A reader writes:

What grabbed me was this part:
“electrodermal activity that grows higher during states such as excitement, attention or anxiety and lower during states such as boredom or relaxation.”

So, this means that they can’t tell the difference between excitement, attention and anxiety? So all you have to do is keep a class in constant fear and you ace the evaluation? It also can’t tell the difference between boredom and relaxation. So if you’re doing “sustained silent reading,” which is it? Are students supposed to be “on” all the time?

I’m not a teacher, and even I can see that this is a huge steaming pile. But it got them a $500K grant! Nice work if you can get it – and stomach it.

Let’s see now. The teacher who keeps the class in a state of high anxiety gets points on the “effectiveness” scale. The teacher whose students are feeling at ease in the classroom will get a low rating.

If this reader saw through this flaw, why did no one at the Gates Foundation?

Last night, I googled “galvanic response skin” and got thousands of hits. It is happening, it has many uses apparently.

But surely you can see how it can be used to mine classroom data, to find out whose students sit on the edge of their seats in a state of alertness, attention and anxiety, and whose are slacking off.

Data mining is now a customary part of the business of online corporations who record our every move, which web pages we open, which products we buy online, which books we are interested in. All of this information is assembled, filtered, and compressed into a personalized profile, so that advertisers can target us with their messages wherever we go on the ‘Net. No point advertising automobile products to me, but they will be just right for someone else. Once gathered, this information can be sold and resold.

Once you understand the template, you can understand the logic of the Galvanic Response Skin bracelets. They will be one more piece of “objective” data to add to test scores, student surveys, and observations when evaluating a teacher. He or she may contest the observations, but how can they protest the objective readings of students’ skin responses to instructions?

And think of the professional development opportunities! Soon there will be workshops on how to increase your students’ GRS ratings. And there will be trained GSR facilitators and GSR measurement experts and GSR coaches.

It all fits so nicely with the U.S. Department of Education’s huge investment in data warehouses for every state. Before long, there will be a statistical profile for every student, compiled from their vital statistics at birth to their pre-kindergarten readiness assessments to everything that happens thereafter.

And to what end?

Diane

I opened the following email and at first I thought it was a prank or, as another reader put it, an article taken from The Onion. See what you think:

—–Original Message—–
From: Leonie Haimson
To: nyceducationnews ; paa news
Sent: Fri, Jun 8, 2012 10:08 am
Subject: [nyceducationnews] Gates Foundation: one more step into the dystopian future with electronic bracelets for students & teachers

 
Gates Foundation experimenting w/Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) bracelets in teacher eval project
 See Susan Ohanian, excerpt below:
 http://goo.gl/KBXtO
 
Look up “effective teaching” on Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grants. Here’s one of the awards.

To: Clemson University
Purpose: to work with members of the Measuring Effective Teachers (MET) team to measure engagement physiologically with Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) bracelets which will determine the feasibility and utility of using such devices regularly in schools with students and teachers [emphasis added]
Amount: $498,055

Think about that!!

NOTE: The emerging field of neuromarketing relies on biometric technologies to determine a participant’s emotional and cognitive response to certain stimuli. In the case of neuromarketing, this stimulus is anything from a television commercial to an internet advertisement. There are six primary biometrics used to gather data on physiological responses to marketing…

So Gates wants to apply it to effective teaching.

The Affectiva Q Sensor is a wearable, wireless biosensor that measures emotional arousal via skin conductance, a form of electrodermal activity that grows higher during states such as excitement, attention or anxiety and lower during states such as boredom or relaxation.

Here’s a paper on the topic: MobiCon: Mobile Context Monitoring Platform for Sensor-Rich Dynamic Environments

Smart mobile devices will be the central gateway for
personal services in the emerging pervasive environment
(Figure 1). They will enable a lot of personal context-aware
applications, forming a personal sensor network with a
number of diverse sensor devices, placed over human body
or in surrounding spaces. Diverse sensors act as the useful
tool for the applications to acquire users’ contexts1 , i.e.,
current status of an individual or surrounding situation that
she/he faces into, without their intervention [42].
 
Wikipedia says neuromarketing is a new field of marketing research that studies consumers’ sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective response to marketing stimuli. So the Gates Foundation joins Google, CB S, and Frito-Lay in looking for ways to measure consumer reactions to products.

Put a Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) bracelet on every kid in the class and you can measure teacher effectiveness in keeping their attention.

Maybe the next step is for the bracelet to zap them with electric current when their attention wanders.

And then the next generation will be the Galvanic Skin Response bracelet on every teacher–to zap her when she veers from the Common Core curriculum. Then. . . bring on the drones to eliminate such teachers.
 
 Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters
124 Waverly Pl.

I needed A reality check, so I googled “galvanic skin response” and added “Clemson.” up popped the following link:

Home/Clemson University
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Clemson University
Date: November 2011
Purpose: to work with members of the Measuring Effective Teachers (MET) team to measure engagement physiologically with Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) bracelets which will determine the feasibility and utility of using such devices regularly in schools with students and teachers
Amount: $498,055
Term: 1 year and 2 months
Topic: College-Ready Education
Region Served: Global, North America
Program: United States
Grantee Location: Clemson, South Carolina
Grantee Web site: http://www.clemson.edu

What can I say? Shades of Brave New World.

Which district will be first to put the bracelets on their students and teachers? Will charter school students have to wear them, or only children in public schools? Who will pay for them? Will schools raise money by selling the data to Amazon and Google and other data-mining corporations? Have we lost all common sense?

Diane

I asked my readers if Melinda Gates was right when she said that an effective teacher would get three times the “gains” of an ineffective reader and if you knew the source of this statistic or claim. I had many thoughtful replies. Many people had heard the claim, which was made not only by Melinda Gates but Michelle Rhee. Some attributed it to Eric Hanushek, some to Education Trust, some to William Sanders.

Surely there can be no doubt that some teachers are more successful than others, at least with some children in some years. Can all teachers get the same gains every year? Not so clear.

Imagine if every child in every classroom in the U.S. had an effective teacher every year, as Melinda Gates said would one day be possible due to the work of the Gates Foundation. That would mean that every child would gain 18 months of instruction every year. By the end of eighth grade, every child would be ready to go to college, having gotten the test score gains equivalent to twelve years of schooling. College-readiness by 13 or 14! That would surely be a break-through for our society and would change the nature of college-going.

In the search for the provenance of Melinda Gates’ statement, Gary Rubinstein seems to have cracked the code with his research. Gary teaches math at Stuyvestant High School and has his own blog, as you will see if you open the link. Gary tracked the claim back to a paper by Eric Hanushek in 1992 (which was cited by some other readers as well). His analysis is worth reading. What Rubinstein discovers about this 20-year-old study will surprise you and make you wonder why so many people are citing it today as definitive proof of certain policy ideas. No one offered any evidence that the 1992 study (or whenever it was conducted) has been replicated, so we don’t need to worry about a sudden explosion of 14-year-olds prepared to enter college.

Diane

PS: A reader on Twitter suggests that she would be satisfied if 14-year-olds arrived with appropriate skills and knowledge for their grade:

,@DianeRavitch re: M Gates: how about we strive to have every 14 year old ready for real high school work?