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Leonie Haimson: Beware of Summit/Facebook Platform, Now in 100 Schools Across the Nation

By dianeravitch
October 18, 2016 //
20

Leonie Haimson, one of the nation’s leading champions of student privacy, posted a detailed description of the Summit/Facebook platform, now in use in more than 100 schools (mostly public schools), and soon to be found in your own district or school, whether it is public or private.

She writes:

Summit is sharing the student personal data with Facebook, Google, Clever and whomever else they please – through an open-ended consent form that they have demanded parents sign. A copy of the consent form is here.

I have never seen such a wholesale demand from any company for personal student data, and can imagine many ways it could be abused. Among other things, Summit/Facebook claims they will have the right to use the personal data “to improve their products and services,” to “conduct surveys, studies” and “perform any other activities requested by the school. ”

The Terms of Service (TOS) limit the right of individuals to sue if they believe their privacy has been invaded:

As the Washington Post article points out, the TOS would force any school or party to the agreement (including teachers) to give up their right to sue in court if they believe their rights or the law has been violated, and limits the dispute to binding arbitration in San Mateo CA – in the midst of Silicon Valley, where Facebook and Google presumably call the shots. This is the same sort of abuse of consumer rights that that banks and credit card companies have included in their TOS and that the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is now trying to ban.

–The CEO of Summit charters, Diane Tavenner, is also the head of the board of the California Charter School Association, which has aggressively tried to get pro-privatization allies elected to California school boards and state office, and has lobbied against any real regulations or oversight to curb charter school abuses in that state.

You will not be surprised to learn that the big money behind this privacy invasion venture is Bill Gates and Laurene Powell Jobs.

In my view and that of many other parents, the explosion of ed tech and the outsourcing of student personal data to private corporations without restriction, like this current Summit/Facebook venture, is as risky for students and teachers as the privatization of public education through charter school expansion. In this case, the risk is multiplied, since the data is going straight into the hands of a powerful charter school CEO – closely linked to Gates, Zuckerberg and Laurene Powell Jobs, among the three wealthiest plutocrats on the planet.

Gates has praised Summit to the skies, has given the chain $11 million, and has made special efforts to get it ensconced in his state of Washington; Zuckerberg is obviously closely entrenched in this initiative, and Laurene Powell Jobs has just granted the chain $10 million to launch a new charter school in Oakland.

Don’t let them data-mine your child.

Get informed. Contact Leonie or other privacy advocates. Leonie’s email address is included in her post.

Categories Accountability, Data and Data Mining, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Technology

Laura Chapman: Why You Should Opt Out of PARCC

By dianeravitch
October 11, 2016 //
13

Laura Chapman, retired arts educator and researcher, offers reasons why you should opt out of PARCC:

“Here is one more reason to be a very serious and unrelenting critic of PARCC.

It has “teamed up” with greatschools.org, a website that rates schools and leases data for commercial exploitation (about which I have commented before).

MONDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2015 ( from http://www.parcconline.org/news-and-video/382-greatschools-parcc-launch-new-parent-tool)

“PARCC states have partnered with GreatSchools to launch the GreatKids Test Guide for Parents, a new resource to assist parents in helping their children prepare academically for college and careers, and for the next grade level. “…”The Guide gives … information about what a child needs to know at each grade level and how parents can help their children succeed academically, based on how their child performed on the PARCC assessment.”

“About GreatSchools. Founded in 1998, GreatSchools is a national nonpartisan nonprofit helping millions of parents find quality schools, support great learning and guide their kids to great futures. GreatSchools offers thousands of articles, videos and worksheets to help parents support their children’s learning. Last year, more than 59 million unique visitors accessed the GreatSchools website including more than half of all US families with school-age children. Headquartered in Oakland, California, GreatSchools partners with cities and states across the country.“
Do not be deceived by sweet talk about “partnerships.” This non-profit is a sophisticated and well-funded system for gathering test scores and other information reported by schools, converting this information into ratings, and selling the data and ratings. The website literally sells ads and licenses for access to test scores and other data on schools—public, private, and charter—with expansions planned for pre-school and daycare-centers.

This national data hog is funded by billionaire foundations unfriendly to public schools. The logos of the Gates, Walton, Robertson, and Arnold Foundations are prominently displayed. A list of 19 other supporters includes the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, Bradley Foundation, Goldman Sachs Gives, New Schools Venture Fund among others. All of these supporters want to make public schools an artifact from the past.

