Parents Mobilize Against States' Student Data Mining 139
theodp writes 'Politico reports that parents have mobilized into an unexpected political force to fight the data mining of their children, catapulting student privacy to prominence in statehouses. Having already torpedoed the $100 million, Bill Gates-funded inBloom database project, which could have made it easier for schools to share confidential student records with private companies, the amateur activists are now rallying against another perceived threat: huge state databases being built to track children for more than two decades, from as early as infancy through the start of their careers. "The Education Department," writes Stephanie Simon, "lists hundreds of questions that it urges states to answer about each child in the public school system: Did she make friends easily as a toddler? Was he disciplined for fighting as a teen? Did he take geometry? Does she suffer from mental illness? Did he go to college? Did he graduate? How much does he earn?" Leonie Haimson, a NY mother who is organizing a national Parent Coalition for Student Privacy says, "Every parent I've talked to has been horrified. We just don't want our kids tracked from cradle to grave." For their part, ed tech entrepreneurs and school reformers are both bewildered by and anxious about the backlash — and struggling to craft a response, having assumed parents would support their vision: to mine vast quantities of data for insights into what's working, and what's not, for individual students and for the education system as a whole. "People took for granted that parents would understand [the benefits], that it was self-evident," said Michael Horn, a co-founder an education think tank."
Re:Good (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe it does. We haven't collectively decided to become an open society, though. So really all that's really happening is that people and their personal lives are being attacked from multiple directions.
I think if we did decide to become a less private and personal culture, it wouldn't be a terrible dystopia, but that's sure as hell not my decision to make on the behalf of others. The default understood social contract of the US is one of separate and distinct personal and public lives.
Lack of Trust (Score:4, Interesting)
Every educator that I have known has acted with positive intent and a genuine desire to make the lives of future generations better. People do not go into education, especially in public schools, because they want to get rich or amass influence and personal power. They do so because they are gluttons for punishment and believe that it is their duty as human beings to make the world a better place.
As a society, we see our data being used against us. Where as the educators are trying to track the effectiveness of their programs, citizens are fearful of the data being mined for nefarious purposes. Some things that come to mind are, increased healthcare premiums / denial of coverage. Denied job opportunities due to invasive background screening. I am sure that the concerns that people have are numerous.
The other side of the equation is compelling though. If the educators are gathering data that showing people who failed or never took geometry end up making 50% less more than students who do pass geometry, they will more than likely look to tailor the curriculum to help students develop the skills and abilities required to pass geometry.
The other issue is monetization of data. Nobody wants to be a product, especially if they are not receiving any benefits. To use the geometry example above, if the data sets are being mined to extrapolate data like, "Students who pass geometry are 50% more likely to purchase a luxury automobile." and that data is then sold to marketers to target Facebook advertising, people are going to be understandably upset.
It all comes down to trust. Even if the educators can prove that their intentions are pure, what about the third parties they engage? What if the third party is initially pure, but then they go bankrupt and the personal data is sold as part of the liquidation of the company? Who is going to control what the fourth party does with it?
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Who benefits? (Score:4, Interesting)
Done right - yes, the kids.
Education is not done at the moment in general in a rational manner.
The process is typically that a politician gets an idea. (which they may even believe).
They then either implement this in their area of influence, or if they are especially progressive, do a poorly setup trial, which they then ignore before rolling it out.
The problem is things that seem reasonable often produce the exact opposite result.
Take for example 'Scared Straight' programs - where troubled teens are taken on prison visits, to see what future awaits them and to help turn their life around. Seems obvious it'll work, so nobody checked. ... found that youth who participate in Scared Straight and other similar deterrence programs have higher recidivism rates than youth in control groups.'
Unfortunately, when they did:
'A study by Anthony Petrosino and researchers at the Campbell Collaboration analyzed results from nine Scared Straight programs and found that such programs generally increased crime up to 28 percent in the experimental group when compared to a no-treatment control group.
There is real debate as to the best way to teach kids to read.
Proper statistics measuring outcomes for each way answers this.
Should this data ever be available outside education, and should there be extreme penalties for using such data in such contexts as insurance- of course not, and yes!.
(I'd start at a million dollars per offence)
https://www.ncjrs.gov/html/ojj... [ncjrs.gov]
Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)
Parents that I know aren't bothered that information is being gathered, but what is being gathered, who uses it, and how they use it. "Did he/she make friends in 1st grade" is not something you want dragging around decades later. We've already had laws passed banning the use of DNA for excluding people - now people are revolting against their digital DNA running into the same abuses. Maybe we should start calling it "eDNA" as a comparison that people understand.