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How To Think About Student Data Privacy

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We are currently in the formative years of an EdTech revolution. A complete digital overhaul of our classrooms is inevitable. New technologies promise to transform education in positive ways. This is not about the Surface, the iPad, Chromebooks and smartboards. Those are all just delivery mechanisms with great PR and marketing departments. The real revolution involves information technologies that rely on data analytics.

Consider the adaptive potential of these technologies. In the same way that Google’s predictive algorithms can anticipate your search terms, digital learning platforms can anticipate a learner’s needs, understand a learner’s struggles and provide tons of information to a learner’s teachers. The great teachers of the future, armed with exceptionally precise information about their students’ performance, will be more effective than we can even begin to imagine.

Think about it this way: classroom teachers are always collecting informal assessment data as they look around the room and evaluate subtle cues about individual students. This is part of what makes for great teaching. But no human teacher can constantly monitor every student during every moment of the learning experience. A computer can. That’s why, when I dream about the future of education, I imagine opening my smart phone and reading Fitbit-like charts about students as I walk across campus to the classroom. Those 10-15 minutes I currently spend feeling out the room at the beginning of each class will no longer be necessary. I can dedicate that time to covering material that leads me, in a more precise manner, toward the day’s learning objectives. It will also allow the students to present more authentically, to be clearly distinguished from whatever preconceived assumptions I had about them.

There’s more. It goes beyond a single classroom or an individual teacher. When you think about how much we can learn about learning through technologies that provide so much student performance data, so quickly, things get really exciting. Top researchers have never had access to the quantity or quality of data that will suddenly be at their fingertips. The trouble is that all of this data collection raises tons of privacy concerns.

Privacy is a big deal these days. Student privacy is an especially big deal. You probably heard about the inBloom fiasco. Even with funding from the Gates and Carnegie foundations, the nonprofit couldn’t survive the paranoid zeitgeist that followed the Edward Snowden story. They discovered that when it comes to school, things can blow up quickly. The whole episode likely provided some momentum for the Student Digital Privacy and Parental Rights Act of 2015, which went to congress back in April. The act aims to create federal legislation that prevents companies from using individual student data for commercial purposes. The White House supported the bill. President Obama mentioned student privacy in his State of The Union Address and covered the topics in detail when talking to the FTC earlier this year.

Still, there’s a bit of ironic absurdity here. Naively, we seem more or less okay with the idea that just about every social interaction our kids have is mediated and tracked through a corporate-controlled commercial filter—every text message, email, video conference call, Snapchat, Instagram etc.—but we’re outraged at the idea that the same thing might happen during the school day. Huh? That bizarre and fantastical school versus “the real world” double standard will just never make sense to me. Are we really content to displace all of our Utopian fantasies on to our children? Have we forgotten that we’re allowed to regulate the adult world to create the civilization of our dreams too? Apparently.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. In the United States, School comes with a whole bunch of cultural baggage. Turn on the Disney channel for just a few moments of tween sitcom television and you can see how young TV viewers are already receiving their first introduction to familiar school narrative tropes. There are characters like the vain principal/administrator and the cool male teacher—stereotypes like bullies, geeks, mean-girls, and stoners are pervasive. Soon the Disney viewers graduate to teen movies and soap operas. Life’s everyday ups and downs are continuously contextualized within a mythical school landscape.

This mythical school landscape remains more or less consistent. Similar characters populate every fictional rendering of the school experience. Rebel Without A Cause, The Breakfast Club, Freaks And Geeks, Glee, Superbad, Girl Meets World. There are certain things that almost every teen novel, TV show, and movie have in common because school is always tangled-up with our concept of what it means to be a teenager. And the self-defining journey through our teenaged years may be the American rite of passage. Our adult identities are, therefore, constructed in relationship with this vision of school.

