Archives for category: Privacy and Privacy Rights
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ConnectEDU Goes Bankrupt, 20 Million Student Data Files at Risk

By dianeravitch
May 30, 2014 //
45

Leonie Haimson, leader of Class Size Matters and a student privacy hawk, reports on the bankruptcy of ConnectEDU. Data mining is big business.

She writes that:

“ConnectEDU was one of the three data dashboard companies chosen by the NY State Education Department to receive a statewide set of personal student data through the inBloom data cloud, as part of their “EngageNY Portal.” Now ConnectEDU has announced it has gone bankrupt, despite receiving a $500,000 grant from the Gates Foundation less than a year ago….The assets of ConnectEDU, including 20 million personal student records, are being bought by a venture capital company called North Atlantic Capital. Now the FTC is stepping in, to try to block the handing over of all these personal records. According to Education Week:
The potential sale of 20 million student records by ConnectEDU, an ed-tech company that filed for bankruptcy in April, has prompted the Federal Trade Commission to step in to protect the student data, the agency announced Friday.

“ConnectEDU, a 12-year-old Boston-based company, provides interactive tools to help K-12 and post-secondary learners make academic and career decisions. In its privacy policy, ConnectEDU promised that—prior to any sale of the company—registered users would be notified and have the ability to delete their personally identifiable data.”

“

Categories Data and Data Mining, Privacy and Privacy Rights

Robert Shepherd on Apathy about the Death of Competition for Education Materials

By dianeravitch
April 27, 2014 //
66

It is curious that duo many supporters of the Common Core standards want choice among schools but celebrate the standardization and lack of choice among suppliers of education materials. They want to multiply choices of schools while standardizing learning and standing back while only two, perhaps three at most, mega-publishers create nearly identical products for the nation’s students and schools.

Robert Shepherd posted a comment about the death of competition in the marketplace for educational materials. Consolidation started years ago as large companies bought up small companies, and as small companies found they were financially unable to compete with the giant corporations. Those trends have accelerated to the point where only two or three corporations control the education publishing industry. He wonders if anyone cares. I say yes, but no one knows how to stop this monopolizing trend. We feel powerless. To whom do we direct our complaints? This is not an oversight. Creating a national marketplace for vendors of goods and services was an explicit purpose of Race to the Top.

Joanne Weiss, who was Arne Duncan’s chief of staff and who directed Race to the Top, wrote in The Harvard Business Review:

“The development of common standards and shared assessments radically alters the market for innovation in curriculum development, professional development, and formative assessments. Previously, these markets operated on a state-by-state basis, and often on a district-by-district basis. But the adoption of common standards and shared assessments means that education entrepreneurs will enjoy national markets where the best products can be taken to scale.

“In this new market, it will make sense for teachers in different regions to share curriculum materials and formative assessments. It will make sense for researchers to mine data to learn which materials and teaching strategies are effective for which students – and then feed that information back to students, teachers, and parents.”

This may explain why so many major corporations are enthusiastic about the Common Core. It promises them a national market for their products and bring America’s schools into the national economy, where consolidation reigns. Walmart wins, Amazon wins, Google wins, small-scale enterprises lose and disappear.

Robert Shepherd writes:

“I am despairing of anyone’s paying any attention to the consequences for markets in educational materials on the CC$$ and of inBloom.

“Perhaps we have become so used to people using political influence to fix markets in this country that they simply don’t think twice when they see another instance of this. Is that the problem? Or is it that people don’t understand why these dramatically reduce the number of players in the educational materials market? Or are people just fine with having a couple of all-powerful providers of educational materials and with having all the little companies go under. Maybe people are OK with curricula from the educational equivalent of McDonalds or Walmart or Microsoft.

“Even on this blog, when I post about these matters, there is very, very little, if any, response.

“When I started in the educational publishing business years ago, there were 30 companies competing with one another. When the teachers at a school got together to decide what book they wanted to use, there were many, many options. Now, there are three big providers that have almost the entire market. What were previously competing companies are now separate imprints from one company.