“Here is what GreatSchools does with the test scores, now including PARCC scores.

“The overall GreatSchools Rating is an average of how well students at a given school do on each grade and subject test. For each test, ratings are assigned based on how well students perform relative to all other students in the state, and these ratings are averaged into an overall rating of 1 to 10.”

“The distribution of the GreatSchools Rating in a given state looks like a bell curve, with higher numbers of schools getting ratings in the “average” category, and fewer schools getting ratings in the “above average” or “below average” categories.”

The ratings are based on the manipulation of data classified in one of three ways: As a proficiency measure, a growth measure (including discredited VAM), and a rating for “how well schools are preparing students for success in college and beyond” (high school graduation rate, SAT, ACT scores). The system is rigged so most schools are rated average or below.

Click to access New_Ratings_Methodology_Report.pdf

The fraudulent rating system gives the notoriously test-driven Success Academy in NY the highest possible rating here

http://www.greatschools.org/about/ratings.page

This non-profit is the front for a mega for-profit operation serving big box stores, and multiple industries— financial, real estate, charter expansions, testing and text publishers. It is designed to capture the interest of media outlets and merchandizers as “partners,” co-opt entire school districts and federal agencies into “partnerships.” The gigantic “partner” basket includes Walmart, Target, Yale Center for Social Emotional Intelligence, Survey Monkey, Forbes, US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Dunn & Bradstreet, US Department of Education, Goldman Sachs, and more

JUST A SAMPLING:

CONTENT 321 Fast Draw; Algonquin Books; Ashoka Foundation; Bay Citizen; California Watch; College Board; Common Sense Media; DK Publishing; Film Sight Productions; IDEO; Learning Ally; Learning and Leadership Center; Mind/Shift; National Center for Learning Disabilities; Parenting.com; Reading Rockets; Scholastic; Treasure Bay, Inc.; UCLA Department of Psychology; US Department of Education; Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.

COMMUNITY AND FAMILY ENGAGEMENT Families Empowered; Hillsborough County Public Schools, Iridescent Learning; KIPP; Magnet Schools of America; Miami Dade County Public Schools; Rocketship Education; Stand Up for Students; Step Up for Students; US Department of Housing and Urban Development

RESEARCH Gallup Education; SurveyMonkey (see also Licensees); SRI; Rockman Et Al.

MARKETING & OUTBOUND MEDIA Care2.com; Common Sense Media; Forbes; NBC News Education; The Bully Project; Univision.

LICENSEES Apartments.com, Brain Pop; Digital Map Products; Dunn & Bradstreet; Fannie Mae; Maponics; Michael & Susan Dell Foundation; Military Child Education Coalition; Move Sales, Inc.; National Association of Charter School Authorizers; National Housing Trust; Onboard Informatics; Policy Map; Realtors Property Resource; SurveyMonkey; Target, US Department of Housing and Urban Development; Walmart; WolfNet; Zillow.

What do these “partners get” for signing on? At minimum, it is the opportunity to become an advertiser or license holder who can gain access to your student’s test scores—for a fee. You can find some of the ad rates here. https://selfserve.rubiconproject.com/advertise3/products/29619

At the bottom of the rate page you can see that these “packages” are offered via the Rubicon Project. Click on Rubicon Project to see what this “project “is. The Rubicon Project is the name for a company that scoops all of greatschool’s data and ratings and comments from users and puts them in Rubicon’s “Advertising Automation Cloud.”

This data warehousing operation “brings buyers and sellers closer together on a robust advertising technology platform. One of the largest cloud and Big Data computing systems in the world, the Automation Cloud leverages over 50,000 algorithms and analyzes billions of data points in real-time to deliver the best results for sellers and buyers,” with 300 real-time data-driven decisions per transaction.”

Follow the money. The billionaire foundations gather the test scores and other information about schools. They are notoriously in favor of market-based education. The scores are translated into a their dubious but “custom” rating scheme with direct links to the great red-lining guru, Zillow (who has paid for a high end license). The data and ratings migrate out from the greatschools website to Rubicon. For a fee, Rubicon facilitates rapid and custom access to the data and ratings from their “cloud,” (a data warehouse), promising their clients they can “Efficiently find your target audience;” “build brand awareness,” “acquire new customers, and re-engage existing customers.”

https://selfserve.rubiconproject.com/advertise3/products/29619

I hope that this information gives parents another reason to opt out of the tests and especially PARCC. Greatschools has test data from every state, has a map of district boundaries searchable by zipcodes, and it is seeking data well beyond that required by state or federal regulation such as such as schools safety, cleanliness, and parent involvement. Next up: Scores for school climate and social-emotional learning, and “customer satisfaction surveys.”

