The business of data-mining is big business. Corporations use a variety of devices to gather data points about children, which may be shared with vendors.
Some states are passing laws to ban or regulate biometric data tracking. Others are not.
Behind the great Golden Data Rush? The Gates-funded Data Quality Campaign, supported by the usual Beltway groups and endorsed by the U.S. Department of Education, which offered funding to states as part of Race to the Top to build longitudinal data warehouses, someday cradle to grave.
Someone is watching every minute, every eye movement, every click on the computer. Is this the world we want to live in?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
from Wikipedia:
On 8 February 1950, East Germany saw the establishment of the Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit), commonly known as the Stasi. The Stasi sought to “know everything about everyone.” Its annual budget has been estimated at approximately $1 billion. Out of a population of 16 million, the agency kept files on nearly 6 million of its citizens.
The Stasi had 90,000 full-time employees who were assisted by 170,000 full-time unofficial collaborators (Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter); together these made up 1 in 63 (nearly 2%) of the entire East German population. Together with these, a much larger number of occasional informers brought up the total to 1 per 6.5 persons.
Room 101 is a room introduced in the climax of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. It is a torture chamber in the Ministry of Love, in which the Party attempts to subject a prisoner to his or her own worst nightmare, fear or phobia, with the object of breaking down their resistance.
According to Anna Funder’s book Stasiland, Erich Mielke, the last Minister of State Security (Stasi) of East Germany, had the floors of the Stasi headquarters renumbered so that his second floor office would be number 101.
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The Department of Education seems to have taken down the report, from its Office of Educational Technology, on Promoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance. This report was an eye opener. Early in the report, its authors bemoaned the fact that fMRI machines for monitoring students’ mental states were too large and expensive to employ in classrooms but then went on to say that other technologies have been developed to monitor, continually, students’ affective responses. It went on to talk about the department’s studies, funded by the Gates Foundation, of the use of retinal monitors, galvanic skin response bracelets, and other technologies for monitoring and recording, continually, in real time, students’ affective responses as they were doing their worksheets on a screen. These go far, far beyond Orwell’s telescreens in their invasiveness.
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Read about this. The researchers are so eager to get funding they have no interest in the ethics of what they are doing, or concern for what others will fo with the research and gadgets.
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Researchers? Scary. I only wanted data to help my students get more assistance each year. I never thought of it as something to keep forever. No one’s business.
Technology has opened a whole can of worms…
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So inBloom died and reemerged into something new. Gates wasn’t about to give up on this. Totally disgusting. Pretty soon Big Brother will be watching all of us.
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“He sees you when you’re sleeping. . . .”
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No need to fight over inBloom when there is “the cloud”. If school systems get rid of their reliance on computer hard drives and servers by using “the cloud”, they can collect ALL THE DATA THEY WANT. And under the guise of saving money too.
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“Watch-listed at 15”
Johnny is subversive
He wrote a tenth grade poem
That called The Man coercive
And criticized his drone
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“Before true accountability can be achieved, we must do a better job as a nation of following individual students from grade to grade, school to school, and from kindergarten to postsecondary education and the workplace. The Data Quality Campaign offers state leaders an important set of tools and resources for accomplishing this goal.” – Matt Gandal, Executive Vice President, Achieve, Inc.”
So “true accountability” hadn’t been achieved yet in 2005. Are we there yet, or do we have to hire many, many more consultants? Is there some point where we achieve “true accountability”?
The passive language they use regarding student role in all this always bothers me: “to improve student achievement” – ed reformers are the (implied) actors, the “student achievements” will improve solely as a result of the ed reformers effort. The way they present this, the only role for students is as data-providers.
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This is O/T, but it IS an opportunity to collect data 🙂
Propublica followed up on the NC charter management company that is a nonprofit but is making big bucks off public schools.
They’re pursuing the “trade secrets” part of the story, where the charter management won’t reveal financial information because they are claiming “trade secrets”.
Trade secrets is the same thing White Hat in Ohio claimed when they were sued by charter parents. They wouldn’t reveal financials in the discovery for the lawsuit because they said that was part of their secret charter sauce, or something. White Hat will probably prevail in Ohio. Ohio’s state lawmakers and regulators are completely captured by charter lobbyists. I don’t know if that’s true (yet) in North Carolina.
