Okay. One more.

Test Scores are bullshit. Secret data is evil bullshit.

Peter Greene @palan57,  Senior Education Contributor for Forbes and author of the excellent CURMUDGIFICATION CURMUDGUCATION (updated and corrected) blog, has a new article in Forbes that describes legislation now before Congress. The bill, whose title is long enough to look like satire but just long enough to be acronymically shortened to "the America COMPETES Act," contains a "College Transparency" amendment introduced by Rep. Andy Levin (D-MI). 

Aimed at supporting "'the next generation of American workers,'" according to Levin, the amendment means to help "'our young people transition seamlessly into good-paying careers is to make sure that high-quality education and job training is affordable and accessible to all.'" 

What does the bill do? From Greene's article:

It requires the government to collect student-level data reporting enrollment, persistence, retention, transfer, and completion measures for all credentials, plus any other data the advisory committee deems necessary.

The bill also requires the collection of “post-completion outcomes for all postsecondary students, including earnings, employment, and further education” both immediately after leaving postsecondary education and “at time intervals appropriate to the credential sought and earned.” That data collection is to be periodically checked against data held by other agencies, such as Defense and the Social Security Administration. But this calls for lifetime data collection of anyone who attended a postsecondary institution.

Dressed up as a way to help the U.S. compete economically around the world, the legislation, the article notes that the law ensures that if you "Go to college or any other post-high school institution... the federal government will watch you for the rest of your life." It is, as Greene puts it, "a plan for lifetime data tracking of college students."

Is this what we want? To cavalierly feed students to the machine?  Affected students might be forgiven for one day shaking their heads and lamenting, like the miners in Matewan, "We've had about all the help we can stand." (h/t John Sayles) Better yet, "We asked for help, and this is what you give us?"

The truth is, that's not the half of it. Data collection and student tracking is being done right now in public schools all the way down into elementary. It's secret--or at least not discussed in polite company among educators who don't want to acknowledge the truth. And it's done by the government and government-sponsored entities. 

My experience, from Answer Key:

This is so bad I suppressed my own awareness of it and my own complicity in its collection. Thank you to my friend Mike for reminding me. 

In today’s Los Angeles Times there is an Op-Ed written by Caleb Scharf, Columbia University’s director of astrobiology. Just the title creeps me out: “We are our data, our data are us.” In the article, Scharf compares the “informational ocean” we’re all swimming in to a living system, and even though he asserts that this “externally held information” (not in our DNA) is nothing new, I still find myself terrified.

But that’s not the problem. We are all undeniably swimming in and under this Panthalassa of bytes of data, and some of that data will be harvested and used for purposes good and ill. However, schools should not be collecting student information for use by other entities. And they are.

Attendance rates and test scores are easily identifiable examples of student information collected by schools. However, thanks in part to stressed resources, lots of schools have accepted the help of outside vendors in order to provide services that in a different universe might have been understood to be the natural province of the schools themselves. Not-for-profit organizations and specialists have set up shop on campuses all over the country and collect student information in a variety of ways including surveys and having kids fill out forms in order to participate in the vendor’s program. Much of this data is then shared under the rubric of “scholarship program” or “college outreach.” Don’t forget to check the box!

Even the laptops I passed out in class for our research project were little data dynamos. Of course, the district monitored every website visited by every student, but so did The Google. And no doubt so did Microsoft and Amazon. Every Yahoo News click was another bitbyte in some kid’s digital profile. I suppose someone could argue that everybody knows that everybody knows everything anyway, and that kids are savvy and experienced digital consumers and fully informed of the risks and exposure, but nobody says that about kids and drugs, and nobody who knows anything about kids would say that anyway.

No matter what, by permitting ancillary entities to occupy campuses and operate this way, and by distributing and utilizing our own technology without sufficient regard to the implications, schools effectively sanction these practices. And whether it’s browsing histories from school laptops, or household education, family size, and even income information though a “We’re here to help” not-for-profit, this covert data collection should be illegal and is just another example of why data is evil bullshit.

What am I supposed to do about it? Resist. Like with many of the institutional outrages described in this book, a teacher’s capacity to curb this abuse is limited.  However, I urge you to resist. Make sure your students are thoroughly informed of their options “Don’t check that box!” including their option to withhold their participation. Remind them that sharing their information, even for school, even on a school computer, has risks and help them protect themselves from those risks. Don’t be thinking years from now that you could and should have done more. Don’t be me.

We are collecting data on students, sometimes little kids, right now--data that will be attached to them forever. We are allowing district-affiliated tech platforms like Schoology and Naviance, and teacher favorites such as Google Classroom and ClassDojo and Kahoot!--and about a bazillion others--to collect student data. We utilize public platforms like Zoom and YouTube and TikTok, and every one of them tracks kids. Every administrator, every superintendent, every teacher knows it. We are complicit.

What choice do we have? we say to ourselves. Public schools are starved for resources. Education Technology companies offer "solutions." And besides, the kids like it. Yes, for the children. And finally: It doesn't matter anyway. The world is a digital matrix and we are our data. That may very well be true. But do schools have to be instruments of collection?  

Everyone knows that when it comes to Big Data, the consumer is the product. In schools, without asking or even honestly discussing it, we are selling our students.