Part 5: Classroom Video Camera Project . . . Who Benefits? Who Loses?

Part 5: Classroom Video Camera Project . . . Who Benefits? Who Loses?

Jim Horn and Denise Wilburn
Part 4 and links to previous posts

Does anyone think that children’s educational data stored in third party corporate “cloud” computers are secure?  No one in his right mind would answer yes to that one, and yet the U. S. Department of Education forced through changes to FERPA regulations in 2011 to allow student and teacher data to be collected, stored, and shared this way.

Why?  It has everything to do with how philanthrocapitalists like Bill Gates and the supporting cast of Silicon Valley hedge funders see the future of education, economic, and social policy.  It is a future that demands more data sliced and diced and sorted by adaptive algorithms into retrievable and sharable info-chunks that will be used to quantify and track the value of all humans from the first standardized tests in Pre-K to adulthood and retirement.

Think we are kidding about Pre-K? 

Check out this ad from Rupert Murdoch’s Amplify, Inc., which is now represented by former NCLB architect and Pearson lobbyist, Sandy Kress.  Amplify, Inc. is betting big time on its standardized test for Pre-K, C-PALLS:

The earlier, the better.

Better prepare children for kindergarten and beyond by combining C-PALLS pre-K assessments with grouping, reporting and targeted activities that help monitor ongoing social, emotional, early literacy, science and math development.

But we digress.  Big Data means Big Money, and the predators of Wall Street and the profiteers of the educational-testing complex will not be deterred easily in their pursuit of social control, economic power, and new revenue gushers. 

When Bill Gates became the unofficial Secretary of Education in 2009, with Arne Duncan as his hapless lapdog, it became necessary to weaken child protections under FERPA in order for the emerging concept of Cloud Computing to increase its footprint. Race to the Top demanded as much.

The visionaries at Microsoft clearly have no reservations about the potential for  a dystopian future they are setting up, and if child protections have to be eviscerated in the process, so be it.  Here are a few thoughts shared by Christian Belady, Microsoft inventor and father of the Gates Cloud, whose grandiosity clearly moves far beyond any petty security issues that parents or teachers may be concerned with:

“I believe the cloud is going to be a forcing function for political and economic change on the global community. When I really think about it, what’s fascinating is that I see the cloud as more of an organism. This organism, the cloud, is getting more and more pervasive around the globe. It’s going to mutate around countries that aren’t cloud-friendly and isolate them. Slowly, businesses inside of those countries will start wanting to move their operations outside the country because they won’t be able to compete. As a result, countries will have to change their policies. The cloud then may become a forcing function that will help create a cloud-friendly policy.”

Concluding Thoughts

Formed through war, the scrappy conversations of our thoughtful forefathers, and an ongoing interpretation of “equal protection” in our courts, the protection of human rights, both civil and individual, cannot be taken for granted. Each time we give up a right, it is gone forever.  Each time we say “big deal, so they are storing, using, and selling data about my child, who cares, I’ve got bigger worries,” we allow children to become objects of profiteering and to be sorted for futures chosen by others. 

When unelected officials working for monied interests are allowed to change even one human right, one clause of law, one phrase of our Constitution without going through the rigorous legislative and judicial processes of that our democracy demands, we create the possibilities for losing many personal rights, local public control of our communities, and eventually our national form of democratic government.  

Desensitizing all of us to invasive data gathering can begin with relinquishing our children’s right to privacy as they grow and develop as individuals and the future citizens of, hopefully, a stronger and better democracy—if we choose to make it so.  We agree with David Tyack:  “Children may be about 20 percent of the population, but they are 100 percent of the future.”

Tennessee Classroom Video Camera Project Spending Millions to Extend Teacher and Student Surveillance

Tennessee Classroom Video Camera Project Spending Millions to Extend Teacher and Student Surveillance

Jim Horn and Denise Wilburn

In a move to quell growing concern among parents over security issues related to new Common Core testing and the collection of student data, Tennessee Commissioner of Education Kevin Huffman recently assured skeptical lawmakers and parents that “the federal government is prohibited from establishing a student-level database that would contain assessment data for every student.” 

