New York State cut all ties with inBloom, the controversial data-mining project sponsored by the Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation.
The legislature, which totally ignored parent demands for new faces on the New York Board of Regents, bowed to parent protests against the State Education Department’s determination to share confidential student data with inBloom.
In this post, Leonie Haimson describes how parents organized–not only in New York, but wherever inBloom planned to gather confidential student data–and fought back to protect their children’s privacy.
Give Haimson credit for being the spark plug that ignited parent resistance across the nation.
Normally, the federal law called FERPA would have prevented the release of the data that inBloom planned to collect, but in 2011, the U.S. Department of Education changed the regulations to permit inBloom and other data-mining to access student data without parental consent.
Gates and Carnegie contracted with Rupert Murdoch’s Wireless Generation, and the plan was to put millions of student records in an electronic data managed by amazon.com.
No one was able to assure that the data could never be hacked.
In every state and district where inBloom thought it was operative, parents brought pressure on public officials, and the contract was severed.
At present, inBloom has no known clients.
But as Haimson points out, this could change.
The thirst for data mining seems to be insatiable, and as I posted not long ago, the president of Knewton boasted that education is one sector that is ripe for data mining and that his company and Pearson would be using online tests to gather information about every student and storing it.
Protecting student privacy must remain high on every parent’s agenda.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
EPIC sued the US dept of ED over the weakening of FERPA. A judge ruled that EPIC lacked the standing to challenge the Regs and the court dismissed the lawsuit. Someone with standing needs to challenge this law. http://epic.org/apa/ferpa/default.html
What is EPIC?
From their website: “The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is an independent, 501(c)(3) non-profit in Washington, DC. EPIC’s mission is to focus public attention on emerging privacy and civil liberties issues.”
Thanks, I’m AI*!
*Acronym Impaired
If the Unions were not collaborators with Ed Deform, they would be the natural parties to undertake such a suit.
A nationwide parents organization, such as “Parents Across America” would probably be a very good organization to carry this out.
It’s an organization of parents with children in public schools and their supporters.
I’m a member in good standing so I’ll inquire about this. Ideally a broad coalition stretching across the traditional ideological spectrum, bringing this suit, would be quite powerful.
I’ll do my part and I invite everyone reading this to do the same.
Diane,
I teach in NYC. My colleagues and I all know that it’s basically a matter of time before the charter movement overtakes the public school sector. I mean it will take a decade, but the truth is clear, in a decade there will be half the amount of public school teachers in the UFT in NYC. I hope to make it to 55. I’d trade in 10 years of my life so I could retire now. That’s how pathetic it is. Public education will certainly disappear (even in the strongest union corners like here in NYC) while Dial-A-Teacher newbies will rotate every 4 years. If you are a new teacher or thinking of becoming one, please do the research. It is GRIM to say the least.
“. . . newbies will rotate every 4 years.”
If I may correct your statement “. . . newbies will rotate every 2 years.”
Today the Berger>Wireless Generation>Murdoch>Klein>Gates>Duncan> Shared Learning Collaborative>inBloom for-profit>for-sale of children’s data bit the dust in NY.
Now push back on the “DQC” Data Quality Campaign and the champion of data collection – Aime Guidera with her staff of 20 and her Board of Directors who are working/lobbying at the state and national levels to collect our children’s data without parental consent. The DQC board needs to hear from parents across the US. – STAY OUT OF LOCAL EDUCATION DECISIONS
Is the DQC on the Gates payroll?
http://www.dataqualitycampaign.org/who-we-are/our-team/
Founder and Executive Director
Direct: 952-476-0054
aimee@dataqualitycampaign.org
Aimee Rogstad Guidera, founder and executive director, leads the Data Quality Campaign’s (DQC) efforts to encourage policymakers to increase the availability and use of high-quality education data to improve student achievement.
http://www2.dataqualitycampaign.org/who-we-are/funders/
“DQC would like to thank its funders. Our work is made possible by philanthropic grants and contributions from the following organizations:
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Michael & Susan Dell Foundation
Alliance for Early Success
AT&T
Target
Annie E. Casey Foundation”
“. . . use of high-quality education data to improve student achievement.”
