Code.org Wants Participating Students' Data For 7 Years

theodp writes "As part of its plan to improve computer science education in the U.S., the Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates-backed Code.org is asking school districts to sign a contract calling for Code.org to receive 'longitudinal student achievement data' for up to seven academic years in return for course materials, small teacher stipends, and general support. The Gates Foundation is already facing a backlash from the broader academic community over attempts to collect student data as part of its inBloom initiative. The Code.org contract also gives the organization veto power over the district teachers selected to participate in the Code.org program, who are required to commit to teaching in the program for a minimum of two school years."

Comments

Self-serving philanthropy

[steelfood]

What else could be expected from names like Zuckerberg and Gates?

I'll bet they'll veto anyone who tries to use Linux or teach kids about privacy.

Re:Self-serving philanthropy

[Cryacin]

I'll bet they'll veto anyone who tries to use Linux or teach kids about privacy.

I'm sorry, that information is confidential.

Re:Self-serving philanthropy

[Anonymous Coward]

inbloom runs their website on Linux (and their entire software stack is open source). Don't let reality intrude on your conspiracy theories.

http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.inbloom.org

Microsoft was ruthless and anti-competitive during Gates's tenure. No one doubts that. But the Gates Foundation is a true philanthropic effort trying to solve really big problems - like improving public education and curing malaria, for fsck's sake. How exactly does curing malaria help Microsoft and Bill Gates? Efforts like Code.org are experiments - to determine if experiments succeed, they need to collect data and analyze it to make sure they are achieving the outcomes they want. Data-driven philanthropy is going to become more and more common - donors want to know their money is accomplishing something, not just giving them warm fuzzies.

Re:Self-serving philanthropy

[mindwhip]

There's noting like a good conspiracy story to get a rise from /. regulars but hell I've got karma to burn so I'm going the other way...

Some achievement tracking is justified and useful (and even necessary) for the project itself. For code.org to justify its efforts (both to itself and to schools in general) it needs to prove that they made a difference and its hard to do that with no data on how well students improved compared to those not involved. Also since there seems to be some kind of grading/tests/qualifications involved and code.org is issuing them they need to be (as for any examining body) able to keep records of what student did what and that they achieved the required competency and how the difficulty of these achievements compare to other disciplines the students are involved with.

The power to veto teachers is also justified to some extent given how many bad teachers there are out there and bad teaching of the material will likely have the opposite effect than the project wants (that is put talented kids off coding for life). As there are 'small teacher stipends' involved this seems very reasonable to me as does training teachers... something that there isn't nearly enough of (especially in the sciences and technology given how fast things change) which just results in even more bad teaching.

Committing to teach for two years also makes sense given the first year the teachers are likely learning the material just in time to teach it, the second (and presumably subsequent) years the teacher will be able to teach it better due to familiarity. It also ensures at least some consistency for students from one year to the next.

There is two things that I would change from what I read and they are 1) Parents need to have the option to opt-out their sprogs from the achievement tracking but since it would seem that they need to give permission to participate in the first place this is a moot point and 2) the extended performance data needs to be anonymous.

Re:Self-serving philanthropy

[femtobyte]

No, Code.org does not need centralized tracking of each individual student's activities over many years. Tracking student achievement; determining who has passed classes and qualified for credits; is the responsibility of the local school district and educators in the classroom. For improving quality of the educational materials, all Code.org needs is aggregate summary data, at the classroom level at the very finest-grained, and to encourage evaluation and feedback from classroom educators on how well each portion of the material engages/baffles/bores/frustrates/enlightens students.

Re:Self-serving philanthropy

[jbolden]

Microsoft ran BSD on the backend for Hotmail. It was migrated a long time ago. They also run gigantic and much larger data projects on their own server project.

Re:Self-serving philanthropy

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The people aren't a good start; but the problem is arguably not one of personality: Is a program, designed by (and to a nontrivial extent, for) people who view the product as future human resources(and, even if it no longer has a personal interest, like Gates who is semi-retired, draws heavily from 'technocrats who certainly don't think that 'privacy' is even on the radar when the employees are on the clock, or, increasingly, off it), rather than students, going to combine the managerial style of corporate cube-herders with the usual high-handedness of people Who Are Here To Englighten The Savages, and then package that up in your state-mandated education?

