Benjamin Herold of Education Week describes the short life of inBloom, the audacious venture funded by the Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation to the tune of $100 million.
The venture collapsed because of parent opposition to sharing their children’s confidential data to a firm that would provide access to vendors of products and services to schools and students.
For some strange reason, parents don’t want their children used for marketing purposes without their knowledge or permission.
The struggle will go on, as new companies engaged in data mining enter the space left by inBloom.
There will continue to be lots of palaver about how this data mining is good for education and great for kids, but parents don’t agree.
And the fight will go on.
The forces behind Big Data will push and push and push, and parents will have to push back just as hard to keep them out of their children’s lives.
Meanwhile, the big unanswered question is whether Congress will force Arne Duncan to restore the privacy regulations that Duncan stripped out of the Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).
Common Core, the federal testing, teacher evaluation by test scores, were all supposed to be part of the overarching plan to introduce Big Data into education.
If we fight this, maybe we can stave them off again and again, and keep Big Data at bay and far away from our kids.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
From the beginning, I’ve assumed the “demise” of InBloom will be another example of re-branding.
The whole purpose of this national database of student responses and test scores was to create a single gateway, or portal, to which all assessments and computer-adaptive curricula would have to be connected if they wanted to make use of that data.
In other words, it was a scheme to create a curriculum and assessment gateway that would be, because it was to be a monopoly, incredibly lucrative. There would be many revenue streams–including per student fees, connection fees from vendors of educational materials who wanted to connect to the database, data use fees from those same vendors, fees from schools and states for reporting, fees from schools and states for using software that came through the portal, revenues from the sale of assessments and computer-adaptive learning materials in which the owners of inBloom had an equity stake, etc.
In other words, inBloom was to be in K-12 education, after the transition form print to online educational materials, what Windows is to the PC market–the one piece that almost everyone has to use and pay for.
Now that inBloom has closed shop, these folks will simply work this at the state and district level. Look out for those cozy, competition-restricting deals with providers of state and district curriculum portals. Look out for the tablets with preloaded curricula and limited other connectivity. Look out for the multi-year contracts and huge initial investments that lock you and your school into using particular providers.
The monopolistic databases will simply become parts of other packages–learning portals at the state and district level.
This stuff is FAR, FAR from dead. And in its new forms, it will be even more insidious because most people won’t even know that it exists.
The folks who cooked up this business plan are not the sort to give up so easily. And there are other ways to go about the creation of these monopolies that are sneakier and more insidious and even more effective because they fly under the radar, especially in a country where education reporting is little more, generally, than public relations for a few monied players in the educational materials industry and their various shill organizations.
I despair of the public and the few politicians who haven’t already been bought bothering to figure out any of this, for they haven’t even understood that there is a reason why certain plutocrats purchased a set of national “standards” for the country–because they wanted a single bullet list to tag their software and assessments to because they believe that textbooks are about to disappear and be replaced by online materials and see this as a huge new market and wanted to be able to address this new market at a monopolistic, national “scale” and crush smaller potential competitors by operating at that scale.
Even the leaders of the two major U.S. teachers unions didn’t understand that. If they didn’t understand that, they certainly won’t understand the more complicated matter of the use of databases to create monopolistic gateways or portals.
A lot of people have been pwned, here, as computer gamers say.
Technology could be incredibly liberating. It could provide unprecedented competition and access.
Or it could be controlled by a few push providers who have worked the political system to create monopolistic portals that they control.
Here’s a February, 2014, post from edSurge, an aggregator of ed tech news, called “Where inBloom Wilted: Lessons from inBloom’s first difficult year”:
https://www.edsurge.com/n/2014-02-05-where-inbloom-wilted
The ed tech entrepreneurs that base their business on student data mining will have a big incentive for “getting it right” next time.
Here’s the inBloom post mortem from edSurge:
https://www.edsurge.com/n/2014-04-21-what-inbloom-s-shutdown-means-for-the-industry
The embedded links are worth following, too. They’re not giving up.
they weren’t marketing to kids. get your facts straight (of course thats not your agenda LOL).