“And the CC$$ creates ENORMOUS economies of scale for those few remaining publishers, making it almost impossible for any other publisher to compete with them.

“And inBloom creates a single monopolistic gateway through which computer-adaptive online materials must pass. A private monopoly created by the state.

“Are people OK with this? Where are the articles and essays and speeches about these issues from those opposed to Education Deform? One can understand the silence from the deformers–they created these deforms precisely in order to ensure their monopoly positions. But . . . but . . . why the deafening silence from the other side?

Categories Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Data and Data Mining, Economy, Education Industry, For-Profit, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Race to the Top

inBloom Closes Down Due to Parental Objections to Data Mining of Students

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2014 //
80

Education Week reports that inBloom is going out of business.

The company was started with a grant of $100 million from the Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation, to gather confidential student data and store it on an electronic “cloud.”

The technology for collection and storage of student data belonged to Wireless Generation, a subsidiary of Amplify, run by Joel Klein and owned by Rupert Murdoch.

Parental objections were strong wherever inBloom planned to gather data.

The last state to sever ties with inBloom was New York, where the Legislature barred the State Education Department from sharing data with inBlooom.

See this story in the New York Times and you will understand why parents got angry. InBloom would have collected 400 data points about students: “But some of the details seemed so intimate — including family relationships (“foster parent” or “father’s significant other”) and reasons for enrollment changes (“withdrawn due to illness” or “leaving school as a victim of a serious violent incident”) — that parents objected, saying that they did not want that kind of information about their children transferred to a third-party vendor.”

The national leader of the fight was Leonie Haimson, leader of a New York City-based group called Class Size Matters, who testified across the nation and alerted parents to the possible breach of their children’s confidential data.

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

Pearson Wants to Help You Swim in the Digital Ocean

By dianeravitch
April 4, 2014 //
14

In case you didn’t know it already, privacy is dead. The
National Security Agency has asserted the power to listen to your
phone calls and read your emails.

Now we
learn from Pearson and the esteemed (Sir) Michael Barber (the
architect of a philosophy known as “Deliverology”) that the
capability to monitor the actions, behaviors, even
thoughts of every student is at hand. We are all about to take a
dive into the Digital Ocean, whether we want to or not. Big data
will tell Pearson and other vendors whatever they want to know.
They will know more about our children and our grandchildren
than we do. Arne Duncan loosened the federal privacy regulations in
2011, so there is no limit on the information that Pearson and
others will collect. But never forget: It is all for the
kids.

Peter Greene shared his thoughts about Pearson’s digital ocean here.

he writes:

“Barber assures us that personalized learning at scale will be possible, and again I want to point out that we already have a system that can totally do that (though of course the present system does not provide corporations such as Pearson nearly enough money). I will not pretend that the traditional US public ed system always provides the personalized learning it should, but when reformy types suggest that’s a reason to scrap the whole system, I wonder if they also buy a new car every time the old car runs out of gas (plus, in that metaphor, government is repeatedly pouring sand into the gas tank).

“But no. There will have to be revolution:

“…schools will need to have digital materials of high quality, teachers will have to change how they teach and how they themselves learn…

“This shtick I recognize, because it is as old as education technology. Every software salesman who ever set foot in a school used this one– “This will be really great tool if you just change everything about how you work.” No. No, no, no. You do not tell a carpenter, “Hey, newspaper is a great building material as long as you change your expectations about how strong and protective a house is supposed to be.”

“You pick a tool because it can help you do the job. You do not change the job so that it will fit the tool…..Barber praises the authors of the paper for their “aspirational vision” of what success in schools would look like.

“They see teaching,learning and assessment as different aspects of one integrated process, complementing each other at all times, in real time;

To which I reply, “Wow! Amazing! Do they also envision water that is wet? Wheels that are round?”

Categories Data and Data Mining, Pearson, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Students

Parent Power Vs. inBloom; Parents Win, for Now

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2014 //
33

New York State cut all ties with inBloom, the controversial data-mining project sponsored by the Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation.

