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The NY Times: DOGE Lied About Social Security

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2025 //
17

In a long and comprehensive article, three New York Times reporters document what happened when DOGE (or DOGS, as I prefer to say) arrived at the Social Security Administration to root out “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Determined to prove that their services were needed, they misinterpreted data and spun outright lies about finding “millions” of dead people collecting Social Security checks.

The Times titled the article “The Bureaucrat and the Billionaire: Inside DOGE’s Chaotic Takeover of Social Security.” The bureaucrat in the title is Leland Dudek, who became the acting administrator of the giant Social Security Administration, even though he never previously oversaw more than a dozen employees. The billionaire, of course, is Elon Musk.

I wish I could give you a gift article but that option was not available to me as a subscriber.

The bottom line of the article is that the young wizards of DOGE came looking for “waste, fraud, and abuse,” and when they didn’t find it, they made it up. While rummaging through the huge agency, which sends out retirement checks to some 74 million senior citizens, they fired senior officers and thousands of other employees. These checks, by the way, are not government beneficence; people pay a percentage of their income into Social Security throughout their work life, which they collect monthly after they retire.

The DOGS sought access to the agency’s huge computer system, which contains sensitive personal data about those who receive those monthly checks. At first, the federal courts rejected their request but ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court decided that these 20-somethings were entitled to access the data. Privacy is dead. Yours and mine. Elon Musk has the data. What has he done with it, along with information about your taxes? No one knows or says. Musk referred to Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme.”

Here are a few of the high points:

Elon Musk stood before a giant American flag at a Wisconsin political rally in March and rolled out an eye-popping allegation of rampant fraud at the Social Security Administration. Scammers, he said, were making 40 percent of all calls to the agency’s customer service line.

Social Security employees knew the billionaire’s claim had no basis in fact. After journalists followed up, staff members began drafting a response correcting the record.

That’s when Leland Dudek — plucked from a midlevel job only six weeks earlier to run Social Security because of his willingness to cooperate with Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — got an angry call from the White House, according to several people familiar with the exchange.

“The number is 40 percent,” insisted Katie Miller, a top administration aide who was working closely with Mr. Musk, according to one of the people familiar with the April 1 call. President Trump believed Mr. Musk, she said. “Do not contradict the president.”

Throughout the early months of this Trump presidency, Mr. Musk and his allies systematically built a false narrative of widespread fraud at the Social Security Administration based on misinterpreted data, using their claims to justify an aggressive effort to gain access to personal information on millions of Americans, a New York Times investigation has found.

Their work has led to the departures of thousands of employees, thinning an already overstretched work force and setting off a wave of public anxiety over the state of an agency administering politically sacrosanct retirement benefits that Mr. Trump has vowed to protect.

Mr. Musk has left Washington amid a blowup with Mr. Trump, and some of his top aides at DOGE have also departed, leaving federal workers and the public to assess what Mr. Musk’s tornadolike path through Washington yielded. At Social Security, Mr. Musk’s efforts amount to a case study in what happened when his team of government novices ran a critical government agency through misinformation and social media blasts.

Musk’s senior aide was Katie Miller, wife of Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s closest aides and the architect of the ICE crackdown on immigrants. When Musk left, she left with him. Don’t ask me to explain how that works, because I don’t know. Did she move to Texas to join his sister-wives? Did she take her three children? Or did she stay in DC? I don’t know.

When he started the investigation of the SSA, Musk believed that he would find “massive fraud,” especially the millions of dead people that he believed were collecting Social Security. He didn’t believe the career bureaucrats who said that he was wrong, nor did he accept a secret DOGE memo concluding that the “massive fraud” didn’t exist. Trump’s presss secretary said on FOX News that “tens of millions” of dead people were collecting Social Security checks. Trump lowered the number in his March 4 address to Congress. He said that Social Security records reported “3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149….And money is being paid to many of them.”

The Times reporters found:

One audit from 2015 found only 13 people older than 112 still receiving benefits. Other audits found payments being sent to an estimated 24,000 people who generally died more recently — a sign of Social Security needing tighter controls and monitoring — but not the millions Mr. Musk claimed.

DOGE did not find the waste, fraud, and abuse they searched for but they pursued something of perhaps even greater value to them: the personal data of everyone who had a Social Security card, which is almost every citizen except young children.

DOGE demanded that the SSA hire a “21-year-old former intern at Palantir, a data analysis and technology firm, and grant him access to the personal data of every Social Security cardholder despite the executives’ concerns that he lacked sufficient training to handle such sensitive information.”

Despite their objections, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the SSA to give the young man whatever he wanted.

DOGE used its power to advance Trump’s political goals. When Trump quarreled with Maine Governor Janet Mills over transgender athletes, DOGE staffers canceled contracts with the state of Maine.

But under pressure from Mr. Musk’s team, nearly half of the Social Security Administration’s 140 senior executives, and thousands of employees overall, have taken buyouts or retired. As many as 12 percent of staff members, out of a bureaucracy that numbered around 57,000 people, are expected to depart their jobs as part of DOGE’s cost-cutting plan.

To try to make up for the staffing shortfall, the agency has encouraged specialized professionals like lawyers, human resources staff and technologists to take reassignments in customer service jobs — often at higher pay than what the people they’re replacing had made. Workers have said they felt pressured to volunteer for reassignments, or else risk being fired later.

No one knows at this juncture whether DOGE saved money by firing workers at the SSA. But the benefits to DOGE and Musk are enormous: they now have personal data on almost every American.

