The Missouri Education Watchdog blog has collected some frightening news: There is a bipartisan push, funded by the Gates Foundation, to create a national database for every citizen, violating the privacy of every one of us. Until now, this has been illegal. Gates and his allies want to lift the ban.
For anyone who has ever filled out a college application, or scholarship or grant application, you know the incredible amount of personal information these forms require. What if there was a massive database that combined and shared not only all of that personal information, but also answers from surveys you took over the years, social media posts you made, information normally kept protected and isolated in agencies like the Social Security Administration, Health and Human Services, HUD, IRS, and the US Census Bureau. This kind of database, linking (and sharing) data across agencies, with a profile on each individual citizen is something that countries like China has, but it is not legal in the US, currently.
This database is about to happen, not for you parents, but for your kids, starting with students in college.
Who wants it? Bill Gates; Booz Allen and Hamilton; Congressman Paul Ryan; Senator Patti Murray. And the many other corporations who want to pry into the lives of Americans.
There has been a push to create this type of database to track and link student data across agencies for years, and has always been rejected due to privacy or cost concerns. However, this year, a special commission, (created by the passage of this law, HR1381–jointly sponsored by Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), and signed by President Barack Obama on March 30, 2016), has convened for the purpose of lifting the ban on this national database, that they refer to as the student unit record. For background on the push for a national student database/unit record, see this 2013 HigherEd publication where they hoped to lift this ban and link the data, with a previous bill:
“The previous version of the bill called for stitching together state longitudinal databases in order to better track students — a project that some observers said would be technically difficult, perhaps unworkable and take years to accomplish, but which would also avoid confronting a federal ban on a national unit record system.
A unit record database has long been the holy grail for many policy makers, who argue that collecting data at the federal level is the only way to get an accurate view of postsecondary education. But privacy advocates, private colleges and Congressional Republicans, all of whom oppose the creation of such a database, teamed up in opposition the last time the idea was proposed, by the Bush administration in 2005. Then, the opponents succeeded; the 2008 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act included a provision specifically forbidding the creation of a federal unit record data system…
An increasing number of groups, including some federal panels, have called for a federal unit record system since 2006: the Education Department’s advisory panel on accreditation, last year; the Committee on Measures of Student Success, in 2011; and nearly every advocacy group and think tank that wrote white papers earlier this year for a project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on rethinking financial aid.
A federal system, those groups agree, is the only way to accurately measure student success. It would allow the Education Department to account for part-time students, transfers and others not currently captured in the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, the clearinghouse of data colleges report to the federal government. And, through linkage with Social Security or other databases, it could track graduates’ wages more accurately than is currently possible.
The Obama administration — unable to create a federal unit record database — has offered states money to construct longitudinal databases of their own, including funding in the 2009 stimulus bill. Nearly all states now have, or are developing, some version of a [ K12, SLDS] database to track students throughout their educational careers.”
Do you value your privacy? Do you want to stop the government and corporations from knowing everything about our lives, from cradle to grave? Read the post in its entirety and then contact Leonie Haimson of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This cradle to death invasion is DANGEROUS. Remember: The Hunger Games.
I understand the desire to track students success (especially college graduates), but creating a massive database with such personal information is not only a privacy violation, but a potential security threat.
Gates is the leader of the drive to get rid of privacy protections. He has commissioned papers that call for a change the Higher Education Act. Currently, the Higher Education Act prohibits creating a database with “a student unit record” (think SS number as the unique identifier). Gates is backed by all of the foundations and venture capitalists who want create an “interoperable” system, digesting data from multiple sources, including health records, court records, all school related records hence to employers and US Census information. This project to get rid of privacy rules is always surrounded by lip service to privacy, citing industry standards and so on. This is part of a marketing strategy. When you read the fine print, privacy is never the responsibility of the outfit gathering data. That responsibility is off loaded to the user or to the proxy for the user (e.g., a school district).