The legislature, which totally ignored parent demands for new faces on the New York Board of Regents, bowed to parent protests against the State Education Department’s determination to share confidential student data with inBloom.

In this post, Leonie Haimson describes how parents organized–not only in New York, but wherever inBloom planned to gather confidential student data–and fought back to protect their children’s privacy.

Give Haimson credit for being the spark plug that ignited parent resistance across the nation.

Normally, the federal law called FERPA would have prevented the release of the data that inBloom planned to collect, but in 2011, the U.S. Department of Education changed the regulations to permit inBloom and other data-mining to access student data without parental consent.

Gates and Carnegie contracted with Rupert Murdoch’s Wireless Generation, and the plan was to put millions of student records in an electronic data managed by amazon.com.

No one was able to assure that the data could never be hacked.

In every state and district where inBloom thought it was operative, parents brought pressure on public officials, and the contract was severed.

At present, inBloom has no known clients.

But as Haimson points out, this could change.

The thirst for data mining seems to be insatiable, and as I posted not long ago, the president of Knewton boasted that education is one sector that is ripe for data mining and that his company and Pearson would be using online tests to gather information about every student and storing it.

Protecting student privacy must remain high on every parent’s agenda.

Categories Data and Data Mining, Parents, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Resistance

WSJ: Big Data Enters the Classroom

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2014 //
43

Yup, it is a fact. Big data is here and it is going to tell us everything anyone wants to know about your children or your students.

Actually, Big Data presents itself as a way to “help” students and teachers, but in fact will be a cool way for entrepreneurs to develop apps, sell student data, and make money.

Over the past decade, schools have started using cloud storage or begun sending more data to state education departments for collection and analysis. The amount of data collected is expected to swell as more schools use apps and tablets that can collect information down to individual keystrokes, or even how long a student holds a mouse pointer above a certain answer.

Innovative education projects include Teach to One, a program run by New York City-based New Classrooms Innovation Partners. The company works with schools in Chicago, New York City and Washington, D.C., to track whether students have mastered math concepts. Through its software, students are given personalized quizzes and lessons that target their weaknesses. Students take classes in a few different settings—in a classroom with a live teacher, with a one-on-one tutor online or even through computer lessons—and the software aims to figure out which setting works best for them.

On a larger scale, Renaissance Learning, a testing and student-data company that recently was sold to a private-equity firm for $1.1 billion, has data on 10.7 million students across the country, who regularly take quizzes through the company’s portal. Chief Executive Jack Lynch says he believes soon it will be possible for the country to drill down to find out which states or districts are doing best at setting up their curricula or teaching fractions.

Some firms want to track students through their entire academic careers. ACT Inc., the company behind the ACT test, the competitor to the SAT exam, in April will launch a system to track students from third through 10th grades in English, math and science. ACT says the series of tests will help make sure students are ready to go to college and work. Another ACT product could help steer students toward careers that fit their skills.

Among their efforts to stave off privacy concerns, education-data companies are hiring chief privacy officers, testifying before state legislatures and reshaping their messages to emphasize their data security. State lawmakers are considering passing bills to rein in access to student data or allow parents to opt out of data collection.

Protests about data privacy have partly derailed one ambitious project, inBloom, a nonprofit with $100 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the nonprofit Carnegie Corporation of New York. InBloom wants to link education-tech companies with school districts—serving as a type of middleman for student data. Its system gives schools the option of uploading hundreds of characteristics about students, including disabilities such as autism or vision problems. Five states initially said they would work with inBloom. That number is down to three: New York, Illinois and Massachusetts.

Actually, Massachusetts has pulled out of inBloom and it is not clear whether any Illinois districts are participating in it.

The most peculiar quote in the article comes from the U.S. Department of Education’s privacy officer. One would expect that she would fiercely defend the privacy of students. But this is what she says:

Kathleen Styles, the U.S. Department of Education’s first chief privacy officer, says the biggest issue she has seen is schools don’t have rules or policies on how much data to collect, how long to keep it and who has access to it.

“The only way to make data totally safe is to not ever use it or keep it,” she says. “That’s just not an option.”