What will they do with it?

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Data and Data Mining, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Lies, Musk, Elon

The Philosopher Crackpot Who Hates Democracy and Influences Powerful Tech Bros

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2025 //
6

If you haven’t heard of Curtis Yarvin, you should learn about him now. Yarvin does not believe in democracy. He believes in a society commanded by a king or autocrat. He was a prodigy as a child and now considers himself to be a political genius. Powerful men in the tech industry and politics pay him court and admire him, men like the billionaires Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, and Vice-President JD Vance.

Curtis Yarvin, advisor to Peter Thiel, Donald Trump

This article in The New Yorker by Ava Kolman paints a biographical portrait of Yarvin, summarizes his major ideas and describes his international standing as a philosopher of far-right leaders of the tech industry.

Kolman writes about Yarvin’s extensive range of contacts among the Trump administration and his influence on them, as well as his contact with royalists in other countries..

Kolman begins:

In the spring and summer of 2008, when Donald Trump was still a registered Democrat, an anonymous blogger known as Mencius Moldbug posted a serial manifesto under the heading “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives.” Written with the sneering disaffection of an ex-believer, the hundred-and-twenty-thousand-word letter argued that egalitarianism, far from improving the world, was actually responsible for most of its ills. That his bien-pensant readers thought otherwise, Moldbug contended, was due to the influence of the media and the academy, which worked together, however unwittingly, to perpetuate a left-liberal consensus. To this nefarious alliance he gave the name the Cathedral. Moldbug called for nothing less than its destruction and a total “reboot” of the social order. He proposed “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law,” and the eventual transfer of power to a C.E.O.-in-chief (someone like Steve Jobs or Marc Andreessen, he suggested), who would transform the government into “a heavily-armed, ultra-profitable corporation.” This new regime would sell off public schools, destroy universities, abolish the press, and imprison “decivilized populations.” It would also fire civil servants en masse (a policy Moldbug later called rage—Retire All Government Employees) and discontinue international relations, including “security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration.”

Does anything on his wish-list sound familiar to you?

It should. Trump has loaded up his administration with people who imbibe Yarvin.

A decade on, with the Trumpian right embracing strongman rule, Yarvin’s links to élites in Silicon Valley and Washington are no longer a secret. In a 2021 appearance on a far-right podcast, Vice-President J. D. Vance, a former employee of one of Thiel’s venture-capital firms, cited Yarvin when suggesting that a future Trump Administration “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” and ignore the courts if they objected. Marc Andreessen, one of the heads of Andreessen Horowitz and an informal adviser to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (doge), has started quoting his “good friend” Yarvin about the need for a founder-like figure to take charge of our “out of control” bureaucracy. Andrew Kloster, the new general counsel at the government’s Office of Personnel Management, has said that replacing civil servants with loyalists could help Trump defeat “the Cathedral.”

“There are figures who channel a Zeitgeist—Nietzsche calls them timely men—and Curtis is definitely a timely man,” a State Department official who has been reading Yarvin since the Moldbug era told me. Back in 2011, Yarvin said that Trump was one of two figures who seemed “biologically suited” to be an American monarch. (The other was Chris Christie.) In 2022, he recommended that Trump, if reëlected, appoint Elon Musk to run the executive branch. On a podcast with his friend Michael Anton, now the director of policy planning at the State Department, Yarvin argued that the institutions of civil society, such as Harvard, would need to be shut down. “The idea that you’re going to be a Caesar . . . with someone else’s Department of Reality in operation is just manifestly absurd,” he said.

Yatvin’s ideas are quirky, inhumane, and extreme, to say the least:

On his blog, he once joked about converting San Francisco’s underclasses into biodiesel to power the city’s buses. Then he suggested another idea: putting them in solitary confinement, hooked up to a virtual-reality interface. Whatever the exact solution, he has written, it is crucial to find “a humane alternative to genocide,” an outcome that “achieves the same result as mass murder (the removal of undesirable elements from society) but without any of the moral stigma.”

Yarvin’s call for an American strongman is often treated as an eccentric provocation. In fact, he considers it the only answer to a world in which most people are unfit for democracy….

Yarvin’s influence on Trump’s inner circle is noticeable:

Last month, an anonymous doge adviser told the Washington Post that it was “an open secret that everyone in policymaking roles has read Yarvin.” Stephen Miller, the President’s deputy chief of staff, recently quote-tweeted him. Vance has called for the U.S. to retrench from Europe, a longtime Yarvin desideratum. Last spring, Yarvin proposed expelling all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and turning it into a luxury resort. “Did I hear someone say ‘beachfront?’ ” he wrote on Substack. “The new Gaza—developed, of course, by Jared Kushner—is the LA of the Mediterranean, an entirely new charter city on humanity’s oldest ocean, sublime real estate with an absolutely perfect, Apple-quality government.” This February, during a joint press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, Trump surprised his advisers when he made a nearly identical proposal, describing his redeveloped Gaza as “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

Trump, who doesn’t like to read, is unlikely to have read Yarvin’s philosophical treatises about the proper functioning of a modern society–without benefit of a popular vote–but certainly Trump’s view of the unlimited, imperial powers of the Presidency are similar to those of Yarvin.

Read the article if you can access it. Make yourself aware of the man who wields an outsize influence on Trump right now.

