3 1/2 minute video https://youtu.be/qrLvK5YD3v8
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The New Gold
Only a short time ago, I thought my husband was being paranoid when he asked me if I’d read the security agreement for an app I was about to download. “Does it tell you howit will use your data?” he asked. I shrugged and told him to relax. What could they possible find out about me that would be of concern?
A year or so later, I still have a tendency to give out personal information with far too much haste, but – for the most part, at least – I no longer think my husband is paranoid when it comes to concerns over data collection.
(You’re welcome, dear.)
The fact is, big data = BIG money – this article even goes so far as to call it “the new gold”– and where opportunities for profit exist, boundaries will be pushed as far as possible.
We are in uncharted territory, and – inconvenient though it may be – we need to be on our toes with this, lest we end up traveling down the same road as China.
China, you may or may not have heard, has recently unveiled something it calls “Sesame Credit” – which is, essentially, a giant game where you earn points for doing things (buying the right stuff, having the right friends), and get rewarded for good behavior with hard-to-access travel paperwork and loan approvals.
It may sound bizarre, but look closely and you’ll see that here in the United States, we are creeping toward similar practices.
Did you know, for example, that Facebook recently acquired a patent for a program that would allow lenders to use the credit scores of your friends in determining whether or not to grant you a loan?
“It’s nothing to lose sleep over for people with decent credit history, but it could potentially affect those who are borderline to begin with,” said Greg McBride, chief financial analyst for Bankrate.com.
Well gee, that makes me feel better.
Also of concern is the fact the concept being promoted in China is also promoted by Global Education Futures, who suggest in this document:
Continuous assessment in gaming-like dynamics that will “transform education into a ‘personal quest to boost a character’ in which “the ‘quest for achievement or trophy’ logic will be embedded into augmented reality systems that would award (with gaming bonuses, tokens, badges etc.) real-life professional conduct, healthy lifestyle, citizenship skills.
If you’ve read any of my previous blog posts, you know that despite the Orwellian picture of it paints of the future, GEF is actually a remarkably influential group, with connections to UNESCO, the Gates Foundation, and the Foundation for Excellence in Education. More than handful of policies they advocate – including mass “personalized” learning and competency-based assessment – made their way into the recent reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
So, the fact that they not only managed to predict but also appear to advocate the bizarre, dystopian game with which China is now experimenting should give one pause.
Like, serious pause:
All of this, meanwhile, has huge implications for our kids, whose data is being collected in more ways that most of us realize.
Check out the video below that was posted recently on Youtube, which gives a brief but important overview of the ways that big data and education are now intersecting in your child’s classroom:
It’s a brave new world out there.
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School Employee Salary’s and Benefits – 2012 study
This study was prepared by a Professor from Texas. They looked at the salary’s and benefits of teachers, aids and classified personnel (support) in Washington State as well as doing comparisons to private sector jobs and other states. If you jump to the end and read the Summary on page 50 you will get the gist.
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This article appears at: http://www.studentprivacymatters.org/bill-gates-and-the-erosion-of-student-privacy/#st_refDomain=www.facebook.com&st_refQuery=/
Bill Gates has had an enduring fixation on the need to expand the collection and sharing of personal student data. In 2005, the Gates Foundation organized a “data summit” among its grantees, at which launched the Data Quality Campaign, “to Improve the collection, availability and use of high-quality education data, and Implement state longitudinal data systems to improve student achievement.”
The Data Quality Campaign has received more than $13 millionsince 2013 from the Foundation, which they have used to advocate for the US Department of Education to weaken student privacy protections and to allow for the sharing of personal student information among state agencies, between states, and with researchers, test companies, and technology vendors.
In 2008 and 2011, The Data Quality Campaign, along with its “partners” among other Gates grantees, successfully lobbied the US Ed Dept. to relax FERPA, to allow for the creation of state longitudinal databases to link student data from preK through the workforce and beyond, and the disclosure and redisclosure of personal student data with a wide variety of third parties without parental knowledge or consent.
According to a participant in a webinar hosted by the Data Quality Campaign on April 14, 2011, Steve Winnick, a prominent DC attorney working for DQC emphasized the need to deny parents the right to consent or opt out of their children’s data being disclosed, saying, “we don’t want parents to get in the way.” You can see the 2011 fact sheet released by Steve Winnick and the Data Quality Campaign about the many ways the US Department of Education weakened this “outdated” privacy law in response to their advocacyhere.