Why is it not an option to leave student data with the school? Why create a permanent record that will follow a young person throughout his or her life? Why does the federal government want to encourage data mining of student records? Why is the “chief privacy officer” not fighting for student privacy from data mining by vendors, hackers, and snoops?

Categories Education Reform, Privacy and Privacy Rights

Peter Greene: Connecting the Dots Between CCSS and Big Data

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2014 //
52

Peter Greene, in a serious vein, explains that the Common Core standards are integrally connected to the collection of data.

They can’t be changed or revised–contrary to the nationally and internationally recognized protocol for setting standards–because their purpose is to tag every student and collect data on their performance.

They cannot be decoupled from testing because the testing is the means by which every student is tagged and his/her data are collected for Pearson and the big data storage warehouse monitored by amazon or the U.S. government.

He writes:

We know from our friends at Knewton what the Grand Design is– a system in which student progress is mapped down to the atomic level. Atomic level (a term that Knewton loves deeply) means test by test, assignment by assignment, sentence by sentence, item by item. We want to enter every single thing a student does into the Big Data Bank.

But that will only work if we’re all using the same set of tags.

We’ve been saying that CCSS are limited because the standards were written around what can be tested. That’s not exactly correct. The standards have been written around what can be tracked.

The standards aren’t just about defining what should be taught. They’re about cataloging what students have done.

Remember when Facebook introduced emoticons. This was not a public service. Facebook wanted to up its data gathering capabilities by tracking the emotional states of users. But if users just defined their own emotions, the data would be too noisy, too hard to crunch. But if the user had to pick from the facebook standard set of user emotions– then facebook would have manageable data.

Ditto for CCSS. If we all just taught to our own local standards, the data noise would be too great. The Data Overlords need us all to be standardized, to be using the same set of tags. That is also why no deviation can be allowed. Okay, we’ll let you have 15% over and above the standards. The system can probably tolerate that much noise. But under no circumstances can you change the standards– because that would be changing the national student data tagging system, and THAT we can’t tolerate.

This is why the “aligning” process inevitably involves all that marking of standards onto everything we do. It’s not instructional. It’s not even about accountability.

It’s about having us sit and tag every instructional thing we do so that student results can be entered and tracked in the Big Data Bank.

And that is why CCSS can never, ever be decoupled from anything. Why would facebook keep a face tagging system and then forbid users to upload photos?

The Test does not exist to prove that we’re following the standards. The standards exist to let us tag the results from the Test. And ultimately, not just the Test, but everything that’s done in a classroom. Standards-ready material is material that has already been bagged and tagged for Data Overlord use.

The end-game is data-tracking, not standards. And that helps to explain why CCSS was written without consultation with educators; without participation by early childhood educators or those knowledgeable about students with disabilities; why there is no appeals process, no means of revision, why they were written so hurriedly in 2009 and pushed into 45 states and D.C. by Race to the Top.

Categories Common Core, Data and Data Mining, Privacy and Privacy Rights

Knewton, Pearson, and Big Data: Here They Come!

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2014 //
22

Big data will open the way to the future of education, says
the CEO of Knewton.

 

The company is piloting its products at Arizona
State University. Whatever we used to call education will cease to
exist. Big data will change everything.

 

“The so-called Big Data movement, which has been largely co-opted by the for-profit
education industry, will serve as “a portal to fundamental change
in how education research happens, how learning is measured, and
the way various credentials are measured and integrated into hiring
markets,” says Mitchell Stevens, an associate professor of
education at Stanford University. “Who is at the table making
decisions about these things,” he says, “is also up for grabs.”

 

Want to know the future? Watch Knewton: “Big Data stands to play an
increasingly prominent role in the way college will work in the
future. The Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University
has been demonstrating the effectiveness of autonomous teaching
software for years. Major educational publishers such as Pearson,
McGraw-Hill, Wiley & Sons and Cengage Learning have long
been transposing their textbook content on to dynamic online
platforms that are equipped to collect data from students that are
interacting with it. Huge infrastructural software vendors such as
Blackboard and Ellucian have invested in analytics tools that aim
to predict student success based on data logged by their client
universities’ enterprise software systems. And the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation has marshaled its outsize influence in
higher education to promote the use of data to measure and improve
student learning outcomes, both online and in traditional
classrooms. “But of all the players looking to ride the data wave
into higher education, Knewton stands out.”

