Yup, it is a fact. Big data is here and it is going to tell us everything anyone wants to know about your children or your students.
Actually, Big Data presents itself as a way to “help” students and teachers, but in fact will be a cool way for entrepreneurs to develop apps, sell student data, and make money.
Over the past decade, schools have started using cloud storage or begun sending more data to state education departments for collection and analysis. The amount of data collected is expected to swell as more schools use apps and tablets that can collect information down to individual keystrokes, or even how long a student holds a mouse pointer above a certain answer.
Innovative education projects include Teach to One, a program run by New York City-based New Classrooms Innovation Partners. The company works with schools in Chicago, New York City and Washington, D.C., to track whether students have mastered math concepts. Through its software, students are given personalized quizzes and lessons that target their weaknesses. Students take classes in a few different settings—in a classroom with a live teacher, with a one-on-one tutor online or even through computer lessons—and the software aims to figure out which setting works best for them.
On a larger scale, Renaissance Learning, a testing and student-data company that recently was sold to a private-equity firm for $1.1 billion, has data on 10.7 million students across the country, who regularly take quizzes through the company’s portal. Chief Executive Jack Lynch says he believes soon it will be possible for the country to drill down to find out which states or districts are doing best at setting up their curricula or teaching fractions.
Some firms want to track students through their entire academic careers. ACT Inc., the company behind the ACT test, the competitor to the SAT exam, in April will launch a system to track students from third through 10th grades in English, math and science. ACT says the series of tests will help make sure students are ready to go to college and work. Another ACT product could help steer students toward careers that fit their skills.
Among their efforts to stave off privacy concerns, education-data companies are hiring chief privacy officers, testifying before state legislatures and reshaping their messages to emphasize their data security. State lawmakers are considering passing bills to rein in access to student data or allow parents to opt out of data collection.
Protests about data privacy have partly derailed one ambitious project, inBloom, a nonprofit with $100 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the nonprofit Carnegie Corporation of New York. InBloom wants to link education-tech companies with school districts—serving as a type of middleman for student data. Its system gives schools the option of uploading hundreds of characteristics about students, including disabilities such as autism or vision problems. Five states initially said they would work with inBloom. That number is down to three: New York, Illinois and Massachusetts.
Actually, Massachusetts has pulled out of inBloom and it is not clear whether any Illinois districts are participating in it.
The most peculiar quote in the article comes from the U.S. Department of Education’s privacy officer. One would expect that she would fiercely defend the privacy of students. But this is what she says:
Kathleen Styles, the U.S. Department of Education’s first chief privacy officer, says the biggest issue she has seen is schools don’t have rules or policies on how much data to collect, how long to keep it and who has access to it.
“The only way to make data totally safe is to not ever use it or keep it,” she says. “That’s just not an option.”
Why is it not an option to leave student data with the school? Why create a permanent record that will follow a young person throughout his or her life? Why does the federal government want to encourage data mining of student records? Why is the “chief privacy officer” not fighting for student privacy from data mining by vendors, hackers, and snoops?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Big Data = Big Brother.
1984, Animal Farm. The Hunger Games….
Much has been written about repression of the citizens via government and big money making up ridiculous laws, plus using jails, cops, and soldiers to instill fear.
“. . . about repression of the citizens via government and big money making up ridiculous laws, plus using jails, cops, and soldiers to instill fear.”
Yes, it’s called Fascism, Classical Fascism as practiced by the progenitor of the name Benito Mussolini.
How ironic is it that this hits the news on the same day as the Administration finally and belatedly announces it is going to stop collecting everyone’s phone metadata as was first revealed by Edward Snowden?
Diane you are absolutely right! Do students have no right to privacy? At least when you buy software or sign up for some service on the web, they go through the pretense of presenting you with an End User License Agreement (EULA) that no one ever reads but basically gives over to them the rights to your data? Are parents now going to have to sign an EULA to enroll their child in school and what if they refuse? Will their child not be educated? If such an EULA is NOT presented, then by what right do they have access to the data?
I won’t even go into the supposed value of this data in educating children, other than to say there’s been a lot of KoolAid drinking over at the Dept. of Education.
the only education that this amount of data collection is serving is the companies who want to and will market to our students. creativity/individuality/love of learning cannot be measured by checking boxes.
