On Facebook, it’s the season where parents are posting pictures of K-12 graduations, including moppets in tiny mortarboards. But unlike a generation ago, today’s smallest graduates are amassing a big data trail. Just as medical and government files have been digitized — some to be anonymized and sold; all susceptible to breaches — student data has entered the realm of the valuable and the vulnerable. Parents are paying attention. A recent study by the company The Learning Curve found that while 71 percent of parents believe technology has improved their child’s education, 79 percent were concerned about the privacy and security of their child’s data, and 75 percent worried about advertiser access to that data.
The fear is that the multi-billion-dollar education technology (or “ed-tech”) industry that seeks to individualize learning and reduce drop-out rates could also pose a threat to privacy, as a rush to commercialize student data could leave children tagged for life with indicators based on their childhood performance.
“What if potential employers can buy the data about you growing up and in school?” asks mathematician Cathy O’Neil, who’s finishing a book on big data and blogs at mathbabe.org. In some of the educational tracking systems, which literally log a child’s progress on software keystroke by keystroke, “We’re giving a persistence score as young as age 7 — that is, how easily do you give up or do you keep trying? Once you track this and attach this to [a child’s] name, the persistence score will be there somewhere.” O’Neil worries that just as credit scores are now being used in hiring decisions, predictive analytics based on educational metrics may be applied in unintended ways.
Such worries came to the fore last week when educational services giant Pearson announced that it was selling the company PowerSchool, which tracks student performance, to a private equity firm for $350 million. The company was started independently; sold to Apple; then to Pearson; and now to Vista Equity Partners. Each owner in turn has to decide how to manage the records of some 15 million students across the globe, according to Pearson. The company did not sign an initiative called the Student Privacy Pledge, whose signatories promise not to sell student information or behaviorally target advertising (151 other companies including Google have signed the non-binding pledge).
A Pearson spokesperson said, “We do not use personal student data to sell or market Pearson products or services. The data is entrusted to us as a part of our work with schools and institutions and is guarded by federal and state laws. From a security perspective, when an education institution or agency entrusts Pearson with personally identifiable student information, we work directly with the organization to ensure the data is protected and our controls are consistent with relevant requirements.”
PowerSchool intakes a large variety of data. Its site touts administrator tools including discipline management and reporting; student and staff demographics; and family management. Brendan O’Grady, VP of media and communities for Pearson, says the company has provided ways of allowing educators to track the performance of individual students and groups of students in order to serve them better. “Big data and all of the associated technologies have really improved all of the technologies in the world, the way we travel and communicate and more,” he says. “But we haven’t seen a similar advance in the way we use data in education. There are very legitimate questions about data security and around what works best for schools. But there should be some very positive experiences using big data to give better feedback on what needs to be learned. That’s the biggest opportunity.”
The biggest flame-out so far in the ed-tech arena has been inBloom, a company that had a stellar lineup of support — $100 million of it — from sources including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. In Louisiana, parents were incensed that school officials had uploaded student social security numbers to the platform. After several other states ended relationships, the last remaining client — New York — changed state law to forbid giving student data to companies storing it in dashboards and portals. InBloom announced in April 2014 that it was shutting down.
When inBloom first launched under the name the Shared Learning Collaborative (SLC), Vicki Phillips of the Gates Foundation described the venture as “a huge app store — just for teachers — with the Netflix and Facebook capabilities we love the most.” (The Gates Foundation did not respond to a request for comment.) An ed-tech industry source said that by launching with a pitch for developers to build apps tailored to the platform, rather than messaging to parents and educators concerned about privacy, inBloom put itself on a collision course with concerned parents.
