David Safier by David Safier Maybe the Onion could make this kind of stuff up, but I can't. A Canton, Ohio, Walmart is holding a Thanksgiving food drive — for its own employees. It's a food drive – not for the community, but for needy workers. "Please Donate Food Items Here, so Associates in Need Can Enjoy … Read more
by David Safier Anthony Cody, a blogger at Education Week and one of the founders of The Network for Public Education along with Diane Ravitch (and Tucson's own Robin Hiller) has written the best analysis of the problems with the Common Core I've read. First he wrote Common Core Standards: Ten Colossal Errors, a long … Read more
by David Safier Oh wait. . . . by virtually all measures of cost, access to care and ease of dealing with insurance problems, Americans fared poorly compared with people in other advanced countries. . . . The United States spends far more than [10 other industrialized countries] on a per capita basis and as … Read more
by David Safier Oh wait. That was the bursting of the housing bubble in September, 2008. Never mind.
by David Safier
I know my harping on the issue of student data mining can seem repetitive, maybe even a little obsessive. But any scheme funded by $100 million in Gates Foundation money that puts sensitive, personal student information in the hands of Rupert Murdoch's educational enterprise and stores it on leaky Amazon servers needs to be exposed. Thanks to journalists and bloggers getting the information out, the inBloom data storage project has lost five of the seven states which were part of the company's test run. Only Illinois and New York remain, and New York school districts are opting out one by one.
So naturally, the PR push is on to salvage the data mining scheme. Sharren Bates, chief product officer for inBloom, claims the corporation's electronic storage will be much more secure than old fashioned methods of storing and sharing student data.
For decades, she said, districts have stored the same data in unlocked filing cabinets, or relied on educators to email spreadsheets to each other.
I guess Bates thinks file cabinets and spreadsheets are more vulnerable to massive hacking than data stored on a single electronic source. She must imagine that bad actors are going to break into schools late at night, pry open counseling office doors and microfilm the millions of pieces of paper storing student information, then sort through the unorganized mess. When they're done with that, they'll plow through teacher emails one by one searching for random bits of student data on random spreadsheets — most of which contain student scores, not personal information like health records, learning disabilities and disciplinary actions.
Really?