Hi Diane – in response to your (rhetorical?) questions in the last paragraph, the answer is simple, undeniable and, really, the sole credible answer to ALL of these education issues from Common Core to privacy concerns – the whole gamut: The Answer is Profit. This ‘profit motive’ comes in many guises: it may be in the form of power (re-election and an evidentiary rebuttal to constituents and potential voters to might complain about the current state of education – and I believe these to be a minority overall, but a very vocal one that plays well for headlines/clicks), or simply for simple monetary gain – there’s lot of money to be made in owning/shaping/monopolizing an educational system, or, in this age of Big Data, having the ability to ‘profile’ potential consumers (ie, students) in order to make marketing more effective, individually tailored and targeted for an entire lifetime. Of course, there are additional profit motives as well: in my daughter’s school, one cannot buy food without swiping an identification card specific to the student’s social security number (no, this is not an inventory management program) – it doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to envision a future in which, say, Insurance companies would use this data to build a ‘nutritional profile’ of a student as a basis for premiums – in other words, that Twinkie you had as a 7-year old proves that you’re a high-risk individual when it comes to health insurance, thus justification for higher rates…. So, WHY, do you ask? There is one and only one answer, and in our current, increasingly oligarchical system, that answer is profit – pure and simple – and at the expense of our students and our future, to be sure.
I am very, very pleased to see these posts. It’s extremely important that people understand WHY the Common [sic] Core [sic] was created.
It was created because a few people have a particular vision for the future of education: we are to experience a computer-based learning revolution. There is to be a single bullet list of tags to correlate all learning to.
That’s why Bill Gates and Pearson paid to have these standards created.
Few have understood this.
Here’s the problem: These people talk all the time about “personalized learning” and “individual learning paths.” But what they are talking about is plopping kids down into a predetermined maze. The learning is individualized to the extent that the program tells you where to put the kid in the predetermined matrix. This rat has already learned to turn left at the first T, so we can put her down in the maze at some point beyond that.
Why is this happening now?
Well, Gates has long had this vision for education. It’s one he articulated many years ago in his autobiographical The Road Ahead.
Pearson and the other big ed book publishers see that Open Source online texts have the potential of completely undermining their business model. Pixels are cheap. There are now hundreds of excellent FREE online textbooks in hundreds of subjects. The BIG DATA model provides the “value-add” that distinguishes will distinguish their products from others and so will keep them alive. They don’t want to go the way of typewriters and telephone booths.
The whole notion of creating a single national database of student responses and test scores was to ensure a single, controllable gateway for this computer-adaptive curricula, again in response to the challenge presented by Open Source to the publishing monopolists’ business model.
I say all this as one who believes that programmed, adaptive learning can be extremely powerful and useful.
Ed tech could mean a quantum leap in availability of resources, including alternate tracks for kids to pursue, building upon their unique propensities and interests.
Or it could mean an Orwellian nightmare of top-down, centralized command and control, regimentation, and standardization.
The Ed Deformers are well on their way toward producing the second sort of future. Why do I think that? Well, consider the way in which they have operated so far, completely outside any democratic process, with no public discourse about ed tech and and big data how these are to be used. The Common [sic] Core [sic] was meant to be a fait accompli. YOU WERE NOT MEANT TO HAVE ANY INPUT regarding the vision for how ed tech is to be used. Consider how you keep being told that “teachers developed these standards” and that “the states freely adopted them.” Yeah. Sure. And North Korea just had free elections.
The Ed Tech revolution is going to happen. It can be liberatory. It can provide unprecedented opportunities for access and collaboration and demonstration and uniqueness of learning paths and progressions. Or it can an instrument of an unprecedented tyranny.
Two futures.
You decide. Or the decisions will all be made for you.
I think there’s something important that’s largely if not entirely overlooked by the disputes about inBloom and, more broadly, the idea of whether there should be a “single national database” of student information. Not specifically relating to testing and curriculum, which I understand you to be addressing here, but relating more broadly to the idea of database of student “attributes.”