To learn more about Yarvin’s influence among rightwing billionaires, read:

https://theconversation.com/an-antidemocratic-philosophy-called-neoreaction-is-creeping-into-gop-politics-182581

Categories Billionaires, Corruption, Cruelty, Data and Data Mining, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Gender, History, Politics, Racism, Trump, Tyranny

U.S. Supreme Court Allows DOGE to Access Your Most Sensitive Personal Data

By dianeravitch
June 6, 2025 //
23

DOGE (or DOGS, as I prefer to call them) just won the authority to see your most important personal data, thanks to the rightwing bloc of six on the SupremeCourt.,

It’s really unbelievable. There is legislation protecting our personal data. But the Court split 6-3 to allow these mostly very young, very inexperienced kids to review and gather our personal data. The Court also shielded members of the DOGE group from public scrutiny.

The six Republicans on the Court claim to be conservatives. They are not. Some of the six claim to be “originalists,” ruling in accord with the wishes of the Founding Fathers. Nonsense.

Who are these people that Elon Musk left behind? No one knows for sure. Were they confirmed by the U.S. Senate? No. What are their credentials? No one knows for certain. What right do these shadowy people have to know our personal data? They are not a government agency. They are friends of Elon.

This decision gives open access to our records by shadowy figures whose purposes are hidden.

Are they building a data base for the next election? Will the data be used to blackmail people?

These are frightening decisions.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Data and Data Mining, Discipline, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fake, Musk, Elon, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Republicans, Scandal

ALERT! The Disturbing Background of the Teen in the DOGE Group

By dianeravitch
February 16, 2025 //
13

Do you have 10-15 minutes to read a very important article? It contains a lot of alarming details about the 19-year-old computer whiz on Elon Musk’s DOGE team.

Brian Krebs, a former Washington Post reporter, writes a blog about Internet security called Krebs on Security. In this awesome post, he describes the links of Edward Coristine to known cyber criminals.

Krebs is an expert on cybercrime.

He writes:

Wired reported this week that a 19-year-old working for Elon Musk‘s so-called Department of Government Efficiency(DOGE) was given access to sensitive US government systems even though his past association with cybercrime communities should have precluded him from gaining the necessary security clearances to do so. As today’s story explores, the DOGE teen is a former denizen of ‘The Com,’ an archipelago of Discord and Telegram chat channels that function as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network for facilitating instant collaboration.

Since President Trump’s second inauguration, Musk’s DOGE team has gained access to a truly staggering amount of personal and sensitive data on American citizens, moving quickly to seize control over databases at the U.S. Treasury, the Office of Personnel Management, the Department of Education, and the Department of Health and Human Resources, among others.

Wired first reported on Feb. 2 that one of the technologists on Musk’s crew is a 19-year-old high school graduate named Edward Coristine, who reportedly goes by the nickname “Big Balls” online. One of the companies Coristine founded, Tesla.Sexy LLC, was set up in 2021, when he would have been around 16 years old.

“Tesla.Sexy LLC controls dozens of web domains, including at least two Russian-registered domains,” Wired reported. “One of those domains, which is still active, offers a service called Helfie, which is an AI bot for Discord servers targeting the Russian market. While the operation of a Russian website would not violate US sanctions preventing Americans doing business with Russian companies, it could potentially be a factor in a security clearance review.”

Mr. Coristine has not responded to requests for comment. In a follow-up story this week, Wired found that someone using a Telegram handle tied to Coristine solicited a DDoS-for-hire service in 2022, and that he worked for a short time at a company that specializes in protecting customers from DDoS attacks.

DDoS is “denial of service, meaning that one’s access to the internet has been cut off. So, I learned that there are companies that can be paid to implement a DDoS and companies that can be paid to protect against DDoS. Presumably, a clever cyber criminal could be on both sides, sort of like the early 20th century mobsters who demanded protection money from small-time merchants so that no one would break their windows.

Krebs’ writing about cybercriminals got personal when they retaliated:

The founder of Path is a young man named Marshal Webb. I wrote about Webb back in 2016, in a story about a DDoS defense company he co-founded called BackConnect Security LLC. On September 20, 2016, KrebsOnSecurity published data showing that the company had a history of hijacking Internet address space that belonged to others.

Less than 24 hours after that story ran, KrebsOnSecurity.com was hit with the biggest DDoS attack the Internet had ever seen at the time. That sustained attack kept this site offline for nearly 4 days.

The other founder of BackConnect Security LLC was Tucker Preston, a Georgia man who pleaded guilty in 2020 to paying a DDoS-for-hire service to launch attacks against others.

The aforementioned Path employee Eric Taylor pleaded guilty in 2017 to charges including an attack on our home in 2013. Taylor was among several men involved in making a false report to my local police department about a supposed hostage situation at our residence in Virginia. In response, a heavily-armed police force surrounded my home and put me in handcuffs at gunpoint before the police realized it was all a dangerous hoax known as “swatting.”

Woven throughout this story is the career trajectory of Edward Coristine, a core member of DOGE’s elite team. He possibly has a thumb drive with all of your and my personal data on it.

Krebs wonders whether and how Coristine got a top security clearance, given his history.

Given the speed with which Musk’s DOGE team was allowed access to such critical government databases, it strains credulity that Coristine could have been properly cleared beforehand. After all, he’d recently been dismissed from a job for allegedly leaking internal company information to outsiders.

According to the national security adjudication guidelines (PDF) released by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), eligibility determinations take into account a person’s stability, trustworthiness, reliability, discretion, character, honesty, judgment, and ability to protect classified information.

The DNI policy further states that “eligibility for covered individuals shall be granted only when facts and circumstances indicate that eligibility is clearly consistent with the national security interests of the United States, and any doubt shall be resolved in favor of national security.”

Now that Tulsi Gabbard is DNI, maybe she’ll give young Edward the clearance he needs.

Please read it and let me know if you were as horrified as I.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Data and Data Mining, Ethics, Fraud, Justice, Lies, Musk, Elon, Technology, Trump

Will Your Child’s Private Data Be Sold by the College Board?

By dianeravitch
February 22, 2024 //
11

In at least 20 states, the College Board collects and sells student data, despite state law forbidding it.

New York was one of those states, but activist parents led a years-long campaign to block the practice.

Recently, State Attorney General Letitia James won a judgment against the College Board for $750,000, and it agreed to stop monetizing student data in New York.

What happens in your state? Does your state protect the privacy of student data? Does it enforce the law?

Read Leonie Haimson’s account of how parents in New York pushed back and finally won. She includes a list of other states that protect student privacy.

She writes:

For decades, the College Board has been selling student names, addresses, test scores, and whatever other personal information that students have provided them,  when they sign up for a College Board account and the Student Search program. According to the AG press release, in 2019 alone, the College Board improperly shared the information of more than 237,000 New York students.  Since New York’s student privacy law, Education §2-d, calls for a fine of up to $10 per student, the penalty for selling student data during that one year alone could have equaled more than $2 million.

And yet for years, on their website and elsewhere, the College Board has also  falsely claimed they weren’t selling student data.  Instead they called  it “licensing” data, a distinction without a difference.  For years, they also claimed that they never sold student scores, though that was false as well, as they do sell student scores within a range.

The College Board urges millions of students to sign up for their Student Search program, with all sorts of unfounded and deceptive claims, including that it will help them get into better schools or receive scholarships.  The reality is that their personal data is sold to over 1,000 colleges, programs and other companies – the names of which they refuse to disclose — who use it for marketing purposes and may even resell it to even less reputable businesses.

Is your state one of them? Is the law enforced?

Categories Accountability, Data and Data Mining, Education Industry, Ethics, For-Profit, Justice, New York, Parent Groups, Privacy and Privacy Rights

UNESCO Report: The Dangers of Ed-Technology!

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2023 //
33

This is the only post today. Read as much of it as you have time for. The report is a valuable reminder that Ed-tech is oversold and even dangerous. It has its uses, for sure. But it should never replace teachers or parents.

UNESCO released a major blockbuster report warning about the dangers of relying too much on education technology. The author of the report was Mark West. The title of the report is An Ed-Tech Tragedy? Educational Technologies and School Closures in the Time of COVID-19.

An alternate link: https://teachertaskforce.org/sites/default/files/2023-09/2023_UNESCO_An-ed-tech-tragedy_Educational-technologies-and-school-closures-in-the-time-of-COVID19_EN_.pdf

The puzzle at the heart of the document is the clash between learned experience and the imperatives of greed. We learned during the pandemic about the risks of becoming dependent on ed-technology as the main driver of instruction. As we reflect on the period from March 2020 to now, we can discern the damage that occurred to students when their teachers were replaced by virtual instruction: boredom, learning loss, mental health issues, loneliness, lack of socialization with their peers, lack of personal interaction with teachers.

Yet with most people believing that the pandemic (or the worst of it) lies in the past, ed-tech corporations are focused on selling more of what has already failed. Why would we want to expand what has demonstrably proved inadequate and harmful to students?

You probably will take a long while to read the full report, but do read the summary and conclusions to whet your appetite. The overview concludes that the global reliance on ed-tech was necessary in the circumstances, but was a tragedy. Children need human teachers. They need people who look them in the eye and encourage them. Education is not a mechanical process; people are not widgets.

The UNESCO report reviews the global evidence of the harm caused by dependence on ed-tech:

[The report] exposes the ways unprecedented educational dependence on technology often resulted in unchecked exclusion, staggering inequality, inadvertent harm and the elevation of learning models that place machines and profit before people.

The summary says:

An Ed-Tech Tragedy? documents how widespread school closures and the hard pivot to remote learning with connected technology during the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in numerous unintended and undesirable consequences.

Although connected technology supported the continuation of education for many learners, many more were left behind. Exclusion soared and inequities widened. Achievement levels fell, even for those with access to distance learning. Educational experiences narrowed. Physical and mental health declined. Privatization accelerated, threatening education’s unique standing as a public good and human right. Invasive surveillance endangered the free and open exchange of ideas and undermined trust. Automation replaced human interactions with machine-mediated experiences. And technology production and disposal placed new strains on the environment.

Visions that technology could form the backbone of education and supplant school-based learning – in wide circulation at the outset of the health crisis – had promised better outcomes. Ed-tech proponents held that the immense challenges of school closures could be met with technology and that deeper technology integration would transform education for the better. But these high hopes and expectations unraveled when ed-tech was hurriedly deployed to maintain formal education as COVID-19 tore across countries.

An Ed-Tech Tragedy? recounts this tumultuous period, documenting the actions and decisions taken by governments, schools and technology companies. The publication contrasts the promises of ed-tech with the realities of what ed-tech delivered as a response to school closures that impacted over 1.6 billion learners and stretched intermittently from the beginning of 2020 to the end of 2022. The evidence and analysis highlight trends observed across countries and zoom in on the specificities of local experiences, creating a global mosaic of what students, teachers and families experienced when connected technology was elevated as a singular portal to teaching and learning.