Earlier in 2009, the Foundation granted $22 million to schools, districts, and states for them to expand their data collection and disclosure efforts, and in 2011, spent $87 million to form the Shared Learning Collaborative, which in 2014 would morph into a separate corporation called inBloom Inc.
inBloom Inc. which would receive more than $100M in Gates funds before closing its doors due to parent protests in 2014, was a hydra-headed effort to collect the personal data from nine states and districts, store it on an Amazon cloud, with an operating system built by Amplify, and make it more easily accessible to ed tech vendors and other third parties without parental knowledge or consent. Here is more background on inBloom; here are a timeline and news clips.
Gates incentivized districts and states to participate in this project of data collection and sharing, with promises of big grants. The Foundation also offered cash awards to vendors who would build their instructional products around this data, through “interoperable” software.
inBloom was designed to help achieve Bill Gates vision of education: to mechanize instruction by plugging every child into a common curriculum, standards and tests, delivered by computers, with software that can data-mine their responses and through machine-driven algorithms, deliver “customized” lessons and adaptive learning. By siphoning off the data into state and multi-state databases and then tracking children through life, educrats can better evaluate which teachers and software programs are effective, and also steer students towards appropriate college and careers, all in the name of improved “efficiency”. Gates has also funded multi-state student databases, which were illegal before FERPA was relaxed, including granting WICHE with more than $13 million, to enable the transfer of personal student information between fifteen Western states.
Since the demise of inBloom, the Gates Foundation has not given up their attempt to supplant real personalized learning with learning through software and machines. Recently, with the Future of Privacy, an ed tech industry group, they funded a survey that was pitched as showing that parents support schools sharing the personal data of their children, but upon further digging really showed the opposite.
Gates has also funded a new effort, in which 27 school districts along with The Consortium for School Networking, will create a “Trusted Learning Environment Seal” to reassure parents that their children’s data is safe. In this way, they appear intent on controlling the student privacy debate , and co-opting the intense parent concerns about rampant data disclosure that led to inBloom’s downfall.
August 23rd
Who’s Watching the Kids?
Common Core is about more than just a shift in educational standards. The architects of Common Core have always planned to integrate computer technology with Common Core standards under the guise of “closing the digital divide” and “preparing our children for the 21st-century workplace.” They want us to envision “educational equality,” where each student has access to the same technology and resources, including his or her own one-to-one device (one student, one device). These sound like worthwhile goals, but we know better.
Initially, in order to continue to be eligible for Obama’s “Race to the Top” federal funding, states were obligated to implement a Student Longitudinal Database System (SLDS), used to track students from preschool through college (P20-WIN). Some of us may recall the many reports about measuring 400 data points. This is part of SLDS. Those of us who are paying attention may have assumed that these data points were going to be gathered via the Common Core assessments. Perhaps some of us assumed that “opting out” or refusing the test would keep us safe. Not so fast. Could these one to one devices be another carefully disguised method of software-driven mass surveillance of students? And in what other ways is data being collected? Parents, you need to take a closer look at this.
We are headed back to school, and this year, all across America, more and more classrooms will be filled with children innocently using their iPads or other handheld devices. Children may be playing interactive educational games, doing interactive assignments, and writing stories that can be easily shared with the teacher and other students. These seemingly harmless activities are in fact being used to collect personal and private information without the parents’ consent or knowledge.
Could that educational game be used to measure your child’s mental state? Could those interactive assignments involve morally ambiguous questions that can be used to create a psychological profile of your child? Could that shared story be used to predict violent behavior?
Besides the one-to-one handheld devices, there are other methods of collecting data, such as written school surveys and notes taken by teachers, guidance counselors, and other school officials who may not even realize that every word they type about a student is stored and analyzed. The obvious “personally identifiable information” is being collected, including student tests scores and grades, and also information such as name, address, Social Security number, date of birth, place of birth, and mother’s maiden name. In addition, “sensitive information” is being collected. This data includes political affiliation and beliefs of students and their parents; mental or psychological problems of the students or their families; illegal, anti-social, or self-incriminating behaviors; gun ownership and beliefs about firearms; and legally recognized privileged or analogous relationships such as those of attorneys, doctors, or priests, among many other things.
