A Student-Data Collector Drops Out

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/27/technology/a-student-data-collector-drops-out.html

by 001sky • 12 years ago

47 49 12 years ago

doubt_me• 12 years ago

Why do they have to shut down?

Why not just switch the model from gathering students data to creating the apps anyways and just letting the school take care of sorting out which app works best for who.

Seems to me like there could have been a bunch of better ways to handle this other than shut it down

EpicEng2• 12 years ago

Well, that wasn't their goal, and I doubt it is easy to displace the systems these schools are using today. The board probably felt that it would be wiser to cut their losses.

objclxt• 12 years ago

I doubt it is easy to displace the systems these schools are using today

...which is pretty much why the players in this space who are finding success are companies like Clever (clever.com), who let schools keep their existing SIS/student management software, but offer conduits to get the data out into other applications.

I know the Clever co-founders post here fairly often, they'll probably chip in on their perspective at some point.

ynniv• 12 years ago

This is good news. While their intentions may have been good, the information they were requesting could have haunted the students being tracked for the rest of their lives. As the government has asserted in their defense of PRISM and related services, once this information has been shared with a company it is often treated as semi-public, and as anyone on this site should realize, information which is not protected as by law (HIPPA, etc) can never be made private again. (Information which is protected by law still can't be retracted, but at least legitimate companies have to think twice about using it.)

[ http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2013/03/inblooms-... ]

[ http://www.classsizematters.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/i... ]

dkarapetyan6• 12 years ago

Anonymize the information as soon as the students graduate. Done! That way it can still be used for gaining insight without being traceable to any given student.

ivank• 12 years ago

Reidentification algorithms could still be used to identify students; see http://33bits.org/tag/de-anonymization/

erichurkman• 12 years ago

It could have given new life to thousands of guidance counselors and administrators the world over threatening: "Don't do _x_, it will go on your permanent record!"

ottertown• 12 years ago

as a former, disenfranchised education technologist, comments like this: “If this is still an ‘emerging concept,’ why are we implementing it?” are all too familiar.

teachers and school administrators are fearful of tech solutions because so many of them have been awful and have completely ignored the needs of the classroom. but that means potentially worthwhile products go unimplemented.

if you're going to do a startup, I highly recommend not doing so in the education space.

dkarapetyan6• 12 years ago

And yet blackboard exists and is thriving.

xux• 12 years ago

And everyone hates it. Professors hate it. Students hate it.

pingburg2• 12 years ago

What type of education technology were you building?

judk• 12 years ago

Good. The world needs an open source as solution that can be deployed locally and respects student privacy.

checker6593• 12 years ago

Open source and privacy don't have much to do with each other. Security yes, but not privacy.

iht• 12 years ago

It is opensource under the Apache license (https://github.com/inbloom/secure-data-service and a few other repos). And I believe there wasn't anything preventing anyone from standing up their own instance except time and some frustration.

Alex39175• 12 years ago

Yet another major fuckup in the education space by Bill Gates. His flagship high school, which he wanted to model every other school in the nation after, literally got shut down after having a graduation rate around 20%. And yet he has yet to pay even a dollar in reparations to all those kids whose lives he destroyed. Diane Ravitch has a good quote about the Gates foundation in her book:

"To advance its agenda, the Gates foundation increased its spending on advocacy. From 2005 to 2009, the foundation quadrupled its annual spending on advocacy to $78 million. Accord to Sam Dillon in the New York Times, the foundation will pump an addition $100 million into advocacy over the next five to six years. That kind of money buys a lot of advocacy and support. Gates funded the groups that wrote the Common Core standards, the groups that evaluated them, and the groups that advocated for them. Gates funded liberal groups such as Education Trust, centrist groups such as the Center for American Progress and the Center on Education Policy, and groups on the Right such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, Jeb Bush's Foundation of Educational Excellence, and the Media Bullpen. It funded groups that advocated for charter schools, such as the Education Equality project, and groups that argued against seniority and tenure, such as TeachFirst, TeachPlus, and the New Teacher Project. Kenneth Libby, then a graduate student known for poring through tax filings of foundations and advocacy groups, commented, 'It's easier to name which groups Gates doesn't support than to list all of those they do, because it's just so overwhelming.' [...]