One of them was Leonie Haimson, who runs the advocacy group Class Size Matters. It opposed SLC/inBloom, and its partnership with Wireless Generation, which did educational database work for New York State and is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. “I was concerned about inBloom because they were going to aggregate student data from at least 9 states [and seek more state partners], and put it into an easily digestible form, offering contracts to vendors who created educational products. But,” she adds, “you can’t expect vendors to tell parents what they’re doing. You need the schools and the districts to take responsibility for telling them what data is being shared for what reason and what conditions.” Mathematician O’Neil agrees: “I’ve worked as a data scientist and for venture capitalists, they’ll ask me to talk to entrepreneurs about their ideas. It’s extremely unsettling. The perspective of the entrepreneurs in big data, they’re just trying to figure out how to make money and what the laws and regulations are. But the regulations are nowhere.”
While battling inBloom, Haimson found out that a federal regulation called the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, or FERPA, had been weakened in recent years, making it easier for schools to share student data and personally identifiable information without parental consent. Today, several bills pending in Congress, including the Protecting Student Privacy Act in the Senate and the Student Digital Privacy and Parental Rights Act of 2015 in the House, aim to tighten up privacy regulations. None seems fast-tracked for passage. That said, Haimson sees a coalition between left and right developing around student privacy, as it has around some other privacy and civil liberties issues.
But the approaches and data sets held by ed-tech companies vary widely. The company Clever has a very different model than inBloom. It’s a platform that organizes permissions for apps used in classrooms, offering its own single sign-in login (akin to the “login with Facebook” function on many commercial websites) so teachers and kids don’t have to remember multiple passwords. Clever is free to schools and charges developers. It also takes far less data than some ed tech companies — roster information (name, teacher, class), not grades or disciplinary records. Tyler Bosmeny, Clever’s CEO, says, “Technology has tremendous potential to improve the lives of students and teachers. But none of it will come to pass if we don’t set higher standards for student data security. That’s exactly what Clever is working with thousands of schools across the country to do.” Clever was the chosen platform of an app called Share My Lesson developed by the American Federation of Teachers, which was vocal in criticizing inBloom and Pearson.
Nonetheless, even for Clever, mastering data security has not been a seamless effort. Last year, the company was criticized for having a clause in their privacy policy saying it could be changed without school consent or notification. In response, the company created a system for soliciting public comments on the policy, and then, taking critiques into account, forged a new policy requiring the company to give schools notice before privacy changes take effect and time for them to opt out.
Concerns about corporate use of student data are the most prevalent. But New York University professor and computer scientist Meredith Broussard says, “Teachers are vulnerable. When they don’t have budgets for software, they’re encouraged to use free online resources. When teachers force students to use free sites they’re essentially giving away student data for free.” In the context of tight education budgets, where public school teachers are frequently forced to dig into their own pockets to pay for basic classroom supplies, such free services are tempting — but teachers can themselves inadvertently become the conduit of leaky student data. Broussard recounts the tale of a teacher who didn’t like the in-house attendance system. She found a free platform online, created a system for entering attendance and grades, and got many others in the school to use it. Was it secure? Probably not.
States are left trying to navigate the need to aid teachers with learning and administrative technology with the concerns of parents. Lan Neugent is the interim executive director of the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA). “There’s a fine balance between companies holding and utilizing data and the decision makers in schools, parents, students impacted by data,” he says. “Every time there’s a target or a home depot or a big data breach, people say it’s dangerous to have data out there — which it can be. But technology gives kids vehicles for individualized learning. Our members would say there’s not enough research being done.”
Researchers like professor Susan Dynarski of the University of Michigan argue that over-regulating student data can hurt research. In a piece for the New York Times, she wrote that one of the several federal bills introduced “would effectively end the analysis of student data by outside social scientists. This legislation would have banned recent prominent research documenting the benefits of smaller classes, the value of excellent teachers and the varied performance of charter schools.”
Susan McGregor, a data journalist and the assistant director of Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, sees the need for research but adds, “Both in the popular consumer sphere and from the research perspective the way we’re handling big data privacy doesn’t work.” University review boards have more stringent rules about how information is anonymized than many private companies. Still, she says, “these days you can take a small data set from one place and cross it with another data set and de-anonymize people. And we’re in a commercial culture that’s very interested in collecting everything forever and never destroying it.”