If you know of a trade secrets claim by a charter management company in your state, you can contact Propublica. There’s a special email address at the end of the story to do that.
http://www.propublica.org/article/north-carolina-tells-charter-schoolchainit-cant-keep-administrator-salaries
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Around SW Ohio, the angry parents are speaking out against the data mining as being their biggest concern, esp through testing data. And they have fears of the Common Core Standards. However, you should see what the Ohio legislature is trying to do to replace CCSS. They want the creation and approval processes to be left up to non-educators…the legislators. We are doomed with these Cretins in Ohio. Kasich favors privatizing education. We have the honor of Boehner as our Rep. People here are voting based on their ministers’ recommendations. And they are unaware of what they are doing because they think they are being told what to think by voices from God. A good teacher friend of mine told me that he adores George W Bush because he is “born again” so he was guided by God. The Koch brothers and friends are well aware of the effect that the Word of God has on these people. They use it to align those voters with our horrendous decisions to ship jibs and money overseas. They block out ant other thought…because God told them. I beg to differ.
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I’m tempted to opt my kid out just to throw a (tiny!) wrench into the system, at this point.
They don’t have any real interest in his school or his “achievement”. If they did they wouldn’t have devoted all their time and PR efforts and advocacy to charters/vouchers. Why should we play along with this experiment? I haven’t seen any benefits of ed reform accrue to our local schools for the last 15 years, and they are not “wealthy suburban”, they are “ordinary rustbelt”.
As far as I can tell public schools in this state are hunkered down just trying to keep above water while ed reformers throw them anvils hoping to sink them.
Can they point to an existing public school system they’ve improved? Not replaced with a charter system. PUBLIC. IMPROVED.
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Do it! Every little bit of data they miss drives them nuts. I’ve opted my son out, they spend time and effort calling us and sending letters. At one point they tried to threaten us about a practice test. My son got mad, answered their questions in German, and refused to translate. (He spends summers in Germany with his German grandmother.) The gap in their data base bugs them.
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The linked memo is pretty much the creation story behind CCSS. Same cast of characters, gotta give it to them for remaining true to their goals . They’ve been playing the long game for the past ten years or so while teachers have had their noses buried in their classrooms, not the boardrooms of the well-connected wealthy few.
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Let’s not forget the critical and supporting regulatory role played by our own Department of Education and their 2012 Datapalooza celebration and gathering of data mining entrepreneurs and vendors…
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The national data-gathering campaigns were established in 2005 with two independent but coordinated funding sources: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and USDE.
The vision of the Gates Foundation. Between 2005 and early 2011, the Gates’ Foundation invested $75 million in a major advocacy campaign for data-gathering, aided by the National Governor’s Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, Achieve, and The Education Trust.
During the same period, the Gates Foundation also awarded grants totaling $390,493,545 for projects to gather data and build systems for reporting on teacher effectiveness. This multi-faceted campaign envisions the link between teacher and student data serving eight purposes:
1. Determine which teachers help students be-come 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 (TSDL, 2011, “Use and Purpose”).
The TSDL system is intended to monitor the work of teachers in a manner that ensures 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 is best understood as person who has a unique identifier (think barcode) for an entire career in teach-ing. A record is generated whenever a teacher of record has some specified proportion of responsibility for a student’s learning activities. Learning activities must be defined in terms of the performance measures for a particular standard, by subject and grade level.
The TSDL system requires period-by-period track-ing 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 surveillance that is said to be comparable to business practices (TSDL, 2011, “Key Components”).
The system will keep current and longitudinal data on the performance of teachers and individual students, as well schools, districts, states, and educators ranging from principals to higher education faculty. This data will then be used to determine the “best value” investments to make in education and to monitor improvements in outcomes, taking into account as many demographic factors as possible, including health records for preschoolers.
The vision of USDE. The Gates-funded TSDL campaign added significant resources to a parallel federal initiative. Since 2006, the U.S. Department of Education has invested over $700 million in the State-wide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) Grant Program. More than forty states have received multi-year grants to standardize data on education. Operated by the Institute of Education Sciences, the SLDS pro-gram is:
“designed to aid state education agencies in developing and implementing longitudinal data systems. These systems are intended to enhance the ability of States to efficiently and accurately manage, analyze, and use education data, including individual student records…to help States, districts, schools, and teachers make data-driven decisions to improve student learn-ing, as well as facilitate research to increase student achievement and close achievement gaps” (USDE, 2011, Overview).