Anyone who believes that “improving student achievement” is a laudable goal for public education should be shot immediately (rhetorically speaking that is) and should never be allowed to come anywhere near a public school other than to pick up and drop off their child.
I want to make sure that everyone recognizes what was (and continues to be) at stake here. apologize for the length of this post, but I hope that some will take the time to read it. I believe that what I say, below, is extremely important for people to understand.
There are some very powerful folks in the U.S. who have a vision for education that goes something like this:
There is to be, in every subject, a single set of standards that specifies what every child should know.
Instruction in every subject is to be delivered via computer. The print textbook will be phased out.
When a child sits down to be instructed, he or she will be tested for knowledge of the standards. A profile of the child will be created in a single state or national database. The profile might show, for example, that at the beginning of the year, little Kwame has mastered Standards A, F, and Q and little Yolanda has mastered Standards B, E, F, M, N, Q, and R.
Each child will then be fed computerized lessons on the standards that he or she has not met. As the child completes each lesson, is tested, and shows mastery, this information will be added to the database.
The database is supposed to know everything there is to know about the child. That data is not to be scattered around in various places. There is to be only one such such database, containing all the information about that child.
Because there is only one database, it is a monopoly. Any educational software vendor who wishes to get access to the database has to go through the vendor in control of it, just as anyone who wishes to sell a personal computer has to license a particular widely used operating system.
In other words, the vendor who runs the database becomes the national gatekeeper for curricula.
The database becomes in the educational materials market what the operating system is in the personal computer market–the piece that everyone has to use and pay for using.
That’s the vision.
And it sounds to me like a recipe for an Orwellian nightmare. It puts one organization in charge of what can be taught, learned, and thought.
And to make it all happen, that organization had first to pay to get a single set of national standards created.
There has been a LOT of talk about the privacy issue, as well there should have been. But the issue of the centralization of standards and of the gateway for curricula is as important or more important, and there has been ALMOST NO DISCUSSION OF THIS because most people have not understood the game plan there.
The folks who paid to have national standards created did so because they wanted a single set of tags to key their software to. Educational software that tracks student achievement against the national bullet list is THE DISRUPTIVE REVOLUTION that they are currently attempting to engineer. They think the ed tech revolution in education to be inevitable because pixels are so much cheaper than paper is, and they want to engineer things, from the get-go, so that the market is large and controlled by them.
The creation of the Common Core had NOTHING to do with improving educational outcomes. It had everything to do with creating a single bullet list to tag the software to. One bullet list to which to tag products to be sold NATIONALLY by a certain monopolist provider and its “partners.”
One advantage of this approach, or so those pushing it believe, is that it can save a LOT of money on education.
You see, by far the biggest expense in education is teacher salaries and benefits. But if you have 300 kids in a room, all doing their work using computer-adaptive software keyed to a single set of standards, you can get by with having a single low-level aide walking around to sure that kids’ tablets are working and helping with problems when kids are having problems they can’t resolve using the build-in, online support.
Thus the ed deform “class size doesn’t matter mantra.”
inBloom is dead in New York for now. But expect to see this monster crop up in new guises, hydra-headed.
Be vigilant. Follow the money. Ask yourself, “How does this proposal change the market?”
Here’s how adopting one set of national “standards” changes the market: It creates ENORMOUS ECONOMIES OF SCALE FOR MONOPOLISTS, who can create one product and one set of marketing materials and one database and one everything else for the entire country. It also makes possible the tagging to that list of ed tech products designed to REPLACE CLASSROOM TEACHERS.
When you hear “Big Data,” remember that what people are talking about there is Total Information Awareness for education. And preapproval, by some centralized authority, of what is to be taught and to be learned.
A free people will do everything in its power to stop that.
This regimentation of all students using software to monitor in detail their progress on an invariant, predetermined track is being called by the Big Data folks “personalization.” It is personalized because the student is tested to find out which of the predetermined lessons for the predetermined track to feed to the kid so that, in the end, he or she will have outcomes from the educational experience precisely identical to those for every other student.
