NUT Report: Funding for pre-school testing announced

With the debt-ceiling debate raging and the urgency to cut spending, the rationale and priority for a new Race to the Top pre-school standardized assessment initiative go unexplained. States will compete for $500 million in funds to develop tests that are intended to measure "academic performance but also children’s social, emotional, physical and artistic readiness for kindergarten." This assessment is intended to assist Kindergarten teachers in preparing targeted learning opportunities and are not to be used for any rewards or punishments for students, teachers, or schools.

Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post noted that in 2003 when President Bush suggested giving all children in Head Start programs a standardized test, reaction seemed different:

Critics howled. Early childhood development experts said preschoolers are too young to be evaluated by standardized tests in part because they don’t have sufficient ability to comprehend assessment cues. The plan was shelved.

A recent article in The Nation notes concerns about this initiative.

The kindergarten-entry assessments are “probably the most radical part of the [Race to the Top early learning] program,” acknowledges Sara Mead, a pre-K expert and senior associate partner at Bellweather Education Partners, a nonprofit Washington, DC, consulting firm. “It would drive a big shift towards much more measurement of early learning program outcomes, which parts of the early-childhood education community have traditionally opposed.… But these are not intended to be assessments to determine whether or not an individual child is ‘ready’ for kindergarten, and they never have high stakes for kids, in terms of denying them entry into kindergarten.”

Laura Bornfreund, a policy analyst at the New America Foundation’s Early Learning Initiative, has written that pre-K assessment remains controversial:

Concerns over inappropriate assessments of young children are rampant, so it bears repeating that appropriate kindergarten readiness assessments are not “tests” in the way adults might think of them. They do not require children to sit down with a bubble sheet and number-two pencil. Often they are based on teachers’ observations of children’s drawings or playtime interactions. For many literacy assessments teachers conduct them by sitting down with students, one by one, to ask them questions about sounds and letters or to point to pictures. The idea is to create a low-pressure experience. But there are still many questions in the research community about how to ensure that assessments are administered in ways that are sensitive to a child’s age and stage of development.

Pop Quiz

1) What is the problem this new assessment will solve?
2) Will the data collected become part of the State Longitudinal Database Systems?
3) Will the data be made available to other agencies and researchers without parental consent in accordance with the proposed regulatory changes to Family Education Rights and Protection Act?

Answers:
1) No one knows, but it's expensive.
2) No one knows, change is hard.
3) No one knows, we have to do something.

I am not an educator, not a policy wonk, nor a pre-K expert, but I am taxpayer and a NUT - No Unnecessary Testing. Peanuts anyone?

Arne Duncan is From the Government and He is Here to Help you

[Reprinted with permission from Missouri Education Watchdog.]
In its effort to clarify student data privacy rules for researchers and education officials alike, the U.S. Department of Education proposed several changes to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, on Thursday and named its first chief privacy officer.
"Data should only be shared with the right people for the right reasons," U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in a statement on the proposals. "We need common-sense rules that strengthen privacy protections and allow for meaningful uses of data. The initiatives announced today will help us do just that."

There is a pesky problem standing in the way of sharing student data between states and Federal Agencies: present FERPA standards. If these standards are not altered, the data necessary to supply the workforce cannot be shared.

The DOE promises your student's data will be secure. Really? What's happened the last several weeks or years regarding cyber information?

•TJX, the parent company of T.J. Maxx, Marshalls, and other retailers, has not acknowledged how data on more than 45 million credit and debit card users who had shopped at the company's retail locations was stolen and sold to fraudsters. (May 9, 2007)

•A data breach involving online marketer Epsilon, whose clients are a Who’s Who of major banks and retailers, was only the latest in a string of hacking attacks aimed at getting email records for more thefts. Companies that have said they were exposed since then include banks Citigroup Inc and Capital One Financial Corp, and retailers Walgreen Co and Best Buy Co. (April 5, 2011)

•According to U.S. investigators, China has stolen terabytes of sensitive data -- from usernames and passwords for State Department computers to designs for multi-billion dollar weapons systems. And Chinese hackers show no signs of letting up. "The attacks coming out of China are not only continuing, they are accelerating," says Alan Paller, director of research at information-security training group SANS Institute in Washington, DC.

Secret U.S. State Department cables, obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to Reuters by a third party, trace systems breaches -- colorfully code-named "Byzantine Hades" by U.S. investigators -- to the Chinese military. An April 2009 cable even pinpoints the attacks to a specific unit of China's People's Liberation Army. (April 14, 2010).

The data sets from the National Data Education Model are set and ready to be used on your student. Don't worry if there is a cyber security attack on the Longitudinal Data Systems; information to be gleaned from an attack would only include some of the following:

•Base salary or wage
•Blood type
•Height and Weight
•Dwelling Arrangement
•Health Care History
•Health Care Plan
•Identification Results
•Immunization Status
•Insurance Coverage
•Overall Health Status
•Residence Block Number
•Social Security Number
•Voting Status

The United States Government cannot stop cyber attacks from China; why should taxpayers believe student privacy is secure because of a change in FERPA legislation?

If you believe this information is secure, you will also believe the following:

According to the No Child Left Behind Act, by 2014 every child is supposed to test on grade level in reading and math.
Not every child can test on grade level in reading and math. It's an admirable goal, but impossible to achieve. That's not going to happen. The goal for data systems is to beef up privacy protections. Like the NCLB goal, it sounds great, but if the government cannot stop foreign countries from hacking into military computers, do you believe the DOE can safeguard student data from hackers?

Read this sentence in the second paragraph again: We need common-sense rules that strengthen privacy protections and allow for meaningful uses of data. The problem with that sentence? Strengthening privacy protections don't safeguard the privacy and the "meaningful uses of data" should raise questions for anyone concerned about the constitutional right to individual privacy that your government is determined to document and share.