This is a very, very strange comment. No one claimed that they were marketing to kids. They were collecting data on children without parental consent, and the Secretary for the Department of Regimentation, Dehumanization, and Privatization of U.S. Education, formerly the USDE, unilaterally did away with parental consent requirements that made this possible.
So, read more carefully and get YOUR facts straight.
quote from post: “parents don’t want their children used for marketing purposes”. so get YOUR facts straight.
aLittleCommonSense, the writer assumed that people reading the post would understand that the data was to be marketed to vendors of educational materials and assessments and to school systems, as part of learning programs and assessments making use of that data. You don’t seem to understand this.
aLittleCommonSense
You completely misunderstood the phrase. That the children were being “used for marketing purposes” did not mean, in that post, that marketing was being done to children. It did not mean that at all, and frankly, that’s a very weird interpretation of the phrase. Using is not marketing to. If I say, “We use data from traffic studies for marketing purpose,” it would be very, very strange for someone to accuse me of saying that I am marketing to traffic studies. Bizarre, in fact.
aLittleCommonSense, but not a lot of it, and no other kind of sense.
So, everyone talks about the privacy issue, and that one is very, very important.
But this use of databases as push technologies to control the market for educational materials is also extremely important AND GETS ALMOST NO ATTENTION.
We can end up with the Thought Police because of violent revolution.
Or because NO ONE WAS PAYING ATTENTION while the mechanism for centralized control of delivery of education, of ideas, was put into place.
Let me be very clear about this. I am going to SPELL THIS OUT.
A lot of people see computer-adaptive learning materials and computerized assessments, both of which make use of student data, as what will soon universally replace current printed educational materials.
If you control the data and who gets access to that data, then you control that market
especially if you own a portal that is the meeting place for that data and those computer-adaptive learning products and assessments and if
states and districts get access to those learning materials and assessments through your portal.
I hope that everyone understands this.
The Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] were paid for by the very people pushing this agenda because they were a necessary first step in carrying it out. There had to be a single national list of “standards” to tag the computer-adaptive learning materials and assessments to if the BUSINESS PLAN that I just described was to work.
All this was carefully planned from the beginning, and the whole thing was present in the Technology Blueprint issued by the Duncan administration at the very beginning of Arne Dunkin Duncan’s tenure as Secretary of the new Department for the Regimentation, Dehumanization, and Privatization of U.S. Education, formerly the USDE.
“A lot of people see computer-adaptive learning materials and computerized assessments, both of which make use of student data, as what will soon universally replace current printed educational materials.”
This memo of August 16, 2012, from the California Education Technology Task Force (ETTF) contains language that supports what you’re saying:
Click to access efftmemo.pdf
“To move California public schools from static text-based resources to dynamic, interactive, adaptive multimedia content that engages, empowers, and connects students to all forms of learning, the Task Force recommends that the State Superintendent…
“Promote innovation, through the availability of tools of statewide benefit, to transition schools from the historical dependence on textbooks and toward an expanded online deployment of instructional materials.”
The memo says that “students generally want and deserve” the following: “Engaging, interactive curriculum that can be carried in a
single wireless device, instead of a heavy backpack full of un-engaging, static textbooks.”
However, the final report contains this language:
“Recommendation #9: Build capacity for local and regional decision making regarding instructional materials, including digital curriculum resources. The CDE, State Board of Education, and education stakeholders should develop guidance and procedures to ensure alignment with the state curriculum and to support local school district decision making. These efforts should ensure flexibility and variety in formats and allow for the use of open education resources.”
See “Empowering Learning: A Blueprint for California Education Technology 2014-2017”:
Click to access yr14bp0418.pdf
The August, 2012, memo isn’t all bad, but it is revealing, and worth a look. Apparently, the slickly produced “blueprint” was published after a period of feedback and revision. I’m sure there’s plenty of lobbying going on in favor of the more drastic measures offered in the original memo. But at least the report acknowledges the importance of flexibility, variety, and local decisions in selecting materials. It even gives a nod to OER.