In other words, in the Doublespeak language of Big Data and Ed Deform, invariance of outcomes is achieved by a process called “personalization.”
personalization for invariance
“Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.” –George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”
And everyone knows that monopolies are just overflowing with creativity and innovation. Right?
As usual Robert, you’re quite correct in what you point out in this post. TAGO!
Three cheers for Leonie and friends!!!!
indeed!
From PolitiFact:
One Wisconsin Now wrote: “The Walton family, which owns Wal-Mart, controls a fortune equal to the wealth of the bottom 42 percent of Americans combined.”
For comparison purposes, the latest data available, for 2010, the figure is 41.5 percent.
We rate the statement True.
sorry, posted this on the wrong page
Note Diane’s warning in the title of this post:
“For Now”
Don’t think for a moment that the databases have been beaten. I am going to explain why. Please take the time to follow what I am going to say here, because it’s a little complicated:
The emergence of the Internet presented a challenge to the business model that the big educational publishers were following. I can point you, right now, to about 80 complete, high-quality, FREE open source textbooks on the Net–ones written by various professors–textbooks on geology, law, astronomy, physics, grammar, biology, every conceivable topic in mathematics.
How were the purveyors of textbooks going to compete with FREE?
Answer: The computer-adaptive ed tech revolution. They could create computer-adaptive software CONNECTED TO DATABASES THAT ONLY THEY HAD ACCESS TO, that open source providers could not get access to. (Added benefit: this would reduce their costs; the biggest items on the textbook P&L, after the profits, are the paper, printing, binding, sampling, warehousing, and fulfillment costs).
Engineering the computer-adaptive ed tech revolution WITH THAT TECH KEYED TO RESPONSES IN PROPRIETARY DATABASES would prevent them from going the way of Smith Corona and whoever it was that manufactured telephone booths.
Doing that would prevent the REAL DISRUPTION that the educational publishers saw looming–the disruption of THEIR BUSINESS MODEL posed by OPEN SOURCE TEXTBOOKS>
But first, to prevent that disruption, to make that computer-adaptive ed tech revolution happen, they would need one set of national standards. That’s why they paid to have the Common [sic] Core [sic] created. That one set of national standards would provide the tags for their computer-adaptive software–they would be the list of skills that the software would keep track of in the databases that open source providers could not get access to.
As I have been explaining for a long, long time now, here and elsewhere, the Common Core was the first step in A BUSINESS PLAN.
Bill Gates described that business plan DECADES ago. He’s an extraordinarily bright man. Visionary. He saw all of this long ago.
That’s the story, in a nutshell. And it’s not an education story. It’s a business story.
And a WHOLE LOTTA EDUCRATS haven’t figured that out and have been totally PLAYED. They are dutifully working for PARCC or SBAC and dutifully attending conferences on implementing the “new, higher standards” and are basically clueless that they have been USED by people with A PARTICULAR BUSINESS PLAN. They don’t know that the national standards were simply a necessary part of that plan.
And here’s the kicker: The folks behind this plan see it is a way to reduce, dramatically, the cost of U.S. education. How? Well, the big expense in education is teachers’ salaries and benefits. But, imagine 300 students in a room, all using software, with a single “teacher” walking around to make sure that the tablets are working and to assist “when necessary.”
Think of the money to be saved.
And the money to be made.
cx: prevent them from going the way of . . . whomever, not whoever, of course
Actually, I think I had it right the first time. Tired here. The pronoun should be nominative because in its immediate clause it is a predicate nominative, object of the copulative verb was (“It was whoever”). That the whole clause is an object of a preposition is irrelevant because the case is assigned in the immediate clause. Mea culpa.
Now don’t go gettin all porno on us Robert, what with copulative verbs and all that!!
Grin.
The wrinkle in the plan, of course, is that people don’t like the Orwellian database. From the point of view of the monopolists with this plan, that’s a BIG problem. That is, after all, what keeps the real disruption, open source textbooks, from happening–the disruption that would end the traditional textbook business in the way that MP3 downloads ended the music CD business.