Data Mining: An Education Reform Strategy

Posted for Sandra in BrevardIf you got mad a few years ago, when you found out Motor Vehicles was sellng information, this won't make you at all happy


If you buy a book through Amazon, rent a movie through Netflix, or have a Facebook account, your information and choices are "mined" to market new products catered to what the data reveals about you. In these large databases, your choices are compared with others and a book you liked might be offered to others who seem to have similar tastes or interests. Specialized algorithms are developed that "mine" in an effective process to sell products.

Wikipedia defines algorithms in part this way:
"Algorithms are essential to the way computers process information. Many computer programs contain algorithms that specify the specific instructions a computer should perform (in a specific order) to carry out a specified task, such as calculating employees' paychecks or printing students' report cards."

NY Times contributor Seth Freeman wrote a clever article this week titled "Me and My Algorithm" of which he said:

“If this is a case of my algorithm, my cyber personal shopper, coach, guardian angel and avatar, knowing me better than I know myself, I really do need to figure out why I, a guy, get repeated offers — tied to a e-mails on vastly different subjects — for mastectomy bras and for something called a vaginal ring. Is the idea that these items make lovely gifts? Since articles I have written have circulated through the Internet by e-mail, it could easily turn out that my algorithm will soon get the opportunity to read what I have had to say about it here. What, I wonder, will it think?” (1)
 
Last year, Bill Gates and other Microsoft executives obtained a patent for a personal data mining system that "would analyze information and make recommendations with the goal of aiding a person's decisions and improving quality of life. The patent abstract described the system this way: "Personal data mining mechanisms and methods are employed to identify relevant information that otherwise would likely remain undiscovered." Users supply personal data that can be analyzed in conjunction with data associated with a plurality of other users to provide useful information that can improve business operations and/or quality of life. Personal data can be mined alone or in conjunction with third party data to identify correlations amongst the data and associated users. Applications or services can interact with such data and present it to users in a myriad of manners, for instance as notifications of opportunities. Of course, it's not all about improving lives: Further down, the patent explains that "such data can be afforded to businesses involved in market analysis, or the like, in a manner that balances privacy issues of users with demand for high quality information from businesses." (2)
 
Building Longitudinal Data Systems for Education

What does this have to do with education? Plenty. There is a widespread belief that the development of longitudinal data, from early childhood through the 12th grade and beyond is a necessary element to educational reform. The Data Quality Campaign (DQC), "a national, collaborative effort to encourage and support state policymakers to improve the availability and use of high-quality education data to improve student achievement." The organization articulates a widespread belief that "States have made remarkable progress in developing longitudinal data systems that can follow student progress over time, from early childhood through 12th grade and into postsecondary education through implementation of the 10 Essential Elements. The 10 State Actions are the fundamental steps states must put in place to change the culture around how data are used to inform decisions to improve system and student performance."

Florida received a federal grant for $9,975,288 with funding starting in July 2010 and ending in June 2013 and cited these major outcomes in their proposal
 

a) Upgrade the four major source data systems that are incorporated into Florida’s Education Data Warehouse (EDW)

b) Employ a unique identifier system so that social security numbers are no longer the key field for tracking students between the Local Education Agencies and the State

c) Provide several different reporting capabilities for use by a myriad of stakeholders

d) Implement a data mining tool for FLDOE to analyze and evaluate its program and policies more efficiently and effectively (3)

The Data Quality Campaign reaffirmed that "Florida is among the top states in collecting data (10 of 10 criteria along with 11 other states) and using it (5 of 10 criteria, better than all but two states). "When states collect the most relevant data and are able to match individual student records over time, they can answer the questions that are at the core of educational effectiveness." (4) According to their website, the founding father of the Data Quality Campaign is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with additional support from Casey Family Programs, Lumina Foundation for Education, Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, and the Pew Charitable Trusts. You can follow DQC on Facebook.

DQC’s executive director believes that there is education data collected that is not necessary and cited Kansas and Tennessee as “leaders in establishing rules for data control.” However, the Fordham Law School Center on Law and Information Policy conducted a study (5) on the massive data collection efforts and concluded that states "are collecting far more information than necessary, failing to take appropriate measures to safeguard student privacy and protect them from data misuse, and failing to comply with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). Fordham's investigation also reveals that 80% of the states "do not have a system to delete student records. "Fordham law professor Joel R. Reidenberg, who oversaw this study, had this to say of the Center’s findings:

“Ten, 15 years later, these kids are adults, and information from their elementary, middle and high school years will easily be exposed by hackers and others who put it to misuse. States, he said, "are trampling the privacy interests of those students." (6)
 
Conclusion

Bill Gates and the entire computer industry need a literate population with financial means to buy and make use of their products. Therefore, at some level, these efforts are intended to spur improvements. I do not mean to suggest any nefarious intent. Clearly, there is business development intent. Then, I wondered what other benefits a massive data collection has. Could it be a way for an industry, like the computer industry, to be able to identify minds early on with potential to join that workforce, nurture them, and ensure that the U.S. has sufficient minds here versus importing from abroad. Right now, the jobs in this sector are blooming in China and India and likely a destination for unemployed U.S. computer guru's, leaving the potential for a U.S. brain drain. Whatever the reasons, I find it troubling. What do you think?
 

1.     http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/opinion/18freeman.html?_r=2
2.    http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/02/gates_ozzie_other_microsoft_execs_patent_personal_data_mining.html
3     http://nces.ed.gov/programs/slds/state.asp?stateabbr=FL
4.     http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/gradebook/2010/01/florida-among-top-states-in-education-data-collection-and-use.html
5.     http://law.fordham.edu/center-on-law-and-information-policy/14769.htm
6.     http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/27/AR2009102703562.html

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