Barring exceptional personalities pushing in the opposite direction, very, very probably. A bunch of silicon valley success stories, (increasingly drawn from companies where Monetizing User Data is half business model and half theology), come down to 'save education' and increase the supply of future code monkeys. How else was this going to shake down?

Re:Self-serving philanthropy

[femtobyte]

You can determine this from anonymous aggregated data. You don't have to be completely stupid and average every grade in every class into a single district-wide mean. But, you can report "here's the distribution of grades on the Module 4.3b semester-end test" without Code.org needing to read each student's report card.

The approach taken by Code.org of centralizing data to create silly metrics is part of the whole process of industrializing education to a horrible "one size fits none," teach-to-the-test approach. The opposite of this is giving classroom teachers the ability to evaluate and address each student's individual learning needs. This happens in small classrooms with experienced teachers; the opposite of "cram everyone into a mega video lecture, and turn teachers into minimum-wage test proctors doling out pre-packaged material according to the Central Computer's instructions."

Re:Self-serving philanthropy

[femtobyte]

The "good and the best," self-motivated learners with the drive and resources to seek out and find the best available resources, don't need Code.org in the first place. Yes, you learned to program and use a broad variety of devices --- without any help from Code.org (who didn't exist).

The Code.org project is primarily about reaching out to a broader selection of students who haven't already learned to program on their own resources. It's mass-educational-material for ordinary classroom students. As such, it should be held to a high standard of being educational in a broader sense than churning out factory-ready robots. Students who would discover the broad world of Free software on their own probably don't need Code.org. For everyone else, learning whether to think "outside the box" of proprietary products, or --- on the opposite side --- being brainwashed into being ignorant and terrified of everything outside that box --- is a matter of education. You can expand students' minds beyond what many would discover on their own; or, you can actively work to chain and constrict those minds. We should be extremely wary about turning the future of computer education over to Microsoft and Facebook's corporate interests. The "best and the brightest" will still escape; but they'll be sentenced to live in a world overwhelmingly populated by the mentally crippled products of megacorporate education.

Re:Self-serving philanthropy

[femtobyte]

I'm sure I could dig out several peer reviewed studies that show the bigger the class and the more standardised the material the better the education level of the population

It would be interesting to see what those studies showed --- and how, when comparing across societal populations that may vary in other ways than typical class size --- they controlled for external factors.

From what I can find of scientifically controlled studies (rather than uncontrolled observational research), where people from the same population were randomly assigned to smaller or larger class sizes, smaller classes showed benefits. For example, some analysis of the Tennessee STAR experiment.

Isolated personal anecdotes do not make for sound science; however, in my own experience, I certainly got a lot more out of small classes where the teacher was more able to individually accommodate student needs (in my own case, the need of generally being way ahead of the average grade-level material).

You're complaining about education being driven to mediocre "average" levels, yet you support mass standardized big class testing-driven approaches because they show good averaged results? You do realize that, in the mega-for-profit standardized educational industry being pushed by Gates and Zuckerburg, the bottom line for corporate profit will be tied to whatever silly mass-averaged metrics the corporations can foist off on the public as measures of "success," which will have very little to do with the needs and development of individual students as assessed by classroom teachers? Collecting fine-grained personally tracked results isn't about providing fine-grained individual best outcomes (like a conscientious teacher would do); it's a power grab to assure that the methods for reducing individual data to bottom-line averaged metrics are in the hands of megacorporations, rather than teachers --- so that "educational success" can be defined in the most profitable ways. "Privatize the system and hand over education to us, and your students will be 36 zurmuflobs better educated! The competition only provides 31 zurmuflobs!".

Re:Self-serving philanthropy

[recoiledsnake]

Have you ever used Stackoverflow.com ? Congrats, you just used IIS/Exchange/Windows. Oh and it scales really well and is used by a lot of popular web sites.

http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/8/5/stack-overflow-architecture.html

Re:Self-serving philanthropy

[Chuck Chunder]

For improving quality of the educational materials, all Code.org needs is aggregate summary data

I don't think that's necessarily true, or at least it's not true that more specific detail than aggregate data won't lend itself to additional useful insights.

For instance it's reasonable to imagine that different people learn better in different ways and that by accumulating data on individuals one might be able to determine different groups among them which might in turn lead to more tailored materials for different types of learners.

