<p>"Over the past 18 months, a massive $100 million public-school database spearheaded by the $36.4 billion-strong Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been in the making that freely shares student information with private companies.</p>
<p>The system has been in operation for several months and already contains millions of K-12 students personal identification ‒ ranging from name, address, Social Security number, attendance, test scores, homework completion, career goals, learning disabilities, and even hobbies and attitudes about school." ...</p>
<p>Dave, in a sense it’s your website, and your forum. But this exact topic has been pretty thoroughly hashed over in the past few weeks in other threads, one of which you started. The article you are linking now has nothing new to contribute beyond a window into extreme right-wing loopiness. It’s highly offensive, and blatantly political in ways having nothing to do with education.</p>
<p>When the author is peddling innuendos that the project is linked to Gates’ “internationalist” agenda, to his “support of homosexual activity” and his promotion of vaccines (at gunpoint, no less) as a subterfuge for birth control . . . well, that’s “of right”.</p>
<p>I have read the story about the newyork city/state effort. However, this is the first time I am hearing that it Bill Gates foundation that started the database as a non-profit. The previous stories were only discussing what happened in New York. </p>
<p>It sounds like this is a nationwide effort. </p>
<p>Enough with Dave_Berry bashing already. I provide the same caveat people provide about other things. If you don’t like the thread, stay away from it. Some of us do want to read these stories. We are forcefed left’s point of the media all day long.</p>
<p>It’s not anything like nationwide yet, although they are expanding beyond the initial pilot districts. Louisiana (not normally thought of as a liberal bastion) is the only place where this has been implemented statewide, but New York City and Illinois are also involved.</p>
<p>Thanks for the link JHS. Schools/districts are liberal by nature irrespective of the State. Houston ISD or Dallas ISD etc do not necessarily become conservative because they are in Texas and will join this program unless someone in the State says they can’t do it.</p>
<p>When we enroll our kids in school, what is it we are signing that allows the schools to handover this type of information to a third party? A database by itself is not a major issue if they can hide the names and social security numbers but once they have every bit of info in there and companies start offering money for it, no one knows where it will end up. We have HIPAA rules protecting our medical records but it sounds odd that schools have no problem putting this information in some national database without parental consent.</p>
<p>I thought it was against TOS to start multiple threads on same topic.
This is confusing as I have noticed the same thing.
Is starting a new thread preferential to bumping a thread if the thread is a few days old?</p>
<p>There are plenty of privacy laws regarding student information, starting with FERPA. I believe that there has been lots of discussion about them in connection with this project, and that everyone involved is comfortable that they are not violating privacy laws. </p>
<p>Whether they are right or not, I don’t know. I don’t mean to belittle privacy concerns here. Clearly they exist, and the fact that people have been sensitive to them doesn’t mean that reasonable people might not disagree about where the critical lines are that can’t be crossed. I am sure that the system being built includes substantial protections against unauthorized access to personal information, but no system is perfect.</p>
<p>I don’t know whether it is true, by the way, that information like a social security number is included, although it probably has to be in order to distinguish students with the same names.</p>
<p>As I understand it (and my understanding may be imperfect), the point of the project is to give teachers real-time access to individualized information about a student’s educational progress and needs, and to curricular material that would be personalized to the student, as part of an overall set of goals to enable highly individualized instruction within a classroom setting, to reduce the educational disruption that occurs when students change teachers and schools, and to have a fair way to evaluate school, curriculum, and maybe teacher performance that takes account of the actual students in a school, not merely their demographics. The “access” that outside contractors are expected to have to the data is not to market anything to the students or their families, but to deliver individualized instructional material to a student’s teacher on request, and also for evaluating the effectiveness of schools, curricular materials, etc.</p>
<p>By way of full disclosure, my interest in this derives from two relatives, one of whom is somewhat involved in this project, and another of whom has at times been very engaged in dealing with the inadequacy and “silo” problems of education data systems, and the harm that causes both to children’s education and to attempts to improve schools and other educational systems.</p>
<p>That’s a BS question, emeraldkity4. No, every parent in Louisiana has not been asked to consent to creation of a statewide educational database that would not be effective for its purposes if it were not complete. “Everyone” in this case refers to the people designing and implementing the program, including of course responsible state officials.</p>
