Big Data, Education Policy, and the General Audience
3 min read
One of my major motivating factors in writing a book on data and education policy through the lens of inBloom is to make the details of education policy more accessible to a broader audience.
It should surprise absolutely no one that many discussions about educational issues take place among people who are deeply immersed in education or edtech, and that the people engaging in these conversations have deeply ingrained beliefs that are unlikely to change. When I talk with people outside this bubble, they express a degree of confusion and horror - confusion about what the actual issues are, and horror at what appears to be the intractability of vaguely defined yet strongly held convictions.
From watching - and participating in - many education policy discussions over the years, I'm no longer surprised when these conversations take place in an ahistorical present. This does everyone a disservice; no one wins when we don't at least acknowledge what the current situation is, or the legislative and policy choices that led us here. One large and obvious example is data collection and privacy - when inBloom came on the scene in 2011, there was an enormous outcry about governmental overreach, student privacy, and handing student data over to vendors. Yet, while these reactions all had a degree of validity, they ignored the facts: by 2011, every state had a datastore of student information; these records had been collected for years as part of federal accountability reporting; the federal government has been giving grants to states since 2005 to support building these datastores; and many of these datastores were built by and managed by third party vendors. The furor over what inBloom might do could just as easily been a furor over what every state in the country was already doing - and had been doing for years, and are continuing to do in inBloom's absence.
The issues discussed as part of education policy discussions are complex, but they're not as complicated as the passions that shape the conversations. inBloom provides an ideal lens for examining education policy, and the role of educational technology. By looking at inBloom, we quickly run into:
- data use,
- parental involvement,
- student privacy,
- state and federal data collection,
- accountability reporting,
- equity,
- issues of race and socioeconomic status,
- appropriate technology use in schools,
- Big Data,
- the role of the wealthy and powerful in shaping education policy,
- data security,
- the Common Core standards, and
- what it means to learn in the era of a real "permanent record."
To be clear, the above list is by no means complete.
We need more people getting involved in the conversations about education. We might not all agree - and I would even say that universal agreement is unlikely, and probably a sign that we're glossing over the details. In looking at the subject of inBloom, we're really looking at a primer on education policy, and how the conversations have evolved over the last three years. My book is intended as a starting point for getting more people involved in the conversation, and for providing current participants with more background on how we arrived at the conditions of the present.
