Michael Cohen, President of Achieve, Inc., was questioned by members of the Michigan House Subcommittee on the Common Core State Standards. He was asked about data mining. MLive reports:
Several legislators, including Rep. Ellen Cogen Lipton (D-Huntington Woods) and Rep. Margaret O’Brien (R-Portage) expressed concerns about what data on individual students would be disclosed as a result of adopting the Common Core.
“The Common Core standards don’t require anyone to collect any data on any student,” Cohen said. “There is nothing in the standards that calls for, asks for, suggests any data be collected.”
Deflective technique. He’s right the standards themselves don’t require it. The assessments, however, do. As Vince Dean with the Michigan Department of Education pointed out.
Education department official Vince Dean said that the data collected on the Smarter Balanced assessments the state is involved in developing will be the same as the data collected on the MEAP exams now, and that only Michigan education officials would be able to match test scores to individual students.
So Michigan already collects student-level data? That’s what Smarter Balanced has agreed to provide to the U.S. Department of Education. Their MOU with the Department says that they will “develop a strategy to make student-level data that results from the assessment system available on an ongoing basis for research, including for prospective linking, validity, and program improvement studies, subject to applicable privacy laws.”
We already know what the Obama Administration thinks of privacy laws. So again either Vince Dean is saying Michigan is already violating student privacy or he’s being disingenuous.