 

Read more:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/01/25/arizona-st-and-knewtons-grand-experiment-adaptive-learning#ixzz2wkgLQ1ZS
Inside Higher Ed

Categories Data and Data Mining, Higher Education, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Technology, Computers

Your Child Is Now a Data Point. Thanks, Pearson and Arne!

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2014 //
28

If you have been wondering why data mining matters so much,
you will want to see this video.

Please note that the U.S. Department of
Education’s logo is on this video.

In it, an entrepreneur named Jose Ferreira, CEO of Knewton, shares his vision for a future in
which education of every individual child is completely determined
by data. Education today happens to be the most “data-mineable
industry in the world,” he says.

His firm and Pearson can map out whatever your child knows and doesn’t know, design lessons, and do
whatever is necessary to “teach” the concepts needed. There is
nothing about your child that they don’t know, and they will know
more about him or her next year than they do this year. If this is
the future, then teachers will be mere technicians, if they are
needed at all. What do you think?

Peter Greene saw the video and
thought it was scary. He wrote: “Knewton will generate this giant
data picture. Ferreira says presents this the same way you’d say,
“Once we get milk and bread at the store,” when I suspect it’s
really more on the order of “Once we cure cancer by using our
anti-gravity skateboards,” but never mind. Once the data maps are
up and running, Knewton will start operating like a giant
educational match.com, connecting Pat with a perfect educational
match so that Pat’s teacher in Iowa can use the technique that some
other teacher used with some other kid in Minnesota. Because
students are just data-generating widgets. “Ferreira is also
impressed that the data was able to tell him that some students in
a class are slow and struggling, while another student could take
the final on Day 14 and get an A, and for the five billionth time I
want to ask this Purveyor of Educational Revolution, “Just how
stupid do you think teachers are?? Do you think we are actually
incapable of figuring those sorts of things out on our
own?””

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

SAT, ACT Sued for Selling Student Data

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2014 //
9

A lawsuit
was filed against the SAT and ACT for selling
confidential data of students to colleges. Some states mandate that
all students must take one of these tests, whether they are college
bound or not. Students assume that their names and scores will be
shared with colleges to which they apply, but it turns out that far
more is disclosed about students, and it is sold, not just shared.
It appears that ACT and SAT are in the data-mining business for
their own gain. A lawsuit filed this week contends
that the College Board, which runs the SAT,
and ACT,
Inc., sell identifying information
about the hundreds of thousands of teenagers who take the exams
each year without the students’
consent. The test
companies are “masking the sale” of personal details about the
students “under the
guise of ‘sharing'” the teens’
information with other
agencies, the suit says. It says
the companies don’t disclose to students that their
personal information will be sold for profit.
The companies collect data from test-takers, then sell
the teenagers’ names and personal details to colleges. The
universities use the information to market themselves to potential
students. Across the country, more
than 1.6 million students in this
year’s high school graduating class — including 101,368 in
Pennsylvania and 83,489 in New Jersey — took the
SAT. Nearly 1.8 million graduating high
school students — including 26,171 in Pennsylvania
and 24,202 in New Jersey — took the
ACT. The lawsuit says the companies
collect details about those students — such as their
names, home addresses, birth dates,
phone numbers and social security
numbers — and sell it at a price of 33
cents per student, per buyer, but “at no time disclosed” to
test-takers that their information would be sold “to third parties
for monetary gain.” On its
website, the College Board tells students it provides
information to educational organizations “looking for students like
you” but says the students’ scores, Social Security numbers and
phone numbers aren’t given to other parties.
Last month, the College Board increased
its fees for student information to
37 cents per name; the ACT now charges 38 centsper
name.

Categories Privacy and Privacy Rights, Testing
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