Caveon, Pearson's eye on internet...We "cast a really broad and deep net".

Crossposted in General Discussion and also linked to Twitter.

Of course many companies monitor the internet for remarks about their companies...for PR purposes.

But if it involves casting a deep net around students many of whom are minors and not keeping parents informed...that's a whole different matter.

Testing spies admit they “cast a really broad and deep net”

Bob Braun appears to be continuing to use the word "spy" on purpose I think. Pearson, PARCC and CaveOn were appalled at the use of the word.

New Jersey is paying nearly $100,000 to a Utah company to go through hundreds of thousands of social media postings to determine whether children are revealing anything about the PARCC tests. The company, Caveon Test Security, is a subcontractor to Pearson, the British-based publishing company.

Caveon will not, however, reveal how it links what it finds to specific students–like those in at least three New Jersey school districts who were caught up in the testing security dragnet. It also won’t say how many students it has snagged in New Jersey.

$100 million and the company won't answer to those who hired them?

The story generally tries to dismiss the importance of the revelation about Pearson’s monitoring of the social media posts of children, not only in New Jersey but in a dozen other states requiring students to take the PARCC tests. Despite the international reaction of shock and anger to the disclosures, the reporter refers to it as “not new or (sic) uncommon.”

Trust me, Mr. Clark, it is new to a lot of people, mostly parents of children who were unaware of it. I have heard from people throughout the world who, unlike you, do not believe it is not new nor uncommon.

But in downplaying the importance of a story it ignored for four days, the outlet—deliberately or not–all but missed a major piece to the spying puzzle. Some people–we don’t know who they are or how they were vetted or what their credentials are–is reading countless numbers of transmissions posted by children.

Caveon says they " use a bunch of different search technology (sic) to cast a really broad and deep net."

We know it is going on in Maryland as well.

The Brave New World of testing expands

No surprise, really–it’s happening everywhere, including Maryland where a state official said he gets daily reports from Pearson, the publisher of the standardized tests. on what students are saying about testing on their internet accounts.

“PARCC has a very sophisticated system that closely monitors social media for pretty much everything (comments like the one you shared, test item questions that students use cell phones cameras and take),” said Henry Johnson, the state assistant education commissioner in Maryland. The state, like New Jersey, has a contract with Pearson.
Henry R. Johnson, Jr. Henry R. Johnson, Jr.

“We get those reports daily.”

Back to the Watchung NJ monitoring problem:

At the Watchung Hills Regional High School district in Warren, three students were caught up in the “monitoring” and at least one of them was suspended. Elizabeth Jewett, the district’s superintendent, won’t say exactly what the students did to violate the rules so we don’t know what the students said and to whom.

Here’s the rub–school officials invoke student privacy concerns to prevent parents from finding out how the privacy of children is violated.

Jewett did write, in a private email to her colleagues, that one of the students singled out for special treatment by the New Jersey Department of Education/Pearson testing police, had twittered about the test after the end of the school day and had not taken a picture of the test question.