Remember, taxpayers made PARCC possible. Time to say bye, bye and good riddance.

Categories Corporate Reform, Data and Data Mining, Education Industry, Testing

Who Is Mining Your Data? A Guide

By dianeravitch
September 27, 2016 //
18

Have you ever wondered who is mining your data?

This post aggregates the biggest data mining corporations.

Try this:

http://www.londonworldwide.com/how-your-enemies-can-have-you-attacked-on-data-mining-services-every-time-you-touch-a-keyboard-you-hand-your-opposition-the-tools-of-your-own-destruction-2/

You will note that only one of them is defunct, dead, gone: inBloom, killed by parent activists Leonie Haimson of New York and Rachel Stickland of Colorado and others who banded together to kick inBloom out of their schools.

Meanwhile, look at the many corporations that are monitoring everything you do online, every purchase, every comment.

Categories Data and Data Mining

Peter Greene: Reformers Pitch Their Ideas to the New President

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2016 //
12

Peter Greene delves into 16 policy ideas for education, proffered by Bellwether Education Partners, a consulting group populated by and for reformers.

You will not be surprised that at the top of the list is school choice. Despite any evidence that charter schools are intrinsically superior to public schools, they are the solution put forward, as well as increasing the federal tax breaks to incentivize more investments in charters.

Peter reviews the 16 policies and finds not much new.

He concludes:

Some points worth thinking about, and a whole lot of swift repackagings of the same old reformster profiteering sales pitches. As I said at the top– Clinton already knows all of this and all Trump really wants is a tub of gasoline and a blowtorch, so I’m not sure to whom this pitch is aimed. But it’s on the reformster radar, so it should be on our as well.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Data and Data Mining, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice

Cheri Kiesecker: What Parents Need to Know About Google Apps for Education

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2016 //
41

Cheri Kiesecker is a Colorado parent who pays close attention to technology that invades student privacy.

She left the following warning as a comment:

In response to the question about GAFE. Below are a few links that may be of help.
GAFE, Google, Chromebooks… seem to suffer transparency issues on how they track and use and analyze student data. When parents have asked to see what data points Google collects, how that information is analyzed, who it is shared with, there are no transparent answers.

Many privacy organizations and advocates have concerns and questions about the algorithms used and data collection/ sharing in GAFE.
Google Chromebooks are pre-set to send student data, all user activity, back to Google.

This article explains how ChromeSync feature tracks students. Some schools purposely leave the SYNC feature on. Others, however, turn off Sync before asking students to use Chromebooks. MANY schools and parents are NOT AWARE of the Chrome Sync tracking feature.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/internet-companies-confusing-consumers-profit

This blog does a great job explaining GAFE issues in Where The Sidewalk Ends: Wading Through Google’s Terms of Service for Education:

Google defines a narrow set of applications as “core” Apps for Edu services. These services are exempt from having ads displayed alongside user content, and from having their data used for “Ads purposes”. However, apps outside the core services – like YouTube, Blogger, and Picasa – are not covered by the terms of service that restrict ads. The same is true for integrations of third party apps that can be enabled within the Google Apps admin interface, and then accessed by end users. So, when a person in a Google Apps for Edu environment watches a video on YouTube, writes or reads a post on Blogger, or accesses any third party app enabled via Google Apps, their information is no longer covered under the Google Apps for Education terms.

To put it another way: as soon as a person with a Google Apps for Education account strays outside the opaque and narrowly defined “safe zone” everything they do can be collected, stored, and mined.

So, the next time you hear someone say, “Google apps doesn’t use data for advertising” ask them to explain what happens to student data when a student starts in Google apps, and then goes to Blogger, or YouTube, or connects to any third party integration.” read more…

https://funnymonkey.com/2015/where-the-sidewalk-ends-wading-through-googles-terms-of-service

EFF COMPLAINT against GOOGLE

The privacy watchdog group Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a complaint with the FTC about Google’s deceptive tracking of students.
Chrome books are set to send back students’ entire browsing history to Google but that is not all.