Thanks, Randal, for that post!
There are some in California who get it, who understand that there can be
inexpensive, high-quality, extraordinarily rich and varied, liberating, innovative, crowd sourced and open sourced pull technology alternatives
to very expensive educational push technologies (that is, to mediocre, unimaginative and mind-numbing but flashy and well-packaged, lowest-common denominator crap being pushed upon schools by educational publishing monopolists at extraordinarily high cost).
Think Wikipedia versus Encarta.
But the monopolists will always be in the wings with big bags of cash whenever there is a vote that bears upon this struggle between the two visions for the near future of US education. And the monopolists have a lot of Vichy collaborators in state departments and districts and among well-known edupundits and consultants.
Making matters worse, the temptation for politicians to take the monopolists’ cash will be great because most people aren’t even aware that there exist two very different possibilities for the near future of US education and do not understand how very much depends upon the direction in which we choose to go, just as most Americans haven’t a clue what “net neutrality” means.
And, of course, both the teachers’ unions, which should be the most well-funded institutions working to educate people about the positive alternative for kids and teachers to that grim future being engineered by the plutocrats have, through incompetence or ignorance, I am not sure which sold out–have become the plutocrats’ propaganda ministries.
The bare bones infrastructure for data-mongering was expanding in 1990, jump-started by a concerted effort to standardize vocabularies to characterize public education–think almanac–but expanded to fit the architecture of computer and information retrieval programs.
In tandem (as usual) Gates and USDE poured massive amounts of money into data-mongering starting in 2005, this intended to link student and teacher data in a continuum from birth to college and beyond.
Gates conjured the program called Teacher Student Data Link (TSDL), one facet of a data gathering campaign funded at $390,493,545 between 2005 and mid-May 2011 by the Gates’ Foundation.
This campaign envisions the link between teacher and student data serving 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, and 8. Inform policy makers of best value practices, including compensation. See http://www.dataqualitycampaign.org/about
The TSDL system is intended to ensure that all courses are based on standards, and that all responsibilities for learning are assigned to one or more “teachers of record” in charge of a student or class. A teacher of record has a unique identifier (think barcode) for an entire career in teaching. A record is generated whenever a teacher of record has some specified proportion of responsibility for “a student’s learning activities” identified by the performance measures for a particular standard, subject, and grade level.
In addition to the eight purposes noted above, the TSDL system aims to have ”period-by-period tracking of teachers and students every day; including tests, quizzes, projects, homework, classroom participation, or other forms of day-to-day assessments and progress measures”—a level of accountability (I call it surveillance) that is said to be comparable to business practices (TSDL, 2011, “Key Components”).
This system will keep current and longitudinal data on teachers and individual students, schools, districts, states, and educators ranging from principals to higher education faculty. The aim is to determine the “best value” investments in education and monitor outcomes, taking into account as many demographic factors as possible, including health records for preschoolers. In Bloom may be dead but there are data-warehouses supported in part by Gates committed to that vision of data mining ( e.g. Battelle for Kids in Ohio).
On the federal side we have The Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) Grant Program, authorized under Title II, Educational Technical Assistance of the ‘‘Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002 H. R. 3801.” The first grants were made in 2005, the same year that the Gates’ Foundation started the parallel Data Quality Campaign. See http://nces.ed.gov/programs/slds/
Achieve promoted, and still promotes, the Data Quality Campaign with a special focus on getting state policy makers to track individual students’ progress from pre-K to graduation and to use that data “to improve outcomes.” The program is being extended to teacher education with college programs measured by the test scores their graduates produce when they enter classrooms. See http://aacte.org/index.php?/Media-Center/AACTE-in-the-News/administration-pushes-teacher-prep-accountability.html.
In Bloom may be dead but all this other work is still in motion.
I think it wise to listen to some experts on Big Data. “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 our-selves 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.
“Data-mongering”, by a “Data-scrounge”!
