Fed & EdTech Partnership Pushes Data Mining And Video Games Into Classrooms
By Carole Hornsby Haynes, Ph.D. November 14, 2018 Excerpt from "The Harmful Consequences of Screen Technologies in Texas Education"
The U.S. Department of Education has become increasingly aggressive in demanding more personal data on students for various federal grants.
The Departments of Education and Defense in 2011 created the Federal Learning Registry as an open source infrastructure where education resources are aggregated and shared. For assistance in collecting student data online and storing it in the Learning Registry, they partnered with giant corporations.
In 2014 the federal agency, National Science Foundation, funded the creation of LearnSphere to mine and store millions of educational data points on each student which is available to registered users. The data is collected through interactive tutoring systems, educational games, and open online courses.
The federal government is aggressively encouraging schools to toss out textbooks and spend the money for digital learning, under the guise of saving money. The website states that, “Traditional textbooks are perpetually outdated, forcing districts to re-invest significant portions of their budgets on replacing them.” This is a ploy to create new content with the Marxist/Common Core ideology. Veteran teachers tell us that,
The only new addition to math studies is in statistics/data analyses. Otherwise, we can use good 50-year-old math textbooks just fine and supplement them with statistics lessons. The same can be said for reading and writing. Good reading materials and correct grammar and writing conventions have rare and few changes within those disciplines. There are more changes in science, of course, and some in world history/geography. Good music and good art skills are old, indeed.
The USDE launched Online Education Resources and encouraged states, school districts and educators to use open licensed online curriculum and educational games. Through OER, giant corporations are bypassing the state boards of education and controlling the online “personalized” curriculum content that our American students are being taught. Taxpayers are being forced to fund this unapproved content.
In Texas 2011 Senate Bill 6 allowed schools to purchase non-state-approved online instructional materials and hand the bill to the taxpayers. This is how CSCOPE – Texas’ version of Common Core – sneaked into the curriculum.