Google’s Student Tracking Isn’t Limited to Chrome Sync

Many media reports on (as well as at least one response to) the FTC complaint we submitted yesterday about Google’s violation of the Student Privacy Pledge have focused heavily on one issue—Google’s use of Chrome Sync data for non-educational purposes. This is an important part of our complaint, but we want to clarify that Google has other practices which we are just as concerned about, if not more so.
In particular, the primary thrust of our complaint focuses on how Google tracks and builds behavioral profiles on students when they navigate to Google-operated sites outside of Google Apps for Education. We’ve tried to explain this issue in both our complaint and our FAQ, but given its significance we think it’s worth explaining again.

To understand what’s going on, you first have to understand that when it comes to education, Google divides its services into two categories: Google Apps for Education (GAFE), which includes email, Calendar, Talk/Hangouts, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Sites, Contacts, and the Apps Vault; and everything else, which includes Google Search, Blogger, Bookmarks, Books, Maps, News, Photos, Google+, and YouTube, just to name a few.

Google has promised not to build profiles on students or serve them ads only within Google Apps for Education services. When a student goes to a different Google service, however, and they’re still logged in under their educational account, Google associates their activity on that service with their educational account, and then serves them ads on at least some of those non-GAFE services based on that activity.

In other words, when a student logs into their educational account, and then uses Google News to create a report on current events, or researches history using Google Books, or has a geography lesson using Google Maps, or watches a science video on YouTube, Google tracks that activity and feeds it into an ad profile attached to the student’s educational account—even though Google knows that the person using that account is a student, and the account was created for educational purposes.

This is our biggest complaint about Google’s practices—that despite having promised not to track students, Google is abusing its position of power as a provider of some educational services to profit off of students’ data when they use other Google services—services that Google has arbitrarily decided don’t deserve any protection. read more

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/googles-student-tracking-isnt-limited-chrome-sync

Google and other apps may be “free”, but as privacy experts warn, your child’s data is the price. GAFE is just one example of needing transparent and enforceable privacy laws to protect students and why schools and teachers should read the privacy policies, terms of service surrounding data collection and use…and communicate that information with parents before signing a child up for GAFE or any app. Ideally, every parent should be given the choice to opt-in, as many parents are not aware of data privacy issues surrounding edtech.
…and as privacy groups warn, Google is playing with [COPPA] fire in promoting GAFE to children under 13.

http://www.cio.com/article/2855414/google-will-target-kids-with-redesigned-versions-of-its-products.html

Categories Data and Data Mining, Education Industry, For-Profit, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Technology

Student Privacy Advocates to Congress: DO NOT PASS the Phony “Safe Kids Act”

By dianeravitch
September 21, 2016 //
10

Leading advocates for student privacy warn that the Senate Commerce Committee is close to approving legislation that will NOT protect student privacy.

For Immediate Release: September 21, 2016

Contact: Rachael Stickland; rachael@studentprivacymatters.org, 303-204-1272

Parent Coalition for Student Privacy opposes passage of Daines/Blumenthal SAFE KIDS Act

Coalition members fear the bill would open up the floodgates of commercialism

The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, composed of parents, advocates and educators throughout the nation, and whose members led the fight against inBloom, came out against the SAFE KIDS Act, co-sponsored by Senators Daine and Blumenthal, scheduled to be marked up in the Commerce Committee today.

Rachael Stickland, co-chair of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy said, “While we appreciate the sincere motivation of these Senators to put controls on how personal student information is used by companies and organizations, we believe that this bill would inadvertently further erode student privacy. Right now, both the Student Privacy Pledge and FERPA, as well as other federal laws, actually ban the use of student data for non-educational purposes including behavioral advertising, while this bill would seem to allow for that possibility. There is also much confusion and ambiguity in the bill’s language about how parents would be informed about how their children’s data is being used by companies, how to request its deletion, and when this will occur, as well as what specific security protections will be required to protect against breaches.”

Josh Golin, Executive Director of Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood, said: “The bill, though well-intentioned, has far too many loopholes to give children the protection from commercial exploitation that they deserve. It allows unlimited targeted ads to students through the use of apps assigned by schools, as long as these ads are based on personal information gained through an individual online session. It also exempts some of the most frequently assigned websites and apps such as YouTube. This is unacceptable, as advertising is harmful to children and detracts from any educational benefits the program might otherwise provide.”

