THE BATTLE OVER COMMON CORE, TESTING

AND STUDENT PRIVACY

Leonie Haimson Executive Director

Class Size Matters

Co-chair, Parent Coalition to Protect Student Privacy

Presentation to Restore Palos Verdes Education

April 12, 2015

What is corporate education reform?• Treat schools as businesses

• Nationalize standards (Common Core) with aligned exams (PARCC and SBAC)

• Raise difficulty of tests to supposedly align with “college readiness”

• Collect massive amount of student personal data including test scores to evaluate children, teachers and schools

• Fire teachers & close schools that do not perform well on metrics and/or convert them to charters

• Encourage vendors to sell online instructional programs as “personalized learning” to schools

Corporate Education Reform relies on the perception of a crisis

• “Experts” from corporate or foundation world tell parents & voters that US is behind the rest of the world educationally

• Also, that US spends “too much” money on education

• That we need Common Core standards, high-stakes testing, charter schools, online testing and data sharing to improve student outcomes

Gates Foundation financed Common Core • Gates has spent more than $200 million to create and build support for the Common Core

standards

• Two main architects of Common Core, consultants David Coleman and Jason Zimba, never taught a day in their lives in K12

• Common Core working groups contained NO K12 teachers but mostly college professors and reps from testing and curriculum companies

• Much criticism of standards, including quotas on informational texts, “close reading” strategies

• Especially inappropriate for younger children, special needs students and English language learners

Common Core to spur commercial development of products

• Bill Gates explained his support for Common Core by likening it to a “common electrical outlet” to plug in students like appliances to standardized uniform curriculum and tests.

• Joann Weiss, Arne Duncan chief of staff, wrote Common Core would provide advantage to vendors who could now market their products to all states via a common set of criteria

• “The development of common standards and shared assessments radically alters the market for innovation in curriculum development, professional development, and formative assessments…the adoption of common standards and shared assessments means that education entrepreneurs will enjoy national markets where the best products can be taken to scale.”

GATES-Keeper:

the Gates Foundation spent over $200 million dollars to promote the common core

Source: MotherJones, AJ Vicens

Shock Doctrine

• Author Naomi Klein has observed that when you scare people enough, it is easier to persuade them to allow you to make radical changes in their self interest, not the public interest

• Nations or communities in “shock” often give up things they would otherwise fiercely protect, like their public schools

• Crisis can be real (eg Hurricane Katrina, which caused New Orleans to lose their public school system) or manufactured – in the case of the Common Core.

• New national tests will manufacture failure in order to ease way for corporate reform.

“Common Core Kool-aid”

• Rick Hess, conservative at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote a column called the “Common Core Kool-aid”:

• First, politicians will actually embrace the Common Core assessments and then will use them to set cut scores that suggest huge numbers of suburban schools are failing.

• Then, parents and community members who previously liked their schools are going to believe the assessment results rather than their own lying eyes…

• Finally, newly convinced that their schools stink, parents and voters will embrace "reform."

• Common Core advocates now evince an eerie confidence that they can scare these voters into embracing the "reform" agenda.”

• However, most of today's proffered remedies--including test-based teacher evaluation, efforts to move "effective" teachers to low-income schools, charter schooling, and school turnarounds--don't have a lot of fans in the suburbs or speak to the things that suburban parents are most concerned about….

Are US schools really “failing”?

•The PISA scores from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show US student generally in the middle of the pack in science, math and reading.

•US has always been in the middle of the pack in terms of test scores, yet that has not hampered our economic success.

If there is a crisis, it is inequality

• 22 percent of American children live in poverty, the highest among developed nations except for Mexico; and the percentage is rising.

• For the first time, over half of all students in US public schools are poor.

• In low poverty schools, US results on international comparisons are quite good.

PISA results: US schools with only 10% students in poverty have better results than any other country

Reasons Why Common Core tests are Damaging

• Preparing for exams take up too much time – up to 25% school year in some

districts.

•Cause teachers to "teach to the test" instead of nurturing higher order thinking

skills.

• Lead children to think there is only one right answer in academics and in life.

• Cost billions of dollars to produce tests and implement them, including

computers/wiring.

•Lead to a “narrowing” of the curriculum, loss of art, music, social studies --

important subjects that help keep students engaged

•.

More Reasons Why Common Core tests are Damaging

• Developmentally inappropriate for specific age groups, special needs students or English

Language Learners.

• Will fail many students who may become discouraged.

• Encourage corruption, including cheating on tests.

• Serves NO diagnostic purpose.

• Defines children as test scores, which may follow them through life state longitudinal data systems.