Aimed at general and specialist audiences alike, this publication shows how the abrupt and deep changes brought about by the recourse to remote digital learning during the pandemic continue to ripple through the education sector even as schools have fully reopened. It questions whether more and faster integration of technology is desirable for learners, teachers and schools and if ed-tech is, as it is often billed, a key ingredient of educational resilience.

An Ed-Tech Tragedy? posits that new principles are needed to forge more humanistic directions for ed-tech development and use. In-person schooling and teaching should be guaranteed even as technologies improve and connectivity becomes more ubiquitous. Governments need to anchor this guarantee in the legal architecture upholding the right to education, especially for young learners. Moreover, future applications of ed-tech must show greater concern for holistic student well-being. While academic learning is central to education, it is not the only component. Ed-tech needs to support the multiple individual and collective purposes of education, from socio-emotional and personal development, to learning to live together, with the planet, as well as with technology.

In detailing what happened when ed-tech was deployed in response to pandemic school closures, as well as questioning why ed-tech was often elevated as a singular solution, this publication clarifies how the education community can move beyond merely reacting to technological change and instead play a more assertive role steering the digitalization of education towards the more holistic goals of education to shape inclusive, just and sustainable futures.

The future of education needs to be a humanistic one. The lessons extracted from what is premised here as an ed-tech tragedy illuminate the ways technology can better foster education that teaches and revitalizes human values, strengthens human relationships and upholds human rights.…

Ed-tech was supposed to solve a problem but it created other problems.

An Ed-Tech Tragedy? examines the many ways that the hurried embrace of technology solutionism steered responses to a global education challenge directly towards ed-tech. Along the way, the logic of technology solutionism changed understandings of educational problems to be solved. The analysis presented here helps reveal, for example, how technological solutions deployed during school closures took a narrow view of education and focused almost exclusively on furthering the academic progress of students in pared-down curricular subjects. This meant that little attention was paid to other education goals, such as fostering curiosity and inquiry and supporting physical health, mental well-being and social and emotional learning. This analysis also shows how ed-tech, originally cast as a solution to maintain learning continuity in the face of widespread disruptions to schooling, has more recently been positioned as a tool to help reverse learning loss. This ‘loss’, however, grew out of the deficiencies of technology-dependent remote learning to preserve the pace of academic learning that would have been typical without school closures stemming from the pandemic. The problem that ed-tech initially set out to solve morphed from assuring the continuity of learning to remedying lost learning. The way the problem was reframed while maintaining connected technology as the centrepiece of the solution is an example of technology solutionism at work.…

Recognizing the chaotic pivot from in-school learning to technology-facilitated distance learning as having a tragic arc provides a forceful rebuttal to a growing consensus that the education sector somehow ‘advanced’, ‘leapfrogged’, ‘catapulted’ or ‘disrupted’ itself to a better future when it deployed technology on a massive scale as an interim measure to confront a crisis. The evidence overwhelmingly points in the opposite direction: education became less accessible, less effective and less engaging when it pivoted away from physical schools and teachers and towards technology exclusively. ‘Tragedy’ in this sense signals regression – a denigration of the status quo,rather than a desired evolution. The narrative that ed-tech should be or must be a central component of ‘building education back better’ warrants new scrutiny after a careful examination of the experiences during the pandemic.

The invocation of tragedy also facilitates awareness that connected technologies, despite their growing reach, power and potential, remain tools in a repertoire of many others to construct stronger, more agile and more flexible education systems that can respond and adapt to disruption. Other tools include strengthened teacher training and support; enhanced school leadership and pedagogical management of schools; curricular renewal; smaller class sizes; and improved physical resources and infrastructure for schools and classrooms. Crises that necessitate the prolonged closure of schools and demand heavy or total reliance on technology have been exceedingly rare historically. Future crises may present entirely different challenges. The trauma of the pandemic has, in many circles, functioned to elevate technology as an almost singular solution to assure educational resilience by providing flexibility in times of disruption. Investments to protect education wrongly shifted away from people and towards machines, digital connections and platforms. This elevation of the technical over the human is contradictory to education’s aim to further human development and cultivate humanistic values. It is human capacity, rather than technological capacity, that is central to ensuring greater resilience of education systems to withstand shocks and manage crises.

Overall, the pandemic is a case study in how technology in its current iterations is not yet a suitable foundation for actualizing the diverse goals that communities assign to education. Expectations that technology may, in time, help further increase the reach, improve the quality and strengthen the agility of education are valid. For now, though, the experiences since early 2020 have shown it to be an alarmingly brittle solution – one incapable of effectively responding to widespread and extended school shutdowns. For far too many students, it was a solution that either never started in earnest or quickly broke down. The sudden shift to ed-tech also accelerated a concerning transfer of authority away from teachers, schools and communities and towards private, for-profit interests. Additionally, the censorship, data extraction, advertising, top-down control, intimidation and surveillance that so often characterize current models of digital transformation have made education less free and, arguably, less capable of facilitating critiques of and positive changes to the status quo. [emphasis added by DR.]

Countries made massive investments to digitalize education through much of the COVID-19 pandemic. But it remains far from clear whether these investments will improve education over the longer term and make it an engine of just, inclusive and sustainable development, especially when compared with conventional school-based and teacher-facilitated education. The digital transformation of education may yet be a force for beneficial change. But the logic of technological solutionism and its associated business models currently steering this transformation, led largely by the commercial technology entities that are remaking so many aspects of society, tend to treat education and knowledge as private commodities and not as global public goods that provide collective as well as individual benefits.