Which is this: Just as “[t]he Ed Tech revolution is going to happen,” longitudinal databases of student information are going to be created. This will happen whether the inBloom project goes forward in its current form, or goes forward in a new form that doesn’t involve Rupert Murdoch or Bill Gates, or doesn’t go forward at all. Oceans of student information exist on Google’s and Microsoft’s and Apple’s (to name only the usual suspects) servers right now. I assume that information is doubling at the familiar, terrifying rate. I also assume that since networks tend to become more, not less, connected, this information will eventually coalesce into multiple quasi-longitudinal databases. They won’t be a “single national database” and they won’t be aligned to the Common Core or any other standards or curriculum. But they will be massive, rich, and manipulable–potentially significantly more massive, rich, and manipulable than any database that was planned and assembled to specification.
Just a hunch.
Thanks, Laura. And yes, FLERP!, as always, well thought through.
USDE and the Gates Foundation jump-started a macro and micro surveillance system in 2004-05. Both have uncritically forwarded the mantra of “data-driven decision making.”
This double whammy includes USDEs “Student Teacher Data Management System,” also called by the Orwellian title “Total Information Management Tool” funded since 2005 by the Institute of Education Sciences’ Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) grant program as wells as funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Grants to 47 states, the District of Columbia and two territories have totaled more than $650 million (for a population of about 50 million students).
Here is how the SLDS system works. All “Teachers of Record“ for any portion of time in a public school have an ID number linked to their students’ ID numbers, and to information gathered in a “Student Data Inventory” (with a minimum of 39 descriptors for each class), plus all other records in those students’ files at any school and in your personnel file(s)—longitudinal data.. The program now extends to teacher education with college programs measured by the outcomes (test scores) their graduates produce when they enter classrooms.
Among other uses, the system is designed to track all known costs and outcomes of education, and then figure out who, and what, gives the most “value” for the buck. See. http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/os/technology/plan/2004/edlite-xplan-sdm.html .
USDE’s blind enthusiasm for big data is documented in Enhancing teaching and learning through educational data mining and learning analytics: An issue brief. (2012) Retrieved from http://www.ed.gov/edblogs/technology/files/2012/03/edm-la-brief.pdf
Meanwhile, in 2005 the Gates’ Foundation began a data-gathering campaign “Teacher Student Data Link” (TSDL) with eight purposes,
1. Determine which teachers help students become college-ready and successful, 2. Determine characteristics of effective educators, 3. Identify programs that prepare highly qualified and effective teachers, 4. Assess the value of non-traditional teacher preparation programs, 5. Evaluate professional development programs, 6. Determine variables that help or hinder student learning, 7. Plan effective assistance for teachers early in their career (sic), and 8. Inform policy makers of best value practices, including compensation. See http://www2.dataqualitycampaign.org/your-states-progress/10-essential-elements/
This campaign enlisted the National Governor’s Association and it’s action arm Achieve, Inc. and the Council of Chief State School Officers (then brewing the Common Core State Standards initiative) and other “partners” to forward this agenda. Between 2005 and mid-May 2011 the Gates’ Foundation awarded grants totaling $390,493,545 for projects to gather data and build systems for reporting on teacher effectiveness.
Commercial data mongering has been enabled by these federal and foundation seeding operations, with the Common Core and associated test scores designed from the get go as a crucial source of data for commercial exploitation. If you doubt this, see the “partners” of the CCSSO at http://www.ccsso.org/Who_We_Are/Business_and_Industry_Partnerships/Corporate_Partners.html
The big data business is an outgrowth of what I call the “econometric turn in education.” My recent “Accountability Gone Wild” begins with this quote:
“We are more susceptible than we may think to the “dictatorship of data” that is, letting the data govern us in ways that may do as much harm as good. The threat is that we will let ourselves be mindlessly bound by the output of our analyses even when we have reasonable grounds for suspecting something is amiss. Or that we will attribute a degree of truth to data which it does not deserve. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger & Kenneth Cukier. (2013). Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. p. 166.
Superb, Laura.
It is very important that people know what is being done, what vision is being born.
I apologize that that post was a bit garbled. I cut and pasted it together in the wrong order.
