Alan Singer writes her about the massive data breach at Pearson, which was covered up for nearly a year.
He writes:
“And you thought it was safe to sign into a test at Pearson Vue. Well you better think again. At least one Pearson online product was hacked exposing student data from 13,000 schools and one million college students. The hack occurred in November 2018, the F.B.I informed Pearson in March 2019, and Pearson, covering itself for as long as possible, finally went public with the disclosure in July 2019.
”The hacked product is Person’s aimsweb®, that is used to monitor student reading and math skills. Pearson’s assessment sub-division markets the product with claims that “its robust set of standards-aligned measures, aimswebPlus is proven to uncover learning gaps quickly, identify at-risk students, and assess individual and classroom growth.” A side benefit, especially useful for authoritarian regimes, is that aimsweb® also monitors student online “behavior.””
Parents who sued were offered a year of free credit monitoring. They said no thank you.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Another head-slapping event where capitalism is not only “greedy,” but so saturates corporate consciousness with short-sightedness as to be named: poster-children for an egregious lack of humanity. CBK
“Parents who sued were offered a year of free credit monitoring.”
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ad infinitum!
You name it. Pearson will be happy to monitor it, for a fee. It particularly likes to monitor funds flowing from state education budgets into its coffers, billions and billions that might have gone to get kids eye exams and paperback trade books and a safe place to play a little b-ball after school.
Newworthy: Pearson once gave a test and there wasn’t a data breach.
LMAO. Pearson IS a data breach.
Pearson just sold of its K-12 courseware unit in a firesale, but it held onto its lucrative test-them-til-they-squeal biz. Shame on those corrupt politicians who have enabled its near monopolies on teacher certification testing and high-school equivalency testing (or allowed these to emerge in the first place). The company has dedicated itself to a “digital first,” depersonalized education strategy. Want to know what the future looks like? Well, it could look like the Pearson boot on every throat in education.
We have turned over what to be human decisions, made by human beings, to Pearson and its tests. How dare, you, Pearson, presume to test me! You can pry my data out of my cold, dead brain. What more I have to say to you isn’t speakable in Diane’s living room.
“Its robust set of standards-aligned measures, aimswebPlus is proven to uncover learning gaps quickly, identify at-risk students, and assess individual and classroom growth”
Well, they were right about one thing. They identified the at-risk students: everyone who took the test.
They also uncovered the learning gaps in their IT test security staff.
😀
The hacked product is Person’s aimsweb®”
I’d say it was hacked in more ways than one.
First, it was hacked together by a bunch of programming nitwits who didn’t know anything about data security.
Then it was hacked by hackers who did — or at least knew enough to find the holes.
InBloom got shut down. Gates has to get his data somehow.
Aimsweb was a useful (free, I believe)tool before Pearson bought it. When I was last supposed to use it, I was teaching struggling high school students. It made no sense at all. It was designed for elementary grade students by a university reading research program. When they sold it to Pearson, all of a sudden, it was supposed to be used with high school students. As far as I know, no studies were ever done with this population. It was an annoying waste of time. I never figured out the process of entering data on the website to gain their “insights,” which in hindsight was a blessing. Who knows what data would have been floating around in cyberspace?
Was MSM media asleep at the switch on this one? WSJ & Chic Trib caught it last summer. Where were NYT & WaPo on a breach affecting upstateNY & VA?
” a robust set of standards-aligned measures”
now with new scrubbing bubbles and a clean, fresh scent!!!
The horrific thing is that some administrators and district-level people are stupid (or corrupt) enough to believe this bs.
” a robust set of standards-aligned measures — now with new scrubbing bubbles and a clean, fresh scent!!!”
🙂 🙂
You have caught the tenor of every ed-industry press release!
yup. easy to do
Ha ha ha.
The scent of fresh hundred dollar bills, no doubt.
Note that I have changed my handle (at least temporarily) to SomeSPAM Poet, which I think may be more apt.
I hope it does not confuse the NSA too much.
Maybe I should use both handles for a while just in case
I hope it does not confuse the NSA too much.
HAAAA!!!!!
and unfathomably, not just admin and district-level people: masses of willing citizens choosing blindness, unwilling to see
Pearson, not Persons!
Pearson über alles!!!
In my book, the Pearson logo might as well be a swastika. If the Pearson name is attached to it, I want nothing, nothing to do with it.
Yesterday I was reading The New York Times &, in the Business Section, Pear$on had a TWO PAGE (2 FULL Pages…in the SUNDAY N.Y.T.!) advertisement, including a spiffy new logo (!) & a new motto “See the future of learning,” dropping, I guess, “Always Learning.”
Now it’s “$$$ee the future of earning.” BTW, Diane, just how much would a 2-page, full-page ad cost in the Sunday N.Y.T. ? (Paid for w/taxpayer’$ $$$, meant to go to real education.)
The new Pearson logo, a question mark and exclamation mark put together to form a P. As in
WTF!?!?!?!?
Let’s just call it that–the WTF logo.
which replaces the previous “We span the globe and control it all” logo
$ee the future of earning. Perfect.
Perhaps the new corporate motto means that the company is going into the fortune-telling biz, to add to its current testing/numerology biz. We ask a couple of multiple-choice questions hacked together by poorly paid freelancers and can tell your entire future. Or, if that doesn’t work for you, we can do Tarot cards. These are equivalent in their reliability and validity.
Ofc, the new Pearson logo–the P formed from a question mark and exclamation mark, is perfect for a company that engages in production of questionable products that provoke strong emotions of disgust and disdain among users.
The field on which the question mark and exclamation mark rests is, we are told a thumbprint. As in, soon everyone will be under Pearson’s thumb?
And, ofc, this is what you have to do if you have engaged in practices that make large portions of your customer base hate you–you rebrand.
Aie yie yie. A load of crap, by any other name. . . .