Children’s Educational Data Privacy

By Kim Jones, CEO, Curriki

Recently there has been a lot of press around the NSA impinging on American citizens’ Internet and telephone privacy, either purposefully or by mistake. Scott McNealy, former CEO of Sun Microsystems, said over a dozen years ago, with the rise of the Internet, that “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”

Certainly in this age of Facebook, mobile phone tracking, Twitter, and unencrypted email in particular, and of social media, WiFi, big data, the Cloud, viruses and sophisticated hacking tools in general, people are sharing more information about themselves than ever before. Often this is deliberately, and just as frequently, it is inadvertently shared. And this information can be accessed by criminals and others, easier than is generally realized.

(The Cloud in this context just means data being stored on servers outside of an organization’s security firewall. A school district, for example, might be storing data not on their own computer servers, but with a company providing cloud data services. Data is shipped over the Internet from the school district to the cloud service.)

But although we may have less privacy than before, most of us also want to ensure we retain certain key privacy rights, including the right against unreasonable search guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution (for the U.S.), and our right to privacy for personal information such as medical records, social security numbers, credit card numbers and bank account balances. Few people would want such information belonging to them to be made public. In the U.S. HIPAA regulations protect the privacy of medical information, for example.

What about children’s data at school? Typically this data has been held at the school district level. Now children’s test scores are being stored in the Cloud. But not just test scores, also other data about kids relating to their school life is being stored in cloud databases as well. One benefit of placing data in the Cloud is to have possible access to a student’s profile as he or she moves between school districts.

The article linked below reports on inBloom, a nonprofit organization that seeks to provide Big Data analysis services for student test scores, in support of an effort to customize learning to individual students and thereby improve outcomes:

http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/28/technology/innovation/inbloom/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

“Non-profit inBloom offers an Internet database service that allows schools to store, track and analyze data on schoolchildren. If you think about it, that information is more than just test scores. It’s whether kids receive free lunch — a telling indicator of the family’s finances. It’s the time a student got into a fight in the schoolyard. And it could be a child’s prescription medication.”

Some parents are concerned, especially since school districts may agree to share information with other districts. “This information … I have no idea what it is, I have no idea who’s using it, I have no idea for what purpose,” said one parent in New York City. Parents in her school district are concerned that they were not given notification before their children’s data began to be loaded into inBloom’s database.

What do you think? How would you feel about your child’s data being loaded into the Cloud, and accumulated over their 12 or 13-year school history? The same data is probably already on your school district’s computers. Does the potential of enhancing personalized learning outweigh the privacy concerns? Please share your thoughts on this issue.

Big Data Analytics for K-12 Personalized Learning

By Kim Jones, CEO, Curriki

There is a rush, perhaps a gold rush, underway in efforts to leverage Big Data analytics to improve K-12 educational results.

A story from Reuters http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/03/us-education-database-idUSBRE92204W20130303
reports that a new $100 million data warehouse has been built in the U.S. to monitor academic achievements of public school students, from kindergarten through grade 12. The article states that “The database is a joint project of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which provided most of the funding, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and school officials from several states.”

Already 9 states in the U.S. are participating to some degree, and two of these, New York and Louisiana, are planning to provide all or most of their student records into the data warehouse. The database includes students names and addresses, and other personal information.

A non-profit named inBloom, Inc. (previously called the Shared Learning Collective) has been established to operate the database, which already contains millions of student files. It is a cloud-based data warehouse for student data such as grades, test results, assessments, standards met, behavior and attendance. It is not a repository for digital content, but will contain links to content, leveraging the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative methodology. The stated goal for the data warehouse is to support more personalized learning.

Here you can watch a video that introduces inBloom’s vision for customized teaching and learning:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=gHjbdpXohk0#!

A very large amount of data is gathered by school districts and states, but resides in many separate databases and is not cross-correlated or well-analyzed. This project aims to change that. See this Mindshift article:
http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2012/07/how-will-student-data-be-used/
Pulling data together in this way is intended not only to make learning more customized, but also to make it easier to track results as students move from district to district or even state to state. In addition, it will allow data analysis on student achievement to be linked to various learning resources, potentially including the 46,000+ resources on Curriki.

Educational software suppliers are excited by the opportunity to mine the database and better determine what educational products to develop, including educational games and other digital learning products, lesson plans, and reports.

The goals of the project are laudable, but not surprisingly, given the sensitive nature of the data, privacy and security concerns are being raised. inBloom states on their web site: “We recognize the sensitivity of storing student data and place the utmost importance on the privacy and security of that data.” Parents in some states are already raising concerns about potential data leakage. While the data warehouse contains essentially the same data already held in school district databases, it now becomes available to a wider audience, including educators in other states than the original source for the data. And educational content vendors are requesting access to test data, for example. Presumably this will be made anonymous when supplied. Ownership of the data is retained by the states and districts that supply it. But some organizations, including the PTA and ACLU, are already asking “What are the remedies if and when data leaks?”.

We’d be interested to hear what you think about this project. What benefits and risks to you see in amassing a well-integrated and analyzable database of K-12 student achievement? How would you want to see this data being used to improve learning outcomes? Do the benefits outweigh the risks? Please provide comments.