Some European regulations require explicit terms-of-use for consumer data permissions, rather than the blanket open-ended ones that tend to exist in the United States. In order to improve the system, says McGregor, there should be a “privacy first” approach to using student data. Requirements should include strong technical personnel, parents and students (particularly once they are adults) able to view and raise any corrections to data, a strong opt-out provision, and assurances the data will never be used for anything other than research.
Cathy O’Neil says the questions facing ed-tech are not just technical, but sociopolitical: It is critical to ask who is targeted for services, and why. “I know a bunch of people who were at inBloom. Some people there were thoughtful, but not the ones in charge. They wanted to turn it into the next Facebook. ‘We’re going to ‘win’ education.’ These were all white rich people who don’t understand the complexity of what’s going on in inner city schools,” she continues. “The belief that data can solve problems that are our deepest problems, like inequality and access, is wrong. Whose kids have been exposed by their data is absolutely a question of class.”
Correction: An earlier version of this piece stated that Class Size Matters is partially funded by the National Education Association. Although Class Size Matters accepted $25,000 from the NEA in 2010, executive director Leonie Haimson says it did so as the fiscal agent for Parents Across America and that Class Size Matters has accepted no additional funding from the union since. We regret the error.
Photo: Getty Images
What going on here?
“These were all white rich people who don’t understand the complexity of what’s going on in inner city schools,”
What does being white (non hispanic) and rich have to do with an ability to understand an issue? Maybe they just don’t t agree with your idea that one must experience inner city life to understand the results of the data? Will you identify some of the complexities of the inner city schools so I may know what your are talking about, and why and how you believe it affects the data?
I agree big data, itself, is not a solution, it must be interpreted, acted upon and constantly reevaluated.
Will Predictive Analytics performed on the “digital dopplegangers” (Jacob Appelbaums term) of these children (henceforth referred to as “liveware”) predict a childs future success more or less accurately than Cumulative Predictive Analytics performed on the “digital dopplegangers” can predict the next product you’ll buy or next crime you’ll commit as an adult? Will Predictive Analytics based on your Comprehensive Digital Dossier as an adult ALLOW FOR FREE WILL or an UNEXPECTED or UNPREDICTABLE OUTCOME?
Christian C Holmer: We Have Included No Question Marks in This Submission. Zero.
Hey Kris
QUERY: “Data driven madness” such as that orchestrated by GCHQ JTRIG and their Domestic American Public an Private Sector Compatriots.
I am not sure whether you want me to reply, but you brought up a Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters’ (GCHQ)–something I had not read about in a previous Intercept article. https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/
Nearly two weeks ago, I got a letter from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management telling me that the recent breach “may have exposed your personal information.” Little did I know that a two year stint as a VA doctor from 1987-89 created a dossier in the aging federal computers that neither encrypted the data, nor had adequate data governance. I listened to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs hearings from last week. I find this this comment particularly troublesome.
http://www.hsgac.senate.gov/templates/watch.cfm?id=23c3d282-5056-a032-5289-536ea0bbadea
48:50 Andy Ozment, Ph.D “As our detection methods continue to improve, we will, in fact, detect more incidences. Incidences that are already occurring that we don’t know about.”
The Senators and their staff are freaking out about this data breach, worried that adversaries may have accessed sensitive data (including mental health records) from background checks. There are data breaches going as far back as 2013, but I didn’t get a firm timeline of what data was accessed and when.
~2:23 Senator Kelly Ayotte asked about using PINs proactively for tax filers. She proposes a good recommendation and she is right that agencies that just “look at” these suggestions, get nowhere.
Last year my husband and I experienced tax ID theft. Since data haystacks have shed so many data crumbs, it seems there is no way to find a data trail when there are breaches.