Laura H. Chapman:
“In addition to the eight purposes noted above, the TSDL system aims to have ”period-by-period tracking of teachers and students every day; including tests, quizzes, projects, homework, classroom participation, or other forms of day-to-day assessments and progress measures”—a level of accountability (I call it surveillance) that is said to be comparable to business practices (TSDL, 2011, “Key Components”).”
That definitely is surveillance. Thanks for digging into it. Do you know if these systems are in use anywhere? Also…
“The threat is that we will let our-selves 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.”
Great quote. Jaron Lanier in his book Who Owns the Future? gives a great example of how data networks can lead to disaster. He writes, “Finance got networked the wrong way. The big kinds of computation that have made certain other industries like music ‘efficient’ from a particular point of view were applied to finance, and that broke finance. It made finance stupid.” He talks about “Siren Servers” (data-gathering computers that analyze the data and use it “to manipulate the rest of the world to advantage”). These big data schemes will always backfire, he believes, because they invariably disperse “increased risk, cost, and waste” into the world. (If you happen to own a Siren Server, though, you may get rich in the meantime.)
This is what’s likely to happen to education if these data systems take hold.
These systems are in use.They are hard-wired into federal policies. For an example of the effort to micromange education by an appeal to the “authority of data” see Federal Register /Vol. 74, No. 221 /Wednesday, November 18, 2009 /Rules and Regulations Race to the Top Fund AGENCY: Department of Education.Retrieved from http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2009-11-18/pdf/E9-27426.pdf
Final Definitions pages 559751-52
Unbridled faith in big data supported Ronald Regan’s 1983 “Strategic Defense Initiative” also known as “StarWars”–a plan to have computers pre-emptively shoot down anything that looked like an “incoming” threat. Operating on some flawed on assumptions about a “threat,” one computer–empowered by artificial intelligence to make decisions–mistook a full moon for a massive attack.
Your points about the hazards in using big data for computer-based “recommendation systems” (in lieu of human judgment) are widely known to computer experts. Many have tried to temper enthusiasms with some reasoning about the vulnerability of these systems to tiny gliches in programming code to say nothing of the deliberate and often patient work of hackers and sabateurs world wide. Ethical issues, too often ignored, occasioned the creation of Computers for Professional Responsibility and other groups of concerned experts. Unfortunately, none ended up in USDE. An informative 1987 anthology by David Bellin and Gary Chapman (my nephew) helped to dampen enthusiasm for the Star Wars project. See Computers in Battle: Will They Work?
Thanks for the info. It’ll take a huge effort to dislodge this nonsense. Awareness is the first step.
laura chapman. you. are. awesome.
you and mercedes schneider.
doing what our education reporters would be doing if we had a free press in the banana republic we’ve become
Where there is money to be made, seems ethics lose! This is what happens when we have a corrupt government and oligarchs.
This is exactly what happens. It’s banana republic stuff. Deals made in backrooms by oligarchs and their sycophants and toadies. National standards created and copyrighted by unelected, self-appointed organizations and entirely funded by the very people who stand to gain financially from them.
You are right, Bob. And Obama and his gang keeps pushing Charters, standards, and testing. NUTS! Our country is getting more stupid.
How much of this was “prophesied” in Brave New World and Animal Farm. If people are like “sheep going astray” and the Gov’t (combined with market capitalism” is supposed to be the “shepherd” that leads them to the “promised land” (via Big Data’s pathway), then who to say what InBloom does or provides is wrong or evil?
I don’t want a 666 in my forehead one day, but it seems like that is the pathway that fallen mankind uses to control the erring masses (offering them some false messiah of technology, control and lack of freedom to choose one’s own solutions).
Bill Gates wants us all to suck off the nipple of Microsoft, and for all his “charity” he would never do it if there was not some expected future reward, via increase in market control. Very few, if any, fallen beings are true altruists. In fact only One/Jesus was and He was killed because of it. HIs altruism puts our best imitations of it to shame.
Yeshua of Nazareth drove the money changers out of the temple.
He said, “It is more difficult for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.”
