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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsSchool Data Profiteering
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/06/21When you were a kid and got in trouble at school, did they ever threaten to put it in your permanent record? Thats a scary prospect, knowing that the information could be seen forever by anyone with access to it. But what if that record had more in it than just grades and disciplinary problems? What if it included things like when your parents got divorced, or that you had been homeless for a while?
Starting at the end of last year, a nonprofit organization called inBloom began to test new cloud-based software to collect information from student records and use it to individualize the education a student receives. Much of this individualized instruction will come from third-party for-profit companies that will be granted access to students data, effectively giving corporations that deal with inBloom free rein to mine student data as they see fit.
A joint venture of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation, inBloom has a long list of corporate partners, including Amazon, Dell, and Scholastic (maker of The Magic School Bus and The Magic Treehouse childrens book series). Originally, inBloom was known as the Shared Learning Collaborative (SLC), a Gates Foundation- and NewsCorp-backed organization that had been quietly developing a set of shared technology services for several years, in order to connect student data and instructional materials.
By 2013s South-by-Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, SLC had rebranded itself as inBloom. The Gates Foundation is a well-known advocate of charter schools, school-privatization measures, and reforms like increased reliance on standardized testing and merit-based pay. (All these changes are unpopular with teachers and teachers unions.)
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School Data Profiteering (Original Post)
xchrom
Jun 2013
OP
pipoman
(16,038 posts)1. I personally don't care what teachers and teachers unions
don't like. I don't like seniority based pay and promotion. I believe it exacerbates the problems in the school systems by putting complacent veteran teachers in leadership roles and keeps passionate teachers in a less effective system governed by people who have lost their passion and are simply waiting for their retirement pensions to be fully vested. This happens in many areas of government and I believe it is a source of bad policy.
Bradical79
(4,490 posts)2. Data mining?
What's that have to do with corporations having access to student personal data?
And what data leads you to believe merit based pay and standardized testing produces better results since that seems to be your focus