<p>Parents aren’t asked for permission when teachers or administrators in their children’s schools view the children’s records, or when copies are sent to a child’s new school. The problem is that the existing records are often incomplete, wrong, and months late when they have to be transferred. There is a big push now for electronic medical records, and for similar reasons – accuracy, cost, effectiveness, timeliness. There are privacy concerns with that, too, I expect, but the potential gains in terms of lives saved and mistakes avoided are obvious. </p>
<p>It’s a little bizarre to suggest that parents should be asked for their consent whenever Teacher A asks Teacher B what kind of a student a particular child is, and what he can do, if Teacher A is now teaching the child, and Teacher B taught him or her last year. Or when a principal says, “Let’s look at how Teacher A is doing with that student, and see if there isn’t something that we could do better.” That’s the essence of this database.</p>
<p>When the story about New York came out, it sounded like someone came up with the idea for this database with a for profit angle. Knowing Bill Gates spent 100 million as a non-profit venture, I am more inclined to believe it started as an altruistic venture. </p>
<p>People have databases of students names and addresses which broaches on privacy but most people don’t care. If one had a kid who was disciplined in school, or has a kid with ADD or ADHD etc, do they want that information accessible to some company somewhere selling educational products? What if colleges start requesting the disciplinary records since they are in this database anyway or even the ADHD records which SAT testing currently does not track on the score sheet?</p>
<p>At some point will employers be able to get this info using background checks?</p>
<p>There is nothing altruistic about what Gates is doing in education. There are billions, heck trillions, of dollars at state in privatizing education. Gates knows that data is power so if there is a reason, it has to do with putting more power in the hands of private companies.</p>
<p>You wouldn’t think that of Bloomberg, Rahm Emanuel and Arne Duncan, but they all support the privatization of public education. The Gates’ Foundation is a huge mover and shaker behind privatization. A quick google search will give you lots of information on the agenda of organizations that the Gates’ Foundation supports.</p>
<p>We had to sign releases permitting our children’s former schools to share their school records with their new schools. </p>
<p>We found in the public schools information was not shared in a timely fashion, due to FERPA. The news descriptions don’t allow me to judge how they get around FERPA. I would not want my children’s teachers’ opinions to be used by for-profit companies. Sorry. Not o.k. </p>
<p>Supposedly confidential medical records have shown up in strange places on multiple occasions in the past. Why should I assume the records will always be accurate, when they’d pass through multiple hands without our knowledge? </p>
<p>A lot of serious thought has been given to the issue of preserving patient confidentiality in the era of computerized records. See: <a href=“http://www.hlpronline.com/kendall.pdf[/url]”>http://www.hlpronline.com/kendall.pdf</a>. In my opinion, many of the same issues apply to school records. Those records are full of individual judgements of students, which may or may not be accurate. As described in the news releases, there seems to be little thought given to the cost to the individual student inherent in the loss of privacy. Will parents find ads for national tutoring chains in their mail? Will certain opportunities be offered to students identified as deserving by the database? Will other students find doors closed to them, because their 6th grade teachers didn’t like them?</p>
<p>Now, if they remove the link to the child’s name, address, social security number, and family background, and sever it from the student’s academic records presented for admission to college, graduate school, and employment, I might feel differently.</p>
<p>I dont care what Bloomberg or Rahm favor since they dont impact anything nationwide. I have not seen a single thing Arne Duncan has done to help bring out more charter schools.</p>
<p>That was a decade ago. They seem to have backed off that some – as has most of the rest of the world – as the data have been mounting that the average charter school is no better than (and sometimes worse than) the bad district public school it replaces. Their current focus seems to be on tools that any school can use, public, private, mixed.</p>
<p>texaspg – If you don’t think Bloomberg and Rahm Emanuel have nationwide impact in the education sphere . . . then you need to drink MORE of the the right-wing Kool-Aid.</p>
<p>The federal government is really something of a marginal player in education, except for the unfunded mandates of NCLB (or whatever they call it now), special ed, and nondiscrimination law. In terms of actual influence, Bloomberg (and Joel Klein, his handpicked superintendant for most of his mayoralty) have had enormous impact almost everywhere.</p>
<p>But as for Arne Duncan – part of the Education Department’s Race To The Top strategy was requiring states to eliminate barriers to opening new charter schools and expanding the enrollments of existing ones.</p>