It is hoped that this analysis and its use of tragedy as a metaphor might moderate the discourse and popular view that the pandemic has ‘unshackled’ education systems and ‘launched’ them into desirable futures characterized by greater technology use. Documenting the severity and scope of the many negative consequences of ed-tech responses during the health crisis inverts the triumphalist narratives that accompany many descriptions of technology deployments to address the educational disruption caused by school closures. A critical examination of the assumptions of technology solutionism and a review of the existing evidence provide a corrective and a counterargument to notions that more, deeper and accelerated use of technology is uniformly positive for education…

Throughout the review that follows, considerable evidence illustrates how the rush to distance and remote learning with ed-tech accelerated the privatization of education in many contexts. While some countries and localities managed a shift to digital learning with limited privatization of the educational experience, a defining characteristic of the technology-centric response to the educational disruptions of the pandemic tended to be the elevation of for-profit, private ed-tech companies. In addition to considering the ways reliance on ed-tech impacted educational inclusion, equity and quality, this publication also explores the complex and often symbiotic links between ed-tech and the privatization of education during the pandemic.The rush to distance and remote learning with ed-tech accelerated the privatization of education.

Most such reports tend to summarize the status quo. This one challenges it. It’s time to take stock before the Ed-tech industry takes control of our most precious asset: our children.

Categories Childhood, Corporate Reform, Curriculum, Data and Data Mining, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Failure, For-Profit, Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), Hoax, Inequity, International, Online Learning, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Privatization, Propaganda, Technology

Why NEPC Will No Longer Use Twitter or Threads

By dianeravitch
August 30, 2023 //
14

The National Education Policy Center announced that it would no longer post on Twitter, nor would it open an account on Threads. I refuse to refer to Twitter as X because is a letter, not a name. NEPC is a trustworthy source of research about education.

I have faced the same dilemma. I have opened an account on several of the alternative social media sites but stayed with Twitter because I have almost 150,000 followers there. When they retweet, my posts go further.

This is what NEPC announced:

The decision to close the @NEPCtweet account was straightforward but not easy.

We truly valued NEPC’s 13 years on Twitter, sharing our work with our 7,500 followers and engaging in often-interesting discussions. Yet after the company’s change in ownership and shift in policies, our continued presence on Twitter (now “X”) became impossible. Disinformation and conspiracy theories, as well as bigotries of all sorts, have moved from tolerated to celebrated.

NEPC cannot, at this point, find a sensible alternative. We may still decide to open a Mastodon or Bluesky account, but their current limited reach and other constraints mean that active participation will have minimal benefits.

Meta’s new platform, Threads, presents a unique set of concerns. Because Threads is attached to Instagram, the Meta privacy policy is the Threads privacy policy. And it’s a “privacy nightmare”–the privacy policy is so weak that Meta can’t launch Threads in the EU.

We remain concerned that Threads and other Meta platforms are used by school-aged children and accordingly raise the sorts of privacy harms that NEPC has long investigated and condemned. NEPC has, for example, recently published analyses of the Summit Learning Platform and the Along platform, both of which are associated with Meta and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

NEPC is committed to working with top scholars to provide a bridge between high-quality research and public deliberations about education policy and practice. Our mission statement reads in part: We are guided by the belief that the democratic governance of public education is strengthened when policies are based on sound evidence and support a multiracial society that is inclusive, kind, and just. The social platform now known as “X” is the antithesis of these values.

Please visit us at nepc.colorado.edu. And if you haven’t yet done so, we hope you’ll sign up to receive our newsletters and publication announcements at https://nepc.colorado.edu/newsletter-signup

Categories Bias, Bigotry, Billionaires, Data and Data Mining, Lies, Media, National Education Policy Center, Propaganda

Nancy Bailey: The Continuing Assault on Public Education

By dianeravitch
August 28, 2023 //
24

Nancy Bailey, retired teacher, has been blogging for ten years. She reflects on the continuing efforts to destroy public education, based on a false narrative, hubris, and in some cases, the profit motive.

Nancy and I co-authored a book that serves as a glossary about fads and “reforms.”

She begins her new article:

School reform continues to privatize and destroy public schools. August marks ten years since I began blogging. Within that time I have written two books and co-authored a third with Diane Ravitch. I’m proud of all this writing but Losing America’s Schools: The Fight to Reclaim Public Education is the book title that especially stands out today.

Many Americans still don’t understand or value their ownership of public schools, and how they’re losing one of the country’s great democraticinstitutions. Instead of working together to build up local schools, to iron out difficulties, they’re willing to end them.

Thank you for reading my blog, commenting, and for those of you who have written posts. I am amazed at the wonderful educators, parents, students, and policymakers I have met. I have appreciated debate.

Here are some of the main education issues still of concern.

The Arts

School arts programs help children thrive. Those with mental health challenges benefit. Students might find art jobs. Sadly, many poor public schools ditched the arts. Some schools might get Arts Partnerships or entrepreneurships (Hansen, 2019). These programs aren’t always consistent. Public schools must offer well-rounded and fully resourced K-12 arts programs.

Assessment

Assessment is important for teachers to understand students. But high-stakes standardized tests push a narrow, one-size-fits-all agenda used to drive parents to private schools which, on the other extreme, have little accountability. Tests have been harmful to students.

Class Size

Children deserve manageable class sizes, especially for K-3rd grade (STAR Study), and for inclusion andschool safety.

