Recent days have seen an uptick in conversations about online Competency-based Education or CBE, the scary wave of educational transformation rapidly sweeping over the country. BCPS students, teachers, and parents are at the front edge of this wave with STAT.
Here is a post by a parent of a public school student who advocates for doing much more than just opting out of end-of-the-year tests.
From Wrench in the Gears (A Skeptical Parent’s Thoughts on Digital Curriculum): Stop! Don’t opt out. Read this first.
National education expert Diane Ravitch recently linked to the blog.
One of the main “benefits” of our 1:1 initiative, according to Dr. Dance, is that it would allow children to be assessed anytime, anywhere. We’re spending millions on contracts to use and sometimes develop computer-based assessments at the end of every unit.
If you have any doubts about whether the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) replacement, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), is ripe for computer-based personalized learning assessments, iNACOL, the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, a major trade group, and its partners love ESSA. Review the slides from this recent webinar hosted by the iNACOL president, iNACOL’s VP for Federal and State Policy, and KnowledgeWorks’ Senior Director of National Policy and you’ll begin to understand why.
During a keynote presentation at iNACOL’s annual meeting, our own Superintendent said:
“The other conversion was this whole idea around the assessment conversion. There’s a lot of talk around the country about that right now. Let’s get away from this idea of paper and pencil, you know, multiple-choice assessments. How do we assess our students without even stopping class, space and time to do that? Great teachers do this all the time with formative assessments. But, we also know, in order to personalize learning for young people, we should be able to assess students at any moment, to figure out what level they’re on, what standards they’ve mastered, so they can move along the continuum as [sic] appropriately.”
Watch here. Go to minute 33.
Read, share these links, ask questions, and follow the suggestions from “Wrench in the Gears” that already apply to those of us in BCPS:
~ If your school offers a device for home use, decline to sign the waiver for it and/or pay the fee.
What happens if you don’t sign the waiver for middle and high school? BCPS needs to make that clear. We also have elementary students using a 1:1 (that means their own) device at school in first grade! Many parents are totally unaware how much time students are spending with it, or what they are doing. Turns out, BCPS leadership doesn’t know how much time students are spending on it either (at approximately 1:00, we hear that there’s “very limited research” on safe screentime in an educational context)!
~ Refuse to allow your child’s behavioral or social-emotional data to be entered into third-party applications. (e.g. Class Dojo)
Ask questions about all the third-party applications being used in BCPS. Class Dojo tracks behavior. Check out whether Common Sense Media’s privacy evaluation team has rated the applications. Subscribe to the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy’s blog and check out their back-to-school advice.
~ Refuse in-class social networking programs (e.g. EdModo).
We’re curious about how this is being used in BCPS classrooms and what other social networking software is used. In general, parents should be very cautious about introducing social media to children – BCPS’ own advice for parents says so. Parents should have a say about when and how their children are introduced to social networking for school.
~ Set a screentime maximum per day/per week for your child.
Research has shown that when children are spending more than a half-hour per day on the computer, learning outcomes are worse. The evaluation of STAT thus far has NO data on learning outcomes. Read the JHU STAT reports here. Ask for homework alternatives that do not require use of a computer. Ask for textbooks so that reading can be done without more time on the computer.
~ Opt young children out of in-school screentime altogether and request paper and pencil assignments and reading from print books (not e-books).
Parents Across America (PAA), a grassroots, non-partisan organization, has a number of useful links. Here are some questions to ask your school.
~ Begin educating parents about the difference between “personalized learning” modules that rely on mining PII (personally-identifiable information) to function properly and technology that empowers children to create and share their own content.
Dreambox and iReady, so-called “personalized learning” software, are being used in BCPS. Neither empowers children to create their own content. See this link on iReady, and this one; this link concerns Dreambox. Look in BCPSone. Ask your kids. Ask your teachers and principals. What else are they using? Log in at home with your child if you can and check it out – if you don’t have access to a computer at home, ask your school to show you the programs in action. You have a right to know what your child is doing at school.
~ Insist that school budgets prioritize human instruction and that hybrid/blended learning not be used as a backdoor way to increase class size or push online classes.
The County Auditor’s report of 2015 notes that class sizes have increased with the implementation STAT. STAT teachers used to be classroom teachers – they are no longer, instead focusing on professional development. Hybrid and blended learning have a host of definitions, but here are some examples of how it is playing out so far for kids as young as first grade in BCPS.
http://lighthouse.bcps.org/reflections/february-26th-2016
http://lighthouse.bcps.org/reflections/flipped-learning-to-differentiate
“Most of the nation’s classrooms have about 30 students in them. How can a teacher personalize and customize unless you leverage technology? In BCPS we have five-year journey to go 1:1 in grades K-12 to where every single kid has a device.”
But wait. Respected education policy center NEPC at the University of Colorado says:
“Smaller classes are particularly effective at raising achievement levels of low-income and minority children.”
STAT-us BCPS 
Parents should easily be able to find out what apps/online programs are being used in the classroom, see the contracts between the vendor and BCPS, know what the vendor is collecting on the child (PII? deidentified data? aggregate only?), what the limits are on what the vendor does with that data (again, contract – how long are the data kept, what happens if the company goes out of business?), what are the plans in case of a data breach, etc.
For that matter, what data does BCPS collect on my child? What are the data points, what are the definitions of those elements, what is the district data governance plan (governs who has access to what data, for how long is it kept and in what form – electronic, paper, etc.), what’s the plan in case of a data breach?
Under what conditions are BCPS data used for research, and by whom?
Who has received the child’s PII, and under what FERPA exception? What’s the outcome of those disclosures?
LikeLike