What our government might do with all this data is a troublesome question.
All of this data from multiple sources (exams, assignments, handheld devices, surveys, conversations with school officials, et al.) now feeds into a larger collection of databases that will be mined for patterns and insights. This data can be accessed and created by the federal government and educational corporations. Parents assume that FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) and COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) provide protection, but too many loopholes exist. COPPA protects only up to the age of 13. FERPA’s privacy protection language was weakened when it was reinterpreted by the U.S. Department of Education to allow greater access by third parties (big business).
There are many yet to be known ways in which this information may be used and abused. Our federal government has extensive plans to use this data for a variety of purposes such as workforce education, shaping student behavior, perhaps forcing compliance to the will of the state, and definitely providing “direction” for our kids in their careers. The data sets on individual students gives government the ability to impose heavy-handed regulations which will direct children’s futures. These handheld devices are the key enabling technology for the marriage of convenience between big government and big business called “public-private partnerships.” Since the government didn’t build the handheld devices, big business provides the ability to collect the student data, while big government provides the regulations that force the collection of the student data.
If you comfort yourself with the belief that this information is desired simply so that companies can market products for your children, for example (as if that weren’t bad enough), think again. This data will be stored forever, and parents will have very, very limited access to it, if any at all. Maybe you think “predicting future violent behavior” is a step in the right direction. What if your kid is flagged because he did something that most of us did growing up, such as draw a picture of a gun?
So who will be watching and analyzing our kids?
National standards plus the universal use of one-on-one devices are sold as “closing the digital divide.” Like every other aspect of Common Core, there is more than meets the eye: these are also necessary pre-conditions for mass surveillance. They are inseparable. This Orwellian vision of “educational equality” enables the kind of mass surveillance that can be characterized only as an educational police state. We the People are watching it happen to our children, and most of us still won’t believe our eyes.
Common Core is about more than just a shift in educational standards. The architects of Common Core have always planned to integrate computer technology with Common Core standards under the guise of “closing the digital divide” and “preparing our children for the 21st-century workplace.” They want us to envision “educational equality,” where each student has access to the same technology and resources, including his or her own one-to-one device (one student, one device). These sound like worthwhile goals, but we know better.
Initially, in order to continue to be eligible for Obama’s “Race to the Top” federal funding, states were obligated to implement a Student Longitudinal Database System (SLDS), used to track students from preschool through college (P20-WIN). Some of us may recall the many reports about measuring 400 data points. This is part of SLDS. Those of us who are paying attention may have assumed that these data points were going to be gathered via the Common Core assessments. Perhaps some of us assumed that “opting out” or refusing the test would keep us safe. Not so fast. Could these one to one devices be another carefully disguised method of software-driven mass surveillance of students? And in what other ways is data being collected? Parents, you need to take a closer look at this.
We are headed back to school, and this year, all across America, more and more classrooms will be filled with children innocently using their iPads or other handheld devices. Children may be playing interactive educational games, doing interactive assignments, and writing stories that can be easily shared with the teacher and other students. These seemingly harmless activities are in fact being used to collect personal and private information without the parents’ consent or knowledge.
Could that educational game be used to measure your child’s mental state? Could those interactive assignments involve morally ambiguous questions that can be used to create a psychological profile of your child? Could that shared story be used to predict violent behavior?
Besides the one-to-one handheld devices, there are other methods of collecting data, such as written school surveys and notes taken by teachers, guidance counselors, and other school officials who may not even realize that every word they type about a student is stored and analyzed. The obvious “personally identifiable information” is being collected, including student tests scores and grades, and also information such as name, address, Social Security number, date of birth, place of birth, and mother’s maiden name. In addition, “sensitive information” is being collected. This data includes political affiliation and beliefs of students and their parents; mental or psychological problems of the students or their families; illegal, anti-social, or self-incriminating behaviors; gun ownership and beliefs about firearms; and legally recognized privileged or analogous relationships such as those of attorneys, doctors, or priests, among many other things.
What our government might do with all this data is a troublesome question.
