As everyone’s personal, confidential information joins that big data warehouse in the Cloud, what are the gains? What are the losses?

A reader sends this comment:

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According to professor Jason Frand of UCLA Anderson School of Management:

http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/jason.frand/teacher/technologies/palace/datamining.htm

“Data mining consists of five major elements:

Extract, transform, and load transaction data onto the data warehouse system.

Store and manage the data in a multidimensional database system.

Provide data access to business analysts and information technology professionals.

Analyze the data by application software.

Present the data in a useful format, such as a graph or table.”

From inBloom’s FAQ page:

https://www.inbloom.org/faq

“With inBloom, school districts can bring results back from each of these systems and build solutions that allow teachers to have one system to sign into rather than 30—so all the information they need to help their students will be available in one place. This makes it simpler for teachers to see a more complete picture of student learning and find learning materials that match each student’s learning needs and spark student engagement. It also makes it easier for schools to offer parent dashboards so parents can more easily see what their children are studying and how they’re doing in school.

The way that inBloom is achieving this vision is by building the technology “plumbing” to connect the different tools and systems in use in schools today and enable those products to work better together.”

And finally, from inBloom’s Privacy Commitment:

https://www.inbloom.org/privacy-commitment

“Vendors have no access to student records through inBloom unless authorized by a state or district with legal authority over those student records.”

It is disingenuous, at best, to defend inBloom from allowing vendors access to student databases simply because they themselves do not grant that access. If anyone thinks for one New York minute that the purpose of creating this database is simply for the good of teachers and students then that person is credulous in the extreme.

And how quickly will it unfold that districts with Broad, Bush, and TFA-trained superintendents and school boards with corporate-sponsored members whose budgets have been severely cut by state legislatures and whose coffers are continuously depleted by federal mandates and school “choice” legislation will begin to sell access to “select” vendors to pay for utility bills, teacher salaries, and building maintenance?

The tech marketers who came together to create inBloom are not innocent philanthropists who have no profit-stake in the end product and to claim so is ridiculous.

From inBloom About: History:

https://www.inbloom.org/about-inbloom

“The SLC custom-built all the inBloom software components and has worked with education technology companies and developers to encourage the development of inBloom-compatible applications.”

Those “educational technology companies and developers” have lots of expensive products to sell and it is not a coincidence that this software debuts at the same time that ALEC, the Business Roundtable, the Chamber of Commerce, and the reform foundations are simultaneously pushing very hard to pass laws in all 50 states requiring state departments of education to mandate online learning, online virtual schools, online testing, and adoption of the CCSS which magically requires (see the Special Education Appendix to the CCSS) software that these miraculously philanthropic companies happen to manufacture and sell at great profit margins to the very school districts whom they are promoting the adoption of inBloom. Now that’s a lucky occurrence, isn’t it? Just like the New York State Dept. of Education/Pearson alliance, maybe?

I see that some commenters are accepting that this is a done deal and are saying that we might as well accept it and try to make the best of it. I say nonsense! I echo Linda in saying that we have no valid reason to acquiesce to the data monster at all without a fight. I have yet to see a compelling reason, backed up with real, peer-reviewed research, that proves beyond doubt that this technology and obsession with data and its collection does anything meaningful to help students learn. It is circular logic always: data collection informs teaching, which adapts to teach to the data-collection tests, which reveal which students do well on data-collection tests, which proves that data collection is necessary.

After following this pied piper for over a dozen years we are no better off than we were before. No miraculous changes have taken place. Poverty has increased exponentially rather than been eradicated by all the magical learning that supposedly lifts students out of their generational poverty and our country and its citizens are worse off by any imagined measure than we were before the reform miracles were mandated upon us. How far does this experiment need to go before people begin to realize that we have little more than a naked emperor?