High Stakes Testing Makes Surveillance Necessary
By Anthony Cody.
Pearson employees may be off for the weekend but when they get to work tomorrow they will find they have a big mess to deal with. The news broke on Friday that Pearson has been monitoring student social media, and has worked with District officials in several instances to ferret out and reprimand students who they Pearson feels have carried out an “item breach.” Pearson stated that the student had posted a photograph of a test item, but that part was untrue, according to the school official who raised concerns about this with her staff.
According to Bob Braun, his blog suffered a “denial of service” attack after the post was published, making it difficult to access. If that is true, someone with some powerful technical skills is working to defend Pearson’s reputation. But the site is back online now.
Pearson was also featured as a “case study” by one of the services they use, a company called TRACX. These folks were working over the weekend, because the page that showed the case has since been taken down. But not before I took a couple of screenshots, which show them monitoring activists like Wesley Fryer and Katie Lapham.
Another shoe dropped on the subject when Mercedes Schneider shared news that the SBAC test, in use in even more states than the Pearson tests, also has a social media monitoring system. Mercedes Schneider shares the full document here. Here is the SBAC’s suggestion to school district officials:
Sites to MonitorTwitter (https://twitter.com/.) If your school has a Twitter account, you can take advantage of following your students by requesting their @username and/or encouraging them to the follow the school Twitter account.
- To search for conversations and posts about the Field Test, consider the High Stakes Testing Makes Surveillance Necessary - Living in Dialogue:
