5 ms·

A Student-Data Collector Drops Out

47 points by 001sky 13y ago

xname 13y ago
Not directly related to the topic, but for those who might interested, here is another piece of critique on Gates Foundation in education: How the Gates Foundation Spins its Research http://jaypgreene.com/2012/01/07/how-the-gates-foundation-spins-its-research/ http://jaypgreene.com/2012/01/07/how-the-gates-foundation-sp... Quote: "With the latest round of reports, the Gates folks are back to their old game of spinning their results to push policy recommendations that are actually unsupported by the data."
doubt_me 13y ago
Why do they have to shut down? Why not just switch the model from gathering students data to creating the apps anyways and just letting the school take care of sorting out which app works best for who. Seems to me like there could have been a bunch of better ways to handle this other than shut it down
- EpicEng 13y ago
  Well, that wasn't their goal, and I doubt it is easy to displace the systems these schools are using today. The board probably felt that it would be wiser to cut their losses.
  - objclxt 13y ago
    > I doubt it is easy to displace the systems these schools are using today ...which is pretty much why the players in this space who are finding success are companies like Clever (clever.com), who let schools keep their existing SIS/student management software, but offer conduits to get the data out into other applications. I know the Clever co-founders post here fairly often, they'll probably chip in on their perspective at some point.
    - EpicEng 13y ago
      Interesting. I looked at their site and I couldn't find mention of exactly what sort of personal information is stored, but I do see the term "student data" pop up a few times. I wonder; why aren't these guys having the same problem?
ynniv 13y ago
This is good news. While their intentions may have been good, the information they were requesting could have haunted the students being tracked for the rest of their lives. As the government has asserted in their defense of PRISM and related services, once this information has been shared with a company it is often treated as semi-public, and as anyone on this site should realize, information which is not protected as by law (HIPPA, etc) can never be made private again. (Information which is protected by law still can't be retracted, but at least legitimate companies have to think twice about using it.) [ http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2013/03/inblooms-student-and-teacher-data.html http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2013/03/inblooms-... ] [ http://www.classsizematters.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/inBloom-Data-Fields-excerpts.pdf http://www.classsizematters.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/i... ]
- erichurkman 13y ago
  It could have given new life to thousands of guidance counselors and administrators the world over threatening: "Don't do _x_, it will go on your permanent record!"
- dkarapetyan 13y ago
  Anonymize the information as soon as the students graduate. Done! That way it can still be used for gaining insight without being traceable to any given student.
  - ivank 13y ago
    Reidentification algorithms could still be used to identify students; see http://33bits.org/tag/de-anonymization/ http://33bits.org/tag/de-anonymization/
    - dkarapetyan 13y ago
      The same way RSA keys can be recovered from CPU noise/heat fluctuations. There is a right way to do anonymization and a wrong way. The same way there is a right way to do crypto and not leak information from side-channels.
ottertown 13y ago
as a former, disenfranchised education technologist, comments like this: “If this is still an ‘emerging concept,’ why are we implementing it?” are all too familiar. teachers and school administrators are fearful of tech solutions because so many of them have been awful and have completely ignored the needs of the classroom. but that means potentially worthwhile products go unimplemented. if you're going to do a startup, I highly recommend not doing so in the education space.
- dkarapetyan 13y ago
  And yet blackboard exists and is thriving.
  - xux 13y ago
    And everyone hates it. Professors hate it. Students hate it.
- pingburg 13y ago
  What type of education technology were you building?
judk 13y ago
Good. The world needs an open source as solution that can be deployed locally and respects student privacy.
- checker659 13y ago
  Open source and privacy don't have much to do with each other. Security yes, but not privacy.
- iht 13y ago
  It is opensource under the Apache license (https://github.com/inbloom/secure-data-service https://github.com/inbloom/secure-data-service and a few other repos). And I believe there wasn't anything preventing anyone from standing up their own instance except time and some frustration.
Alex3917 13y ago
