Data and Education Panel at Eyebeam’s “New Topics in Social Computing”
Tressie McMillan Cottom
Data and privacy have been translated as market issues, individual issues and technological issues. That is really bizarre for someone like me. I am likely not here speaking to you today, in my capacity as an academic who is also black and female, had some data about the disparate impact of segregated schools on black children’s life chances never happened. As most of you likely know, the case was
Brown versus the Topeka Board of Education. Psychologist Kenneth Clark testified before the high court. His testimony drew on his extensive studies of the psychological impact of racism and segregation on black children. These are the infamous “doll studies” in which black children choose a black or white doll. There was a real debate among the NAACP counsel about whether using social science in this way was frivolous if not outright counterproductive. Who cared about an experiment conducted on black children in black schools using dolls, for goodness sake? The Court concluded that " [w]hatever may have been the extent of psychological knowledge at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson, this finding is amply supported by modern authority ." (Beggs 1995) A few things jump out at me about this moment in time. There was no discussion of the children’s privacy. Privacy in this instance isn’t even a debate!
I take away a lot from this little historical vignette. First, privacy is socially contingent. Audrey Watters has an excellent summary of this contingency . It relies on the mores of a time and a place. And the mores of a time and place (at least since the great transformation of modern social systems) tend to be intricately bound up in economies and markets. If privacy is different at one time as opposed to another time, we should ask: what conditions are driving our contemporary definition of privacy? So, let’s see. We are trying to form currencies with States in Europe. We’re debating police’s extra-judicial murder of black people caught on tape. We’re actually suggesting that gay marriage is the end of times. We’re selling college degrees. We’re busting unions in Wisconsin. We’re agitating for living wages or even a life without wages at all. This is the context of our “privacy” right now. Privacy isn’t being debated in a vacuum.
There really isn’t a single definition of privacy being used in our discussions of students, data, and schools. Take for example, some homeschooling advocates like the Home School Legal Defense Association. HSLDA ties their definition of student privacy to the religious authority of parents over their children (Estrada 2014). This movement seems to be tied to the backlash to perceived “diversity” curriculums in public K-12 schools. HSLDA lobbied hard against InBloom as an example of federal overreach designed to usurp the God-given right of parental dominion over their children. HSLDA said at the time that, “ Education should not be an Orwellian attempt to track students from preschool through assimilation into the workforce .
Many progressive organizations agreed with that interpretation. And, I’m personally worried about privately controlled databases of every U.S. student. But when I’m

agreeing with the HSLDA, it is usually a sign that I need to step back and think about life. The HSLDA has also protested programs like Head Start on the basis that they
“allegedly assist children from birth to kindergarten” when in truth
“ institutionalized Pre-K will be a launching pad for policy makers’ personal political agendas and “politically correct” ideologies ”. In that, HSLDA shared opposing counsel’s argument against de-segregation in Brown v. Board: it was an overreach, supported by intrusive data collection of students, and designed to inculcate children with liberal ideas of equality between black and white children. If we share a definition of privacy in schools that the HSLDA can get behind then maybe we should all think about life.
Parents with the economic and social means to do so sometimes use privacy as a shield against the encroachment of progressivism in schools. Then there is the competition for “good schools” among wealthy families. Families who can afford to do so buy into neighborhoods that afford their children vastly superior resources to secure access to elite colleges, elite social circles and ultimately elite social positions in their children’s’ adult lives. Dumi Lewis’ new book “ Inequality in the Promised
Land” is a good intervention here. And New York may be the apotheosis of this with expensive and competitive schools starting in utero . Privacy in those contexts can be about defending those parents’ “choices” for their children, choices that are made at the expense of parents who cannot afford them for their children (boyd 2015). danah boyd asked recently, “What would it take to get people to care about how we keep building out infrastructure and backdoors to track low-status youth in new ways ?” That’s a good question and one not being asked enough. What if privacy is euphuism for individualism, the politically correct cousin of rational actor theories that drive markets that is fundamentally at odds with even the idea of school as a public good? If that is possible (and, I of course, think it is not only possible but the case at hand), then how can we talk about students’ privacy while preserving the integrity of data to observe and measure inequality? I suppose that is where I am on current debates about privacy and data in K-12: are we talking about everyone’s privacy or are we talking about new ways to mask injustice? Do you get to a Brown v. Board when schools that are also businesses own school data? I suspect not, because the rules governing data are different in markets than they are in public trusts. That is particularly clear in privatization and higher education where forprofit colleges’ have transformed student data into market research, complicating students’ rights and privacy. For example, a “lead” at a for-profit college never dies.
A name, some data points, a phone number is captured through various intersecting means. And once it is captured and sold into the for-profit college model it has more lives than a cat. These data points expose not only the person attached to it but the people who are attached to them. When a for-profit college recruiter gets someone on the phone based on one of these phantom leads, the recruiter does not care if the person is from whom the data was harvested. There is no way to get out of that lead’s life cycle. Everyone that lead touches becomes implicated in its life cycle. You are transformed into a prospective student through this process. There are no interventions possible through existing school privacy regulations. Because the

