It's Your Choice

Here's what inBloom - the "cloud" student data system that the Gates Foundation is setting up says about students:

Every student is an individual, with unique knowledge, abilities and learning needs. But the technology used in most K-12 schools today can make providing personalized instruction time-consuming and cumbersome for teachers.

Meanwhile, states, districts and educators implementing the Common Core State Standards have set new goals for student learning, and they need effective tools and resources to ensure students meet those goals.

Better, more integrated technology and data analytics can help by painting a more complete picture of student learning and making it easier to find learning materials that match each student’s learning needs. Unfortunately, creating the technology infrastructure to do this is often too expensive for most states and school districts.

That’s where inBloom comes in.

I feel like many parents are out there shrugging.  So what?  My kid is on Facebook, there are cameras everywhere, what's the point in trying to fight back?  If it helps create better and more individual learning, what's the harm?

From The Guardian interview (by Glenn Greenward) with Edward Snowden, the former contractor for the US who leaked top-secret documents about the NSA surveillance program. 

Snowden: You can't come forward against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and be completely free from risk... But at the same time you have to make a determination about what it is that's important to you. And if living unfreely but comfortably is something you're willing to accept, and I think it many of us are it's the human nature; you can get up everyday, go to work, you can collect your large paycheck for relatively little work against the public interest, and go to sleep at night after watching your shows.

But if you realize that that's the world you helped create and it's gonna get worse with the next generation and the next generation who extend the capabilities of this sort of architecture of oppression, you realize that you might be willing to accept any risk and it doesn't matter what the outcome is so long as the public gets to make their own decisions about how that's applied.

Greenwald: Why should people care about surveillance?

Snowden: Because even if you're not doing anything wrong you're being watched and recorded. And the storage capability of these systems increases every year consistently by orders of magnitude to where it's getting to the point where you don't have to have done anything wrong. You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody even by a wrong call. And then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you've ever made, every friend you've ever discussed something with. And attack you on that basis to sort to derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.

What the ACLU says:

With this sensitive data, the government can compile vast dossiers about innocent people. The data sits indefinitely in government databases, and the names of many innocent Americans end up on bloated and inaccurate watch lists that affect whether we can fly on commercial airlines, whether we can renew our passports, whether we are called aside for “secondary screening” at airports and borders, and even whether we can open bank accounts.

Dragnet surveillance undermines the right to privacy and the freedoms of speech, association, and religion.

And they are talking about adults.

Does your child's behavior and personality deserve this kind of scrutiny? 

Does it deserve to be in a database that likely could be shared - at any time and without permission - by the government?

This is what is most important to children in public schools getting a better education?

And, keep in mind, it's only the public school students.  Not Bill Gates' children.  Your children.