Parents Mobilize Against States' Student Data Mining

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."

Comments

Good

[i kan reed]

Facebook's evil laughter as their monopoly on distributing childrens' personal information becomes secure from local governments inadvertent competition. Elsewhere a "marketing expert" begins the process to pony up an extra half-cent per human being whose privacy is permanently and irrevocably destroyed.

Re:Good

[i kan reed]

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.

Re:Good

[PopeRatzo]

Damn right it's good. It's high time parents started ripping out the Surveillance State infrastructure by the roots before their kids find themselves in a world without privacy.

There's no issue more important than this. Ubiquitous surveillance impacts negatively on every other important issue. Economy? You will never have broad-based prosperity in a surveillance state. Health care? It's obvious. Education. Read TFA.

The explosion of intrusion over the past decade has completely transformed me politically. We've got individual privacy eroding at an accelerated pace and institutional secrecy doing the same. That's a really bad trend.

There can be no free society among people who are being watched.

The benefits are obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

The benefits are indeed obvious, as long as you trust the people holding the data....

Re:Not Anticipated

[Em Adespoton]

More likely they were just high. It's ridiculous to think that what works for kids in Florida works for kids in Hawaii, or what works for kids in Arizona works for kids in New York. This kind of data is just meant for tracking, it wouldn't be used to improve a thing.

That's why they include location data.

Really: the goals are pretty good -- use machine learning to get the correlations instead of depending on the all-too-fallible "common sense". The problem is, the goals and the implementation are only loosely related. The researchers are trying to do the right thing, but in the process they're creating a database that can be abused intentionally or inadvertently for other goals. There's a reason HIPAA exists; this system would not just do an end-run around HIPAA, it would do much more. This data would become one of the most valuable assets to many corporations and government agencies in the US (and beyond).

Nothing new

[RevWaldo]

Teachers and vice principals have been warning students that their misbehaving and bad attitude were going on their permanent record for decades.

.

Benefits for whom ?

[mbone]

"People took for granted that parents would understand [the benefits], that it was self-evident,"

Oh, I think that the parents understand the benefits fairly well. They just realize that they don't accrue to them or their children.

Benefit Understood. Cost Underestimated.

[Bob9113]

"People took for granted that parents would understand [the benefits], that it was self-evident," said Michael Horn,

I'm sure they do. The benefits are self-evident. It is the people who have been advancing these programs who are lacking foresight, for not considering the costs.

The problem is not that these programs have no value, it is that the cost is large and not well understood, and that once built it is very hard to make these things go away. As a society we have not begun to seriously examine the threat of these massive databases. Recent big data research has shown us the approximate threat level: In terms of influence power, it is "very big, larger than even the researchers expected."

Re:2 Decades

[nbauman]

Please, in spite of how much worse some things have gotten, the respect for dissent in the US has expanded, no contracted.

I'm not sure about that. Daniel Ellsberg went free. Bradley Manning went to jail. Snowden and Assange have arrest warrants out for him.

Back in the 1950s, the FBI identified spies, like Stephen Hall, that they decided not to prosecute, because in court the accused had a right to hear the evidence against him under the Fifth Amendment, and the FBI decided it wasn't worth having their sources and methods disclosed.

Now, they prosecute somebody, and simply say that the defendant doesn't have a right to hear the evidence against him, and the Constitution doesn't apply.

Re:If.

[sabri]

I can see CSI: Nosy Neighbors TV show, questioning a guy, "According to your school info, you have trouble making friends and once pulled up a girl's skirt. You murdered Mr. Body, didn't you?"

Exactly that.

If.

No, when.

Somewhere 5-10 years downstream, some politician/NYPD-chief will use the next Sandy Hook event to say "We had the troubling information in the school's database, but we couldn't use it. Let's change the law".

And we all know it's going to happen at some point.