student is a customer and that transforms the nature of the relationship and the politics that protects it. When public trusts become markets our means of regulation become pitiful. And, the most marginalized always rely on public trusts more than those who because of inheritance (be that wealth or phenotype) do better in markets. That isn’t to say that I am not concerned about how student data is being mined in schools. Instead, I question the assumptions about privacy that seem to be the only way we currently have to talk about how deeply enmeshed schools are in markets. Can we talk about privacy in a way that is about justice rather than individualism? If we cannot then privacy may be as big a threat to students as data mining because they are two heads of the same beast.
Testing and Categories
Testing in schools has always been about control. It may not have introduced the idea of disciplining students (anything institutionalized is about discipline; god help me I am calling on Foucault here), but testing is sort of the ultimate ends of the whole ideology. Categories, indexes and taxonomies by definition introduce hierarchies – some categories being superior or preferable to others – when the larger context is that there isn’t enough of anything – good teachers, college seats, good jobs – for everyone. I like Jeffrey Alan Johnson on this. His argument is about figuring out how we can move from the idea of open data (or open systems or open anything) to information justice . I hope I do his framework justice when I say that the difference is that open data is prima facie democratizing. That should sound familiar. It is the entire marketing pitch of companies like GoNoodle and its product
HealthTeacher. Its premise is that having more student data makes for a better system. That better system, in turn, “levels the playing field” (a common metaphor in ed-tech land). If it happens that GoNoodle can also increase standardized test scores, then all the better. Bill Fitzgerald does a good break down of this and ends with how open data (rather than GoNoodle’s closed proprietary for-profit ecosystem) would be better (2014). It is an argument for open data as resistance, grounded in a tension over the supremacy of standardized tests. It is a good argument. And I personally support open data and open-source tools. I’m often working on open source software. I do not require my students to use private or forprofit platforms for my class. I try to use open source textbooks and reading materials. I believe in open. I just believe as Johnson does that an uncritical open data politic can “mask the social choices present in data systems” (2014:274). For open data to move beyond democratizing to justice building they would have to consider these social choices. The tools often, as Audrey Watters puts it (2015):
“...involve scientific management. They are designed by white men for white men.
They re-inscribe inequality.” Assumptions about learning, motivations, skills, aspirations, and values are just as embedded in our open tools as they are our institutionalized and market tools. The organizers of this panel asked if data gathering and retention policies are simply inheriting the bad policies around standardized testing. Looked at this way, not only is data gathering inheriting them but some of our responses to those practices are also inheriting them.

