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I would personally be refusing consent at every turn and then some. Don't teachers have enough on their plates as it is without also having to play a part they aren't qualified to do in evaluating their students? Then there is the whole privacy and personal data concerns...
I do think teachers should be able to spot concerns with the children they are teaching, but leave the evaluations to the professionals who are legally, and morally going to uphold the privacy rights of your child, and act in the child's best interests, not those of a massive corporation.
As a parent: not while there is breath in my body. There is no guarantee of who the information is shared with, according to Pearson's own blurbs who they share with may change without notice, so finding out who currently is on the list is immaterial. Those shared with, by the way, are not bound to the confidentiality that binds Pearson. For example, if Pearson is given data that teenage angst ridden Bobby is ADHD, suffers from depression, or has the traits of a budding psychopath they aren't allowed to tell the CIA or CNN that but they do have permission to share the information with their subcontractor Gary's Great Graphs. Pearson has guaranteed they will treat the information confidentially and has made all their employees sign a non-disclosure agreement, but oops, Gary's Great Graph's hasn't. Fast forward 20 years, Bobby has resolved in a positive manner whatever his teen age issues were and is a normal, productive citizen. He decides to run for a political office and some really good investigative reporter gets a hold of Gary's Great Graph's copy of Bobby's data, which isn't protected. That is a way simplistic example - but you get the picture.
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There are some school employment sites that make you take a behavior test when you apply for a job.
I have no clue what they use that for and it states that they keep the results on file for a few years.
It's supposed to let the schools know if you'll be a "good fit".
Pearson is big on gathering data now all via their various tests for both students and teachers.
And the more data they get the more data they want.
There's quite a bit of hyperbole and misunderstanding in that piece. First, the BASC and other measures like it have been used for years as an observation form that is part of a psycho-educational assessment battery. Long before Common Core, teachers were asked to fill these out when a child was evaluated because otherwise the evaluation wouldn't contain data from the people who actually work with the child in school. I've done dozens of them over the years, they ask teachers to indicate the frequency of certain behaviors in a child on a gradual scale. That data is tabulated and included in the psycho-ed report. These are typically not done on every child, though there may be districts that do that - I just can't imagine why. The BASC provides quantitative data that supplements qualitative teacher input for evaluations. Evaluations may be done for any of a number of reasons - most of the ones I have done were in connection to diagnosis for a learning problem.
In this case, it looks like the test is being re-normed, which all standardized measures need to do in order to be valid. When norming a test, you need a sample population that reflects the overall demographics of who will be taking the test. These sample populations often consist of a small number - maybe in the hundreds or thousands - so selecting who is part of the sample is done carefully. In all likelihood, this school has been chosen as being representative of a segment of the overall population.
Now I can understand why people might not want to participate, and I'm certainly no fan of the grip that Pearson has attained on education, but this is a practice that has gone on for generations. The alarmism of the article is misleading and ill-informed.
There's quite a bit of hyperbole and misunderstanding in that piece. First, the BASC and other measures like it have been used for years as an observation form that is part of a psycho-educational assessment battery. Long before Common Core, teachers were asked to fill these out when a child was evaluated because otherwise the evaluation wouldn't contain data from the people who actually work with the child in school. I've done dozens of them over the years, they ask teachers to indicate the frequency of certain behaviors in a child on a gradual scale. That data is tabulated and included in the psycho-ed report. These are typically not done on every child, though there may be districts that do that - I just can't imagine why. The BASC provides quantitative data that supplements qualitative teacher input for evaluations. Evaluations may be done for any of a number of reasons - most of the ones I have done were in connection to diagnosis for a learning problem.
But in the case of psych testing at school, parents normally give permission, right?
We only want to give jobs to people who have learned to be properly subservient in school.
What do you think this is, a Free Country?
Didn't our economists learn to be properly subservient? None of them have suggested that 700 year old double-entry be mandatory in our schools in the last 50 years. Of course it can't make more sense now that we all have cheap computers.
I had a math teacher call Mr Pearson, and I spent most of my lesson on a special little table outside the classroom, in the corridor due to bad behavior. His assessment of me would be that I would benefit from a Pearson Behavioral Assessment.
There's quite a bit of hyperbole and misunderstanding in that piece. First, the BASC and other measures like it have been used for years as an observation form that is part of a psycho-educational assessment battery. Long before Common Core, teachers were asked to fill these out when a child was evaluated because otherwise the evaluation wouldn't contain data from the people who actually work with the child in school. I've done dozens of them over the years, they ask teachers to indicate the frequency of certain behaviors in a child on a gradual scale. That data is tabulated and included in the psycho-ed report. These are typically not done on every child, though there may be districts that do that - I just can't imagine why. The BASC provides quantitative data that supplements qualitative teacher input for evaluations. Evaluations may be done for any of a number of reasons - most of the ones I have done were in connection to diagnosis for a learning problem.
In this case, it looks like the test is being re-normed, which all standardized measures need to do in order to be valid. When norming a test, you need a sample population that reflects the overall demographics of who will be taking the test. These sample populations often consist of a small number - maybe in the hundreds or thousands - so selecting who is part of the sample is done carefully. In all likelihood, this school has been chosen as being representative of a segment of the overall population.
Now I can understand why people might not want to participate, and I'm certainly no fan of the grip that Pearson has attained on education, but this is a practice that has gone on for generations. The alarmism of the article is misleading and ill-informed.
I understand the observational evaluations have been done in the past, when required, as part of a full, professional evaluation, but what I took from the information I read, is that now they want to have the freedom to do it, just because, and that any data collected will be shared with 3rd parties, who may not be restricted by privacy policies from sharing and using that information further still.
I still stand by my belief that while teachers are capable of spotting potential problems and observing student behavior, that they are not trained and qualified to be making professional behavioral statements that can have a profound influence on he rest of their lives if that information ends up being a judging factor in college admissions or employment eligibility.
If the teacher is filling out an assessment as part of a thorough professional evaluation of a student, then it is weighted against the experience, knowledge and observations of a trained professional, rather than a standalone observation from a teacher being out on record. That's not even getting into the time and attention the teacher is required to take away from actually teaching and attending to the rest of their class.
...and on an entirely different note, from those snippets of the measures they use to assess behavioral problems, I would have been in big trouble! Instead, I was an A student, never disruptive to the rest of the class, who doodled constantly through lessons, but could still answer a question the teacher asked of me without pause. I stared out of windows, did math homework in English class and did my English assignments at 2am when inspiration struck.
My teachers never felt my 'seeming inattention in class' was an issue or cause for concern. I did well on my exams and got assignments completed on time. I think if I was in school today and under this kind of scrutiny, my experience with education and learning would be vastly different.
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