Data Collection Isn't New. And It Predates Common Core.
5 min read
In 2013, there has been a burst of attention on data collection and student privacy. Much of the attention has linked data collection to the Common Core rollout, but these arguments are not grounded in fact. Data collection predates Common Core. Here are a few simple examples pulled from the "Customers" page of a single vendor, eScholar.
In this post, I link to case studies included on eScholar's "Customers" page; I also include the case studies as attachments to this post in case the eScholar links change or go dead.
Pennsylvania
From
In the quotations below, PDE stands for Pennsylvania Department of Education.
PDE kicked off this project in December of 2005 with a very aggressive timeline of assigning a statewide identifier, known as PAsecureID, to each of Pennsylvania’s 1.8 million public school students by June of 2006. By working closely with our LEAs, the LEA’s SIS vendors, our assessment vendors, and our contractors, PDE was able to reach this goal on time and within the budget allocated. Since the project was such a success, program areas within PDE, such as early childhood, post-secondary, safe schools, and special education, have realized the power a unique persistent identifier has in regards to the ability to track a student’s progress
And:
During its first year of implementation, PDE successfully collected and loaded demographic, school enrollment, and program participation on more that 1.8 million students. In addition, demographic and assignment data were collected and loaded for 170,000 staff, as well as data on almost 11.5 million course enrollments
In Pennsylvania, student data has been collected and shared with a variety of vendors, starting in 2005.
Kansas
From
From In 2004, the Kansas State Department of Education (KSDE) developed a plan to collect student level data as part of its Kansas Individual Data on Students (KIDS) program. The KIDS project would become part of an initiative to build an enterprise data system.
And:
The software was purchased in November 2004 and the roll-out process announced the following January. By August 2005, KSDE had collected data for more than 470,000 students in the state.
The state of Kansas has been running statewide data collection since 2005.
New York
From
In 2001, the Regional Information Centers in New York purchased the eScholar Complete Data Warehouse® solution. Their initial goals were to provide data warehouse services to constituent districts and to assist in meeting the New York State Education Department’s (NYSED) accountability reporting requirements. In 2004, NYSED built upon the success the Regional Information Centers were experiencing and chose eScholar to be the backbone of its statewide data warehouse. The statewide project began by collecting data such as student demographics, enrollment, program participation, and assessment data. It has now grown to include additional domains of data such as Special Education and Career and Technical Education data. The data warehouse now stores data for over 3 million students annually.
And:
It was not long before several of the Regional Information Centers realized that they could use the high-value data they were collecting for accountability reporting to drive instruction at the district and classroom levels. The Suffolk Regional Information Center, at the Eastern Suffolk BOCES on Long Island, was one of these centers. Suffolk RIC began loading more granular assessment data down to individual student responses on test items.
In New York, in a program started in 2001, Regional Information Centers have been collecting data as detailed as individual responses on test items.
Closing Notes
Finally, in 2013-2014, there appears to be more widespread concern about student privacy and student ownership of the data they create as part of their learning. But most of the outrage links data collection to the Common Core rollout, and to the risk of state and federal agencies sharing data with vendors.
The reality is that large scale data collection has been going on for more than a decade, and that longitudinal data systems are part of accountability measures both required and supported by federal law. In addition to these state and federally required data collections, schools and districts require students to hand over their data to a variety of other services that are largely unquestioned: Google Apps; Microsoft services like Office 360 and Bing search; Apple's App store and related educational apps; TurnItIn; Schoology; Edmodo; Powerschool; Canvas; etc - there are a whole range of "free" and "low-cost" services marketed to schools that collect student data. Generally, the terms of service for these apps and services allow data collected to be shared with "affiliates."
It's great to have more people paying closer attention to privacy. But, let's not delude ourselves that "solving" privacy means focusing on one company, or only one way in which student privacy can be compromised. If we curtail data collection by state agencies, but still allow student work to fuel the databases of companies like TurnItIn, we have only shifted the problem.
