Special Report
Data

Analytics in K-12 Schools: Big Data, or Big Brother?

By Benjamin Herold — January 11, 2016 3 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

The emergence of big data and analytics in public education is bringing new urgency to the national debate over digital privacy.

Take AltSchool, an education startup that is adapting some of the passive-observation technologies already in use in such fields as consumer technology, professional sports, and retail sales. Those approaches include constantly running video cameras and audio recorders, and the use of motion-tracking and facial- and speech-recognition software.

The idea is that more and better information on students, collected unobtrusively as they go about regular learning activities in the classroom, might help make education more personalized, powerful, and efficient.

But where proponents see potential for innovation, others see big trouble.

It’s especially problematic that big-data-based experimentation is almost entirely unregulated, said Joel Reidenberg, a school privacy expert and law professor at Fordham and Princeton universities.

“The extent to which a total surveillance environment affects a child’s learning, psyche, and personal growth is uncharted territory,” Reidenberg said. “We need development of ethical principles for the use of these data, as well as objective review mechanisms.”

That kind of independent, third-party review of ed-tech companies’ plans for experimenting with big data and analytics doesn’t appear likely anytime soon. The conversation is only just beginning, Reidenberg said, because big advances in data science are so new.

In the meantime, parents and citizens should be aware of possible harms, said Elana J. Zeide, a privacy research fellow at New York University’s Information Law Institute. “There is the potential that ubiquitous surveillance might chill intellectual exploration,” she said.

Other worries involve the creation of profiles that could linger beyond their accuracy or utility; making key educational decisions based on algorithms that are too complex for the typical student, parent, or teacher to understand or challenge; and the possibility that pervasive monitoring in schools might normalize the kind of real-world surveillance that has landed the National Security Agency in hot water.

For their part, AltSchool officials stress that there’s a big gap between what they’re doing currently and what they may do in the future. Parents are opting into the AltSchool model, and scrutiny and debate are welcome, CEO Max Ventilla said.

“I agree that there is a psychic cost to monitoring that is quite high, and that needs to be overcome to justify the monitoring in the first place,” Ventilla said. “But if you don’t allow yourself to even get started, you preclude a lot of [potentially] good uses of these kinds of technologies.”

So far, though, legislators and policymakers have mostly struggled to keep up with the ambitions of the ed-tech sector.

One major example: the actions of online-services-giant Google, the former employer of both Ventilla and AltSchool co-founder and chief technology officer Bharat Mediratta.

Just last month, for example, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission. It alleges, among other charges, that Google is violating the voluntary Student Privacy Pledge by tracking the millions of students who use its Apps for Education tool suite when they venture to other Google applications such as Maps and YouTube, then using the information to create behavioral profiles.

That capability is very connected to what Ventilla worked on when he was the company’s head of personalization just a few year ago.

But it would be a mistake to assume that AltSchool will push privacy boundaries in the same manner as Google, despite the histories of some key employees, said Mediratta, who was a top engineer in charge of the larger company’s homepage for more than a decade.

“Google [has] business reasons that cause it to cozy up to that line in ways that are going to upset some people,” Mediratta said. “But for us to be successful, we have to make sure that people trust us with the data we gather on their children and help them understand that it will pay off in a much higher-quality education for their child.”

Coverage of the implementation of college- and career-ready standards and the use of personalized learning is supported in part by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Education Week retains sole editorial control over the content of this coverage.
A version of this article appeared in the January 13, 2016 edition of Education Week as Big Data or Big Brother?

Events

Jobs Virtual Career Fair for Teachers and K-12 Staff
Find teaching jobs and other jobs in K-12 education at the EdWeek Top School Jobs virtual career fair.
Ed-Tech Policy Webinar Artificial Intelligence in Practice: Building a Roadmap for AI Use in Schools
AI in education: game-changer or classroom chaos? Join our webinar & learn how to navigate this evolving tech responsibly.
Education Webinar Developing and Executing Impactful Research Campaigns to Fuel Your Ed Marketing Strategy 
Develop impactful research campaigns to fuel your marketing. Join the EdWeek Research Center for a webinar with actionable take-aways for companies who sell to K-12 districts.

EdWeek Top School Jobs

Teacher Jobs
Search over ten thousand teaching jobs nationwide — elementary, middle, high school and more.
View Jobs
Principal Jobs
Find hundreds of jobs for principals, assistant principals, and other school leadership roles.
View Jobs
Administrator Jobs
Over a thousand district-level jobs: superintendents, directors, more.
View Jobs
Support Staff Jobs
Search thousands of jobs, from paraprofessionals to counselors and more.
View Jobs

Read Next

Data A New Digital Divide? Low-Income Students See More Ads in the Tech Their Schools Use
Students from the lowest-income families are the most likely to attend schools that do not systematically vet their education technology.
4 min read
Group of Students in IT Class
iStock
Data What the Research Says What Does 'Evidence-Based' Mean? A Study Finds Wide Variation.
Fewer than 1 in 3 education interventions get consistent judgments on their evidence base from reviewers.
5 min read
photograph of a magnifying glass on an open book
Valiantsin Suprunovich/iStock
This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff.
Sponsor
Data Whitepaper
Use Your Data to Guide Greater Growth this Spring
Walk through steps to help your team use assessment data to set rigorous yet realistic goals that guide instruction at all tiers.
Content provided by Renaissance
Data 'Hidden Homeless': A Key Measure of Homelessness Excludes Most Students
Federal agencies differ in how they measure homelessness—and many vulnerable students are left out.
3 min read
Photograph of a low angle view of children with backpacks climbing the school staircase.
E+/Getty