We are all aware that our personal data are being collected, stored, sold, and used every time we log on to a computer. Yet it never ceases to surprise when we learn this again. Bill Fitzgerald is a teacher, administrator, and technology director. He signed a petition called neveragain.tech. He explains why in this post.
Here is his conclusion:
Third party tracking is pervasive on the web. This technology creates marked and growing information asymmetry, where the odds are increasingly stacked against people, and stacked for corporations. Technology fuels this power imbalance, and technologists build the tools that make it possible.
The day before the leading technologists in our country shuffled into Trump Tower, news broke of 200 million records for sale on the dark web containing information that appears to come from a data broker. The records identify individuals, and include details like spending habits, political contributions, political leaning, credit rating, charitable contributions, travel habits, and information on gambling habits/tendencies. These records were certainly assembled and stored via different tracking technologies.
With this as a backdrop, when I see something like neveragain.tech I will admit a degree of skepticism. The profiling tools are built, and the data sets are assembled, multiple times over. I also want to make explicitly clear that my signature, or lack of signature, on the list is pretty unimportant in the larger scheme of things. But with all that said – and with all the technology that has been built, and is right now humming along, collecting data, serving bad search results, and tracking us – we can still make things better. Hell, we might even be able to make things right.
With regard to privacy, people often use two metaphors to describe why the efforts to increase privacy protections are meaningless: “the genie is out of the bottle” and “the train has left the station.” What people using these metaphors fail to recognize is that the stories end with the genie returning to the bottle, and the train pulling into another station. “Too late” is the language of the lazy or the overwhelmed. Change starts with awareness, and change grows with organized voices. That’s something I can get behind, and is the reason I signed neveragain.tech.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Educators and signors of the neveragain,t.tech petition should be aware of CEDS (Common Education Data Standards) at https://ceds.ed.gov/
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Why should they be aware of CEDS, Ed?
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Tracking throughout PK-20 then into the workforce.
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Thanks, Ed. Wasn’t sure why.
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Ed Johnson. CEDS is worth paying attention to, along with other developments.
The Common Education Data Standards (CEDS) project is one of many initiated by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. All are intended to build a national and substantially privatized data gathering system on education.
The Common Education Data Standards (CEDS) is compatible with prior Gates investments in non-governmental but national projects, notably the Teacher/Student Data Link (TSDL) Project (teacher of record data system) managed by the Center for Educational Leadership and Technology (CELT) with guidance and dissemination support from the Data Quality Campaign (DQC). All of these entities are from Gates. Funding began in 2004-05. http://www.tsdl.org.
The Common Education Data Standards (CEDS) project is one part of the Gates Foundations still-in-development quest for a national system of data gathering system ultimately incorporating data from the US Census and periods US Census community surveys.
“CDES is an education data management system whose purpose is to streamline the understanding of data with and across the P-20W institutions and sectors. The CEDE initiation includes a common vocabulary, data models, that reflect the vocabulary, tools to help education stakeholders understand and use education data, an assembly of metadata from other education data initiatives, and a community of education stakeholders who discuss the uses of the CEDS and the Development of the standard.” https://ceds.ed.gov/whatIsCEDS.aspx
Here is a typical Gates pitch that portrays the Common Education Data Standards (CEDS) project as voluntary, a bubble-up venture fashioned from “conversations” and producing a consensus, convergence.
“ Common Education Data Standards (CEDS) is being voluntarily adopted in the field, with stakeholders across the states and education sectors engaging in conversations around the standards, aligning data systems to the standards, and putting the standards to use to support the exchange and application of the data. https://ceds.ed.gov/pdf/ceds-in-the-field-wa.pdf
Gates has been working on a comprehensive national data infrastructure of use and available for non-profit and for-profit tracking of data on children and educational programs. In this system, data collection begins at birth, continues through childcare and preschool, and all K-12 records through high school graduation. The data collection continues into postsecondary programs (higher education and vocational certificate training) then workforce participation at several intervals for at least a decade.
The long range plan calls for removing the privacy laws, HIPPA and FERPA and a law in the Higher Education Act that prevents the development of a “student unit record system” with a common identifier (e.g., Social Security number). Ultimately, privacy laws have to be breeched for the sake of “interoperability.” The latest justification is the need for a “customer pricing” service for postsecondary enrollees, with cost/benefit analyses for individual students, preferred field of study, job prospects and the like.
In August 2015, the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP)–well-funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—convened a working group of national postsecondary data experts “to discuss ways to move forward a set of emerging options for improving the quality of the data infrastructure in order to inform state and federal policy conversations.”
Ah, conversations !!! No, white papers. Eleven funded by the Gates Foundation to bolster the case for another “voluntary” initiative that “converges on consensus.” See, for example “Toward Convergence: A Technical Guide for the Postsecondary Metrics Framework
Click to access ihep_toward_convergence_low_2b.pdf
All of the Gates-funded papers under the title “Envisioning the National Postsecondary Data Infrastructure in the 21st Century” included ready–to-use “targeted recommendations” for technical, resource, and policy considerations for cradle to work-life data gathering.” http://www.ihep.org/postsecdata/mapping-data-landscape/national-postsecondary-data-infrastructure
On the matter of privacy, Congress seems to be more willing than ever to consider legislation that would allow for the creation of a student unit record system with personally identifiable information. That kind of record would also link with the Statewide Longitudinal Database system (SLDS) now being used in 47 states. The envisioned linkage probably means that state data systems would also have to be modified to have a parallel system of student identification.
Personally Identifiable Information is defined as: student name, name of student’s parents or other family members, address of student or family, personal identifier (Social Security number or biometric record), indirect identifiers (date of birth, place of birth, mother’s maiden name), “other information that, alone or in combination, is linked or linkable to a specific student that would allow a reasonable person in the school community, who does not have personal http://www.ihep.org/sites/default/files/uploads/postsecdata/docs/data-at-work/ihep_federal_student_data_collection_legislation_final.pdf
Meanwhile, Bellwether Education Partners is circulating a ready to use proposal called BRING THE BLOCKCHAIN TO EDUCATION, written by Andrew P. Kelly who was a resident scholar in education policy studies and the founding director of the Center on Higher Education Reform at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a national policy think tank. http://bellwethereducation.org/sites/default/files/Bellwether_16for2016_Final%20%281%29_0.pdf
Blockchain technology is being promoted by fans of so-called personalized learning, online, anytime anywhere learning with records that other parties get to see if given “permission” by the owner of the record.
In brief, a blockchain is a system of portable files of student’s data (including transcripts, formative and summative assessment data, etc.) promoted as cost-effective, secure, and providing many benefits–(reduce administrative burden, provide teachers of new students with accurate and comprehensive records, automate student enrollment in on-line courses, enable payments of federally subsidized micro-loans for students, permit students to create job-ready credentials, accumulate micro-credentials for a full degrees, identify needed remedial work, etc, etc.
Andrew Kelley’s wish list for blockchain includes a request for USDE to invest up to $5 million for three awards in each three tiers of its Education Innovation and Research (EIR) program (successor to the Investing in Innovation program). Currently, winners of the development grants must secure a 15 percent private-sector funding match. The match is intended to facilitate engagement from private-sector entrepreneurs and investors in blockchain technologies for students, parents, and schools.
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