“A breach includes any time someone shares information about a test outside of the classroom — from casual conversations to posts on social media,” the statement said. “Again, our goal is to ensure a fair test for all students. Every student deserves his or her chance to take the test on a level playing field.”
Let's be clear - not only are our children being subjected to insane testing schedules that breaks many down to tears and disenfranchises students - several times a year - but now it's supposed to be top secret?? Now kids can't even discuss the tests out loud with parents or other students?
If you are a parent - and I am - I urge you to "opt out" your young child from this insanity, all in the name of data-driven teaching and evaluating teachers. This testing has no bearing at all on your child's educational future, except it may create lasting walls between children and learning.
Source: my father was a teacher, my mother is a teacher, my wife is a teacher, my cousin is a teacher, and several of my friends are teachers - they all despise PARCC and the testing load placed on young, impressionable children. This isn't High School or SATs, this is elementary school.
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.
It's actually worse than that. The teachers and administration are very concerned about the test scores. Now they are compelled to buy the lesson plans and other materials from the same private corporation that creates the test. Every piece of paper my kids bring home says Pearson on it. Privatization of public education is a serious problem.
We will also be opting out like @themartorana. In case you want similar content about opting out with regards to NY state, look here:
>> Non-American here. Perhaps I'm being overly cynical, but why is a private company even been allowed to test kids?
That is the key question. And it is a rhetorical question. It would be better to point to the fact that "this is not supposed to be the job of a private company." Phrasing it as a question implies that there may be a legitimate answer, and offers the people pulling this crap an opportunity to try to justify it with an answer.
I've been to school board meetings where concerned parents ask rhetorical questions. IMHO the approach needs to shift to pointing out the boards responsibilities and the fact that they are not meeting them. Outsourcing is both failure to do your job, and also violating the childrens privacy as mandated by law. "Opting" in or out is just a diversion - it implies again that what they're doing ok because it's optional.
Perhaps I'm being overly cynical, but why is a private company even been allowed to test kids?
In a nutshell: because a profound ideological shift has occurred in the last 40 years, which dictates that nearly all aspects of public life should ultimately be privatized -- real effectiveness, hidden costs (and nefarious side effects) be damned.
wife teaches at top 10 us university. they adopted Pearson books after Pearson allowed newer white book edition to be authored by one professor of the department (not the one that are reference in the file field, no. the one that barely has a degree in the dpt subject but is the TA and undergrad teaching supervisor)
now they moved several undergrad and extra classes that were taught by phd TAs to 60% online on Pearson black board system. which is a piece of crap site made in java.
their selling point to the university was that they could save money they pay to TAs. as if TAs are even paid... there is nothing in their pitch (which became public after a small strike) mention better learning.
What does the Citizens United decision have to do with any of this? Standardized tests have been written by private companies for decades, it didn't just happen recently.
Privately run standardized testing generates a lot of money. Money influences politicians. Getting money out of politics would help prevent that influence. Citizens United went in the other direction.
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.
Aren't twitter posts, you know, public by default ? What is the big deal if these students intended to share this information with everyone. Or did Pearson somehow played tricks to subvert their trust ?
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.
Yes, but in theory you cannot sign up unless you're older than X.
Thing is that neither twitter nor facebook do anything to prevent children using their networks, you know, data is very important, specially that data.
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".
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.
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.
The PARCC test (which my daughter just wrapped up taking) is a computer-administered test, and I assume if Pearson is the company responsible for the questions, then Pearson is running the websites that grade the tests and provide the results to individuals, schools, districts, states, etc.
So I'm a little confused by outrage over the potential of Pearson to "collect personal information" about students via Twitter etc, when by definition Pearson is collecting an extreme amount of personal information about every public-school student in every one of these states administering this test.
Twitter is publicly visible. Everyone sees everything posted there. There is no expectation of privacy. Why is this so hard for all the "outraged citizens" to grok?
Exams are obviously rubbish, the last time in your life you won't have the internet, never collaborate because that's wrong, if you can remember things for 24 hours you get a good grade.
Any test of students' abilities whose efficacy can be substantially weakened by leaking is, from its very design, just not a good test.
Even my HS teachers (who designed their entire curriculum -- front to back) were hip to this. They said "Yeah, we know some students have photocopies of midterms from previous years. But we mix up our questions enough that we're not too worried about it. Plus, a student who would waste his or her time with rote memorization just isn't going to understand the material conceptually, and will certainly bomb the essay questions."
(What? You're not letting your teachers design their own curricula? Or they're not able to? Then you have a much worse problem on your hands than students trading answers to multiple-guess exams).
I went through 18 years of study in France, without having to answer a single MCQ or item.
Such developments are just a logical consequence of the reliance on statistical methods to assess knowledge.
As to the violation of privacy...
Let's be clear - not only are our children being subjected to insane testing schedules that breaks many down to tears and disenfranchises students - several times a year - but now it's supposed to be top secret?? Now kids can't even discuss the tests out loud with parents or other students?
If you are a parent - and I am - I urge you to "opt out" your young child from this insanity, all in the name of data-driven teaching and evaluating teachers. This testing has no bearing at all on your child's educational future, except it may create lasting walls between children and learning.
Source: my father was a teacher, my mother is a teacher, my wife is a teacher, my cousin is a teacher, and several of my friends are teachers - they all despise PARCC and the testing load placed on young, impressionable children. This isn't High School or SATs, this is elementary school.
http://www.nj.com/education/2015/01/what_happens_if_nj_stude...