He said,
“And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”
It’s pretty clear what He would have thought of all this.
I don’t think anyone cares what he would have thought about this.
Although like TFA teachers, Jesus did a lot of teaching without proper certification.
No wonder the authorities were so upset. LOL
http://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2014/05/10/inbloom-bloomboard-and-the-undeniable-corporate-reform-need-for-student-data/
See also this great piece by the indefatigable Ms. Schneider:
http://deutsch29.wordpress.com/?s=golden+goose
Pearson PLC, not Pearson Inc., A Publically Limited Company Based in London
Senator Edward Markley sent a letter to the DOE asking for information on the impact of increased collection and distribution of student data on student privacy rights. EPIC:Student privacy
and EPIC: v. The Department of Education. A judge ruled that EPIC lacked the standing to challenge the DOE’s unlawful regs. But parents have the standing to challenge . Electronic Privacy Information Center
epic.org
Nadine – I know this is not news to us but we must continue to fight to keep parents aware and involved. Shari
Sent from my iPad
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In the ancient Greek myth of the twelve labors of Heracles, when the Hydra’s head is cut off, two more grow back in its place. Well, in this case, we’ll see many, many more heads than that, and those will take the form of database systems and curriculum portals adopted by states and districts.
That reminds me.
I visited a middle school this afternoon, one my daughter is considering attending this fall. I was looking at some of the student writing on the wall — some writing about novels they’d recently read. The only title I recognized was one from the Hunger Games series. The rest, from what I could surmise, all looked like they were in the “young adult” or “age 10-14” or whatever the category is called. No “classics,” certainly, and so I found myself filling with nostalgia for classics.
Then I caught myself and thought, was this any different from the stuff I was reading in middle school? Is this a train that left the station 40, 50 years ago? I truly have no idea, no memory at all.
Anyway, it bummed me out.
I understand entirely, FLERP, but some of these titles might really surprise you. There is a lot of really superb YA literature–work that is challenging and fascinating to kids and that helps to turn them into readers. The variety of this literature is truly astonishing, and there are some first-rate authors producing it. I’m sorry to hear that there were no classics on this wall, but it’s entirely possible that that’s a function of the particular assignment or program that generated the work featured there.
Perhaps you have heard don’t judge a book by its cover?
Don’t judge a school/curriculum/program by what is up on the walls.
Seriously.
I have a friend at a tony private school. They have teacher assistants put up the bulletin boards. Very beautiful. Lots of time and money involved.Only the best stuff goes up. Often the entire point of the assignment is to produce “show material” as my friend calls it. The parents love it.
At my school we are required as part of our evaluation to have an ever rotating gallery of student work complete with annotation by the teacher. Not all work/assignments are “show material”, but up it goes. We don’t want to fun afoul of the chick with a check list, ah…err.. I mean, administrator.
Anyway. Just a thought.
Perhaps they are reading Jane Eyre next week.
BTW, I agree with you, it does make me a bit sad when my older students have NO IDEA who Huck Finn (or some other classic character) is. I loved those books so much when i was young. The English teachers tell me they must focus on non fiction. And that is probably better for the students anyway.
Sigh.
The article refers to Pearson as, “The London – and New York City – based publishing giant…”
Though they have business concerns in NYC, the company is based in London.
( It has always been Pearson PLC, not Pearson Inc.)
The mission of Gates/Murdoch/Klein and their surrogates is to monetize children. Follow the money starting in Texas with the “miracle” and it’s very clear what’s happening. UT Health/UT System commercialize intellectual property via the Bayh-Dole Act. Lobbyists profiteers such as Sandy Kress and Beth Ann Bryan (Spellings surrogate) promoted Wireless Generation in Texas and then nationally through Reading First legislation – federal and state grants.
Then, Joel Klein and his BFF Rupert Murdoch see billions funneled to them from taxpayers by Arne’s RTTT and buy Wireless Generation – rebrand as Amplify. inBloom grows – then wilted as a result of hero parents.