THIS IS WHAT MOST PARENTS WOULD LIKE THEIR CHILDREN TO LEARN

Skills & subjects needed in life –mostly NOT on the test

Common Core tests costing billions• Smarter Balanced is charging $22.50 per student for computerized testing, and $32.50 for

paper and pencil testing.

• CA just accepted bid from ETS to produce additional Common Core exams, a three-year deal worth $240 million

• 2013-14 CA state budget already allotted $1.25 billion to districts – about $200 per student – in one-time money to implement the Common Core standards.

• Four districts – Santa Ana, Vallejo, Plumas and Porterville –filed a claim in January to classify the new tests as state mandates

• If the Commission on State Mandates agrees, the state will be required to reimburse all districts statewide seeking to recover costs for computers, internet wiring, etc.

• The state could be liable for as much as $1 billion per year for expenses associated with implementation of computer-based Common Core exams

Time taken by Smarter Balanced up to 7- 8 ½ hours per grade

61-67% students will “fail” SBAC math exams, 59-62% will fail in ELA across all states

What was inBloom Inc.?• inBloom Inc. was a corporation created by the Gates Foundation in 2013, with more than

$100 million.

• Designed to collect the maximum amount of personally identifiable student data, including names, grades, test scores, detailed disciplinary & health records, race /ethnicity, economic and disability status and much more.

• Six to nine states had agreed to participate, and Gates Foundation was using its money and influence to recruit more.

• The information was to be stored on a data cloud operated by Amazon.com, with an operating system built by .Wireless Generation, part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.

• inBloom planned to share data without parental knowledge or consent with for-profit companies to help them develop their interoperable “learning products.”

Sampledashboard from inBloom video

Financial incentives to participate• Gates gave millions of dollars in grants to districts that agreed to share

their student data.

• inBloom was traveling the country, offering cash prizes to tech companies to build their software around this data.

• Ultimate goal: to create and accelerate a thriving market of personalized “learning tools” based on access to this very valuable & highly sensitive info.

• Parent protests and a new law in NY caused all the participating states and districts to pull out one by one, and inBloom shut its doors in the spring of 2014.

InBloom kick-started national debate on student privacy

• Before inBloom controversy, few parents understood how widespread practice was in schools sharing student information with data-mining vendors.

• In response to parent outrage & increased understanding, 20 states passed laws last year around student privacy of varying impact and quality

• Now bills to be introduced this session in Congress to regulate school/district use of personal student data and separately to regulate vendor use of this data

Myriad threats to privacy remain

With growth of online learning & testing, student data is easy for vendors to accumulate and is incredibly valuable to them.

Educational tech sector: $500 billion market and growing fast.

Yet NO proven benefits from online learning programs in K12.

All states creating P12 longitudinal data systems, to track students from cradle to grave and combine personal data from many state agencies – unclear under what privacy/security conditions with no stakeholder oversight.

Big money in big data

What about FERPA ?• Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, federal law passed in 1974

that protected privacy of student records & required parental consent for disclosure of student educational records.

• FERPA regulation weakened by US Dept of Ed in 2008 and 2011.

• In 2008, regulations were rewritten to allow states, districts or schools to share PII data with any third party performing operational services, who could be designated as a "school official."

• This could include "contractors, consultants, volunteers, and other parties to whom an educational agency or institution has outsourced institutional services or functions it would otherwise use employees to perform."

FERPA revision part II• In 2011, FERPA regulations revised to allow personal student data to be

disclosed to “authorized representatives” to conduct studies or audits of the effectiveness of an education program.

• Any organization or individual now could be defined as "authorized representative” and get access to student personal data.

• Previously, "authorized representatives" were entities over which educational authorities had "direct control,” such as an employee or a contractor.

What about health data in student records?• Often children’s education records include detailed disability/health data.

• Same info in medical records couldn’t be shared without parental consent with 3rd parties, acc. to HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) .

• Security provisions in HIPAA require “reasonable methods” including encryption to protect against breaches; NO security protections required in federal law to protect student records.

• HIPAA also requires privacy/security training for all persons handling personal health data – none in case of education records.

• Even so, there have been breaches of health information despite HIPAA.

What about security?• In survey, 86% of technology experts say they do not trust clouds to hold

their organization’s “more sensitive” data.* And yet much student information now stored in clouds.

• Repeated breaches off clouds include personal information of 50 million LivingSocial customers; Target breach affected up to 110 million customers.

• After ConnectED went bankrupt last spring, FTC intervened in court to try to block its sale of PII of 20 million students.

*Lieberman Software's 2012 Cloud Security Survey

Data tracking can lead to profiling – even if there are no privacy violations

• Minor incidents –even those years previously -- can now enter into a student’s permanent record and be easily accessible to teachers and admins through the dashboards.

