Education Week Covers K12/AZVA Outsourcing

by David Safier

NOTE: You can read all my posts on the topic of AZVA, K12 Inc. and outsourcing here. If you only want to read one post, this is the one that pulls most of the threads together.

Education Week just posted an article, K12 Inc. Scraps India Outsourcing, on its website. It’s supposed to be in the magazine’s print issue that comes out sometime next week.

The article is basically a back-and-forth between what I’ve written about K12’s outsourcing on this blog and K12’s response. The writer, Andrew Trotter, bends over backwards to be fair to both sides — too far backwards for my tastes, but hey, I’m an interested party in this thing. It’s hard for me to read his article without looking at it from my perspective.

According to the article, K12 finally admitted it sent papers to India to be scored and commented on, first by a subsidiary of Socratic Learning, Inc., then by TutorVista. It also admitted that India-based tutors were used with students at some of its online schools. K12 says both programs have been discontinued, which may be true. I haven’t uncovered any information about what’s happening this year one way or the other.

But when it comes to the question of whether student names and other identifying information followed the papers to India, K12 is still stonewalling.

A teacher using the service would remove sensitive personal information, then using a separate server, would “send it to a reviewer who would provide initial feedback, which [the teacher] would receive and use at their discretion, or discard,” Mr. Kwitowski said.

I believe this is untrue. A number of documents I have indicate that, not only did student names follow papers to India, but that was integral to the process Arizona Virtual Academy used to track the papers. Student names were on the papers when they went to India; a grade tracking spreadsheet with all the student names followed; and people in India used the spreadsheet to enter the scores on each essay they finished.

If I’m wrong about this, it should be easy enough for K12 to prove it. I’m speculating here, but I would think K12 or AZVA would have sent a dated directive to its teachers instructing them on the proper procedure for scrubbing student information and assigning an arbitrary number to each student. I would also imagine the company should be able to produce examples of forms it used to transmit information back and forth that would demonstrate they were free of identifying information.

I’m not saying K12 has to do this, of course. It might consider this information proprietary,though from what I’ve seen, the way they set up their forms and spreadsheets is pretty basic. I looked over similar material dozens of times in my last few years of teaching when rubrics and scoring sheets came into vogue. If it were me, I wouldn’t worry about anyone stealing the methodology. And if the company can show my assertions are wrong, that would go a long way toward refuting what I’ve said on this blog.

But it doesn’t look like K12 is planning to do that. The for-profit corporation’s main concern seems to be ferreting out the source of the leaks.

One of Mr. Safier’s most serious charges is that the company or the Arizona Virtual Academy released confidential information about students when it transferred their essays to reviewers in India. He said he bases that charge on documents he obtained from India. The Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act and other state and federal laws hold schools to a high legal standard on safeguarding student information.

“K12 takes this very seriously, which is why K12 is conducting an investigation to find out what [Mr. Safier’s] information is,” Mr. Kwitowski said.

For now, “we don’t know the source,” he said last week. “We have reason to believe that may have come from one of these previous vendors,” he said. “Right now, we are investigating. We believe the information [released] is very limited.”

He added that in all of K12’s contracts, “particularly these two pilot programs,” outside vendors are bound by confidentiality and nondisclosure provisions that would be violated by unauthorized release of students’ personal information.

K12 doesn’t want to answer the question, “Did you release student information to India?” It wants to know how I obtained the documents I have.

I don’t know about others of you out there, but I think the question of what K12 did or didn’t do with student information is more important than how I found out about it. So I’m going to ask K12 two questions, each with a sub-question, which I consider far more germane than “Where is the leak and how do we plug it?”

1. Did names of AZVA students (and/or students at other K12 schools) follow their papers to India either by being left on the student papers or by being included in grade tracking sheets?

Sub-question: If student names went to India, was it an inadvertent error or part of standard protocol?

2. At the outset of the program, did AZVA communicate with its parents in writing to tell them the school planned to send student papers to India?

Sub-question: If the parents weren’t adequately informed at the outset of the program, when they found out papers were going to India, were they given the impression that AZVA was planning to stop the practice even though it continued?

It’s my feeling that K12 should answer those questions clearly and publicly.

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