” Big Data presents itself as a way to “help” students and teachers,”
Did anyone ask students and teachers if we needed/wanted their type of help?
The ed tech revolution will happen because pixels are much cheaper than paper is and because when people invent technological capabilities, they use them. The question is whether we are going to allow the creation of the means to CENTRALIZE COMMAND AND CONTROL of ed tech in a few hands.
The Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] are tags. They were created to be an instrument of such centralization.
A lot of educrats did not understand this. And those people have been PLAYED.
Bob, I have studied this in depth. You are right on the mark.
Actually, the “cheapness” of pixels vs. paper is illusory.
While digital technology may seem obviously cheaper than paper, that’s only so if you look at the electricity consumption of the devices while being used.
But that’s the wrong way to look at it. In fact, one must look at the “embodied” energy in the device, in other words, the energy needed to produce it. When seen that way, digital devices have a huge and unacknowledged energy footprint.
According to lowtechmagazine.com, “a handful,of microchips can have as much embodied energy as a car,” and “the embodied energy of memory chips exceeds the energy consumption of a laptop during its life expectancy of three years.”
Think of all the energy embedded, via mining, in the gold and silver in the device’s switches, in the rare earth minerals used in its batteries, etc. That entire expenditure of energy is latent in the device before it’s ever used. And that’s long before the health issues arising from their disposal in poor developing countries.
Aside from their uses as a leash and for surveillance, digital devices have a huge energy/resource footprint that is not widely understood.
(lowtechmagazine.com/embodied-energy-of-digital-technology,html)
yes, one has to take into account all the “negative externalities”
Paper production is extremely costly environmentally. Only 2 percent of the old-growth forests of the United States remain. If you clear cut for a tree farm for a paper mill, you are planting,but you are not replanting the communities that were destroyed.
Of course, we ought to be making paper from hemp, which is a wonderfully sustainable crop.
The first vertically integrated industry in the U.S. was paper production. William Randolph Hearst bought up timberlands, paper mills, and newspapers. Then, a couple guys invented a machine that made high-quality paper, cheaply, from hemp. Hearst immediately poured tons of money into getting hemp made illegal. He started running racist stories almost daily in his papers about the evils of marijuana. He bought a lot of politicians. He got his buddy from DuPont appointed head of a new federal drug enforcement agency.
As with the Common Core, the reason given to the public and the actual reason for the hemp ban were two different things. Hearst wanted to kill the making of hemp paper. And he could afford to make that happen.
The more things change. . . .
Watch this video posted by the US Dept of Education!!!!
This was filmed at the White House in 2012 during a “Datapalooza” and shows the vision of data collection and data mining in public education. The video is of Jose Ferreira, the CEO of Knewton. Knewton’s largest partners are Pearson and Microsoft.
In my opinion, this video helps to tie all of the pieces together.
1.) Loopholes were added to FERPA in 2008/2011 to allow these companies access to students personally identifiable information (PII) without a parent’s knowledge or consent in order to “conduct research” or “improve instruction.”
2.) Common Core provides the structure for the “atomic concept level” data to be gathered in a uniform way.
3.) PARCC (which is developed by Pearson) or SMARTER be aligned to this education taxonomy so that the closer you follow it the higher your scores.
4.) The SLDS will then be used to put pressure on teachers and schools to get the highest possible test scores driving them to Pearson’s curriculum announced in this press release: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/02/prweb11601976.htm
5.) Once all of the analytics and software is developed it will be nearly impossible to get all of the stakeholders to ever agree to revise or upgrade the standards.
I believe this data collection, data mining and data sharing is what inBloom and TS Gold are being built to facilitate. All of this powerful, predictive and personal information will be used to profile our children and put them on an educational track. Will the benefits seem intriguing at first glance, the risks are simply beyond comprehension if we don’t protect our children’s privacy. Oh, and Gates/Pearson/Amplify all stand to make a LOT of money.
Last point, if you are not already familiar with Teaching Strategies Gold (TS Gold) you need to be! This is the next inBloom but it is sooooooooooooo much worse. Here is a great blog written by a teacher in Denver to get you started.
http://www.pegwithpen.com/2013/09/do-not-go-for-gold-teaching-strategies.html
Great post, SF!
