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

[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

[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

[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

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.

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.