It is completely possible to have adaptive online curricula without having Orwellian databases evaluating student work against monolithic, invariant criteria for stack ranking.
One of the many horrific features of systems like the ones being forced upon the country right now is that they completely predetermine the criteria for acceptable learning and so personalize only to the extent that they test to determine where to plop students down in a completely regimented learning pathway. Entirely absent from such systems is the student’s discovering a passion and pursuing it along a divergent path or learning how to think independently.
Such a system will not produce students who vary in their intellectual experiences and passions in keeping with the variety that is actually needed by a complex, diverse, pluralistic society that depends upon schools to produce persons of unique talents and interests. In fact, such a system won’t produce people who are passionate about learning AT ALL, and it isn’t intended to do so.
Such a system will reward being an obedient drone who undertakes and obediently performs any particular task put before him or her. Thus the current emphasis on “grit”–the ability to persevere in any task no matter how alienating that task might be from one’s own intrinsic motivations, from others (who are, after all, the competition), and from the rewards of one’s own labor (e.g., the satisfaction of having produced something unique and creative). Such systems are meant to beat intrinsic motivation out of children and to replace this with conditioned response to extrinsic motivators–to produce compliant, low-level workers.
The system being created will not produce artists or thinkers. It will produce people who will paint by number on demand and do as they are told.
And that’s why the oligarchs are creating such a system.
Of course, they don’t want THAT for THEIR children. No. Such regimentation is what they want for the training of OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN. Their children, the children of the blessed ones, of the Elect or the Eloi, are to go to schools where teaching and learning are not envisioned as checking off items on a list or as milling to specifications but as nurturing of the growth of unique sets of skills, knowledge, interests, aspirations, goals. That separate, parallel system for the children of the oligarchs, unlike the Commoners’ Core, will produce individuals who can think for themselves and will insist upon being able to do that but, of course, ones who recognize and act upon their superior birthright within the emerging economic system in the United States and the rest of the world, which is most accurately called NeoFeudalism.
This whole move to centralize and regiment and minutely define and grade educational attainment in real time, from cradle to grave, is an attempt to create a training system for workers, for the children of the proles.
Arne Duncan is very, very clear about this. So is Bill Gates. This is about a particular vision for workforce training, as distinct from a vision for an educational system. This is training for Other People’s Children. The children of the Little People. Those people, as Mitt Romney called them.
I wonder if part of the embedded data mining in testing is (or could ever lead to) psychological profiling. Diane mentioned that the information would be sold to “vendors of products and services to schools and students.” Beyond more “educational” software development, could this encompass pharmaceutical companies?
For example, if a child answers questions that point consistently point to depression, anxiety, or anger, would that test be flagged? Even if no personal information was given to companies (a nice, easy loophole), the percentages could be aggregated and sold. You know, 39% of teens in suburban [insert city] may have depression, 45% of rural [insert city] teens may have uncontrollable anger, etc. The drug companies could focus their rep’s energies in those areas for those particular problems, as well as advertise at certain time of the day, when parents and children are likely to be watching TV together and see heart-warming adverts. for said drugs. That, combined with the information already available about what regions have higher populations of medically insured parents, it would be like fishing in a barrel.
Going even farther out…mining socio-political viewpoints of future voters could open a whole new market for political agencies and lobbying groups. For example, a test question could allude to a solution of either eliminating a perceived threat or building understanding surrounding the feelings/issues towards the source of that threat. In cities where gun regulations are strict, gun sales are mediocre but a majority of teens believe that eliminating a problem is more effective and satisfying than [responsibly and humanely] working out conflict, the NRA could channel their energies and funding into getting the right people in office to be ready for the next wave of voters/consumers.
I have a sneaking suspicion that there is a lot of money waiting in the wings to know what tweens and teens are thinking and feeling, beyond the stock industries such as food, clothing, and entertainment. It is a very easy way for big business (who have the funds to buy this info) to divide and conquer even more efficiently.
Of course, any of this profiling would be under a social service guise to help identify and serve troubled children. Sounds so delightfully altruistic, doesn’t it?