Yet another major fuckup in the education space by Bill Gates. His flagship high school, which he wanted to model every other school in the nation after, literally got shut down after having a graduation rate around 20%. And yet he has yet to pay even a dollar in reparations to all those kids whose lives he destroyed. Diane Ravitch has a good quote about the Gates foundation in her book: "To advance its agenda, the Gates foundation increased its spending on advocacy. From 2005 to 2009, the foundation quadrupled its annual spending on advocacy to $78 million. Accord to Sam Dillon in the New York Times, the foundation will pump an addition $100 million into advocacy over the next five to six years. That kind of money buys a lot of advocacy and support. Gates funded the groups that wrote the Common Core standards, the groups that evaluated them, and the groups that advocated for them. Gates funded liberal groups such as Education Trust, centrist groups such as the Center for American Progress and the Center on Education Policy, and groups on the Right such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, Jeb Bush's Foundation of Educational Excellence, and the Media Bullpen. It funded groups that advocated for charter schools, such as the Education Equality project, and groups that argued against seniority and tenure, such as TeachFirst, TeachPlus, and the New Teacher Project. Kenneth Libby, then a graduate student known for poring through tax filings of foundations and advocacy groups, commented, 'It's easier to name which groups Gates doesn't support than to list all of those they do, because it's just so overwhelming.' [...] Writing in Dissent, Joanne Barkan described the challenge that the aggressive venture philanthropists pose for American society: 'Can anything stop the foundation enablers? After five or ten more years, the mess they're making in public schooling might be so undeniable that they'll say, 'Oops, that didn't work' and step aside. But the damage might be irreparable: thousands of closed schools, worse conditions in those left open, an extreme degree of 'teaching to the test,' demoralized teachers, rampant corruption by private management companies, thousands of failed charter schools, and more low-income kids without a good education. Who could possibly clean up the mess?'" If you want to read about what happened the last time billionaires got involved with the school system, John Taylor Gatto does a pretty decent job documenting it in his Underground History book.
- nopinsight 13y ago
  Do you have a reference about that supposed flagship high school with 20% graduation rate? I searched and couldn't find it. At least the info on why and how they failed would be useful to many education innovators here.
programminggeek 13y ago
When they say $100 million, do they mean raised or company value? If they burned through $100 million in 15 months, I have no idea how they could light that much money on fire so quickly.
- windsurfer 13y ago
  They raised $100 million. Source: http://gigaom.com/2013/02/05/gates-foundation-backed-inbloom-frees-up-data-to-personalize-k-12-education/ http://gigaom.com/2013/02/05/gates-foundation-backed-inbloom...
nickbauman 13y ago
I think they folded because they figured out that public education in the US isn't about really developing understanding and learning. It's designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny appreciable leadership skills and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens in order to render the populace "manageable." Individual teachers don't think this: they actually think they're supposed to help develop a student's intellect. A lot of conflict arises here. John Taylor Gatto wrote about this in his essay "Against School". It's a good read. http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm
dkarapetyan 13y ago
Honestly, where is this level of scrutiny when it comes to things like facebook and google+. How are the privacy violation in those enterprises different?
- timbre 13y ago
  Children are not legally compelled to join Facebook and Google+.
  - dkarapetyan 13y ago
    And yet they do. So make school voluntary. Privacy violation problems solved I guess.
wallflower 13y ago
FERPA is an important act for education startups as it is the HIPAA of that domain. It gets more interesting for post-secondary education. By law, students have to grant permission to their parents to see their college grades. Decades ago, colleges used to post final exam test scores anonymously. How did they do that? They used SSNs. Of course, that practice is now verboten and schools actually try to use something other than an SSN as the foreign key of the student's records. http://www.studentaffairs.pitt.edu/sites/default/files/PDFsandForms/Parents/FERPA.pdf http://www.studentaffairs.pitt.edu/sites/default/files/PDFsa...
Edmond 13y ago
This is good...ordinarily I am relaxed about the issue of privacy and mostly don't get the paranoia about government(US) surveillance...but the idea of my life being reduced to a few data points terrifies me to no end...ironic that this was being funded by the Gate's foundation (which I admire), it brings to mind the Bill Gates mugshot (http://www.thesmokinggun.com/mugshots/celebrity/business/bill-gates http://www.thesmokinggun.com/mugshots/celebrity/business/bil...)
frade33 13y ago
>it was too far ahead of its time I would never get this phrase, does it mean, it is of no use at the moment? If yes, why not say it so.
hackplus 13y ago
"To continue reading this article, please log in or register for free. Or, subscribe now and get unlimited access to all of our articles. Just 99¢ for your first 4 weeks."
christkv 13y ago
To bad his actions speak louder than his words. The children of Bill and Melinda Gates – Jennifer, Rory and Phoebe – have attended Lakeside School, Seattle’s most elite, fancypants private school.

