Education Week

Education technology experts say the gap between districts that appear to be well prepared to put common-core online assessments in place and those that aren't is significant and could pose challenges down the road.

Some districts are already piloting common-core tests, while others are just getting started in figuring out how to build up their technological bandwidth in preparation for them.

A recent report by the State Educational Technology Directors Association suggests the readiness concerns are justified, indicating that 72 percent of schools do not meet the basic Internet bandwidth requirements of 100 kilobits per second per student set by the association, or the minimum of what's required to run a school-wide 1-to-1 computing environment. Further, a 2013 survey conducted by the Washington-based Consortium for School Networking and Market Data Retrieval, a Shelton (CT)-based education market research firm, found that an overwhelming 99 percent of districts indicated a need for increased connectivity. It also found that only 57 percent of elementary schools and 64 percent of secondary schools had wireless Internet capability.

Later this spring, the 23 states included in the Smarter Balanced consortium, will participate in a field test. Its purpose is to gauge each district's readiness in advance of the 2015 formal assessments. The 17 states, plus the District of Columbia, in the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, are also planning similar field tests this spring. Whatever bumpy ride this technological preparation takes, experts say online assessments are the undeniable wave of the future, and not just for common-core tests. They see online tests, and adaptive ones in particular, as a key tool for building personalized learning programs that address individual students' strengths and weaknesses.

As part of a potentially explosive lawsuit making its way through federal court, giant online-services provider Google has acknowledged scanning the contents of millions of e-mail messages sent and received by student users of the company’s Apps for Education tool suite for schools.

In the suit, the company also faces accusations from plaintiffs that it went further, crossing a “creepy line” by using information gleaned from the scans to build “surreptitious” profiles of Apps for Education users that could be used for such purposes as targeted advertising.

The US District Court for the Northern District of California is currently hearing the complaint, which alleges that the data-mining practices behind Google’s Gmail electronic-messaging service violate federal and state wiretap and privacy laws.

Gmail is a key feature of Google Apps for Education, which has 30 million users worldwide and is provided by the company for free to thousands of educational institutions in the United States. A Google spokeswoman confirmed to Education Week that the company “scans and indexes” the emails of all Apps for Education users for a variety of purposes, including potential advertising, via automated processes that cannot be turned off -- even for Apps for Education customers who elect not to receive ads.

The Education Department’s recently issued guidance on student-data privacy appears to deem the alleged practices of Google Apps for Education as violating the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA. Some experts, however, argue that the federal law is too antiquated to effectively address the complex privacy concerns raised by such high-tech data mining.

Few schools in the United States are more remote than the 18-student K-12 Qugcuun Memorial School in Oscarville, Alaska. Despite that isolation -- and despite the fact that the school has just three teachers on site -- the students at Qugcuun Memorial still have access to geometry and biology classes taught by highly qualified teachers, as well as up-to-date electives like digital photography.

Students owe that kind of educational access, in part, to the efforts of Dan Walker, 53, an assistant superintendent at the 4,000-student Lower Kuskokwim school district. He has steadily increased the number of distance-learning courses taught by certified teachers through the use of videoconferencing technology, the type of technology available to students and teachers even in the most remote areas of the district, and has strengthened the reliability and durability of the infrastructure that makes it all work. And he's done it with limited funds in a district where 90 percent of the population lives at or below the federal poverty level. "Technology becomes an equalizer for kids in these small, remote communities," Walker said.

"I saw the Internet and technology as a way to bring down those barriers and to get kids a broader experience and access to the wider world." Walker is proud of his district's 100-megabit Internet connection, which has come at a "tremendous effort" and costs about $20 million a year. But with reimbursement from the federal E-rate program, which helps provide connectivity to low-income districts, Lower Kuskokwim pays only about $2.5 million annually for the Internet services, he said.