<p>They are keeping track of anything and everything about students. Attendance records, extra curriculars, test scores, homework completion, learning disabilities…
School districts may be sharing their portion of student records with private companies selling goods and services, apparently without parents opting in.
Perhaps they see it as a way to increase funding - because more tracking is always good for kids?
:rolleyes:</p>
<p>Not thrilled with a privacy policy worse than facebook.</p>
<p>It *is *terrifying.
( oh well, the post I was responding to, disappeared)
:o</p>
<p>My kids graduated from high school sometime ago, but over the past ten years the emphasis on tracking, on evaluations developed by large companies selling their products to school districts, on evaluating educators on how their students do on these computerized tests, has really accelerated.</p>
<p>If the teacher has a reasonable class size, if the teacher is involved in developing and selecting curriculum, shouldn’t the teacher and parents be able to work out what will support and challenge the child without the Gates foundation et.al. deciding what that will look like?</p>
<p>My daughter attended the same elementary school as the Gates progeny. The only tests she was given were periodic spelling and math quizzes. Very brief paper & pencil tests.
So why does Gates think that other kids need computerized exams up the yin yang?</p>
<p>The better to target them, although I don’t remember if school districts have social security numbers, but they probably do, for identification purposes.</p>
<p>You need primary keys in databases for consistency. Better privacy implementations use generated keys.</p>
<p>This was an issue in NH where a motorist refused to provide a social security number for a drivers license. Not sure if there was a lawsuit but I’d guess that there probably was. The state implemented an alternative generated identification number for people that didn’t want their social security number used.</p>
<p>BTW, I think that this falls along the lines of medical database privacy. I’d like to see state or federal laws prohibiting this sort of thing. If you don’t want this stuff out there, use private schools or homeschool or make sure that your local school board officials know how you feel about student privacy.</p>
<p>I think we have learned that once information gets out there, you can’t get it back, and it is one thing for people to decide that for themselves, but for a school district to take it upon themselves to share it, seems wrong.</p>
<p>It also seems discriminatory, because the individuals that are funding these educational testing companies, are more likely to have their own children in private schools where their privacy is protected, than in the public schools which are being exploited.</p>