All of this data from multiple sources (exams, assignments, handheld devices, surveys, conversations with school officials, et al.) now feeds into a larger collection of databases that will be mined for patterns and insights. This data can be accessed and created by the federal government and educational corporations. Parents assume that FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) and COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) provide protection, but too many loopholes exist. COPPA protects only up to the age of 13. FERPA’s privacy protection language was weakened when it was reinterpreted by the U.S. Department of Education to allow greater access by third parties (big business).
There are many yet to be known ways in which this information may be used and abused. Our federal government has extensive plans to use this data for a variety of purposes such as workforce education, shaping student behavior, perhaps forcing compliance to the will of the state, and definitely providing “direction” for our kids in their careers. The data sets on individual students gives government the ability to impose heavy-handed regulations which will direct children’s futures. These handheld devices are the key enabling technology for the marriage of convenience between big government and big business called “public-private partnerships.” Since the government didn’t build the handheld devices, big business provides the ability to collect the student data, while big government provides the regulations that force the collection of the student data.
If you comfort yourself with the belief that this information is desired simply so that companies can market products for your children, for example (as if that weren’t bad enough), think again. This data will be stored forever, and parents will have very, very limited access to it, if any at all. Maybe you think “predicting future violent behavior” is a step in the right direction. What if your kid is flagged because he did something that most of us did growing up, such as draw a picture of a gun?
So who will be watching and analyzing our kids?
National standards plus the universal use of one-on-one devices are sold as “closing the digital divide.” Like every other aspect of Common Core, there is more than meets the eye: these are also necessary pre-conditions for mass surveillance. They are inseparable. This Orwellian vision of “educational equality” enables the kind of mass surveillance that can be characterized only as an educational police state. We the People are watching it happen to our children, and most of us still won’t believe our eyes.
Mary Anne Marcella is a parent and New York City public school teacher. She cares about her children and her students and wants the best for them. Her opinions are her own. maryannem@optonline.net MaryAnne@maryannemercog
Cort Wrotnowski is a management consultant in biotechnology and president of BioSpark Associates, LLC. Over the last two years he has been fighting Common Core, over-testing, and the assaults on local control in public education.
Wonder what the parents and students rights are regarding data associated with school? This article walks through FERPA, PPRA and COPPA:
http://www.studentprivacymatters.org/ferpa/
Update: August 14th
Ever wonder what other states are doing regarding Opt-Out efforts from the High Stakes Testing? New York has evolved from low concern to high concern over the past ~3 years. Take a look at this story from The New York Times and then share your thoughts here with us.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/08/12/nyregion/the-growing-strength-of-new-yorks-opt-out-movement-maps.html
In addition here is a slide deck that New York released showing much more detail:
New_York_State_Testing_Results_13to15
Update: August 14th
This article in on the main page but is posted here because it’s releveant.
This link takes you to the blog of Sarah Blaine called: parentingcore. Her post is a follow up to a Facebook discussion she had. In this blog article she expands on the discussion and adds more details and information.
It will take 3-4 minutes to read the article. After reading it stop back by here and share your thoughts. The graphic is from her blog.
Update: August 13th
This is an article in the Washington Post about the testing results and Op-Out effort in New York state. You may find it interesting.
Update: August 12th
Here are the slides from the OSPI “media update” on August 12th. The full data set will be made available to the public on August 17th. Under each slide I’ll make some comments:
In 2014 the test was given on paper and 2015 on computer (for most). 2015 was the second time students had taken the test and used the format. They did slightly better in 2015 which allowed OSPI to claim that students “did better than anticipated”. No matter how you look at it these are terrible scores. This is English Language Arts (ELA)
This is the math portion of the SBAC test. The results are even worse than the ELA
They need 95% participation or the data isn’t useful and the district would receive a failing grade. It appears that with the exception of 3rd and 6th grades otherwise others barely had enough students and Juniors clearly said NO.
What does this slide say? It shows that they LOWERED the passing standard. Up until the test results a 3 and 4 were passing with 1 and 2 failing. To make the test results more acceptable they decided that a 2.5 is now passing. In essence they threw out what the planned because the reality would have raised a storm. This says the testing process is not just flawed it’s fatally flawed.
Updated August 9th
This is a letter multiple elected officials in Washington State wrote to the public about High Stakes testing. The only issue I have with their comments is the statement that the minimum number of tests should be based on federal laws. This needs to be a state level and not federal.