Writing in Dissent, Joanne Barkan described the challenge that the aggressive venture philanthropists pose for American society:

'Can anything stop the foundation enablers? After five or ten more years, the mess they're making in public schooling might be so undeniable that they'll say, 'Oops, that didn't work' and step aside. But the damage might be irreparable: thousands of closed schools, worse conditions in those left open, an extreme degree of 'teaching to the test,' demoralized teachers, rampant corruption by private management companies, thousands of failed charter schools, and more low-income kids without a good education. Who could possibly clean up the mess?'"

If you want to read about what happened the last time billionaires got involved with the school system, John Taylor Gatto does a pretty decent job documenting it in his Underground History book.

nopinsight• 12 years ago

Do you have a reference about that supposed flagship high school with 20% graduation rate? I searched and couldn't find it.

At least the info on why and how they failed would be useful to many education innovators here.

Alex39175• 12 years ago

Yeah Ravitch talks about this in her Death and Life of the Great American School System book, in Chapter 10 on p. 207. That page and a bunch of the previous pages are available to read for free on Amazon. The basic gist though is that all the research shows that medium-sized high schools are the best for students, because they're big enough that students can find classes and activities (and friends) they're interested in, but not so big that they get lost. But despite this research Gates decided to make having extremely small high schools his main educational priority, with results that were basically exactly what the research previously suggested they would be.

nerfhammer• 12 years ago

Doesn't mention the graduation rate but see the "The Small-Schools Movement" section of this article:

http://nsmn1.uh.edu/dgraur/niv/TheMostDangerousEquation.pdf

JackFr• 12 years ago

But you make it sound like all would be well if only the meddling foundations would just leave the schools alone.

These do-gooders did not develop in a vacuum. And while personally I think the crisis in American education has been overblown, there is widespread dissatisfaction with the job the public schools are doing.

You ask Bill Gates to pay reparations -- what of the public school administrators who have presided over the failing schools of our inner cities? Will they pay as well?

Finally, in your quote from Barken, she describes problems which have already been seen in public schools, and offers no indication why corruption, demoralization and failure would be worse for the meddling of the foundations.

Alex39175• 12 years ago

There's no question that there's all kinds of problems with public (and private) schools. And conceptually there's no reason why foundations are inherently bad.

The issue though is that in practice they are mostly doing really bad things -- standardized testing, value-added assessment of teachers, charter schools, merit pay, etc. And of those, standardized testing and charter schools aren't even inherently bad either, it's just that again their implementations are extraordinary bad and damaging in practice.

pingburg2• 12 years ago

So is your point that foundations or advocacy is bad for education?

Alex39175• 12 years ago

Neither. Foundations are potentially good for education, and advocacy/lobbying is absolutely necessary. The Gates Foundation specifically is bad though because:

A) Gates doesn't take the time to learn the research and the history of the fields/problems he's trying to solve.

B) For whatever issue he's trying to solve, he buys every organization that might conceivable oppose him, creating a one-truth world.

For what it's worth, there are prominent people who accuse him of doing the same thing with respect to malaria. To quote Ravitch again:

"The chief of malaria research for the World Health Organization, Dr. Arata Kochi, complained in 2008 that the Gates Foundation was stifling a diversity of views among scientists, because so many of the world's leading scientists in the field were 'locked up in a 'cartel' with their own research funding being linked to those of others within the group,' making it difficult to get independent reviews of research. The foundation's decision-making proces, he charged, was 'a closed internal process, and as far as can be seen, accountable to none other than itself.' In a statement that had implications for the foundation's education initiatives, the scientist said that the powerful influence of the foundation 'could have implicitly dangerous consequences on the policy-making process in world health.' In other worlds, the Gates Foundation was setting the international agenda, because of its unrivaled wealth, and unintentionally shutting out competing views."

checker6593• 12 years ago

You're a jackass. The students are equally responsible for signing up. I bet nobody forced them to join High Tech High (or whatever the school was called).

dang• 12 years ago

You're a jackass.

