Just when you thought you had enough, the Seattle Public School district bought another standardized test, Amplify
Created and funded by the Gates and Carnegie Foundations with $100 million, inBloom Inc. was designed to collect a maximum amount of confidential and personally identifiable student and teacher data from school districts and states throughout the country. This information — including student names, addresses, grades, test scores, economic, race, special education status, disciplinary status and more — was to be stored on a data cloud run by Amazon.com, with an operating system by Wireless/Amplify, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. InBloom Inc. planned to share this highly sensitive information with software companies and other for-profit vendors.Leonie Haimson, InBloom and the need to protect student privacy
Just when you thought you had enough, the district is spending more money on more standardized tests. The Seattle Public School district wants to buy Amplify’s mClass Beacon to implement it district-wide in 2016. It is to be administered at the end of the school year but because of the testing that is already set into place, there is no time for students to take it in May or June so it will be given in February.
The cost of the pilot program implemented in 50 schools in 2014 came just under $250k. That is under the $250,000 threshold required for approval by the Seattle school board. Coincidence? I think not. This was the same tactic used when folks at the Stanford Center decided we needed more of the MAP test. The school board and public were not given the opportunity to discuss, debate or vote on either battery of tests.
Now the district wants to implement Amplify across the district at an estimated cost of $433,160.
Unfortunately there are those at the Stanford Center who have different agendas from that of the public’s best interest, but more on that later.
I asked Leonie Haimson with NPE, who is a founding member of Parents Across America and who also founded Class Size Matters, recently about Amplify. It was to be a part of a data collection and sharing system in New York State called in-Bloom until parents pressured the state to pull out of the agreement.
In Leonie Haimson’s post InBloom and the need to protect student privacy:
The backers of inBloom pitched the project as an effort to help students by providing more personalized learning tools, yet there are no proven benefits to online learning and there are huge risks involved in commercializing this data and storing it on a Just when you thought you had enough, the Seattle Public School district bought another standardized test, Amplify | Seattle Education: