people with buy it.
Or, instead, you can get your cronies in state departments to make you a monopoly provider from Day 1 so that only you and your buddies can play in the state’s educational materials market,; you foist your Total Information Awareness Program on every parent, student, teacher, and administrator in the state; and you force anyone who wants to sell curricula in that state to go through you and pay to play.
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cx: “and see if a free people will buy it”
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Teaching, there’s an app for that:
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/01/big_data_puts_teachers_out_of_work_partner/
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So, according to the Salon article, the Executive Vice Provost at Arizona State expects that “in three years 80 percent of [professors and students] aren’t going to know anything else” but teaching done by computers, with professors acting, at most, as facilitators when kids are stuck.
Welcome to the Bill Gates vision for U.S. education: teachers are obsolete. They represent the old way of doing things. Teachers are going to go the way of typewriters, dial-up, paper maps, and public pay phones.
1,000 students per class? No prob! One can hire low-wage teaching assistants to walk around and make sure that the kids’ computers are up and running.
Sorry, you guys.
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http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/1752275
“In addition to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, a broad array of stakeholders will join the discussion, including Senator Edward J. Markey; Federal Trade Commissioner Julie Brill; Joel Klein, CEO of Amplify and former chancellor of the NYC Department of Education; Cameron Evans, CTO of U.S. Education at Microsoft; Katherine Varker, Associate General Counsel, McGraw-Hill Education; Dr. Terry Grier, superintendent, Houston Independent School District; Professor Joel Reidenberg, visiting professor of IT policy at Princeton University; and others.”
Why do we keep doing this? Why do we let “industry heavyweights” write the regulations on their own conduct?
Has this ever, in the history of the world, worked? Did it work when we let the finance and lending sector write their own rules? All it does is send a loud message that the government actors are captured by the industry they’re supposed to be regulating.
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http://amarillo.com/blog-post/jon-mark-beilue/2011-09-22/most-hated-man-houston-once-had-same-title-here
“When you mention Terry Grier to certain people with ties to the Houston Independent School District — certain teachers, certain principals, certain parents, certain politicians — you are likely to get a reaction not unlike something you might have seen in “The Exorcist.”
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My concern isn’t so much privacy – I don’t think there’s any real way to regulate private contractors given how much clout they have and industry capture of regulators, so the horse is out of the barn there- my concern is they’ll turn public schools into a completely commercialized space.
I think they should have one place where they aren’t being sold something 24/7.
Food producers would say they love children, too, if you asked them. Yet they’ve been marketing garbage to children for the last 50 years.
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yup. a completely commercialized space WITH A SINGLE, PRIVATE GATEKEEPER FOR ALL VENDORS
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This is MOST FASCIST.
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Indeed, but there has been ALMOST NO discussion of this aspect of the Orwellian database. Almost all the discussion has been about the privacy issue. Right now, the inBloom windup toy, Arne Duncan, is doing PR for this takeover by pretending that he’s going to be tough about privacy and creating some conditions to be met so that he can then rubber stamp inBloom as having met those conditions. But the other big issue–the one of centralized command and control in the hands of a monopoly will not even be considered because of the DISTRACTION of the privacy debate.
In other words, a kind of shell game is being played, the old magicians’ sleight of hand, a little prestidigitation for the benefit of the suckers.
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Don’t miss the link at the bottom of the article in which Aimee Guidera of the Gates-funded Data Quality Campaign debates Superintendent Mary-Fox Alter of Pleasantville NY on NPR’s Here and Now program.
hereandnow_0224_student-data-privacy.mp3
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Scott Bakker, the polymath philosopher and novelist who developed the Blind Brain Hypothesis, one of the leading contemporary models of consciousness, writes of a near future “when retail giants use biometric surveillance to catalog their customers and to insure that their employees continually smile.”
inBloom will be PERFECT training for kids who will live in such a world.
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http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/nielsen-solutions/nielsen-measurement/consumer-neuroscience.html
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Ms. Ravitch, thank you for including our student data privacy petition in your blog. I started the petition with another mom at a computer in my kitchen. We believe fiercely in public education. We are battling the destruction of our public schools and the erosion of our privacy. Sometimes it feels like a battle between David vs. Goliath. We don’t have the funds of Bill Gates or Pearson. However, we have the knowledge that there are good people out there (especially you!) who believe in our kids and our schools and in what we are doing. You keep us going. Our local paper ran a story about us, you can read it here http://portwashington-news.com/attention-big-data-hands-off-our-kids/#!
Thank you again!
Here’s the petition link http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/protect-new-york-state
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