Despite these assurances, the TN Department of Education has been engaged in a multimillion dollar experiment since 2013 to record, store, and share video and audio data from Tennessee classrooms in 19 schools systems across the state.  And even though the video data is not stored by the federal government, it is stored by a third party corporate vendor with close links to the Gates Foundation.

Although the classroom camera experiment has remained unannounced to the public, the TN Department of Education began placing The thereNow Classroom Observation and Performance Feedback System in Tennessee classroom during the 2012-13 school year.  Schools Matter became aware of this issue through concerned sources in a number of counties where the use of cameras has been recently to teachers.

A search of past press releases by the Department found no previous mention of the $3,700,737 Gates Foundation grant issued to TDOE in November 2012 to “support multiple measures of effective teaching including the use of student surveys and video recordings of best practices of teaching.” However, SM did find a prominent press release announcing a smaller grant for another important program, though much less likely to generate as much controversy: Tennessee Gets $3 Million to Grow Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program. 

Since early 2013, the powerful network-ready portable cameras have been placed in 55 schools of 19 districts in Tennessee, and state officials indicate that more are on the way.   Earlier this week, the State Department of Education agreed to send the list of participating systems in the classroom camera project, along with the total amount of the Gates grant and any record of a public announcement of the grant.  The following day, however, Communications Director, Kelli Gauthier indicated that SM must file an Open Records Request before this information will be released. 

According to Courtney Seiler, director for the camera project for the TN Department of Education, the purpose of the program is to provide cameras so that school systems may use them as optional tools for teacher evaluation, professional development, monitoring of struggling teachers, and for the capture of lessons by teachers of high performing students so that the lessons may be archived and shared via the Web-based library with other participating systems in the state.  

Six separate accounts are available for each camera, which allows up to six “keyholders” to operate and upload video data. The holders of the camera keys, whether evaluators or teachers, have the capacity to monitor and record occurrences of student behavior with comments that cue the exact moment of off-task behavior, flagging attention, verbal miscues by teachers, or any other observable behavior deemed worthy of archiving. 

Seiler indicated that the choice of cameras was made after it was determined that most Tennessee schools do not have the bandwidth required to utilize there.Now’s top of the line camera, the iris LiveView, which allows for real time remote video monitoring and camera control, as well two-way audio sharing so that an observer in a remote location may provide corrective commands through wireless earpieces designed for teachers to wear during recording (“firewall must be configured to allow access for: www.thereNow.net (IP= 129.123.46.32).” 

With Tennessee now spending millions to upgrade school computer networks so that online Common Core testing can move forward, it seems only a matter of time until the more advanced cameras will be made available in Tennessee schools.

Presently, however, Tennessee is using the portable DUO camera (see video below), which is a very powerful tool as well:

Capturing classroom video can be a challenge. Between camera set up to getting a playing file onto an online environment, off the shelf solutions just don’t give users a truly turn key solution.

The insight DUO allows teachers to capture video with one touch! By inserting their personal recording key, the classroom camera captures two discrete angles of video, and three discrete audio channels (including one from an hd wireless microphone). To stop the recording the teacher simply removes the recording key.

At the end of the lesson or day, the classroom camera is connected to the internet and the video automatically gets uploaded to the user’s account that was used to capture the video. By giving each teacher their own recording key, you can freely share the classroom camera during the day and the insight DUO manages the security, transcoding, and uploading of the files – all to the applicable user accounts.

Once a recording has been made, the video and audio data is uploaded to a third party server at an undisclosed location in Utah, where the camera vendor, thereNow.net, is located.  Those six individuals holding accounts may log in to review the videos and may share the videos with others who have thereNow accounts.

The six key accounts for each camera may be assigned to administrator or teachers.  In Washington County, for instance, where cameras are used as a tool for recording teacher observations that are part of teacher evaluations, administrators control camera keys, even though teachers may request their own video copies of observations, which may be downloaded to portable drives that they may keep. 

With parental concern over potential student data sharing now a national issue, we asked Washington County Assistant Superintendent, Bill Flanary, if parents had been consulted or if parental consent forms had made available to parents.  Dr. Flanary indicated there were no plans to establish informed consent.  “It did not occur to us,” he said, “there are so many surveillance cameras in the schools, what difference will another camera make?”

In Part II, we will examine the privacy issues for both students and teachers from the educators’ perspective, and we will examine in more detail responses to this the collection and storage of student video data.