Rule changes have loosened data sharing and neglected fair information practices. In the era of big data, data minimization is the first to go:
US Dept. of Homeland Security PRIVACY POLICY GUIDANCE MEMORANDUM http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/privacy/privacy_policyguide_2008-01.pdf
Data Minimization: DHS should only collect PII that is directly relevant and necessary to accomplish the specified purpose(s)and only retain PII for as long as is necessary to fulfill the specified purpose(s).
Salient to this discussion is a video just uploaded from the Patient Privacy Rights June International Summit.
Somebody Call the Doctor! Stitching Up Student Privacy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoAIWajsNDA
Moderator
Khaliah Barnes, Director, EPIC Student Privacy Project | EPIC, http://www.epic.org
Speakers
Dissent | Pogo Was Right PogoWasRight.org, http://www.pogowasright.org/
Bill Fitzgerald | Speaker, Founder FunnyMonkey, http://funnymonkey.com/
Dale King, Speaker | Director, Family Policy Compliance Office | U.S. Department of Education http://www.ed.gov/
Cameron Russell | Speaker, Executive Director, Fordham Center on Law and Information Policy | Fordham University School of Law http://www.fordham.edu/info/20346/school_of_law
Question Mark and the Mysterians: We Have Included No Question Marks in This Submission. Zero ????
Hey Kris
QUERY: “Data driven madness” such as that orchestrated by GCHQ JTRIG and their Domestic American Public an Private Sector Compatriots?
Data-driven madness creates blinders to what is obvious. Social instability goes hand-in-hand with poverty. The seeds of prejudice are sown early when academic inequality manifests in the race to the top. The school-to prison-pipeline just grows wider with growing income inequality. Reason to create cradle through career dossiers on these kids? Hell no!
“Race Dramatically Skews Discipline, Even In Elementary School” http://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/race-dramatically-skews-discipline-even-in-elementary-school/
“ ‘The data doesn’t lie,’ said Jody McVittie, a physician turned trainer who runs the nonprofit Sound Discipline. ‘Black kids aren’t the only kids acting out, but they tend to be the kids sent to the principal’s office.’ “
Data Driven “Madness” a la GCHQ JTRIG Kris?
Hey Chris,
My arent you the prolific one. ????
QUERY: Data driven madness such as that orchestrated by GCHQ JTRIG and their Domestic American Compatriots?
Big data simplifies access to data—a win-win for business and government. While corporations learn our secrets, trade secrets simultaneously protect how they profit from data mining our private lives. And it’s far more efficient for the government to obtain confidential information data mining big businesses, thus bypassing teachers and doctors, who would compromise professional ethics when confidentiality is compromised.
Telemedicine is a technological coup. HIPAA Security Rules do not apply while HIPAA Privacy Rules do apply.
School-based health centers (both at college campuses and increasingly in k-12) tout telemedicine because employees will miss less work and kids will miss less school. What’s a practitioner to do when the market demands telemedicine? For ZoomCare patients in Portland, Oregon, trust in Skype! Get complete diagnosis and treatment for over 27 medical conditions.
Coinciding with the publication of his book No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald released this memo: “PRISM has a new collection capability: Skype stored communications” and said the FBI’s Electronic Communications Surveillance Unit had approved “over 30 selectors to be sent to Skype for collection.”
Digital dossiers from mined medical and educational records are fair game for the surveillance state.
Privacy activists should be concerned about how their data may be used for behavioral targeting, described in the following article as “an online advertising technique designed to deliver specific, targeted advertisements to Internet users based on their perceived interests.” (For kids under 12, Facebook has worked around COPPA, Children’s Online Privacy Protection, with “consensual advertising.” http://mashable.com/2012/12/19/coppa-facebook/)
“Big Brother Gets A Makeover: Behavioral Targeting and the Third-Party Doctrine.” http://law.emory.edu/elj/content/volume-61/issue-3/comments/big-brother-gets-a-makeover.html
“But advertising networks can use the information they collect for purposes beyond behavioral targeting. In addition to exploiting Internet users’ information to deliver targeted advertisements, ad networks sell the information to third parties, which could include, perhaps surprisingly, the government. Armed with detailed records about Internet users and their online activities, the government has unprecedented access to the most intimate details of peoples’ lives. What seems such a gross invasion of privacy can occur despite the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government. The Fourth Amendment likely does not apply to information gathered for behavioral targeting because of what is known as the ‘third-party doctrine.’ Under the third-party doctrine, the Fourth Amendment does not protect any information a person volunteers to a third party, because that person presumptively has assumed the risk that the third party will reveal the information to the government.”
