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| Blooming Automatons? (Image from Flickr, by edenpictures) |
Want your
child to flower academically? That’s what inBloom Inc. says it will do by
accessing your child’s social security number, test scores, hobbies, learning
disabilities, attendance records, career goals, homework completion records,
and other personal data, in order to develop “personalized” learning aids that
it will sell back to you or your school district.
Private Education Companies are School Officials According to Fed
inBloom’s
new $100 million database has been in operation for three months, the Business
Insider reports. Funded by the Gates Foundation, with its infrastructure
built by Amplify Education, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s New’s Corp, the
database was designed to acquire and monitor student data from kindergarten
through high school. It already contains files on millions of children,
according to Reuters. While local school officials retain legal control over the
information, federal law allows them to share these files with private
companies that sell educational products and services. According to the U.S.
Department of Education, parental consent is not required for school officials to
share student records with other “school officials,” including private companies,
which the department defines as “school officials” if they sell educational
services or products.
Needless to
say, the project has the corporate education vultures drooling copiously. Jeffrey
Olen, from CompassLearning, called it a “huge win for us," according to Business
Insider, while Jason Lange, chief executive of BloomBoard, said "It is
a godsend for us [as it] allows us to collect more data faster, quicker and
cheaper." Other software manufacturers, distance learning companies and
distributers of digital textbooks and curriculum all stand to profit handsomely
through direct marketing to students and their teachers and families. inBloom
eventually plans to charge schools for their “service,” which will bring in
additional profits.
Overall,
technology startups directed at K-12 education brought in over $425 million in
venture capital last year, according to the NewSchools Venture Fund. Meanwhile, twenty-one education technology companies have already started developing
applications that will work with the inBloom database, according to the inBloom website.
9 States Already Drinking the Koolaid
For the time
being, the “service” is free. Seven states (Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois,
Kentucky, North Carolina, and Massachusetts) have already agreed to voluntarily
make some of their student data available to inBloom, while Louisiana and New
York have committed to providing nearly all their student records.
Proponents
claim the project will improve “personalized” learning, which is just another
vapid reform that sounds wonderful, but means little. Everyone wants their child’s
personal needs and interests to be directly and meticulously addressed, but
this is not something that can be accomplished through data mining. Consider
how much smarter and productive you have become as a result of the
advertisements Google and Amazon have directed to you as a result of their data
mining. Even when they hit the nail on the head, the consequence is that you might
buy something you might not have otherwise considered buying, not any kind of significant
leg up on your peers. Furthermore, that product may be of dubious quality
because you lacked the time to research it or test it before purchasing it and
it was so easy to just click the purchase button.
While it is
certainly possible that some educationally sound products will appear as pop
ups on parents’, teachers’ or children’s screens, the overwhelming majority
will likely be garbage (like the majority of non-digital canned curriculum).
Furthermore, all will come at a cost (e.g., subscription price, future
commitment, more pop ups and advertisements encouraging children to whine and
beg mommy to buy something else). Plus, with all the fundraisers and other
things parents already have to purchase for their children’s free public education, why should they have
to buy more? Just because Bill Gates or some other huckster says it’s good for
you and they have the data to back it up, they do not have any credible data
that their snake oil actually works. In fact, the only thing their data can
show is that there may be a need or interest.
Trojan Horse for Union Busting and
Lowering Labor Costs
Projects like
this contribute to the deskilling of teachers, as they transfer many of the
responsibilities best met by sentient professionals (e.g., assessing students’
academic and social skills, identifying their academic and personal needs,
tailoring curriculum to meet these needs, communicating with parents, hosting
clubs and extracurricular activities) to software designers who never have any
face-to-face interactions with children. Like the obsessive reliance on testing
(NCLB, RttT), which replaces instruction and pedagogy with test proctoring, online
and distance learning make the trained, professional teacher superfluous. Eventually, districts will move to substantially
lower teachers’ salaries and hire greater numbers of untrained factotums to monitor
the computer labs, proctor the tests, and cover the other, growing menial tasks
that are replacing actual teaching.
One of these
menial tasks is data entry. inBloom’s promoters claim that schools currently operate
too many databases and these do not communicate well with each other, while
they miss considerable data that is still contained on paper. However,
regardless of the software, the paper data needs to be uploaded by humans,
which requires more mindless toil, much of which will fall on teachers (e.g.,
administering and uploading data from tests, grades, attendance, student
surveys, behavior), taking time from actual teaching. Even though it would be
useful for teachers to know how many times a student has been tardy to each of
his other classes, something databases can (and already do) readily handle, no
database or software can meet face to face with that student’s teachers and
counselor to discuss his personal circumstances and home life and how these may
be affecting his attendance.
Another
claim of proponents is that inBloom will be able to provide tailored
professional development to teachers. Of course, inBloom will determine which
skills teachers need help with based on their students’ test scores, which
actually have very little to do with teacher skill and much more to do with
students’ socioeconomic backgrounds. Thus, teachers will find their
professional development time taken up with even more mindless test prep
training and unproven reforms du jour
mandated from above than is already the case. This will further alienate them
from advancing their own profession through collaboration and developing a
school-wide or subject-based consensus on what the school’s and students’ needs
actually are.
Children’s Online Security
Parents
probably do not want their children’s disciplinary records, special education
status, or counselor’s notes, in the hands of strangers or entrepreneurs whose
only goal is to exploit this information to make a buck. In the pre-digital
days, this kind of information would have been considered protected by counselor/client
privilege. Even today, school counselors do not tell teachers the details of a
student’s personal problems at home, as this would violate the student’s
privacy, yet this same information, once entered into the database, could be
transferred to any number of private companies without the counselor’s, child’s
or parent’s consent.
inBloom has
promised to guard children’s personal data tightly. However, its own privacy
policy states that it "cannot guarantee the security of the information
stored ... or that the information will not be intercepted when it is being
transmitted." These are reasonable and expectable statements from their
legal team’s perspective, considering how often people’s personal data is
stolen from large companies and how difficult it is to stay a step ahead of
cyber crooks and hackers, but it is not very reassuring to parents who do not
want random strangers or advertisers offering their children candy over the
internet.
Profit, Not People
If there was
ever any doubt about the role of public education in society, the inBloom
database ought to dispel it. Schools exist to promote the interests of capital.
Traditionally, they did this by providing as little education (at as little
cost) as necessary to reproduce sufficiently trained workers to keep businesses
running, who were sufficiently compliant and accepting of their lot to consume,
obey and promote the status quo. There have always been a few businesses that got
a little more from this tax subsidy (e.g., textbook and test publishers,
cafeteria service providers), but over the last decade or so there has been a
serious drive by capitalists to take full advantage of the millions of obligate
consumers (i.e., students and parents) and the steady influx of capital (i.e.,
tax dollars).
In some
ways, inBloom follows in the footsteps of Channel 1, which began marketing
directly to teens through faux-educational news programs and advertisements broadcast
in public schools starting in 1989. A study by the American
Academy of Pediatrics found that children remembered the ads more than the news,
indicating that Channel 1 was highly effective at its actual goal: marketing to
children. It seems unlikely that inBloom will have any greater success than
Channel 1 at educating children, but it will very likely result in much greater
profits for its clients.