If you aggregate the data early around one factor (eg a class or school) that will vastly reduce your ability to come up with other ways to view the data or to have things emerge from the data that you didn't already anticipate.

It would be absurd to suggest that more fine-grained data wouldn't allow for more detailed analysis. The only question is where the line needs to be drawn for privacy or other reasons.

Re:Self-serving philanthropy

[femtobyte]

Fine-grained individual learning evaluation is something that the educators in the classroom should be in charge of. I know all my good teachers were the ones who put effort into learning the character of each student, and adjusting things to work. Centralizing control over analysis of student performance data --- taking the capability away from teachers to evaluate how a program is really working, and placing it in the hands of Gates and Zuckerberg to push whatever megacorporate agenda they want --- is far from ideal. An educational program should be seeking input from teachers --- "hey, this module seems too lecture-heavy for most of my students; the kids who did best in the hands-on lab dropped the thread in sections 4.3 to 4.8". Instead of turning to Zuckerberg to algorithmically decide how the world should run, while reducing teachers to uninvolved lackeys just there to proctor tests, we should be giving teachers greater ability to share their on-the-ground observations, and flexibility to taylor education for their students.

Re:Self-serving philanthropy

[exomondo]

I just had a look at their website and much of it seems to be device and platform agnostic, in fact some things are just critical-thinking tasks that don't even require a computer. I doubt it would be difficult to tie all the corporate and private donors together to come up with some big conspiracy theory about how this is all to enslave everybody as corporate drones and somebody should think of the children but there doesn't really seem to be anything to actually support that notion so wouldn't a more effective use of that time be producing an alternative to the specific elements - if any - that you disagree with?

Re:Self-serving philanthropy

[serviscope_minor]

With enough thrust, a pig can fly.

What do you expect?

[MLCT]

It is a Mark Zuckerberg project - he hasn't exactly got a good track record for respecting people's privacy and not trying to build profiles that can be exploited down the road.

Honestly, even in a supposed "philanthropic" venture, I would always question the motive.

"Push until you meet resistance, then pull back, then push again when people aren't looking" that is the facebook/zuckerberg motto.

Re:What do you expect?

[Animats]

"Push until you meet resistance, then pull back, then push again when people aren't looking" that is the facebook/zuckerberg motto.

That follows "When they advance, we retreat. When they hunt, we hide. When they sleep, we attack. When they retreat, we advance." from "On Guerrilla Warfare", Mao Zedong, 1930. This is the standard operating procedure for guerrilla groups. Classically it is a strategy of the weak against the strong. It's interesting to see it used by tycoons.

Re:Yes. Give Us You Children

[plopez]

Corporations are the pinnacle of human achievement. Corporations are the most efficient, benevolent, and wise people on the planet.

Re:Necessary Evil?

[femtobyte]

"Some kind of feedback" means collecting aggregate data reports from teachers and local school districts on how the program is working. "Some kind of feedback" does not require centrally tracking every assignment grade from each individual student. That level of intrusive tracking serves different ends from improving the educational quality of the material --- for which the companies involved have a proven track record of being heinously evil.

An alternative approach

[ebno-10db]

Bill, Zuck,
Here's an alternative approach. Take your money out of offshore tax havens and pay your taxes so that voters can determine school policy. That may mean public schools, school vouchers, or any other approach with widespread support. Zuck, you've still got majority voting power, so you can even do that with your Face(whatever it is) company.

Re:An alternative approach

[Tom]

A hundred times this.

Whenever you hear of the philantropic efforts of multi-millionaires, always keep in mind that they took that money of theirs out of the local economy. It's not like it appeared out of nowhere, you know?

umm

[superwiz]

I want that data, too. Why isn't performance data public record? These are public schools which operate completely on tax payers' dollars. All teacher salaries are public record as is all public employee data. Why shouldn't performance metrics be public record? I doubt they are asking for students to be named by name. I am sure they would be happy with just the student performance data in a way that keeps students names impossible to find. I would like to know that data, too. Certainly when I pay property taxes I'd like to know what they buy me.

Re:It's only a proposed contract...

[Improv]

If we think we might object to provisions we wouldn't like in the final contract, we'd better start objecting now. The end effect of such protests can only be positive for us, particularly because we often lack a direct input into terms and in the end are left with a thumbs-up-or-down; making a fuss early gives us some of the only kind of leverage we really can get.