Commercial interests have lobbied for FERPA, HIPAA and COPPA rule changes which codify data sharing without consent. So it’s not even a matter of persons volunteering their confidential information under these circumstances…
Thank you for your insightful and well-contextualized comments
I am a teacher (not a lawyer) and I am not so sure to which extent you are talking in a sarcastic way, but thinking that you can, in any way, apply the ‘third-party doctrine’ to minors as part of their day-to-day schooling I find, the least to say, preposterous
I find the letter and spirit of the third party doctrine very questionable because every action is irremediably done for a conscious reason with a clear intention among negotiating parties (in case third parties are involved), with a purpose and for an ultimate end. If you go to the doctor with a stomach problem with the obvious purpose of being healed, USG shouldn’t have any legal authority (which indeed has as part of the 215 provisions of the “Patriot Act”) or moral business whatsoever in storing my “behavioral information” for whichever reason they deem “patriotically necessary”, “useful for business/commerce” or whichever b#llsh!t politicians may fancy
// __ Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Government Surveillance (HBO)
~
youtube.com/watch?v=XEVlyP4_11M
~
I remember once I read about parents protesting the marketing of “shelf-prominence” in school text- and workbooks to merchants. They would, say, present an Arithmetic word problem about some tennis shoes and then they would leave the (extra large) space for a picture which merchants would bid for to include their brand. School officials said they did that “to cut costs”. That was deemed illegal. It is not the same kind of thing, but a case nonetheless in which children were being brainwashed, which any teacher with a little sense of morality could clearly see as such and consider to be abusive and wrong.
USG has been abusing exactly thast kind of “behavioral information” as part of third party doctrines to customize, personalize harassment and torture to people who are not criminals under any standard, who haven’t been arrested, are not detained to the point of making them commit suicide:
// __ “My Experience as a Targeted Individual”
~
youtube.com/watch?v=Z8ZQurVAV3M
~
32:25 They are NOT able to manipulate your bodily functions and pain receptors
38:20 stalkers are NOT able to know about images originating in the target’s individual mind
~
// __ Anonymous – The Story of Aaron Swartz Full Documentary
~
youtube.com/watch?v=gpvcc9C8SbM
~
https://ipsoscustodes.wordpress.com/2015/05/27/zersetzung-made-in-u-s-a/
~
If you try to think of it in a principled logical way, you may clearly noticed that the third party doctrine used nowadays (with the ubiquity with which records can be collected literally key stroke by key stroke (they have been even collecting people’s facial reactions from their laptop’s webcams, of course, without their consent)) would totally debase the 4th amendment
~
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
~
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
This decision in Katz was later developed into the now commonly used two-prong test, adopted in Smith v. Maryland (1979),[44] for determining whether the Fourth Amendment is applicable in a given circumstance:[45][46]
* a person “has exhibited an actual (subjective) expectation of privacy”; and
* society is prepared to recognize that this expectation is (objectively) reasonable.
