The National Education Policy Center recently published its 18th annual report on schoolhouse commercialism. When these reports began, the focus was usually the intrusion of advertising and other selling of products via textbooks, videos, and other means of communication.
Now the commercialism is different: when children are online, corporations are watching them and mining their data.
Faith Boninger and Alex Molnar’s report is called: “Learning to Be Watched: Surveillance Culture at School.”
They summarize it thus:
“Schools now routinely direct children online to do their schoolwork, thereby exposing them to tracking of their online behavior and subsequent targeted marketing. This is part of the evolution of how marketing companies use digital marketing, ensuring that children and adolescents are constantly connected and available to them. Moreover, because digital technologies enable extensive personalization, they amplify opportunities for marketers to control what children see in the private world of their digital devices as well as what they see in public spaces. This year’s annual report on schoolhouse commercialism trends considers how schools facilitate the work of digital marketers and examines the consequent threats to children’s privacy, their physical and psychological well-being, and the integrity of the education they receive. Constant digital surveillance and marketing at school combine to normalize for children the unquestioned role that corporations play in their education and in their lives more generally.”
Key Takeaway: 18th Annual Report on Schoolhouse Commercialism Trends explores the use of digital marketing in schools
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Responding to comment, a PARCC spokesperson said: “I’ll get you my pretty, you and your little dog too.”
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If PARCC tests were well written and grade level appropriate this conversation would never be happening. Their test items violate many of the straight forward rules for MC item writing. Violations so blatant that they are completely indefensible. So-called “rigor” should never involve trying to mislead and confuse young children.
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HEY PARRC! Can’t blame you guys for being a little thin skinned. Down to six actively participating states (down from 24) and now the new ESSA threatens to shut you down completely. BAD reviews and bullying the teaching profession will not help your reputation. In your defense, as a former consultant test writer, I know how constraining bad standards can be when developing a test. But jeez, guys this CRRAP test writing gets you a “highly ineffective” rating from me.
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This whole thing is reminiscent of Scientology’s attempts to keep its version of “The Book of Genesis” (known as “OT Level VII”) off the internet.
According to OT VII:
75 million years ago, Earth’s first human inhabitants — the ancestors of you & me — were invaded by evil spirits or “thetans” that were placed here by the evil Galactic ruler Xenu as part of Xenu’s intergalactic colonization program in response to planetary over-population… and … well, you get the picture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology_and_the_Internet
Watch South Park’s summary of OT Level VII here:
or the BBC’s version here:
In Scientology, you’re only allowed to learn the Xenu story, and other idiotic “secrets” after you’ve spend years and upwards of $500,000… but some folks started posting all of this on the internet, and for years, Scientology leaders engaged in countless nonsensical attempts of repression and removal from the internet of this stuff.
The more they tried to repress and remove the information, the more people found out about it. That’s how it works with the internet.
As with PARCC folks, the Scientologist leaders claimed that these “secrets” were banned from dissemination because they owned the copyright, then engaged in countless acts of madness that are detailed below. Given the way the internet operates, the Scientology leaders eventually realized the expensive and wasteful futility of attempting to hide their “secrets” and gave up.
The PARCC folks should try and learn from Scientology’s folly, and throw in the towel as well. It’s just going to be a huge waste of time and money. Not only are they going to end up losing in the end, but the more they try to suppress it, the more people will read all these “secret” standardized test questions.
If you tell people, “You’re not allowed to see this,” that will just make those people more and more determined to try and see it, and say, “Oh, people are telling me this is forbidden? Oh, now, I REALLY want to see it. What the-hell are they hiding?”
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wikipedia:
The online battle is generally regarded as having begun with the arrival of Dennis Erlich to alt.religion.scientology in late July 1994. A former high-ranking official in the Scientology organization who had been personally affiliated with L. Ron Hubbard, he caused a number of regular participants in the newsgroup to sit up and take notice.[11]:4, 6[12]
…
The first postings of the OT (the Xenu story) documents were done through an anonymous remailer, and the identity of the person who made them available on the newsgroup was never discovered. However, Dennis Erlich posted replies to these messages on the newsgroup, and his replies contained the entire text of the original messages (including the disputed materials). Scientology’s lawyers therefore approached him, declaring that Erlich had re-published the copyrighted works in his newsgroup messages. Erlich’s reply to this was to deny their requests to remove his postings from the newsgroup.
…
Shortly after the initial legal announcements and rmgroup attempt, representatives of Scientology followed through with a series of lawsuits against various participants on the newsgroup, including Dennis Erlich, in Religious Technology Center v. Netcom. The first raid took place on February 13, 1995.[17] Accompanied by Scientology lawyers, federal marshals made several raids on the homes of individuals who were accused of posting Scientology’s copyrighted materials to the newsgroup. Raids took place against Arnaldo Lerma (Virginia),[18] Lawrence A. Wollersheim and Robert Penny of FACTNet (Colorado), and Dennis Erlich (California). Internationally, raids took place against Karin Spaink (The Netherlands) and Zenon Panoussis (Sweden).