47 points by 001sky 13y ago

xname 13y ago

Not directly related to the topic, but for those who might interested, here is another piece of critique on Gates Foundation in education: How the Gates Foundation Spins its Research http://jaypgreene.com/2012/01/07/how-the-gates-foundation-spins-its-research/ http://jaypgreene.com/2012/01/07/how-the-gates-foundation-sp... Quote: "With the latest round of reports, the Gates folks are back to their old game of spinning their results to push policy recommendations that are actually unsupported by the data."

doubt_me 13y ago

Why do they have to shut down? Why not just switch the model from gathering students data to creating the apps anyways and just letting the school take care of sorting out which app works best for who. Seems to me like there could have been a bunch of better ways to handle this other than shut it down

EpicEng 13y ago
Well, that wasn't their goal, and I doubt it is easy to displace the systems these schools are using today. The board probably felt that it would be wiser to cut their losses.
- objclxt 13y ago
  > I doubt it is easy to displace the systems these schools are using today ...which is pretty much why the players in this space who are finding success are companies like Clever (clever.com), who let schools keep their existing SIS/student management software, but offer conduits to get the data out into other applications. I know the Clever co-founders post here fairly often, they'll probably chip in on their perspective at some point.
  - EpicEng 13y ago
    Interesting. I looked at their site and I couldn't find mention of exactly what sort of personal information is stored, but I do see the term "student data" pop up a few times. I wonder; why aren't these guys having the same problem?

ynniv 13y ago

This is good news. While their intentions may have been good, the information they were requesting could have haunted the students being tracked for the rest of their lives. As the government has asserted in their defense of PRISM and related services, once this information has been shared with a company it is often treated as semi-public, and as anyone on this site should realize, information which is not protected as by law (HIPPA, etc) can never be made private again. (Information which is protected by law still can't be retracted, but at least legitimate companies have to think twice about using it.) [ http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2013/03/inblooms-student-and-teacher-data.html http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2013/03/inblooms-... ] [ http://www.classsizematters.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/inBloom-Data-Fields-excerpts.pdf http://www.classsizematters.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/i... ]

erichurkman 13y ago
It could have given new life to thousands of guidance counselors and administrators the world over threatening: "Don't do _x_, it will go on your permanent record!"
dkarapetyan 13y ago
Anonymize the information as soon as the students graduate. Done! That way it can still be used for gaining insight without being traceable to any given student.
- ivank 13y ago
  Reidentification algorithms could still be used to identify students; see http://33bits.org/tag/de-anonymization/ http://33bits.org/tag/de-anonymization/
  - dkarapetyan 13y ago
    The same way RSA keys can be recovered from CPU noise/heat fluctuations. There is a right way to do anonymization and a wrong way. The same way there is a right way to do crypto and not leak information from side-channels.

ottertown 13y ago

as a former, disenfranchised education technologist, comments like this: “If this is still an ‘emerging concept,’ why are we implementing it?” are all too familiar. teachers and school administrators are fearful of tech solutions because so many of them have been awful and have completely ignored the needs of the classroom. but that means potentially worthwhile products go unimplemented. if you're going to do a startup, I highly recommend not doing so in the education space.

dkarapetyan 13y ago
And yet blackboard exists and is thriving.
- xux 13y ago
  And everyone hates it. Professors hate it. Students hate it.
pingburg 13y ago
What type of education technology were you building?

judk 13y ago

Good. The world needs an open source as solution that can be deployed locally and respects student privacy.

checker659 13y ago
Open source and privacy don't have much to do with each other. Security yes, but not privacy.
iht 13y ago
It is opensource under the Apache license (https://github.com/inbloom/secure-data-service https://github.com/inbloom/secure-data-service and a few other repos). And I believe there wasn't anything preventing anyone from standing up their own instance except time and some frustration.

