Maybe you missed it, because it's the sort of story many with media influence wouldn't want
you to hear, but in April of this year a school district in Missouri announced
a data breach associated with CCSS-era stockpiling of student information.
Park Hill School District of Kansas City released a statement revealing the breach as not the move of external hackers but
a former employee who,
“…downloaded all files from this
employee’s work computer onto a hard drive without consent. When the hard drive
connected to a home network, all the files became accessible from the Internet
for a period of time. Unfortunately, this meant it was possible to find the
files through a Google search or other sites that logged the IP address. We
know that at least one person accessed the hard drive and left the former
employee a message warning that the information was available online, but we
cannot tell whether that person or anyone else took any information.”
Among the data collected: That
which many have admitted school systems can't adequately secure and which
contains intimate, important particulars like academic assessments scores and student social security numbers. Employees’ sensitive identifying info was accessed as
well.
In total, the breach put for
10,210 people at risk, including folks no longer associated with the district.
That number does not account for
damage the breach could cause to those thousands’ families, of course.
Such breaches reveal a telling Truth about ed reform and ed reformers. First, a note about educators:
Many teachers and teacher educators hold the ideal that teaching should, at its center, “Do No Harm.”
A lofty ideal since no one can ever know the full consequences of an
action, sure, but one which should apply to an educator’s sense of how to plan,
assess, learn about students, and calculate risk. One which centers education
on the human element.
Further, before the era of Big Data and as forces gathered steam for what would become the CCSS initiative, several forewarned applying the "Do No Harm" maxim to K12 (and Higher Ed) data harvesting would be especially tough.
The human element seems less important to data mongering architects of
ed reform and the Common Core State Standards.
Bill Gates, for example, has extolled the possibilities of individualized custom
markets based on data created when facts gleaned from the ether coalesce to
reveal the specific needs of specific kids whose specific parents can pay
specific companies, most likely Pearson, to help address the specific academic
areas needing work.
He's tempered his enthusiasm by suggesting states might make their own decisions on how to use data, but, generally, the possibilities seem to make him giddy with excitement.
Maybe one reason for happy giggles?: Microsoft’s cloud system is
reported as a major data storage provider.
The market vision of fast data and customizable consumer portfolios
must look amazing to those who see datum and dollars.
But to those of us who see instead children and hard-working men and
women, any beneficent potential from the educational utopia created from mining
Big Data turns horrific. Harmful.Or, with the potential to create harm when all variables are considered, anyway.
Certainly, breaches such as these, even if they're result of simple human error, violate the “Do No Harm” maxim and
show how eager corporate entities and their supporters are to collect, market,
and sell.
They also reveal a Truth those of us critical of CCSS and other ed reform initiatives have known for years:
At its core, the CCSS – along with many key tenets of contemporary
educational reform – do not account for the human element.
Districts which must gather data must have people who are able to
access it. The cloud is not secure, nor are databases nor hard drives in
brick-and-mortar facilities.
Other breaches have occurred. El Paso Independent School District was
hacked in 2011, and in 2013 Guilford County Public Schools (NC) had some situations in which,
ultimately, leaders had to admit to the community that their data mining
operation would not and could not be 100% secure.
And they’ll continue to happen. Even if the cloud were to become a
floating Fort Knox, there’s no accounting for the human element.
A central blow to “Do No Harm” ethos; a central flaw of CCSS and ed
reform.
Please, read more about the Park Hill data breach at the Missouri Education Watchdog blog. Anne Gassel gives full treatment to the event, why it is worrisome, and why Park Hill's breach won't be the last.
Further, here's a great blog post (from which this post's graphic originates) on data breaching paradigms.
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