Incredible. DoE’s chief privacy officier? WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH! Talk about doublespeak and doublethink. Our officials do not recognize Orwell’s 1984 as satire, but rather a blueprint for the future. What makes this situation doubly scary is not just the vision of data mining by DoA big shots, but that it is well on its way to being implemented. This is a very sad trend for those of us who want our students to be provided with rich educational experiences. I see this as an assault on the entire concept of reasoning and literacy. My city of more than 150,000 (Pomona, CA) almost lost its only library a year and a half ago. We managed to keep the doors open–barely (currently up to 29 hrs per week), but with entirely part time staff. Most of the school districts have gone from trained librarians in almost every school, to about 2 throughout the entire district. A loud argument is that technology has make trained staff library staff obsolete.
If we could take the profit out of personal data gathering we could lessen or eliminate the experimentation on our students, I have a feeling. A law preventing any student information to leave a district that receives fed funding maybe? Could something like this be workable?
hugomarm, there actually is a low that protects student privacy. It is called FERPA. Arne Duncan changed the regulations in 2011 to permit data mining.
Have Duncan’s changes been litigated?
http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?id=9479587
Charter school insanity!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I’m thinking it’s my day to be contrarian on issues of data… Mobility is one of the biggest problems in dealing with students who are raised in poverty. Nothing is more frustrating to teachers and administrators than having a student appear in, say, March with no records because his parents moved without notifying his prior school. Getting the records from “School A” to School B” often requires lots of paperwork and lots of time… We seem to be OK with having our medical records on the cloud as part of Obamacare… I’m not understanding why we can’t make student records as readily available. Ultimately the students and the parents are beneficiaries of seamless transfer of information.
I wish more people were contrarian. It helps clarify issues and arguments.
My 2 cents: I tend to think that the arguments about student privacy and “risk of disclosure” don’t capture the real problem with longitudinal data aggregation in education. To me, the problem is more like what R. Shepherd describes above: it potentially puts an enormous amount of policy leverage in the hands of a very few. It’s different from personal information that is stored in the cloud (or any other archive) so that it can be accessed as necessary and for reasons that are specific to the individual. The express goal of this project is to aggregate data not for storage, but for use; and not for uses that are triggered by the needs of the individual whose data is at issue, but rather for uses that are based largely on the policy goals of the entities accessing the data.
There’s a fundamental difference between storing, sharing, and using student data to provide education services efficiently, and using it as a lever to set policy that would transform the nature of those education services.
Don’t worry, everyone. Big brother has only your best interests at heart.
Reblogged this on Saint Simon Common Core Information.
I see this as becoming a massive profiling operation whereby students will be categorized for employment and denied opportunity to get out of their chosen (not by them) caste. Grit will not get them out of their profile, their future will be projected early by the longitudinal data. Businesses are already commenting that the data they mine and sell are in some cases worth more than the goods they sell.
Most of the data we teachers collect at my school has no earthly use except for an administrator to fill in a little box to show that we teachers are complying with the directives that will make us an “A” school. (I live in Indiana, ground zero for many frivolous, asinine reforms.) Collecting it is a waste of time, talent, energy, resources, and memory space on the computer.
I, for one, have undertaken a policy of what I call “principled disobedience.” Since last year, I have not entered student test scores that would be tallied against my colleagues. I know how well my students are doing compared to themselves. There is no real reason to place this data into a larger document that has test scores from other students in my colleagues’ classes.
Guess what? The higher-ups in our building are too busy counting beans to notice or send some dust-sniffing drone to harass or punish me for my disobedience. I’ve got better things to do than “busy work” that does nothing to help my students or improve my teaching skills. (I once heard the term “make work” as a label for many redundant administrative tasks performed by government bureaucrats in the former Soviet Union.)
On a side note, teachers getting a top evaluation score in my building are labeled “highly effective.” (What damfool thought of that?!) When speaking informally with colleagues, I often bid farewell with the words “Have a ‘highly effective’ day!” It usually brings a wry smile accompanied by a sarcastic laugh.