In addition to filing lawsuits against individuals, Scientology also sued the Washington Post for reprinting one paragraph of the OT writings in a newspaper article, as well as several Internet service providers, including Netcom, Tom Klemesrud, and XS4ALL. It also regularly demanded the deletion of material from the Deja News archive.
Participants in alt.religion.scientology began using quotes from OT III in particular to publicize the online battle over the secret documents.[19] The story of Xenu was subsequently quoted in many publications, including news reports on CNN[20] and 60 Minutes.[21] It became the most famous reference to the OT levels, to the point where many Internet users who were not intimately familiar with Scientology had heard the story of Xenu, and immediately associated the name with Scientology.
The initial strikes against Scientology’s critics settled down into a series of legal battles that raged through the courts. The Electronic Frontier Foundation provided legal assistance to defendant Tom Klemesrud and his attorney Richard Horning helped find Dennis Erlich Pro Bono defense. Daily reports of the latest happenings were posted to alt.religion.scientology.
In the wake of the Scientologist actions, the Penet remailer, which had been the most popular anonymous remailer in the world until the Scientology “war” took place, was shut down. Johan Helsingius, operator of the remailer, stated that the legal protections afforded him in his country (Finland) were too thin to protect the anonymity of his users and he decided to close down the remailer as a result.[22][23][24]
Scientology’s online campaign
After failing to remove the newsgroup, Scientologists adopted a strategy of newsgroup spam and intimidation.[25] Scientologists hired third parties to regularly flood the newsgroup with pro-scientology messages, vague anti-scientology messages, irrelevant comments, and accusations that other posters are secret Scientologists intent on tracking and punishing posters. This makes the newsgroup virtually unreadable via online readers such as Google Groups, although more specialized newsreading software that can filter out all messages by specific “high noise” posters make the newsgroup more usable.[citation needed]
While legal battles were being fought in the courts, an equally intense and aggressive campaign was waged online. The newsgroup alt.religion.scientology found itself at the heart of an electronic maelstrom of information and disinformation, as the newsgroup itself was attacked both literally and figuratively. Tens of thousands of junk messages were spammed onto the newsgroup, rendering it nearly unreadable at times when the message “floods” were at their peaks.[25] Over one million sporgery articles were injected into the newsgroup by Scientology management and staff; former Scientology staff member Tory Christman has spoken at length about her involvement in these attacks. Lawyers representing the Church of Scientology made public appeals to Internet service providers to remove the newsgroup completely from their news servers.[26] Furthermore, anonymous participants in the newsgroup kept up a steady stream of flame wars and off-topic arguments. Participants on the newsgroup accused Scientology of organising these electronic attacks, though the organization consistently denied any wrongdoing.
In the early days of the World Wide Web, groups associated with Scientology employed a similar strategy to make finding websites critical of the organization more difficult. Scientology employed Web designers to write thousands of Web pages for their site, thus flooding early search engines.[27] This problem was solved by the innovation of clustering responses from the same Web server, showing no more than the top two results from any one site.
Since 1995, Scientology has utilized copyright infringement laws to prosecute critics posting controversial information about the organisation on the Web. The organization has been accused of utilizing not only legal pressure, but also blackmail and character assassination in an attempt to win many of the court cases in which it involves itself.[28] On the other side of the battle, many Web-page developers have linked the words “Dianetics” and “Scientology” to Operation Clambake.
This resulted in the anti-Scientology site having the highest Google index on the term for a while, which in turn resulted in Scientology persuading Google to remove links to the site[29] until international outcry led to the links being restored. This might be considered an early example of a Google bomb, and has led to questions about the power and obligations of Internet search providers.
In the 1990s Scientology was distributing a special software package for its members to ‘protect’ them from “unapproved” material about the church. The software is designed to completely block out the newsgroup alt.religion.scientology, various anti-Scientology web sites, and all references to various critics of Scientology. This software package was derided by critics, who accused the organization of censorship and called the program “Scieno Sitter”, after the content-control software net-filter program Cyber Sitter. Since no updates have been reported since 1998 (and the original filter program only worked with Windows 95) the package is unlikely to be in use with recent operating systems and browsers due to software rot.[27]
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Here’s a better quality version of South Park’s animated re-telling of Scientology’s Xenu story: (it’s totally free, although you have to click acceptance of Trey & Matt’s terms, and then sit through a commercial… but it’s worth it, in my opinion)
http://southpark.cc.com/clips/104274/what-scientologist-actually-believe
This stuff is truly barking mad!
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Great …… I need to discuss the Texas Court ruling on school finance..BRR
Billy R. Reagan
(713) 795-9696
(832) 215-8877 cell
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It appears that our adversaries are realizing the importance of social media in our pushback and are now trying to disrupt it. Too similar to what has been happening with Julian.
Burris from my iPad
>
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