The data being collected on teachers, students, and their families could easily turn us into products used by data-rich, third-party vendors to enhance their own bottom lines or political agendas.
From the NSA’s eavesdropping on phone calls to disputed claims that spyware in Facebook Messenger sucks up personal data, privacy concerns abound. Yet not enough people are talking about the potential privacy invasions of student and teacher data.
A year ago, at a statewide Teacher Advisory Group meeting in Arizona, I asked about the data safety of third-party vendors developing our Common Core assessment platform. How could parents be confident that their child’s private information is safe? An Arizona Department of Education official responded with a litany of “industry standards” vendors must meet before winning a contract.
Official: “How can you expect more than industry standards?”
Me: “Industry doesn’t have a great record on protecting our data.”
Another teacher: “You mean like Target? If someone really wants to hack the system, they’re going to.” (Lots of nods.)
Another participant: “I can think of 50 other areas of data security that scare me more than someone hacking our assessment data.” (Lots more nods.)
These cavalier responses carried the day. To me, they underscore the danger of a perfect storm of questionable intent, opportunistic business practices, aggressive data acquisition, and an antagonistic media. Some scenarios I worry about:
- A whistle-blower, suspicious that a school is racially biased in grading, leaks to media every teacher’s grading data.
- A computerized assessment company exploits legal loopholes to sell test results to an educational materials vendor. That vendor then bombards parents’ and teachers’ social media with product advertisements influenced by the data.
- The education materials vendor takes pictures from the social media of students, parents, and teachers and uses them to promote its products.
- Districts begin using data on student progress in a mandated online math curriculum as part of teachers’ evaluation, even though the teachers do no direct instruction.
- An online curriculum provider gains access to students’, parents’, and teachers’ private online habits and sells mailing lists to relevant merchants.
Before you conclude I’m paranoid, consider two recent U.S. Department of Education documents.
An issue brief by Bienkowski, Feng, & Means in 2012 details the amount and kinds of data that online commercial curricula can suck up about students, teachers, and families. It includes long sections on the differences between data mining (looking for patterns in massive data sets) and learning analytics (prescribing actions based on data). The authors drop this bomb in a section on privacy concerns: “FERPA (The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) generally allows for the disclosure of personally identifiable information from a student’s education record without consent to ‘school officials’ if there is a legitimate education interest” (p. 42).
Couldn’t teacher evaluations be a “legitimate education interest”? And couldn’t vendors of online curricula plausibly claim to be “school officials”?
The second document describes new biometrics tools, such as wireless skin conductance sensors and facial expression cameras, called “affective technologies,” that are capable of measuring students’ “discreet emotions particularly relevant to reactions to challenge — such as interest, frustration, anxiety, and boredom . . . .” (Shechtman et al., 2013, p. 41).
I value and use student- and teacher-generated data. But I stand against and call on all teachers to identify and resist any technology that turns students and teachers into products instead of consumers.
References
Bienkowski, M., Feng, M., & Means, B. (2012, October). Enhancing teaching and learning through education data mining and learning analytics (Issue Brief). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.
Shechtman, N., DeBarger, A.H., Dornsife, C., Rosier, S., & Yarnal, L. (2013, February). Promoting grit, tenacity, and perseverance: Critical factors for success in the 21st century. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.
CITATION: Merz, Sandy. (2015). BACKTALK: Am I a consumer or a product? Phi Delta Kappan, 96 (6), 80
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sandy Merz
SANDY MERZ is an engineering and algebra teacher at Safford K-8 Magnet School, Tucson, Ariz., and a member of the Collaboratory at teachingquality.org.