The Supreme Court has held that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to information that is voluntarily given to third parties.[47] In Smith, the Court held individuals have no “legitimate expectation of privacy” regarding the telephone numbers they dial because they knowingly give that information to telephone companies when they dial a number.[44][48]
Following Katz, the vast majority of Fourth Amendment search cases have turned on the right to privacy, but in United States v. Jones (2012), the Court ruled that the Katz standard did not replace earlier case law, but rather, has supplemented it.[49] In Jones, law enforcement officers had attached a GPS device on a car’s exterior without Jones’ knowledge or consent. The Court concluded that Jones was a bailee to the car, and so had a property interest in the car.[50] Therefore, since the intrusion on the vehicle—a common law trespass—was for the purpose of obtaining information, the Court ruled that it was a search under the Fourth Amendment. The Court used similar “trespass” reasoning in Florida v. Jardines (2013), to rule that bringing a drug detection dog to sniff at the front door of a home was a search.[51]
~
Will we ever have a way out of madness?
Satyagraha,
RCL
Social media, because of who controls and profits from all the data people voluntarily provide them, is more accurately a component of social control and manipulation.
Neil Postman had it that in our version of a materialist capitalist 1984, instead of the materialist socialist one, we would seek out Big Brother to report on ourselves, rather than Big Brother having to try to plant bugs on us.
It is both ways actually, not owning a cell phone turns you into a “person of interest” …
RCL
Last time I looked, Pearson had 80% of this digital market. That is a British corp sucking the life blood out of state funds by massive majority. I assumed when Murdoch moved in this gimmick was already Myspace, but I bet he’s just building a better hack. Would you let his crew handle your child’s data? Then you haven’t heard about how he raked Brown’s son over the coals for being secretly sick. Just born that way. Hack, hack.
All tests based on subjective evals score hardest against the first takers, but more deviations of the theme are deemed acceptable to the standard until the first scored wind up hosed in the end game. That’s an observational fact. So send those state test in as late as you can, school managers. Spend for razor thin margins.
Gaming the system? That never happens? Data has to get loaded, too. Boo Hoo, the system getz wise! Butt what about the kidz? Ever known a test to teach anyone shite unless they go over it? Do they? Nope. And we wonder why they wind up dopes.
I recall a conference in Naples where we kidz got to write a constitution for our collective school governments as we were the dependents of those who cooled that war for ya’ll, you’re welcome. Bitburg reprezentz! Frankfurt, what a farter! I only asked that we made sure we had the same right to review our school documents these folks collected on us that kidz stateside had just got. You can’t count on the military to guard your civil rights when they haven’t any, especially if they don’t follow breaking news. My counselor sent my SAT application to Sallie, the big dope. Gotta check chubby, twice.
I know how to make a fortune telling kidz that their records are correct, Trans Union High! Those guys have me really fucked up. They recommend cops to my house because the guy they want has a birthdate near to mine and lived in same town as did I. That’s what the AG said they said. They also confused my married and maiden names, Iron Curtain.
So let’s be certain we know WTF before we fuckit up, over. I’m not Wild Weaseling for folks who don’t know what they target is, SAM.
YGBSM? Nope, I told you this a year ago.
Don’t forget Watson wants to manage all our medical records, now, sillies! Just winking.
Shite, I’ve been hinting at this for years because propriety prevents me from sharing that MadMen would LOVE to get their hands on those essays, assayers! A 2 billion dollar enterprise does not just go away even when proven to have failed to raise a single alarm.
“This computer tells me this data send isn’t secure.”
“Ignore that and continue scoring.”
Can’t tell, don’t ask. But congrats on the rainbow, bridge builders!
Another problem for the future of your child… I only knew that a ADHS diagnosis cause problems to get a job at the police or the gouvernment (or anywhere else). And of course insurances love to know whom to exclude. But now even those with high performances are tracked, for being selected for the best. NSA is calling! :P
It is all about money, and whether we can afford it or not…isn’t it? No money actually needs to change hands for anything to happen in our universe, but we choose to inhibit our ability to evolve as a society, or as humanity, because of this money crap! This is insanity! The laws of physics are enough to allow us to do what we must to survive, but pleasing this insane monetary dragon we have created is impossible! It will consume all of the Earth. It is certain death!