Personalized Education: Often ed-tech programs are sold as personalizing education. What’s actually happening here?
Again, personalizing education means different things to different people.
And different people have very political aims but few people are transparent about their politics. The dream is that personalized education will efficiently identify and
“fix” learning preferences. Well, then we’re back to fetishizing efficiency (a market concern) and reinforcing some well-documented baselines of what constitutes learning. Jade Davis points out how adopting technical platforms in classrooms can skew baselines.
When there isn’t a way to account for students with no data because they don’t have computers, the learning baselines are really just measures of those who do. In class recently all of my students spontaneously shared how they had all gone to Kumon as kids. Kumon is one of these education adjacent for-profit companies that promises personalized education. They all rolled their eyes and bonded over how useless Kumon was. But as the sociologist and teacher at the front of the room all I could think was, “holy crap, they’ve all been to Kumon!” There’s reading the trendlines and then there’s seeing them in action in class. Now, on the one hand all of these students were enrolled in a selective competitive college. They were all taking a sociology course in summer school to work the college credit system. They had obviously efficiently achieved some desirable end to a limited good. But I was not sure Kumon had done that for them. They certainly did not think it had. I think the words “omg so boring!” were uttered. Are these personalized education dohickies about learning or are they about status and that special brand of middle class parental anxiety – that’s my question. There is a lot of anxiety about not only doing best for one’s children but being seen doing what is best for one’s children. I think some of this personalized education is about that anxiety. Kumon’s actual tagline in its Google search ad is “give your kid an academic advantage”.

But, even if these platforms do have positive longitudinal effects on learning
(broadly defined here not just as skills acquired but the ability to integrate and use skills), are we saying that is education? We come back to what’s beneath the surface of the desire for an on-demand, personalized learning platform that gets rid of all that inefficient socializing, peerage, relationship-building, experimentation and corrupting ideologies. Why is that something we are all so excited about? I think the answer to that question is the answer to what is happening here.
Give Up On Computers?
First, I agree with Audrey Watters on almost everything. Her recent essay on giving up on computers is poking the points I’ve brought up here. I would add: give up on computers and get up on politics. Computers can be fine. Computers are politics.
Personalized learning may be fine. Personalized learning is politics. Apps are fine.
Apps are politics. Tech is politics. Tech is politics. Tech is politics. Unless and until that is the conversation, then tech is most likely a politics at odd with my own.
Accountability
It is hard for me to imagine accountability in educational institutions that are aggressively pushing to be markets. For me, schooling can be a pole in that double movement we make as our society swings from excess to excess. Schooling can pull us back from a fully marketized self. Schooling can but only to the extent that schools are not also corporations. This is especially acute in higher education where, despite the rhetoric, the only difference between some “real” colleges and a forprofit college is a football team. How can you counterbalance market excesses when you are a produce of market excess? Where does a social movement exert influence in that equation? What does accountability mean in that context? My friend Gaye
Tuchman would argue that accountability in that context is likely to only lead to new accountability regimes, i.e. new forms to categorize learning activities and faculty and students; new taxonomies of acceptable ideas and books and majors and programs; new databases that track new metadata and tasks for new forms of surveillance and norms.
Closing Thoughts
In closing, my talks are often a bummer. I have tried pictures of puppies but they don’t translate well to documents. Instead, I will aim for clarity. I believe education is a human right when education is broadly defined as the right to know and be.
Period. I believe schooling can still do education but it cannot do it and be a market.
Information symmetry is at odds with most market relationships and schools have to be about information symmetrically produced, accessed and imagined. Schools can be valuable to markets without becoming them. I believe there is such a thing as a social category that subsumes markets to societies. I believe those are political choices and only effected by social action. I believe we ultimately win even if I’m not

entirely sure what winning looks like. Being critical even of the things I revere (such as open source platforms) is about being hopeful, not cynical. I think privacy and data should be subsumed to justice. And I think we can have a better conversation if we come up with an explicit language about justice. I am really grateful for the chance to think through some of these things with such smart, generous people.
And, puppies.