Leonie Haimson, the Executive Director of Class Size Matters and the co-chair of the Parent Coalition concluded, “We would like to work with Senators Daine and Blumenthal and the other members of the Commerce Committee, on improving this bill to ensure that student privacy is strengthened rather than further eroded. Right now, we cannot support this legislation given the huge push from the ed tech industry to exploit our children’s personal information and to treat them as consumers rather than as students. Parents are increasingly concerned about the accelerated adoption of so-called educational apps in schools; we strongly believe their use must be approached with caution and regulated with a firm hand, to ensure that they do not violate children’s privacy and safety or undermine the learning experience. We fear this bill would further open up the floodgates of commercialism.”
###

Categories Data and Data Mining, Education Reform, Privacy and Privacy Rights

Nancy Bailey: Beware of PBS’s “School of the Future”

By dianeravitch
September 13, 2016 //
80

Nancy Bailey watched advance promotional material for PBS’s “School of the Future,” and she is fearful that it will be a sales pitch for digital learning.

She writes:

“On Wednesday, Sept. 14, 9 pm ET, PBS and NOVA will air a two hour special called “School of the Future.” The advertisement tells us much. They are warning that the future for children demands that students need better preparation to succeed due to globalization. What they probably won’t tell us is that this future will likely continue to be manipulated by corporations.

“Technology

“This abstract, strange future they speak about (possibly puzzling to the smartest among us), will be about technology, of course.

“Their message appears to be that we better address technology that can be used with students, even to study their brains to see if they can learn faster and better. The goal is to close the achievement gap.

“The ad has that hint of emergency for which school reformers are known.

“Sal Kahn of Kahn Academy fame will be on the program. I don’t mind Kahn’s online instruction, but it is naïve to believe that such a program will replace public schools and real teachers.

“And that’s what today’s technology is about. Don’t be deceived by the few teachers that might be shown on this program.

“In some parts of the country they are sitting children online in teacherless preschools.

“They are replacing elementary, middle, and high school classes led by teachers with all online instruction, even though research shows that more computer time doesn’t work out as well as less screen time.

“Many school districts have wasted an exorbitant amount of money on iPads that have not proven to be worth what administrators thought when they purchased them. In some places they sit unused in the closet.

“Technology isn’t bad. It can benefit teachers, students and parents. But it should not be made to appear like it will miraculously improve the way students learn used alone.

“Many parents understand this. The reasonable use of technology is what Parents Across America recently advocated for in a position paper. They recognize the overarching push many corporations are doing to destroy public schooling by creating all online schooling.

“The last chapter in my book Losing America’s Schools: The Fight to Save Public Education is about the technology threat. I believe, like many, that the ultimate goal of the school reformers involves closing public schools in favor of all online–at home or in substandard charter schools set up like warehouses.

“Technology might help the homebound student or the student in rural areas, but this is an alternative. It can also provide review for students who need it, or advanced information for students who want it, but it is not as good as brick-and-mortar schooling.

“It is also troubling to hear repeated claims that computers will individualize schooling which we will hear about in this program. They might give students lessons at their level of understanding, but truly personalized learning involves real teachers and students with which to connect. The human element is critical.”

Get ready for the Brave New World of education, the one without teachers. Think of the cost savings!

Get

Categories Data and Data Mining, Education Industry, Education Reform, Online Learning, Technology, Computers

Parents Across America Warn about Misuse of EdTech in Schools

By dianeravitch
August 24, 2016 //
31

This just in from the parent advocacy group, Parents Across America:

Contact: Laura Bowman, PAA-Roanoke Valley: 540-819-6385
Julie Woestehoff, PAA interim executive director: 773-715-3989

Our Children @ Risk

Parents raise alarm about EdTech’s harmful effects on children’s
academic, intellectual, emotional, physical and social development

Echoing the 1983 “Nation at Risk” report, Parents Across America (PAA)
today declares, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose
on America the takeover of public education by digital technology that
threatens our children’s health and well-being, captures their private
data, and undermines the best elements of their education, we might
well view it as an act of war.”

PAA has spent extensive time looking into recent writing and research
that raise red flags about the impact of the EdTech explosion on our
children. This high-pressure movement has brought a mishmash of digital
devices and online and other pre-packaged programs into our schools,
where they are promoted as “personalized,” “competency-based,”
“student-centered,” or “self-directed” learning, terms which we refer
to together as EdTech.