Common Core State Standards

Controversy originally surrounded Common Core State Standards, promoted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2010, but Common Core continues to drive profiteering, especially in online programs.

Stan Karp of Rethinking Schoolssaid CCSS are:

A massively well-financed campaign of billionaires and politically powerful advocacy organizations that seeks to replace our current system of public education which, for all its many flaws, is probably the most democratic institution we have and one that has done far more to address inequality, offers hope, and provide opportunity than the country’s financial, economic, political, and media institutions with a market-based, non-unionized, privately managed system.

Corporations and Politicians

Corporations and politicians continue to work to end public schools and drive teachers out, transferring tax dollars to nonprofit and for-profit entities.

Nancy covers many more topics that have been harmful to public education.

Open the link and read her article in its entirety.

Categories Accountability, Arts Education, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Class size, Common Core, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Curriculum, Data and Data Mining, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, For-Profit, History, Inequity, Injustice, Teach for America, Vouchers

Leonie Haimson: Stop Congress from Passing Massive Data Collection on Every College Student

By dianeravitch
April 4, 2022 //
39

Leonie Haimson is a New York-based education activist who has two passions: reducing class size and protecting student privacy. She is co-founder of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy. She writes today in Valerie Strauss’s “Answer Sheet” about legislation that threatens the privacy of every college student. Do your part to stop this invasion of privacy by writing your member of Congress. Use the link to contact your representatives.

Haimson writes:

With practically no public notice and no public hearings, the House of Representatives passed the College Transparency Act (CTA) on Feb. 4, 2022, by slipping it into a much larger unrelated bill called the America Competes Act, intended to better position the United States to compete with China. The bill is now slated to go to conference with the Senate…

The CTA would authorize the federal government to create a comprehensive data system that would include the personal information of every student enrolled in college or another higher education institution, and track them through their entire lives, by collecting their names, age, grades, test scores, attendance, race and ethnicity, gender, and economic status, directly from their colleges, along with other highly sensitive information pertaining to their disabilities and/or “status as a confined or incarcerated individual.”

Then, as they move through life, this data would be “matched” with their personal data from the other federal agencies, including the Census Bureau, the Department of Defense, Veterans Affairs, and the Social Security Administration.

No student would be allowed to opt out of this database, and there are no provisions for their data ever to be deleted. Instead, this bill would essentially allow the federal government to create a perpetual surveillance system, vulnerable to breaches and abuse.

This bill would overturn the legal ban on the federal government’s collection of personal student data, otherwise known as a “student unit record” system. The ban was established as a privacy safeguard in the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008, which “prohibits the creation or maintenance of a federal database of personally identifiable student information.”

Yet the federal creation of cradle-to-grave tracking system has been among the top priorities of the Gates Foundation and many of the groups they fund for years. In September 2016, Dan Greenstein, then the director of the foundation’s postsecondary division, told Politico that “[c]losely tracking student-level data remains at the top of the foundation’s list — something the foundation says can be accomplished by working around the federal government, which is banned from tracking students as they move through college,” although he hoped that “collective efforts could also work as a ‘lever’ to push Congress to reconsider the federal ban.”

The report that the foundation put out at the same time, entitled “Postsecondary Success Advocacy Priorities,” showed clearly that their goal was to overturn this prohibition and allow the federal government to directly collect this data for all children, starting at birth. This report has since been scrubbed from their website but is archived on the Wayback Machine here.

It says in part:


GOAL: Support the development of a comprehensive national data infrastructure that enables the secure and consistent collection and reporting of key performance metrics for all students in all institutions [emphasis theirs]. These data are essential for supporting the change needed to close persistent attainment gaps and produce an educated and diverse workforce with career-relevant credentials for the 21st century.

BACKGROUND: In this era of escalating costs and uncertain outcomes, it is important that prospective students, policymakers, and the public have answers to commonsense questions about whether and which colleges offer value: a quality education at an affordable price.

The Gates report included a chart that revealed the overarching and comprehensive nature of the infrastructure it envisioned, in which all “entities” would share their data, including “institutions/providers” before children even entered school, followed by state K-12 systems, colleges, and federal agencies such as the IRS, the Social Security Administration, the Department of Labor, the Department of Defense, etc. Together, this data would be fed into a “National Postsecondary Data System.”

The year before, the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking (CEP) had been established by Congress, with the stated goal to consider “whether a federal clearinghouse should be created for government survey and administrative data.” The commission first held hearings in Washington, D.C., on October 21, 2016, where many Gates-funded groups, including New America Foundation, Data Quality Campaign, Education Trust and Young Invincibles, testified in favor of weakening or overturning the ban on the federal collection of personal data.

The organization that I co-chair and co-founded, the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, submitted comments to the commission, co-signed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Network for Public Education, and other organizations, strongly opposing the overturning of the ban, noting that the potential risks to privacy were enormous from such a huge, centralized, comprehensive system.

According to the commission’s final report:
The Commission heard many substantive comments about the student unit record ban and received more feedback on the issue than on any other single topic within the Commission’s scope. Nearly two-thirds of the comments received in response to the Commission’s Request for Comments raised concerns about student records, with the majority of those comments in opposition to overturning the student unit record ban or otherwise enabling the Federal government to compile records about individual students.
Nevertheless, the commission recommended that the “Congress and the president should consider repealing current bans and limiting future bans on the collection and use of data for evidence building.”