• “Pygmalion” or “Golem effect”: studies show that teachers and administrators tend to stereotype students based on prior knowledge.

• When teachers arbitrarily told a student is problematic, this can become self-fulfilling prophecy.

• If dashboards reveal negative academic or disciplinary history before teachers have even met a student lead to negative expectations that seriously impair their prospects.

Privacy/security concerns with PARCC and Smarter Balanced

• PARCC and SBAC are multi-state testing consortiums; SBAC adopted by California

• Like inBloom collecting huge amount of personal student information and sharing data with other third party vendors without parental knowledge or consent.

• PARCC privacy policy allows it to utilize personal data “to analyze test results …for purposes of accountability, including promotion and graduation decisions for individual students; teacher and school leader evaluations; school accountability determinations; determinations of principal and teacher professional development and support needs; and teaching, learning, and program improvement”

• Smarter Balanced has NO privacy policy at all – or at least none that has been made public.

• Several parents and advocates have asked for Smarter Balanced privacy policy, and have gotten back nothing but talking points.

From the Smarter Balanced website• Smarter Balanced will maintain a “secure” data warehouse on behalf of all

member states; an associated reporting system will grant authorized users access to reports.

• The system will include data reporting, analysis, and visualization tools for customized reports, including scores for individual students reported on growth scale and within-grade performance category

• Individual student reports will only be generated for states that choose to make Smarter Balanced the custodian of student identity data (eg student name, date of birth)

• States that choose not to share identity data will need to operate their own data warehouse and reporting system for generating individual student reports.

Lessons from inBloom fiasco• FERPA as revised does not protect kids’ privacy; we need federal law strengthened.

• Data is powerful, and can be used for good or for ill.

• If collected, personal student data must be used – and shared – with great caution.

• Parents must be informed and involved in the decision-making.

SOPIPA: California’s new student privacy law• Student Online Personal Information Protection Act passed in Sept. 2014

• Only regulates online vendors but not the data-sharing activities of schools, districts or states;

• Bans vendors from selling personally identifiable student data but does not ban transfer of data in case of merger, acquisitions, or bankruptcy.

• Does not ban advertising in instructional software assigned to students, only “targeted” ads developed through use of their personal data or behavior will online.

Other gaps in SOPIPA• Provides no notification requirements for parents, nor provides them with the

ability to correct, delete, or opt out of their child’s participation in programs operated by data-mining vendors;

• Sets no specific security or encryption standards for the storage or transmission of children’s personal information, but only that standards should be “reasonable”;

• Allows tech companies to use children’s data to create student profiles for “educational” purposes or even to improve products;

• Would not have stopped inBloom or other similar massive “big data” schemes designed to hand off PII to data-mining vendors

What happened in NY last year

• Since the introduction of Common Core tests in 2013, the state has failed more than 2/3 of the students on these exams.

• Districts where more than 90% of students graduate on time and go to college and do well were told that 2/3 of their students weren’t “college and career ready.”

• Last year, more than 60,000 students opted out of the state exams; in more than 35% of districts, more than 5% of students opted out.

• No school or district lost any funding or faced any penalty for large numbers of students opting out.

• This year we expect number of student opt outs may double.

Legislation allowing parental opt out

• Bills introduced this year in NY, NJ, CO and other states to let parents know they have the right to opt out of the state exams.

• CA one of only a few states that already have an explicit opt out right for parents

• Yet as far as we know, few parents actually exercise this right.

Reasons to opt out of the testing• When students, teachers and schools are evaluated via test scores, the tests themselves

become the focus of education.

• Class time is devoted to test prep, robbing children of their natural desire to learn.

• The exams test only two subjects: English and math, which encourages schools to give less time to social studies, music, art, world languages, physical education, and even science.

• The Common Core/SBAC exams have never been independently assessed for validity or reliability – and are designed to fail the majority of students.

• Common Core testing is costing billions, while our schools are underfunded and class sizes too large

More reasons to opt out• High-stakes tests don’t help students learn or teachers and have no diagnostic

value.

• In 2011, the National Academy of Sciences reviewed America’s test-based accountability systems and concluded, “There are little to no positive effects of these systems overall on student learning and educational progress.”

• One-size-fits-all tests discourage students – especially students of color, English-Language Learners, children with special needs, and students from low-income families.

• Smarter Balanced has never released its privacy policy, and thus your child’s personal data may used, shared, and appropriated in ways that you will not know.

Parent Coalition for Student Privacy

• Many of the parents & advocates who fought inBloom have formed a coalition to protect student privacy.

• We are working to inform parents about the rights they still have to be informed of the use of their children’s personal data.

• We’re also working with Congress to strengthen federal laws around student privacy.

• More info or sign up for our newsletter at studentprivacymatters.org