Personal attacks are not allowed on HN. We ban people for this kind of thing, especially when they don't have a history as a positive contributor.

ithought• 12 years ago

There's at least some evidence to suggest that non-profits in the early to mid 20th century negatively influenced education via the American Historical Association (historians.org)- http://www.realityzone.com/hiddenagenda2.html

I don't think anyone has contradicted the claims of Norman Dodd, the Reece Committee or the Cox Committee. And there was Professor Bloom's book, The Closing of the American Mind, in the late 1980s. It sees to have confirmed the shift in education and promotion of relative truth.

hga• 12 years ago

One accusation about the Common Core I recently investigated, the official documentation and telling comments by one of the professors involved in the process:

It's math curriculum does not even reach the level of precalclus by high school graduation. No one who goes to a school that's totally based on it will ever be admitted to MIT or any other serious STEM program that expects you at minimum to be ready to learn the calculus when you arrive.

programminggeek• 12 years ago

When they say $100 million, do they mean raised or company value? If they burned through $100 million in 15 months, I have no idea how they could light that much money on fire so quickly.

windsurfer• 12 years ago

They raised $100 million. Source: http://gigaom.com/2013/02/05/gates-foundation-backed-inbloom...

nickbauman• 12 years ago

I think they folded because they figured out that public education in the US isn't about really developing understanding and learning. It's designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny appreciable leadership skills and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens in order to render the populace "manageable."

Individual teachers don't think this: they actually think they're supposed to help develop a student's intellect. A lot of conflict arises here.

John Taylor Gatto wrote about this in his essay "Against School". It's a good read.

http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm

dkarapetyan6• 12 years ago

Honestly, where is this level of scrutiny when it comes to things like facebook and google+. How are the privacy violation in those enterprises different?

timbre• 12 years ago

Children are not legally compelled to join Facebook and Google+.

dkarapetyan6• 12 years ago

And yet they do. So make school voluntary. Privacy violation problems solved I guess.

wallflower• 12 years ago

FERPA is an important act for education startups as it is the HIPAA of that domain.

It gets more interesting for post-secondary education. By law, students have to grant permission to their parents to see their college grades.

Decades ago, colleges used to post final exam test scores anonymously. How did they do that? They used SSNs. Of course, that practice is now verboten and schools actually try to use something other than an SSN as the foreign key of the student's records.

http://www.studentaffairs.pitt.edu/sites/default/files/PDFsa...

Edmond• 12 years ago

This is good...ordinarily I am relaxed about the issue of privacy and mostly don't get the paranoia about government(US) surveillance...but the idea of my life being reduced to a few data points terrifies me to no end...ironic that this was being funded by the Gate's foundation (which I admire), it brings to mind the Bill Gates mugshot (http://www.thesmokinggun.com/mugshots/celebrity/business/bil...)

xname• 12 years ago

Not directly related to the topic, but for those who might interested, here is another piece of critique on Gates Foundation in education:

How the Gates Foundation Spins its Research http://jaypgreene.com/2012/01/07/how-the-gates-foundation-sp...

Quote: "With the latest round of reports, the Gates folks are back to their old game of spinning their results to push policy recommendations that are actually unsupported by the data."

frade33• 12 years ago

it was too far ahead of its time

I would never get this phrase, does it mean, it is of no use at the moment? If yes, why not say it so.

hackplus• 12 years ago

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christkv• 12 years ago

To bad his actions speak louder than his words.

The children of Bill and Melinda Gates – Jennifer, Rory and Phoebe – have attended Lakeside School, Seattle’s most elite, fancypants private school.

A Student-Data Collector Drops Out

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