Why We Oppose Excessive and Harmful High Stakes Tests
This post is an article I co-wrote with seven other Senators on June 15 2015 explaining why high stakes tests often do more harm than good and therefore should be reduced to the minimum number required by federal law:
The more than 60,000 high school seniors who graduate here in Washington state this month are to be commended for 12 years of successfully completing dozens of courses. Thousands other high school seniors will not graduate with their classmates, however, even though they successfully completed the same courses as the students who are graduating. These thousands of seniors will not be allowed to graduate solely because they failed one or more state-required, high-stakes tests.
This is neither fair nor sensible. Some students are simply not very good at taking high-stakes tests — even when they know the material and did well in their courses. There are students who earn A’s in courses only to freeze up and forget on the day of a high-stakes test. This is not a test of knowledge; it’s a test of who tests well.
Numerous studies confirm that some students — especially low-income and minority students — do much worse on high-stakes tests than students in the same school, in the same courses and with the same grades. A study of thousands of California students in 2009, for example, found low-income and minority students with matching grades were 19 percent more likely to fail a high stakes test than their peers.
Some argue that we need high-stakes tests to determine who is career and college ready. But numerous studies over many years have found no high-stakes test has ever been able to predict college readiness. Indeed, the most accurate predictor of college readiness is high school grade point average. If we want students to do well in college, we should encourage them to do their daily homework and do well in their courses — not spend months of time worrying about test prep trivia for a misleading high-stakes test.
Mind you, we’re not opposed to testing per se. We still want to be able to gauge how our students do compared to students in other states, as we did with the Iowa tests; but high-stakes tests are not the answer.
Academic achievement is not measured by a single test. It is measured by the diligence of students who master the curriculum. How a student performs over the course of a 180-day school year is far more telling than how a student performs on a 180-minute test.
Despite the evidence that high-stakes tests have little value, Washington requires high school students to pass four high-stakes exams — in reading, writing, math and biology — to earn a high school diploma. House Bill 2214 would eliminate the biology exam as a graduation requirement, a change that would allow 2,000 additional high school seniors to graduate. Information recently released by the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction indicates there are more than 10,000 students who will not graduate this year due to failure to pass one of more high stakes tests. But only a few of these students would be helped merely by waiving the biology exam because most of the affected students have failed two or more of the required high-stakes exams.
There is another, better option. Senate Bill 6122, co-sponsored by 11 senators, would allow all 10,000 students to graduate — provided they have completed all of their course requirements — by eliminating all high-stakes tests as a graduation requirement. Half of all states in our nation do not require high-stakes tests for graduation. It is time Washington was one of them.
Written by: Sens. Maralyn Chase, D-Shoreline; Annette Cleveland, D-Vancouver; Karen Fraser, D-Olympia; Bob Hasegawa, D-Beacon Hill; Pramila Jayapal, D-Seattle; Karen Keiser, D-Kent; John McCoy, D-Tulalip; and Pam Roach, R-Auburn.
Updated August 4th
The teacher in this video says he helped write the Common Core standards as way to correct “white privilege”. Somehow I thought that all children should be treated equally and given the same opportunity rather than education being used to redress someone’s perception of “privilege”.
http://truthuncensored.net/common-core-co-author-wrote-white-privilege/#sthash.OhMTy8ZN.dpbs
This page is dedicated to information about testing and data gathering.
Update: June 25th 2015: Do you know what the ACT is? It’s one of the two (the other being the SAT) tests usually taken by high school students going to college. The SAT is being completely revised to follow the Common Core standards. Now it appears the ACT is going down the same path. Take a couple of minutes to read the story in this link: http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-act-is-tattling.html
Post #1: (reposting from a blog by Diane Ravitch)
The University of Puget Sound has joined some 800 other colleges and universities by dropping the SAT
“Put away your study guides, college applicants — the University of Puget Sound doesn’t care how you do on the SAT or ACT.
“The Tacoma university has joined a small number of Washington colleges, and a growing list of colleges nationally, that don’t require undergraduate applicants to submit standardized test scores when submitting an application for admission.
“The reason? UPS has found that grade-point averages are much more predictive of how a student will do in college than a score on a test.”