The Data Promise: Efficiency, Transparency, Perfection, and Doom

The Data Promise: Efficiency, Transparency, Perfection, and Doom

I wonder that a soothsayer doesn't laugh whenever he sees another soothsayer.--Marcus Tullius Cicero

Silicon Valley's quest to fit us all into a digital straightjacket by promoting efficiency, transparency, and perfection. . . .--Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, CLICK Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism
David Rieff notes that on foreign policy there is considerable overlap between the Tea Party and the Occupy movement. So, too, with opposition to the massive data collection that's tied to the Common Core. The New York Times, to name a prominent example, is currently on a campaign of hysteria to make sure the public accepts the Common Core --in order not to be associated with the Tea Party. It is sad to see Charles Blow and Paul Krugman associating themselves with such a strategy:

Bill Keller: War on the Core

Charles Blow: The Common Core and the Common Good

Paul Krugman: Stupid is a Strategy

Speaking of "Stupid as a Strategy," Krugman should take a look at the New York Times editorials on education.

Fat chance. The Guild protects its own.

And can Fathead Friedman be far behind? Aren't we all waiting with breathless anticipation to know why a cabdriver in Bangalore loves the Common Core? (Truth in Disclosure: Today I received an e-mail from an entrepreneur in Bangalore, wanting to partner with me with software about my 28 Questions About the Common Core: I shall be happy to make freely available -- to yourself and/or to any associates of yours - copies of my prototype OPMS software. . . What you'd get is an Action Plan based on an *integration* of currently available good ideas of all stakeholders to accomplish the chosen 'Mission'. . . . )

The Washington Monthly brings us full circle on the ed deform merry-go-round with this piece by Ed Kilgore: The Race to Implement--or Kill--the Common Core Standards. Note: Kilgore is managing editor for The Democratic Strategist and a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, founded in 1989 as part of the Clinton 'third way democrats' scheme. Current ed reform started with Arkansas governor Bill Clinton joining hands with IBM CEO Lou Gerstner, who founded Achieve. See Why Is Corporate America Bashing Our Public Schools? For the lowdown on all this.

But enough background. Let's talk about current lies. Talking about the Snowden leaks, Rieff notes, "the government outright lied to the public and was caught in its own lies." So, too, with all the pronouncements about inBloom in particular and data collection in general. With education policy, government lies are helped along by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the AFT, NEA, national PTA, and on and on and on, in particular With a media not interested enough to investigate. But they persist in putting up opinion pieces revealing their ignorance.

As Rieff points out, the press concern about the detention of Glenn Greenwald's partner and the forced destruction of Guardian data in the Snowden affair is concern of the elites. It doesn't seem to touch on the privacy rights of individual citizens. Somehow, that sounds too right wing. Ditto concern about collecting data on kindergartners to "personalize" their education experience, part of the techno-utopianism promised to us by Silicon Valley.

Techno-utopianism: the conviction that networking technologies inherently are politically and socially emancipatory and that massive data collection will unleash both efficiency in business and innovation in science -- the idea that Big Data might be your enemy and not your friend is antithetical to everything we have been encouraged to believe. A soon-to-be-attained critical mass of algorithms and data has been portrayed as allowing individuals to customize the choices they make throughout their lives. --David Rieff

That's what the Common Core data collection people are promising: A soon-to-be-attained critical mass of algorithms to customize and totally individualize curriculum choices provided to students throughout their K-12 career.

And there's that bridge for sale in Brooklyn.

Techno-utopianism in the schools runs contrary to learning from life. Techno-solutionists don't live life and learn from it. They learn everything they know from numbers--and then just train the population to accept surveillance as a given and numbers as The Solution, the Only Solution.

Consider the rejoiner of Adam Falk, president of Williams College:

At Williams College, where I work, we've analyzed which educational inputs best predict progress in these deeper aspects of student learning. The answer is unambiguous: By far, the factor that correlates most highly with gains in these skills is the amount of personal contact a student has with professors. Not virtual contact, but interaction with real, live human beings, whether in the classroom, or in faculty offices, or in the dining halls. Nothing else—not the details of the curriculum, not the choice of major, not the student's GPA—predicts self-reported gains in these critical capacities nearly as well as how much time a student spent with professors.

Evgeny Morozov gives a good example of solutionist projects in food preparation: The cook is monitored by several video cameras and chefs are informed whenever they deviate from a chosen recipe. The quest here is to turn the modern kitchen into a temple of modern-day Taylorism, with every task tracked, analyzed, and optimized.

Morozov comments: Chefs are imagined not as autonomous virtuosi or gifted craftsmen but as enslaved robots who should never defy the commands of their operating systems. And he carries it to its logical conclusion--with cameras in all our kitchens so we receive better instructions; then we discover that all our cooking data now resides on a server in California, with insurance companies analyzing just how much saturated fat we consume and adjusting our insurance premiums accordingly.

Horrified? Think about schools. As Morozov points out, "education is one domain where it's easy to fall for the shallow, celebratory accounts of the benefits offered by quantification."

We've only just begun the quantification of public schools. You ain't seen nothing yet.

Design theorist Michael Dobbins has it right: Solutionism presumes rather than investigate the problems that it is trying to solve, reaching "for the answer before the questions have been fully asked." ----Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, CLICK Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age.-- Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

By Susan Ohanian: http://www.susanohanian.org/
Susan Ohanian, a long-time public school teacher, is a freelance writer whose articles have appeared in Atlantic, Parents, Washington Monthly, The Nation, Phi Delta Kappan, Education Week, Language Arts, and American School Board Journal. In 2003, Ohanian received The National Council of Teachers of English's "NCTE Orwell Award" for her outstanding contribution to the critical analysis of public discourse.