The Data Quality Campaign: Encouraging States to Ramp Up Data Collection
In April 2013, I wrote a post about the inBloom database and Louisiana Superintendent John White’s secret arrangement with inBloom. White’s inBloom arrangement is not the only student data sharing agreement into which White has entered. It is one of many arrangements White has made and about which the public has been kept in the dark.
So much for transparency.
Corporate education reform is designed to turn profits for privatizers. That said, in corporate reform, there are two huge money makers that will ”outprofit” all other profiteering: standardized testing, and data sales and storage.
The two are inextricable. Consider the mandates for state participation in Race to the Top (RTTT). In order to compete for RTTT funding, states were required to demonstrate both a standardized testing dependence and establishment of a “statewide longitudinal data system.”
While the federal government insists that reform is being driven “by the states,” it is clear that the USDOE is actively clearing the way for reforms that it supports, one of which is the collecting of an unprecedented amount of data on America’s school children. Consider US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s January 3, 2012,