Today, PAA released a position paper and a series of reports, including
a 35-page background paper, detailing some of the many threats to
children’s health and well-being, parental control, family privacy, and
the quality of teaching and learning by this latest effort of corporate
reformers to profit from our children’s education and undermine
democratic public schooling.

PAA’s executive director, Julie Woestehoff, explains, “What we have
found out about the EdTech push alarms us, and should alarm any parent.
First of all, there is actually very little research addressing the
many news ways that EdTech is being used in our schools — our children
are truly being used as guinea pigs. What we do know about children and
screen time is based in part on new studies and in part on previous
research into children’s use of television, video games and computers,
which can help us anticipate some of EdTech’s health effects. And
EdTech’s teaching and learning track record is not positive. Yet
corporate reformers and the new federal education law, the Every Child
Succeeds Act, or ESSA, are investing heavily in EdTech and increasingly
pressuring its widespread use.”

Leader of PAA’s chapter in Roanoke, VA, Laura Bowman, says, “We are
speaking out for balanced, healthy classrooms for our children. We
strongly oppose the push to increase student screen time, replace
teachers with packaged lessons delivered by digital devices, and
continuously test students, data-mining the results. We are very
concerned that the massive and growing use of EdTech is displacing
valuable elements of schooling without providing clear benefits, and
threatening our children’s right to a healthy and educationally-
appropriate school environment.”

PAA is not against the appropriate use of technology in schools. Just
as the group opposes standardized test misuse and not the tests
themselves, they challenge technology use that reduces schooling to a
data-mining computer game, and not technology itself. We know that our
children need to master technology, and we acknowledge that parents
must work harder to monitor their children’s use of technology at home.
But we also strongly feel that schools, school districts and states
must become far more cautious, diligent, transparent and accountable
about their technology decisions.

PAA believes that, in the face of strong pressure from the parental
opt-out movement, and criticism that the misuse and overuse of
standardized tests harms children and their education, corporate
reformers and “Big Testing” have changed their tactics.

These education profiteers are promoting even more lucrative testing
and teaching strategies, mostly tied to the Common Core State Standards
and the PARCC or SBAC national tests.

These products help Big Testing continue to control the curriculum and
access vast amounts of student data. Meanwhile, students are spending
increasing hours glued to computer screens and other digital devices
which leaves less time for interacting with other children, adults or
their own imaginations, and exposes them to new dangers.

We have prepared a set of informational materials for parents covering
PAA’s specific concerns about EdTech’s:

-harmful effects on children’s mental and emotional development,

-negative impact on student intellectual and academic growth,

-damaging physical effects,

-depersonalization and other ways of undermining the educational
process,

-questionable value and effectiveness,

-continuous testing of students, often without obtaining consent from
or even informing students or parents,

-threats to student data privacy, and

-hugely lucrative benefits for private companies.

Parents must be alerted to these potential risks, and be prepared to
challenge and, if necessary, opt out of school-based technology that
may be harmful to our children.

Based on these and other concerns, we call on legislators and education
policy makers to consider our list of recommendations found at http://p
arentsacrossamerica.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/EdTechRecs8-20-
16.pdf.

Please see our documentation paper (http://tinyurl.com/edtechdocu) and
reports (http://tinyurl.com/PAAEdTechreports)for more detailed informat
ion, references and background.

Categories Data and Data Mining, Parents, Technology, Computers

Kevin Ohlandt: Delaware Is Leading the Wrong Way–to Destruction of Public Education

By dianeravitch
August 23, 2016 //
10

Kevin Ohlandt blogs at Exceptional Delaware.

He left the following comment in response to Peter Greene’s post about “Lab Rats for America.”

“But where oh where would all of this become incorporated? Look no further than the home of 85% of U.S. companies… the First State… Delaware. On May 2nd, Delaware Governor Jack Markell announced his state would begin to look at changes in state regulations and state code to allow for Blockchain start-ups to come to Delaware.

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/governor-markell-launches-delaware-blockchain-initiative-300260672.html

“As well, we have a coding school in Delaware which was founded by Ben DuPont, of the legendary DuPont family of Delaware. The same family that actually created many of the “brown schools” in our state in the early 20th Century. Also a big supporter of charter schools.