WSJ reports: “A pattern of wrong answers is no longer just a bad grade; teachers can get clues to why students picked the wrong answer”. So: “Earth to WSJ: Teachers can and do already figure out why students picked the wrong answer — and have been doing this for YEARS, GENERATIONS, etc. (although in my case, since I don’t give multiple choice tests, it’s even easier — I actually get to see their work and thinking. It’s right in front of my face. In 30 years of doing this, I still occasionally get surprises, novel approaches, etc. — so, I doubt if the big data programmers know more about teaching math with real students or could tell me anything I didn’t figure out long before they did.”
What do people think teachers actually do ? Just sit in our rooms and read the paper while kids do work that we never even look at ?
http://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/02/25/a-brief-analysis-of-two-common-core-state-standards-in-ela/
Sorry, I pasted the wrong link. Here’s a great presentation by Vivienne and Norma Ming in which they address this very issue:
http://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/03/07/superb-presentation-on-educational-technology-by-norma-and-vivienne-ming/
Spot on, Julie.
Well said, Julie. When the deformers make such statements, they reveal both their arrogance and their ignorance of what teachers actually do.
exactly, Julie!
That is what I mean. We keep getting told this massive collection of numbers will “help us”
BS
we neither want nor need this type of help!
I just love how these wonderful “personalized” computer programs will tell us which students work best via computer and which work best via personal interaction. It’s pretty easy to manipulate the program so that ALL kids “should” learn via computer–making it cheaper and easier to get rid of teachers. If 85 or 90 percent of kids supposedly learn “better” by computer, then we can get rid of all of these expensive teachers.
Newsflash, computer people: EVERYONE needs human interaction. Especially kids. The ones who supposedly learn better by “personalized” computer programs probably need MORE human interaction, not less. I once had a student that “didn’t like people,” and avoided interacting with anyone whenever possible. You will be stunned to learn that she was in a “virtual” school for several years.
The Common Core was created as a set of tags for learning software. The intent is to reduce the teacher force significantly using video and other learning software because teacher pay and benefits are the major expense in education.
And yet the leaders of the two major teachers’ unions have entirely bought into the Common Core, clueless as to its purpose, which is, in the end, to relieve teachers of their jobs.
What a terrible irony.
Why click “Like”?
Why link to this site?
Why leave comments?
Because clicking “Like” and/or leaving comments is something search engine spiders look for as they crawl several hundred million Websites/Blogs to rank posts and Blogs when someone somewhere in the world searches a specific topic.
The more links, comments, likes, etc, the higher the search engine rank for this site, the better chance Diane’s posts will land on the first page for a search on this topic.
Try an experiment: Google “Common Core” and then tell me if Diane’s Blog appeared on the first page of that search. I just did this and guess what: In 0.20 seconds, there were about 298,000,000 results and Diane’s Blog wasn’t one of them.
Every post must have specific categories and tags listed. Every post needs support to land them on the first page of any search for the topics discussed here. Is this site just for educators (with voices lost in the darkness of the Internet) or for everyone?
Therefore, I suggest clicking “Like” even if you don’t Like what the post is about. Clicking “Like” and/or leaving comments is not approval of what the false reformers are doing unless you say so in a comment.
I should have said wasn’t one of the results on the first page of the search. More than 90% of Internet surfers will not look beyond the first page of a search.
Why is the “chief privacy officer” not fighting for student privacy from data mining by vendors, hackers, and snoops? For the same reason her boss, Secretary of PUBLIC Education is not fighting for truly democraticly run PUBLIC schools for ALL children! It’s a crazy world!
The Ed Deformers are adept at co-opting language. Top-down standards forced on the states via blackmail are called “state” standards. Bullet lists put together by a few amateurs hired for the purpose with no public discussion and no vetting by scholars and researchers are called “common” standards. Programs that plop students down into predetermined tracks and measure their conformity with those are called “personalized learning.”
I think that these folks come up with their names for things by first figuring out what is treasured by those who will oppose them and then co-opting the term, as in “North Korea just held free elections.”
The chief privacy officer for the USDE, that organization pushing as its major initiative Big Data, that organization that revised the FERPA laws to allow private student data to be turned over to corporations without parental consent.
Doublespeak.