Alex3917 13y ago

Yet another major fuckup in the education space by Bill Gates. His flagship high school, which he wanted to model every other school in the nation after, literally got shut down after having a graduation rate around 20%. And yet he has yet to pay even a dollar in reparations to all those kids whose lives he destroyed. Diane Ravitch has a good quote about the Gates foundation in her book: "To advance its agenda, the Gates foundation increased its spending on advocacy. From 2005 to 2009, the foundation quadrupled its annual spending on advocacy to $78 million. Accord to Sam Dillon in the New York Times, the foundation will pump an addition $100 million into advocacy over the next five to six years. That kind of money buys a lot of advocacy and support. Gates funded the groups that wrote the Common Core standards, the groups that evaluated them, and the groups that advocated for them. Gates funded liberal groups such as Education Trust, centrist groups such as the Center for American Progress and the Center on Education Policy, and groups on the Right such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, Jeb Bush's Foundation of Educational Excellence, and the Media Bullpen. It funded groups that advocated for charter schools, such as the Education Equality project, and groups that argued against seniority and tenure, such as TeachFirst, TeachPlus, and the New Teacher Project. Kenneth Libby, then a graduate student known for poring through tax filings of foundations and advocacy groups, commented, 'It's easier to name which groups Gates doesn't support than to list all of those they do, because it's just so overwhelming.' [...] Writing in Dissent, Joanne Barkan described the challenge that the aggressive venture philanthropists pose for American society: 'Can anything stop the foundation enablers? After five or ten more years, the mess they're making in public schooling might be so undeniable that they'll say, 'Oops, that didn't work' and step aside. But the damage might be irreparable: thousands of closed schools, worse conditions in those left open, an extreme degree of 'teaching to the test,' demoralized teachers, rampant corruption by private management companies, thousands of failed charter schools, and more low-income kids without a good education. Who could possibly clean up the mess?'" If you want to read about what happened the last time billionaires got involved with the school system, John Taylor Gatto does a pretty decent job documenting it in his Underground History book.

nopinsight 13y ago
Do you have a reference about that supposed flagship high school with 20% graduation rate? I searched and couldn't find it. At least the info on why and how they failed would be useful to many education innovators here.

programminggeek 13y ago

When they say $100 million, do they mean raised or company value? If they burned through $100 million in 15 months, I have no idea how they could light that much money on fire so quickly.

windsurfer 13y ago
They raised $100 million. Source: http://gigaom.com/2013/02/05/gates-foundation-backed-inbloom-frees-up-data-to-personalize-k-12-education/ http://gigaom.com/2013/02/05/gates-foundation-backed-inbloom...

nickbauman 13y ago

I think they folded because they figured out that public education in the US isn't about really developing understanding and learning. It's designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny appreciable leadership skills and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens in order to render the populace "manageable." Individual teachers don't think this: they actually think they're supposed to help develop a student's intellect. A lot of conflict arises here. John Taylor Gatto wrote about this in his essay "Against School". It's a good read. http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm

dkarapetyan 13y ago

Honestly, where is this level of scrutiny when it comes to things like facebook and google+. How are the privacy violation in those enterprises different?

timbre 13y ago
Children are not legally compelled to join Facebook and Google+.
- dkarapetyan 13y ago
  And yet they do. So make school voluntary. Privacy violation problems solved I guess.

wallflower 13y ago

FERPA is an important act for education startups as it is the HIPAA of that domain. It gets more interesting for post-secondary education. By law, students have to grant permission to their parents to see their college grades. Decades ago, colleges used to post final exam test scores anonymously. How did they do that? They used SSNs. Of course, that practice is now verboten and schools actually try to use something other than an SSN as the foreign key of the student's records. http://www.studentaffairs.pitt.edu/sites/default/files/PDFsandForms/Parents/FERPA.pdf http://www.studentaffairs.pitt.edu/sites/default/files/PDFsa...

Edmond 13y ago

This is good...ordinarily I am relaxed about the issue of privacy and mostly don't get the paranoia about government(US) surveillance...but the idea of my life being reduced to a few data points terrifies me to no end...ironic that this was being funded by the Gate's foundation (which I admire), it brings to mind the Bill Gates mugshot (http://www.thesmokinggun.com/mugshots/celebrity/business/bill-gates http://www.thesmokinggun.com/mugshots/celebrity/business/bil...)

frade33 13y ago

>it was too far ahead of its time I would never get this phrase, does it mean, it is of no use at the moment? If yes, why not say it so.

hackplus 13y ago

"To continue reading this article, please log in or register for free. Or, subscribe now and get unlimited access to all of our articles. Just 99¢ for your first 4 weeks."

christkv 13y ago

To bad his actions speak louder than his words. The children of Bill and Melinda Gates – Jennifer, Rory and Phoebe – have attended Lakeside School, Seattle’s most elite, fancypants private school.