Brave New World: Data stored on all children except those whose parents are setting up the system

One of the most clueless speeches I have ever seen given on education was delivered a couple of years ago by President Barack Obama when he decried teaching to the test and said that kind of thing did not happen at the school where he sends his daughters.

Of course, it doesn't. As is his right, he sends his children to a private school.

If we examined the backgrounds of the people who have been pushing Common Core Standards and standardized tests, I am sure we would find that most, if not all, of them do not send their children to the schools that will be affected by their policies.

In a blog post today, Diane Ravitch, one of the leading advocates of public schools and classroom teachers, writes about the incredible amount of data that will be collected on our students, but that data will not be coming from the children of those who are changing the face of American education:

Parents and school districts are beginning to understand that student information will no longer be private.

The Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation created something called the Shared Learning Collsborative, now called inBloom. They have a contract to Wireless Generation, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, to create the software to collect massive amounts of data. InBloom will collect confidential data about students. It will be stored on a “cloud” managed by Amazon. There is no guarantee that the data cannot be hacked.