All Your Child's Data Are Belong To InBloom 211
theodp writes "Q. What do you get when Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch put their heads together? A. inBloom (aka SLC), the Gates Foundation-bankrolled and News Corp. subsidiary-implemented collaboration whose stated mission is to 'inform and involve each student and teacher with data and tools designed to personalize learning.' It's noble enough sounding, but as the NY Times reports, the devil is in the details when it comes to deciding who sees students' academic and behavioral data. inBloom execs maintain their service has been unfairly maligned, saying it is entirely up to school districts or states to decide which details about students to store in the system and with whom to share them. However, a video on inBloom's Web site suggesting what this techno-utopia might look like may give readers of 1984 some pause. In one scene, a teacher with a tablet crouches next to a second-grader evaluating how many words per minute he can read: 55 words read; 43 correctly. Later, she moves to a student named Tyler and selects an e-book 'for at-risk students' for his further reading. The video follows Tyler home, where his mom logs into a parent portal for an update on his status — attendance, 86%; performance, 72% — and taps a button to send the e-book to play on the family TV. And another scene shows a geometry teacher reassigning students' seating assignments based on their 'character strengths', moving a green-coded female student ('actively participates: 98%') next to a red-and-yellow coded boy ('shows enthusiasm: 67%'). The NYT also mentions a parent's concern that school officials hoping to receive hefty Gates Foundation Grants may not think an agreement with the Gates-backed inBloom completely through."
Objecting to InBloom or the data collection? (Score:4, Interesting)
In one scene, a teacher with a tablet crouches next to a second-grader evaluating how many words per minute he can read: 55 words read; 43 correctly.
-- This has been done since typewriters were introduced in classes
Later, she moves to a student named Tyler and selects an e-book 'for at-risk students' for his further reading. The video follows Tyler home, where his mom logs into a parent portal for an update on his status — attendance, 86%; performance, 72% — and taps a button to send the e-book to play on the family TV.
-- Supplemental reading? The only difference is, it is going to a TV
And another scene shows a geometry teacher reassigning students' seating assignments based on their 'character strengths', moving a green-coded female student ('actively participates: 98%') next to a red-and-yellow coded boy ('shows enthusiasm: 67%').
-- And kids with vision problems are also moved to the front of the class. What the point?
Common Tool Problem (Score:2, Interesting)
At first glance this system I think has the common tool problem.
It's naively neither good nor evil but depends on how it's used.
The scenarios illustrated in the synopsis could very well be seen as beneficial, if it's used in good faith and understood as such.
But I find it often is easier to use tools in non-beneficial ways. Will the teachers use the seating arrangement tool to try to make their problems with students other students problems (and they very well might not be able to handle the problem)?
Will teachers use the evaluation tools to help out weaker students or just to select them out, shuffling them to the sidelines so they can concentrate on the more successful students?
Will the company behind the system spring changes in the Terms of Use later on to make use of the data in malicious ways?
I'm jaded enough to expect only the worst a few years down the line.
False benchmarks (Score:5, Interesting)
The bigger issue IMO comes from the described use of easily-measured statistics over more difficult, but meaningful measures of learning. 55WPM with 43 correct (what does that second number even mean, anyway? "No Billy, that says potato, not aardvark" )? Useless, unless we want to train a generation of speed-readers. More importantly, did he fully appreciate the racist subtext inherent in Jane ordering Spot to run?
Sad. On the one hand, I weep for the future of humanity; On the other, I have absolutely no concerns about job security for as long as I want to stay in the workforce. But hey, I see a great future for the the trophy manufacturing industry!
Education data systems rely on teacher input (Score:5, Interesting)
My county's school system uses an on-line system to involve parent's in the education process. Student attendance, assignment status, and grades are posted in the system; parents access the system to monitor how their children are doing, and can theoretically use the information to apply virtually real-time corrective action. Everyone's involved, so this is good, right?
Unfortunately, we have discovered that not all of the teachers are good at getting data in. After several episodes of us correcting our child and then finding out that the data in the system was inaccurate (assignments turned in were not credited, leading to fails and missing assignments) we have very mixed feelings about using the system.
On the one hand, having access to see that assignments are/aren't being turned in, and seeing grades even if the work doesn't make it back home, is good. On the other hand, when the quality of the data is bad, it becomes virtually useless for the purpose of involving the parent in the education process. We can never be sure that a missing assignment is really missing; often a week or more later the system will be updated to show that the assignment was turned in after all.
In one extreme example, a report that was delivered in class and turned in at the end of the presentation was given a grade of zero for never being turned in, and it was an end of the year project report worth a significant portion of the grade. When we went to bat for our kid, the teacher eventually admitted that the report had been delivered in class but didn't know where the hardcopy went. It was too late to turn in a copy of the hardcopy, so in the end that grade was just removed from my child's average. Since she had an "A" anyway, it wasn't harmful, but could have been if she had a lower grade and the report would have brought it up.
My point with all this is that these systems all sound great, but unless an incredible effort is put in the data quality may not be sufficient for the purpose of the system. Its worse to have a system with low quality data that can't be relied upon than it would be to not have the system at all, in my opinion. Depending on how many people are relying on the system and in what ways, it could be extremely problematic. The traditional "end of marking period only" grading system has lots of play where teachers can make adjustments. This is bad if they abuse the power, but is good if they simply correct for lapses. A more realtime scoring system may not have the same flexibility yet may be being used in a more direct feedback manner. Data quality issues will be harder to correct, yet the dependency on the data correctness will be higher.
Re:What's the problem? (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree with you that the particular example of the teacher checking the student's reading speed and accuracy in real time is not Orwellian.
What I am more uncomfortable with is the example of:
Here we have a system where, early on, students are being sorted by behavior -- or more accurately, on the teacher's subjective impression of their behavior. Let's hope the teacher is totally fair and unbiased, because anyone who's too different from his/her preconceptions is going to get labeled with an official-looking percentage. My concern is that these numbers, which sound very arbitrary and subject to emotional judgments, will create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In school, did you ever have a teacher you just didn't click with? I hated my sixth-grade math teacher's guts, and as far as I can tell that sentiment was totally mutual (I remember her body language.) But for me, it was no problem, because the seventh-grade math teacher didn't give a damn what Mrs. G. thought. With this system, Mrs. G. could have labelled me red (40%) in some "character" category and that data would stay with me into seventh grade. So the seventh grade teacher could say "oh, little Sir Garlon is an insubordinate slacker, I'd better not waste my limited time on him -- I'll concentrate on the yellow students because I need to end the year with 50% green to get tenure."
This is more or less what happened to my brother, whose IQ is 10 points higher than mine but who had a hearing disability that made the educational system sideline him. Now he's driving a truck instead of curing cancer or building space probes.
Re: Speaking of classic literature... (Score:2, Interesting)
That's basically how US public education has always been, since the time of Horace Mann, who modeled the system on Prussian regimentation, which relied heavily on absurdly precise measurements and uniformity. Hold your pen at a 51 degree angle, sit in rows and columns spaced exactly three feet apart, write out paradigms and submit your answers to be graded as percentages. The 19th and 20th century educational movements were largely about quantifying the student. Sometimes that data gathering gets dehumanizing, but few people challenge the quantification of students now, for better or for worse. Very little of what's in that video in terms of data collection and storage are new; the interface is shinier and the data is more integrated in their vision than it is now, but that's the only big difference.