These two interlocking data systems are now being used to determine the format and data-entry requirements for teachers who are required to write SLOs–Student Learning Objectives (and variants). The templates for these pseudo-scientific exercises require “baseline data” reports on students who are dubbed the “population” enrolled in a class or course.
SLOs are framed and rated as if the teacher is documenting a one-group pretest-posttest experiment for the population named in the SLO, but with no control group, and with an arbitrary demand for multiple standards, measures, and research-based teaching strategies. No validity, no reliability, just sales talks since 1999 on this absurd process–marketed as a proxy for VAM and guarantor of “improved teaching” therefore “improved student learning.” There is no there there, just the desire to micromanage teachers.
A graphic for USDE’s “Student Teacher Data Management System” also called by the Orwellian title “Total Information Management Tool.” is here
http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/os/technology/plan/2004/edlite-xplan-sdm.html
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Funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, the SLDS concept has been expanded to be the MLDE (Multi-State Longitudinal Data Exchange). This was done as apparently students MUST be tracked as they move from state to state. Has their been any public discussion about the MLDE? Of course, none of this data is even verified in the SLDS or the MLDE so just how good is any of this “data” anyway. This database is “permanent” — so what guarantees are there in some future about who would have access to this data? Parents and teachers are the only advocates for students and most don’t even know this is happening.
http://www.wiche.edu/news/release/17081
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Why isn’t personal data personal?? There needs to be a HIPAA for student and teacher data.
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There is, it’s called FERPA. It’s just that the semi-dog, oops I mean semi-god The Dunkster declared that it was no longer in effect.
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I meant now.
It must be demanded.
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Deb… I find this so incredibly ironic in that teachers who have students who have allergies (some serious food allergies) are not allowed to post this on a door to warn any unsuspecting outsider coming into the classroom due to privacy laws and yet every other component of the student’s personal history is on a database anyway! One aspect deals with “life threatening need for information” and isn’t allowed due to supposed “privacy” under HIPPA and the other is used for some bureaucrats zest for more date and this is allowed… UGHH.
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Art, I know. I smack my head regularly. We also have bags of food delivered for certain students. The person delivering it can’t know the names. The teacher can’t know the names, but we are responsible for getting the bags to the kids. The other kids know! They don’t judge. It is just how it is. They know that some kids get free or reduced lunches. No one cares. But it is private. The kids with allergies are designated as existing in the rooms, but not by name. It is so absurd.
Yet, we enter, as directed, their private educational info, and it remains forever indelibly written on a database.
We are nuts!!!!
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This will enable the online providers to track students market their wares and have the date they need to offer so-called personalized education. One promoter of this “flexibility” and on-demand anytime programming is the international association of on-line providers of educational services and here in Ohio the KnowledgeWorks foundation recipient of lots of Gates money
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Thanks for this reference. The expansion is really Orwellian and also looks like it brings into being the dreams of Mark Tucker in his letter to Hillary Clinton…Workforce tracking for college graduates, productivity measures–salaries earned by major and by college, data for competitive and anti-competitive wage policies in states (cooperation in a race to the bottom) and economic pandering sufficient to close down higher education operations that are not producing job-ready workers-reification of vocational training over studies in the arts and humanities.
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Deb–I posted over a year ago that the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center:
epic.org filed suit against the USDOE. A judge threw the case out saying that EPIC did not have standing to challenge FERPA. It is going to take the teacher’s unions or a parent or a group of parents in a class action suit to challenge the law. Here is the link about the EPIC challenge: https://epic.org/apa/ferpa/default.html
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Thanks!
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My name is Martin Serna. My Father still insists that because he is doing nothing wrong and has nothing to hide, he does not really mind all the tracking and cameras.
I have a comment, though. The people who are tracking the Masses are the Elites, i.e. Harvard, etc.. The Masses need another educational attainment goal other than Harvard, etc., because those places are houses of prostitution and the entrenched Elites want people like me to the the prostitutes.
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