In the meantime, it recommended the creation of a “National Secure Data Service to facilitate access to data for evidence building while ensuring privacy and transparency in how those data are used. … to temporarily link existing data and provide secure access to those data for exclusively statistical purposes in connection with approved projects. The National Secure Data Service will do this without creating a data clearinghouse or warehouse.”

In any case, in May 2017, a bipartisan group of senators, including Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Orrin G. Hatch (who was a Republican lawmaker from Utah at the time), introduced the College Transparency Act, which would overturn the ban on the federal collection of student data, and instead enable the government to track the employment and outcomes of college students throughout their lives.

Similar legislation was soon introduced in the House. As the reporter from Inside Higher Ed pointed out at the time: “While the bill has support from some Democrats and Republicans alike, its passage remains in doubt because opposition to a federal data system remains on the right and the left, based on privacy concerns and philosophical differences over the role of the federal government in higher ed.”

And while the CTA was resubmitted annually, there was little action by Congress during the intervening years. Nevertheless, the Gates Foundation and its allies kept pushing this idea, and last May, in yet another report, they again promoted the idea of a “federal student-level data network (SLDN) that provides disaggregated information about all students’ pathways and post-college outcomes, including employment, earnings, and loan repayment outcomes.”

With little warning, a few weeks ago, the CTA suddenly reappeared, at the last minute folded into the America Competes Act (ACA), although the ACA was an essentially unrelated bill focused on increasing the competitiveness of the United States with China. Even reporters who had in the past written about the CTA were not alerted in advance. The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy heard about it from a D.C. insider two days before its passage, and rushed out a news release the day before, with quotes from several different advocacy groups in opposition, as well as Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.).

As Rep. Bowman pointed out:

We have been down this road before and know how people’s personal data can be abused. Under the Trump Administration we saw this play out in the form of ICE stakeouts in our communities that put people in danger of being deported, separated from their families, and having their lives completely destroyed from one day to the next. The College Transparency Act raises serious concerns about how the data of our students can be used and abused.”

The next day, the bill passed the House by a vote of 238-193, with only a few Democrats opposed, including Bowman and two of his colleagues in the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Cori Bush (D-Mo.).
The bill will now go to conference with the Senate. The Senate passed its version of the legislation, known as the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act (USICA), S.1260, last summer. And though the Senate version did not include the College Transparency Act, “supporters of the bill are very hopeful it will be approved by the conference committee that will review differences between the two bills,” according to a recent article.

On March 14, our student privacy coalition released a letter — co-signed by several other national privacy, consumer, education and parent groups — urging Congress not to pass this bill. As our letter pointed out, the bill would authorize the federal government to not only collect a huge amount of personal information, but also add to this nearly any other kind of data in the future, as long as the Department of Education thought it “necessary to ensure that the postsecondary data system fulfills [its] purposes,” although those purposes are not clearly defined.

And we once again emphasized how the risks of such a surveillance system outweighed the potential benefits by far:

Although the CTA’s supporters maintain that creating this massive federal system holds value for prospective students, history shows clearly how this sort of data collection has been used to target and violate the civil rights of our most vulnerable and marginalized individuals and communities. We have also learned that whatever guardrails exist to protect student privacy and anonymity in the current bill could easily be amended in the aftermath of a national crisis, like 9/11, so the CTA data could be used to target current and former students simply because they are a member of a disfavored racial, ethnic, religious, or other vulnerable group. Whatever the value of such a system in terms of promoting accountability for higher education institutions may be, such benefits must be pursued through far less invasive means that do not threaten core American rights and values.

Surely, there are many less intrusive options that could be used to analyze and evaluate higher education outcomes, by using data sampling and use of aggregate data. The existing federal College Scorecard has been enhanced via the collection of aggregate, non-personally identifiable data drawn from colleges, and could be further strengthened by including aggregate data on part-time students, as well as data related to transfer students, contributed by the National Student Clearinghouse, an independent, non-governmental group. This would obviate any need for the federal government to collect and amass personal data from students and follow them throughout their lives.

Such a data system would not only be vulnerable to breaches, but also could have unanticipated negative consequences, by discouraging colleges from accepting the highest-need students to boost their ratings, and/or cause them to discourage their students from entering into careers that have great social value, but lower than average salaries, like teaching.

Please use this link to write your members of Congress and urge them to reject this Orwellian legislation.

Categories Data, Data and Data Mining, Privacy, Privacy and Privacy Rights

Website Created by Gates Foundation Leaves Open Personal Data of Hundreds of Thousands of Students

By dianeravitch
December 30, 2020 //
18

The Financial Times reported a major data breach of personally identifiable student data on a website funded by the Gates Foundation. Bill Gates, as we know, is a data aficionado. Several years ago, he created an ill-fated project called InBloom with the intent of gathering the personal data of millions of students. Fortunately it was killed off by parent activists Leonie Haimson and Rachel Stickland, who created the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy. The “cloud” is not secure.

The personal details of hundreds of thousands of US students were exposed to hackers after a database was left unsecured by Get Schooled, an education charity set up by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Viacom. Get Schooled was set up a decade ago to help students from low-income, minority and immigrant backgrounds with their college applications and financial aid, and to offer job advice. But it left a database of 125m records, including 930,000 email addresses belonging to children, teenagers and college students, “open and accessible” earlier this year when it overhauled its website, said the UK cyber security company TurgenSec. TurgenSec said the database included names, age, gender and school and graduation details of the individuals. Contact information such as addresses and phone numbers was also accessible.

Categories Accountability, Data, Data and Data Mining, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Privacy and Privacy Rights
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