Cross posted at http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/STOP-Our-Government-Wants-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Bush_Corporations_Data-Mining_Diane-Ravitch-170107-565.html
I thought Senator Murray was sensible and honorable, able to stand up to Big Data (re: Common Core) and withstand the pressures of having in her state the most malevolent billionaire and his wife Melinda. I was wrong. and extremely disappointed.
…am extremely disappointed.
Here is more information with some of this not dublicating the remarkable work of Missouri Education Watchdog. This is a Gates-driven quest: get rid of all “friction” in data sharing caused by privacy rules.
Data-gathering schemes in education have gone well beyond what is reasonable for census-like information on the status of education of the kind gathered by the National Center for Education Statistics. Consider these initiatives.
. 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—all engaged in pushing the Common Core. 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.” All of these players helped to hardwire data gathering into federal legislation and policies.
. The America Competes Act of 2007, offered grants for developing statewide education data systems preschool through a baccalaureate degree (Title VI, Subtitle D) aligned with standards. All students were to be given a unique identifier. The America Competes Act anticipated the publication of the Common Core State Standards and also called for data gathering on “21st Century Skills” a confusing mish-mash of ideas conjured by tech-lobbyist Ken Kay. https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/110/hr2272/text/enrhttps://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/110/hr2272/text/enr
Beginning in 2007, Gates funded the Common Core–envisioned as a system of national standards with a coding system for each standard so it could be incormorated into a data system.
In late 2010, The Gates Foundation funded the Teacher Student Data Link initiative (TSDL) intended to serve 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/ (2011, TSDL “Use and Purpose”).
The TSDL system was designed to ensure all courses would be based on standards, and that all responsibilities for learning were 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 teaching. A record would be generated whenever a teacher of record had some specified proportion of responsibility for a student’s learning activities. Learning activities were to be defined in terms of the performance measures for a particular standard, by subject and grade level— a feature of the Common Core (and most recent standards).
This data-gathering system was intended to allow 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 surveillance that is said to be comparable to business practices (2011, TSDL, “Key Components”). In addition, the system was intended to 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 would 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. At last count at least 14 states had worked on key components of the TSDL system with six states receiving Gates money to develop the teacher student data-link scheme–Ohio, Louisiana, Colorado, Georgia, Florida, and Kentucky.
Concurrently, Gates and the Carnegie Corporation funded “inBloom,” a commercial data-mining venture. That venture collapsed, but it has not entirely gone away.https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2014/01/08/inbloom-and-data-mining-a-common-core-cousin/
Several federal initiatives built out a data-gathering in education. Between 2006 and 2015, the U.S. Department of Education sent over $700 million to 47 states and Washington D.C to set up Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems—to standardize data on education. The SLDS program was 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 learning, as well as facilitate research to increase student achievement and close achievement gaps.”
Since 2009, and still in the works, is a federal initiative to get these longitudinal data systems to conform with a national system of “Common Educational Data Standards” (CEDS) so that state systems are “interoperable.” That means all descriptions and codes for data are standardized. Multiple uses of this standardized system is shown in this interactive info-graphic. https://ceds.ed.gov/whatIsCEDS.aspx
CEDS was developed in collaboration with IMS global, an international organization dedicated to promoting the gospel of digital innovation and Computer Based Education (CBE)—e-learning, distance learning, blended learning, personalized instruction assessment-driven adaptive learning, virtual schools, massive open online courses, competency–based education —all of these producers and users of data.
IMS has over 200 members and participants, about 390 “certified” products/services. IMS is working on interoperability data systems that interface with interactive whiteboards, question and tests, assorted “learning tools” and OneRoster™. OneRoster™ is a simple process of moving information on individual students into ANY digital product or service. The roster for a single class or a whole school can be uploaded. No need to bother with a privacy clearance or a password for each student.
Pearson, McGraw Hill and others are marketing OneRoster™ as a freemium— basic level is free with limited functions. Schools or districts pay fees for tiers additional bells and whistles.
See this diagram of the data mining operations that all of this standardization produces. Also notice who the sponsors and affiliates are. The “platinum” sponsor is ….drumroll…the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. https://www.imsglobal.org/activity/qtiapip
Quotes from the fictional novel, The Circle, by David Eggers, about a powerful internet company and our society’s obsessions with sharing and social media.