“This is what is has all been leading up to. And opt out? They love it. As long as they resist it just enough to issues threats and build the base for more parents opting out. Not wholesale, but steady increases. That way they can “realize the error of their ways” and lead us to a digital personalized learning competency-based education paradise where the state assessment is no longer given once a year, but throughout – in the form of end of unit online assessments. At the end of the year, the total scores will be calculated and serve as the official state assessments.

“Because these are also part of students grades and their ability to move on, the ability to opt out becomes moot. Teachers (or rather, glorified digital moderators), will get immediate feedback. The tests won’t be as long, so parents won’t have to worry.
They are three steps ahead of us, always. While we are lashing out about PARCC, Smarter Balanced, and teacher evaluations, they are laying the groundwork for all of this.

“They can say this is an attempt to erase all inequity, but we know that is a false narrative. This is the corporate takeover of America. This is the end of public education.
But the question we ALL need to ask ourselves… how do we stop it? We are seeing coding classes in 3rd grade in Delaware. Are kids actually laying the groundwork for a lot of this already? You know this is a data-mining paradise for them.

“The Rodel Foundation of Delaware has been pushing this in our state for a long time. Our State Board of Education and Dept. of Education are the most deceptive and fraudulent parts of our state.

“If we want to save public education and, I’m going to say it, the future of the country, we have to act now.”

Categories Accountability, Data and Data Mining, Delaware, Democracy, Education Industry, Online Education, Standardized Testing, Technology, Computers, Testing

Peter Greene: Lab Rats for America, A Kafkaesque Version of Our Future

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2016 //
36

Peter Greene writes here about a polished (and terrifying) video released by the ACT Foundation that portrays the programmed education of the future.

He begins:

Oh my God. Oh my effing God.

If you want to see where Competency Based Education, data mining, the cradle to career pipeline, the gig economy, and the transformation into a master and servant class society all intersect– boy, have I got a video for you. Spoiler alert: this is also one way that public education dies.

I’m going to walk you through the video, embed it for your own viewing, and tell you about the people behind this. Hang on. This is stunning. And I’ll warn you right up front– this is not some hack job that looks like amateur hour video production (like, say, an in house USED video). This is slick and well-produced. Which somehow makes it more horrifying.

The video is a little SF film taking us ten years into the future. Imagine you are one of the one billion people using a new technology called The Ledger. And our slogan…?

Learning is earning.

Peter patiently walks you through this dystopian vision of the future of training, disguised as “education.”

He writes:

Exactly what task will certify that you have acquired one hour’s worth of critical thinking?

And how do we even begin to discuss the notion that it doesn’t really matter whether you learn quantum physics from a PhD in the field or from a person who once sat in one class taught by that PhD?

And does anybody think that this is how the children of the wealthy will be educated? Will they accept this sort of “education”? Will they accept this total violation of data privacy?

This is not education. This is training. This is operant conditioning for the servant class that also provides the upper class with tools that let them trickle even fewer benefits down to the working class.

In fact, I would say that this is just training rats to run a maze, but it’s even worse than that, because ultimately even if we were to accept the premise that simply giving some job-ish training for the underclass is good enough, and even if I were to accept the racist, classist bullshit that somehow ignores the immoral and unethical foundations of such a system, the fact remains that this would be a lousy training system. To reduce any job of any level of complexity to this kind of checklist-of-tasks training provides the worst possible type of training.

So, no, this isn’t even sending rats into a maze to earn a pellet of food. This is carrying the pellet dispenser with you as an app. This is saying, “Well, the maze just involves twelve left turns and seven right turns.” Then I hand the rat a tiny phone with an app that measures his ability to turn corners, and once the rat has turned twelve left corners and seven right ones, the app spits out a food pellet.

This is also, not incidentally, the death of public education for any but the wealthy. In the world of the Ledger, there are no teachers, no schools, and no education for any purpose other than to satisfy the requirements of the people with power and money. In the world of the Ledger, education training exists only to help workers better react to the demands of employers. There is no benefit to education training except to trade for money. The Ledger is the wet dream of every corporate boss who said, “Why are they wasting time teaching these kids all this extra stuff. I’m not gonna pay them for that.”

It is important to know what the futuristic thinkers have in mind for us and our children, whether their vision will expand our ideals or contract them. This is most certainly the latter.

Categories Data and Data Mining, Democracy, Technology
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