snopes.com: Pearson PARCC Social Media Spying

snopes.com: Pearson PARCC Social Media Spying:

PARCC Strife

Claim:   Educational materials publisher Pearson monitored students' social media accounts for content related to the PARCC test.

MIXTURE:

	FALSE: Pearson monitored individual, private student accounts to circumvent cheating on PARCC tests.
	TRUE: Pearson monitored social media networks for public posts that possibly disclosed test contents.

Example:   [Collected via e-mail, March 2015]

This was posted on FaceBook. It stated that Pearson was monitoring students' social media after a student tweeted about a PARCC test question.

Origins:   On 13 March 2015, the Facebook page "Bob Braun's ledger" (operated by a former newspaper reporter named Bob Braun) published two status updates about an e-mail message purportedly documenting that test and textbook manufacturer Pearson was surveilling the social media accounts of students taking the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) test:

PEARSON IS MONITORING SOCIAL MEDIA OF NEW JERSEY STUDENTS AND NOTIFYING THE STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT IF THEY MENTION PARCC. More on my blog later but three students from Somerset County high school were caught up in it.

BREAKING NEWS: HOW'S THIS FOR AN OUTRAGE: PEARSON, STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT, SPYING ON STUDENTS' SOCIAL MEDIA,ASKING DISTRICTS TO DISCPLINE STUDENTS

Braun's post (and a subsequent article) drew widespread attention and prompted debate about student privacy. On 14 March 2015, Superintendent Elizabeth Jewett of Watchung Hills Regional High School District in New Jersey published a letter confirming that the leaked e-mail circulated by Braun was authentic. Jewett said that she did not authorize the widespread release of the message and was unsure about why it was forwarded to Braun:

Dear Watchung Hills Regional High School Learning Community,

On Friday, March 13, 2015, Bobbraunsledger.com published a story referencing an email I had sent to other superintendents about issues regarding PARCC testing and Pearson's monitoring of social media. The email shown in his article is authentic. It was an email I sent on March 10, 2015 at approximately 10:00AM to a group of superintendents to share my concerns and to see if other schools had a similar experience. I did not authorize the release of this email nor am I aware of who did release it. I am also not aware of the motives they may have had behind the release. That said, I completely stand behind my comments as they represent not only my views and concerns; they also represent the views and concerns of our Board of Education.

The article references instances involving students during PARCC testing and any related disciplinary action. For student privacy issues, we cannot comment on any of the specific students or discipline referred to in the article. What I am able to share is that all issues have been dealt with in accordance with our Code of Conduct, Academic Integrity and Acceptable Use of Technology Policies.

Our main concern is, and will always remain, supporting the educational, social and emotional needs of our students. The privacy and security of student information remains the utmost priority for our district.

The district will have no further comment on this matter at this time.

A representative for Pearson also released a statement after Jewett's e-mail circulated, confirming that social media monitoring pertained only to information published publicly on the internet:

The security of a test is critical to ensure fairness for all students and teachers and to ensure that the results of any assessment are trustworthy and valid.

We welcome debate and a variety of opinions. But when test questions or elements are posted publicly to the Internet, we are obligated to alert PARCC states. Any contact with students or decisions about student discipline are handled at the local level.

We believe that a secure test maintains fairness for every student and the validity, integrity of the test results.

The claims about PARCC test content and social media alarmed a number of parents, many of whom were concerned that their children's social media accounts were subject to invasive, secret audits by a large educational testing company. However, much of the controversy boiled down to an initial lack of detail in the retelling regarding
the privacy level of content shared to social media.

Upon later examination, it became clear that Pearson monitored social networks (primarily Twitter) for public tweets that potentially included content from PARCC tests. Irrespective of whether folks find that specific protocol acceptable, Pearson was not implicated in the interception of any private social media postings or communications belonging to students who were administered PARCC tests.

Moreover, although the security measures cited were adapted to include social media networks, the overall practice of stringent test security for statewide materials is neither new nor novel. New York state's long-term efforts to secure its Regents exams [PDF] is a well-documented example of such measures, as revealed when controversy erupted in June 1989 after the secrecy of the statewide standardized Chemistry test was compromised and its answers were published in a newspaper:

State education officials said that The Post's front page, which displayed the answer sheet, appeared to have been sent by facsimile machines this morning to some students in upstate New York and that this led to the decision for a statewide ban. The chemistry test was to have been given this afternoon.

A spokesman for State Attorney General Robert Abrams said investigators were aware of "at least four tests and their answers having been bought and sold" among students. In addition to chemistry, the tests were in United States history, global studies and 10th-grade mathematics, said the spokesman, Timothy Gilles.

Education officials, who said they had no idea how the keys were obtained, pledged an overhaul of security procedures for administering the tests, which in their 111 years have been canceled statewide only once before.

Despite the initial controversy, Pearson was not accused of monitoring individual Twitter or Facebook accounts and merely accessed publicly-posted information visible to anyone with an Internet connection. Moreover, standardized testing-based security measures existed well before Twitter and Facebook, and students have long been subject to scrutiny and security measures to circumvent cheating on statewide tests. It didn't appear any students were specifically targeted in larger social media monitoring for PARCC test content, which included only publicly-available posts that were turned up through keyword searches.

Last updated:   16 March 2015

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