So, the deformers have to go to plan B there. But the databases are key to that plan. They are what will keep Open Source textbooks from happening.
Possible solution, from the monopolists’ point of view: Sell systems state by state, to state education departments. Those systems will simply be the each state’s system, and approved vendors (guess who?) will flow through it. What vendors? Well, the ones with the lobbying bucks and with the money to navigate whatever arcane procedures are created by the states implementing them. So, the system will work basically as the old textbook adoption system worked, as an educational materials monopoly protection plan.
I hope that some few will read the preceding posts. I love the folks who show up on this blog, but rarely, when I post about the business reasons behind the Common Core and the current education deform, do people read the posts because, I suppose, the business reasons are boring.
But they are WHY all of this is happening. They are what is actually motivating ed deform. They are why the standards were created. They are why we had the push for a national database. They are the reason for the push for BIG DATA.
All this is part of a business plan put in place to prevent the Open Source textbook revolution from destroying the business model of the educational materials monopolists.
In business, this is called Strategic Planning.
A few years ago, we had the 50th anniversary of the Standard and Poors Index. At that time, 70 percent of the companies that were originally on the index no longer existed. They were killed by disruptions they didn’t see coming.
The educational materials monopolists saw the disruption of Open Source textbooks coming. And they cooked up computer-adaptive ed tech keyed to standards, with responses in proprietary databases that they would control, to maintain their position.
And to make that happen, the first needed a set of national standards.
That’s why you have the Common [sic] Core [sic].
I read every post, Bob, but have little to contribute although I did go and skim “open source textbooks” on the web. When you are talking about free resources as opposed to computer adaptive canned programs, you wonder why people would jump on expensive canned programs as opposed to free. I suppose that is one reason for dismissing the role of teachers as teachers. Using the open source material requires the expertize of teachers to adapt material for their purposes. Canned programs are “teacher proof” and require little from real human beings other than the ability to follow instructions.
I think, never2old, that the educational materials monopolists saw the writing on the wall. They have seen, for example, what Wikipedia did to Encyclopedia Britannica, and they saw what was starting to happen to their college textbook business. Why would people adopt a $200 introductory statistics textbook when several very high quality FREE open source intro stat textbooks, written by college professors of statistics and accompanied by excellent FREE teachers’ guides, were available on the Net?
In 2007, the Standards and Poors index turned 50. On the day it turned 50, 70 percent of the companies that had been on the index at its creation no longer existed. They had been destroyed by some creative disruption. Video killed the radio star.
The educational materials monopolists needed to find a way to stop that from happening. Switching from print delivery to delivery of their materials in computer-adaptive form, with those materials tied inextricably to databases of student responses that only THE publishers had access to was a way to kill Open Source in its cradle and maintain and even expand their monopolistic control over educational materials markets. But to make that happen, they needed one set of national standards. So, they paid to have the CC$$ created and continue to pay for the PR to sell those “standards.”
Open Source texts would become as robust or more so than anything now available from the educational publishing houses. The houses knew that. Again, look at Wikipedia. Look at Linux.
I understand what you are saying. I just can’t get my frugal mind around the willingness to spend $$$ for something you can get for free. Don’t get me wrong; there are some really good cyber resources out there and the uses to which technology can be directed productively are incredible. However, the stuff being marketed is NOT incredible and does not in any way shape or form replace a live, thinking human being who has chosen to teach.
Bob, My brother, a computer programmer, shared this vision of education with me about 15 years ago. The plan he described from a tech point of view was that each student would be given a personal computer with individualized curriculum. I had a difficult time believing this would ever become reality–I am not so sure anymore. He also said the main issue driving this idea was cost in education.
And it is going to take the parents to end Common Core in its entirety; standards, modules, reformers, and all. After all we are a democracy here. We have strong voices and must use them.
Mayor De Blasio and Sheldon Silver are taking a victory lap school tour on the lower East Side today, in case anyone’s still angry about the budget vote.