2 billion dollars in North America for just one of the corps who benefit from this data onion. They also publish Financial Times, I pink.
Yes, RCL, I’m also concerned that such systems will ultimately lead to abuse.
Now let’s remember Pearson (whose products I used when I was still working, was monitoring students’ social media activity when they were doing online testing…
Just being “tracked” is bad enough, but there are way too many concerns about the way bid data is handled as to security and any semblance of privacy, and as some have noted, things like predictive analytics and a data trail that can follow someone maybe forever.
We all should be VERY concerned.
If that was a Freudian slip, it was a very clarifying and poetic one at that ;-)
Also, as any teacher knows true “intelligence” is impossible to gauge and is to a large extent a semantic, personally worked/tamed traits
RCL
RCL –
You are so kind to excuse my typo as a ‘poetic’ Freudian slip. But yes, that data is always being bid on, isn’t it. I saw where Radio Shack going into bankruptcy was investigating selling its customers’ data…
Of course true intelligence is well, maybe not impossible to gauge but certainly not well gauged by mere standardized tests (they have their uses, but they focus on material—- and isn’t intelligence something more —- the ability to learn and to evaluate knowledge? (how’s that for a start of a definition?
I wish more teachers would speak out…
this “system” will be abused, we will see more forms of standardization, “norming”, discrimination, …
RCL
Will Predictive Analytics performed on the “digital dopplegangers” (Jacob Appelbaums term) of these children (henceforth referred to as “liveware”) predict a childs future success more or less accurately than Cumulative Predictive Analytics performed on the “digital dopplegangers” can predict the next product you’ll buy or next crime you’ll commit as an adult? Will Predictive Analytics based on your Comprehensive Digital Dossier as an adult ALLOW FOR FREE WILL or an UNEXPECTED or UNPREDICTABLE OUTCOME?
I was in school when the Internet was still idealistic and it was all just content. Search engines didn’t even have log-in forms. They are now pushing the search bubble deeper and deeper into people’s lives so that soon everybody will never seen anything they don’t want to see any they can be incessantly indoctrinated that their government is perfect and doing a the best for them.
http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/dissertations/AAI3180187/ Applying artificial intelligence data mining tools to the challenges of program evaluation.
This is the 2005 doc dissertation by one of the principals of the Newtown Conn. schools ,Reed Intermediate.
She used students in Conn. as her test subjects.Big government.This ties into Obama’s agenda.I think she was investigating at the behest of the federal government. http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/dissertations/AAI3180187/ .Applying artificial intelligence data mining tools to the challenges of program evaluation.
The new buzz word is fast-track.It allows early development of superior minds from a federal agency.
Thanks for the article, Michael
The people who advocate relentlessly for the wonderful benefits of big data mining are simply delusional. Somehow, magically, if they can aggregate enough information, analyze and personalize that info, they believe they can solve all the impediments to learning. If that’s not delusional, what is? Thank God my children are beyond school age, but their children are not. God help them, please.
While this data can be abused, it also has a tremendous potential to help people. One story I heard from a source who is sometimes reliable, was about a parent whose child had failed kindergarten three years in a row. After paying a Big Data firm to change the grades in the database, the kid is now being actively recruited by major colleges – and he’s only in Grade 3. Without Big Data, he’d probably still be in kindergarten.
You’ve found some positive implications in an otherwise ominous story, Duce. Given how adept kids can be at tech, it’s possible that they can hack into the database and revise their grades and evaluations retroactively. Now that’s truly someone who “works and plays well with others.”
@Benito Mussolini
What might Big Data Firm charge for such a service? (both monetary and quid pro quo)
Do they ever offer discounts?
Does it require pre-qualification? (race, household income, family lineage)
Is there a refund policy?
Lastly, what if I’m a kindergartner and my parents want to leapfrog me into 4th grade? Is there a rate plan that will meet those needs?
I’m afraid Big Data intrusion into schools is already even worse than the article suggests.
