Pearson Under Fire for Monitoring Students’ Twitter Posts
Is it corporate due diligence or spying on children?
That is the question parents across the country have been asking on Twitter and on blog posts since they learned that the publishing giant Pearson Education has been monitoring social media to identify students who might be leaking information about certain tests administered by the company.
The math and English tests — called the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC — are being developed by a consortium of states in conjunction with Pearson to measure students’ preparedness for life after graduation.
In a statement posted on the company’s site, Pearson said the states contractually required it to monitor public social media posts to make sure students did not disclose test questions.
Although education officials in some states already screen social media on their own for possible test leaks, Pearson’s efforts have ignited a firestorm among some teacher and parent groups who contend the monitoring is invasive and unfair.
On Tuesday, the American Federation of Teachers demanded that Pearson halt its student social media monitoring and make public any contract language related to its security measures for tests.
“It’s one thing to protect intellectual property, but this raises far too many questions,” Randi Weingarten, the president of the teachers’ union, wrote in an email on Tuesday. “How is Pearson monitoring students? What information about students does Pearson have, where did it get it, and what will it keep? Is Pearson reviewing everything students post? What protections are there for student privacy?”
Pearson’s monitoring of social media for possible leaks on test questions first came to public attention a few days ago after Bob Braun, a blogger in New Jersey and a former columnist for The Star-Ledger, of Newark, published a private email from a concerned school official to her fellow superintendents.
In the email, Elizabeth C. Jewett, the superintendent of the Watchung Hills Regional High School District in Warren, N.J., told her colleagues that Pearson had notified state education officials of a security breach in the belief that a student at the school had taken a photograph of a question during the test and posted it on Twitter. The state officials, she wrote, asked that her school discipline the Pearson Under Fire for Monitoring Students' Twitter Posts - NYTimes.com:
