Pearson Under Fire for Monitoring Students’ Twitter Posts

Non-American here. Perhaps I'm being overly cynical, but why is a private company even been allowed to test kids? They have totally perverse incentives to make tests more frequent and difficult, so they can sell more training materials for the same.

Also, stuff like this (http://www.state.nj.us/governor/news/news/552012/approved/20...) seems to give Pearson the ability to arm-twist states into using their standardized tests ("otherwise we'll move somewhere else").

It seems like Pearson is more concerned about students revealing test questions, than just talking about the test in general.

And I don't see that as a huge deal.

The level of control these companies assert over our young people (directly through testing procedures and less-directly through influence over their futures/distortion of curriculum goals) is a symptom of larger problems in our education system. These tests are also hugely expensive. The answer, however, is to increase the amount of testing we're doing - not eliminate it. The 'problem to be solved' is to create a way to integrate trusted assessment into everyday instruction more often and less intrusively.

This requires us to develop a way to accredit (through national scale use/vetting) assessment materials on a much smaller scale. PARCC, ACT, et al. will maintain their current level of influence (functionally, not politically) so long as we can't assure that teachers are assessing their students against agreed upon benchmarks.

If these benchmarked assessment materials could be integrated into everyday instruction (which, as a teacher, they surely can be) AND we can accredit them as accurately assessing student ability on "competency X' then we will no longer need centralized, high-stakes assessment.

This accreditation will come from a decentralized exchange of classroom instructional materials/artifacts which will allow for the 'cream' (i.e. materials that accurately assess 'competency x") to be used, assessed, modified, re-used and finally accredited. Currently, teachers are silo'ed and rarely exchange learning materials beyond person-to-person contact or by physically gifting photocopies. Google docs facilitates exchange with real gains in productivity, but only within your immediate department (which could 4 people, could be 20 - but will hardly be >1000). We need the ability to fluidly exchange learning and assessment materials from all over the country/world that can be easily personalized for our classrooms.

As we more thoughtfully mediate the average classroom (which is inevitable) I hope we see these sorts of changes - but right now I don't see very many edtech designers attempting to create tools that will enable my teaching in this way.

In US law, at least, there is a large distinction between public school administrators searching a particular student and large-scale searching of students, even if the search only pertains to publicly available information. You can see the issues more clearly if you think about the history of freedom of speech cases vs. public schools, especially those pertaining to freedom to practice religion.

There's "public, anyone can hear it and forget it a little later", and then there is "public, collected, stored, analyzed beyond anyone's wildest imagination". These are two different concepts; the latter is not understood at all; it would be nice if the former could exist in some form, so there you have this attempt to push back on "monitoring".

EU data protection laws are a useful model.

An organisation should only collectthe information it needs to; it should not keep that information longer than it needs; it should be transparent about the information it gathers and the reason for doing so.

In this case a company is searching public information (reasonable) but using education databases to get contact info for the student (not reasonable). This is unreasonable because they should be using things like warrants to get addresses -- something with judicial oversight. The student's personal contact information should be protected from this kind of trawling.

Collection of data on children younger than 13 is regulated by COPPA. Parents need to sign off explicitly on all data that is knowingly being collected by websites or applications on children younger than 13 years of age.

It doesn't matter if the children made the information public. The company can't store it.

Pearson used data it had on a student to identify the kid's district and began an investigation on its own. I.e., it abused its own privileged position. Supposedly they won't do that anymore and instead will forward info to the districts to investigate.