Newark Memorial High School in California is becoming the first school in the country to host a new “gun sensing technology”, which involves listening devices of some sort, and which nay-sayers are already rightfully seeing as cover for surveillance applications of the seedier variety.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/gunshot-sensing-technology-installed-in-first-u-s-high-school/
And because government surveillance is evidently just another form of pedophilia, schools in Houston are now collecting digitally-scanned thumbprints for all eaters of student lunches.
http://citizensvoice.com/news/hazleton-area-to-offer-all-students-free-lunch-1.1899134
Almost like the kids are becoming labrats for data-collection. And in the UK, there was this other story over concerns of giving students questionnaires apparently to rat out their parents.
http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/may/28/fury-after-primary-pupils-are-asked-to-complete-radicalisation-seeking-surveys
Hi Richard C. –
That UK student survey was quite intrusive and misguided, I think. Thanks for posting that link. I’m glad a lot of parents were angered!
In regard to the citizensvoice article; the site actually demanded you answer a survey question to read it. So I did not. Maybe there’s another source online somewhere…
It is worth keeping an eye on, so here’s the copy/pasted text for the citizensvoice piece:
Hazleton Area to offer all students free lunch
By Maria Jacketti
Published: June 17, 2015
Come September, all students in the Hazleton Area School District will be offered free lunch.
The district will join select major city districts, such as Boston, that now offer all students free lunch as part of a federal initiative to provide better nutrition for children, particularly those at high risk of malnutrition.
In 2010, Congress passed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. The program was designed to improve a nutritional safety net for children falling through the cracks of the program that was already in place, according the program’s website.
In order to receive free or reduced priced lunches, parents must fill out an eligibility form. Because in some homes, parents cannot read materials sent home in English, and in other households, parents may choose not to read the materials or just plain ignore them, the USDA concluded that millions of children eligible and in need of free lunches, simply were not getting them.
The agency’s conclusion was that is better to provide free lunches to all children, since this approach would assure that every needy child gets a lunch.
Of course, participation in this initiative is entirely up to school districts. There is no obligation to participate.
“We will at least break even, if not come out ahead because of federal reimbursement,” Craig Butler, superintendent of the Hazleton Area School District, said.
While it would seem that providing all children with lunch would cost districts more, the pilot federal initiative turns that assumption on its ear. The initiative encourages school districts to move toward full participation by providing districts with reimbursements that will in fact absorb the cost of providing lunch to students of all income levels, whether they walk to school — or if a chauffeur drives them.
Last year, the Hazleton Area School District invested in biometric software to track the usage of the program by students who receive free or reduced-cost lunches. Students’ thumbprints were scanned each time they received a lunch. This data provided by the biometrics was made available to the district and federal government for tracking purposes.
Butler is unsure about the future of using the biometrics given the district’s participation in the initiative, which was first discussed by the school board in the spring, and adopted as the school year concluded.
The act increased funds for the new standards for federally subsidized school lunches, increasing funding also for breakfasts and after-school snacks in high-risk school districts.
Additionally, it now allows for the assessment of a nutritionally high-risk area based on census data rather than applications submitted to a district.
Free breakfasts for all, for the time being, will not be a part of Hazleton’s participation in this initiative, according to Butler.
Many thanks, Richard :-) !!!
It was quite an interesting article for sure. I have seen articles about at least some school districts moving toward free or reduced lunch for all. That seems fine to me; well-fed students learn better, and providing lunch for all removes any stigma.
However, I DO find the biometric tracking of those students who previously received free or reduced lunch troubling. In fact, I would find biometnric invasive, period. What is also troubling to me is that who is targeted for the biometrics: the economically challenged.
Indeed, this is something to keep a watch on.
The pessimist in me thinks the free meals were merely the means to get the biometric tech into the schools. It’s just like Facebook, I feel, in that people think they are getting something valuable out of it, when in truth the rewards are impermanent and the unseen costs are extravagant.