“Already 90% of the world’s searches go through the Circle. Without competitors, this will increase soon to 100%…if you can control the flow of information, you can control everything.”
“How can anyone rise up against the Circle? If they control all of the information and access to it? They want everyone to have a Circle account, and they are on their way to making it illegal not to?”
“The crew has been working to coordinate all student measurements-to make sure all homework, reading, attendance and test scores are all kept in one unified database. They’re almost there. We’re inches away from the moment when, by the time a student is ready for college, we have a complete knowledge of everything a student has learned. Every word they read, every word they looked up, every sentence they highlighted, every equation they wrote. Every answer and correction. The guesswork of knowing where all students stand and what they know will be over.
Interesting book which details the history of the data security. It describes the use of data by the Nazi regime, and their propensity to amass data on individuals, in the event that they need to put them under “protection.” Worse things were done to individuals who fit certain categories.
https://books.google.com/books?id=BruxCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA23&lpg=PA23&dq=gestapo+use+of+data&source=bl&ots=t7jVga-xG2&sig=G1SanS5UGkkky8ZhZvPZS20Iwzo&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjtwKC3vbDRAhXjzlQKHcHYBLEQ6AEIOzAI#v=onepage&q&f=true
Reblogged this on BLOGGYWOCKY and commented:
This is extremely alarming and totally unacceptable. (And shame on Patti Murray for backing this.)
They already have way too much of our data as it is, but this will make it even worse.
Welcome to a combination of “1984” and “Minority Report.”
😢
They want it all.
CAP just published a report on teacher recruitment that recommends schools collect info in order to attract “human capital” from far & wide. How? By leveraging technology that includes Facebook and Twitter.
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/reports/2016/12/22/295574/to-attract-great-teachers-school-districts-must-improve-their-human-capital-systems/
“School districts should develop thoughtful recruitment strategies to strengthen their talent pipelines, including by approaching talented candidates individually. In addition to standard measures—such as posting job openings online and recruiting at local universities—school districts should leverage technology and personal networks to attract talent from near and far. Social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, provide additional avenues to connect with possible candidates. School districts should also ensure that they have ample staff to develop and implement innovative recruitment practices, especially to address priorities based on areas with teacher shortages.”
I love your link! The researchers would be well advised to enter the real world. They appear to be unaware that teachers of color are targeted for dismissal when “failing schools” are closed. Moreover, district budgets are being reduced thereby effectively precluding the possibility of hiring additional personnel to upgrade the human capital recruitment process.
Reblogged this on NANMYKEL.COM and commented:
Devious; power-hungry and voraacious. I’ve re-blogged to nanmykel.com
I guess now is the time to attempt such a takeover while the horrors of a Trump presidency are still in ascendancy. There are so many atrocities planned that Gates probably figures they can fade this plan into the background.
I’m guessing now is when we need an independent media willing to track everything that is going on and that does not determine coverage of events through social media surveys. I would “LIKE” news coverage that concentrated on news that has import beyond Hollywood. So much progressive policy is in danger that we can’t all be involved in everything. A media that doesn’t pander to the socially popular “news” or a one (narrow) world view approach would allow us to concentrate on those causes where each one of us feels most able to contribute while still remaining aware of a larger world view. I find myself trapped in a perpetual state of outrage and am deeply offended by amused brush offs recommending I “get over it,” that somehow the universe will protect us all (or at least those that count) from trumpism’s excesses.
2Old2Teach,
Perhaps you understand my new approach. I will no longer tolerate fools. I will not pander. I will not pretend to impartiality.i love this country, and I will fight to keep it out of the hands of Yahoo’s and fascists and to reclaim it when they seize control with Putin’s help.
Reblogged this on Rcooley123's Blog and commented:
Big Brother threatens us more each day and with each new technological “improvement”. Definitely worth watching and sounding the alarm as it encroaches ever more severely on our privacy and individual rights. A government that keeps so much important information secret from its own citizens needs to refrain from infringing on our liberties to control us in an authoritarian nightmare.