A century of psychology research has taught us that our identities are always partially constructed in relationship to stories that we collectively share within our communities. You can see this clearly among isolated religious groups: ritualized life transitions are directly tied to myth. And although it is mostly unintentional in the secular world, the relationship between narrative and maturation functions the same way. Just replace scripture with pop culture. We make sense of our real life experiences through the structures of collective storytelling—trying to fit our everyday adventures into cookie cutter narrative shapes. Which means, even as we grow older, the teenaged story of the mythical school landscape remains a part of our adult identity (a concept that was amusingly dramatized in Back To The Future).

If the social milieu of the mythical school experience is such a foundational pillar of our identities, it seems likely that the pedagogical structures would be also. It is understandably difficult for us to imagine a world without the screech of chalk against the blackboard, raised hands and letter grades, single file lines, shameful walks to the principal’s office, number two pencils, and standardized tests. In fact, it is difficult for us to imagine ourselves in a world without these academic customs. My conception of “me”—the person I like to imagine myself to be—is partially formulated in relationship to school. No wonder we are so slow to accept technological change in education. Unconsciously, it feels like a reformation of the self.

I’m reminded of an adage shared among Psychotherapists: when sitting down on a long airline flight, always lie to your neighbor about your profession. If they know what you do for a living, they’ll either spend the whole flight trying to get you to agree that their sister-in-law is certifiably crazy, or they won’t talk to you at all for fear you’re analyzing every word and forming a diagnosis. It is the second half that pertains to my point: Even the most extraverted among us are protective of the most vulnerable parts of our identity. We clam up quickly when we think someone is paying too close attention. And in the American psyche, where the seeds of both insecurity and self-confidence are sown during our elementary and high school years, this is precisely the kind of paranoia that is triggered by education technologies that collect student data. We don’t want other people up in our personal business. We’ve all got too many school-days skeletons in our closest.

The whole Student Data Privacy issue, therefore, is not just about Google-style data analytics or big-brother type surveillance fears, it is also about some deep neurotic relationship we have to the very institution of school itself.

Maybe this will shed some light on how one company, which offers a kind of digital force field which buffers the contact educational apps have with the students themselves, has managed to go from a presence in just 4 schools to a presence in 44,000 schools in just 3 years. It must make districts feel just a little less vulnerable.

Clever, the software platform that NPR’s Anya Kamenetz called: “this app you’ve never heard of,” is now in 1 out of 3 schools in the United States. That should make your jaw drop; that’s some serious adoption. What does Clever do? It is a software portal that “K-12 school districts use to simplify and secure the process of creating accounts with learning applications.” No more teachers randomly signing up students for free apps without anyone reading the EULA. No more surrendering students’ personal information to a revolutionary new platform that gets frustratingly buggy as soon as you try to implement it under real classroom circumstances. Clever “creates a secure channel for districts to provide student roster data (student name, grade level, class name, etc.) to” approved learning apps.

Clever CEO Tyler Bosmeny says, “EdTech needs to be far more secure than the levels we tolerate as consumers.” And apparently, despite the fact that Clever is backed by the same VCs who back the commercial data-mining products we are protecting our children from—Sequoia, Peter Theil, Google Ventures, etc.—something about it seems to put schools at ease. Clever makes a whole lot of schools feel a lot less vulnerable. It should. It is a technology-based solution to the student data privacy issue that functions well at the local level. By creating a single place where schools and districts can control the flow of data between learning apps and students, it empowers districts and schools to self-regulate.

The big question is whether or not an innovative technological approach, like Clever’s, will keep our kids safer than a legislation-based approach? That’s unclear. After all, this is the same question we’re struggling with in every corner of our economy. It is the essential political issue of our time, polarizing the U.S. into “libertarians” and “socialists.” Do we let the market self-regulate as we transition to new technological paradigms? Or do we erect societal borders, only within which we’ll allow free trade? I don’t have the answer. We’ve got to work this one out together. We’ve got to settle on a new collective identity for this oncoming era of data and information. It’s a tough decision. Whatever we decide for our children shapes generations to come. And right now, we’re all still having nightmares about showing up, in just underwear, on the day we’ve got to make the big decision.

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