Data, data, data, data...and more data on the dashboard.

Is the media shifting its tone on education reform? Catching on? Have they typed "choice" and "data" and "test" so many times that they can't stand it anymore and feel some obligation to achieve at least some critical distance?

Last Sunday I posted on the diminished background noise of education reform in assorted local and national outlets.

This week there was virtually nothing again (State Treasurer Andy Dillon only has a few more of the 28 days left before appointing a mystery consultant to "save" Pontiac Schools for 750K over two years).

And, tellingly, what was there -- a longish, informed NYTimes story on data collection by Gates Foundation funded giant inBloom -- was almost downright critical. From the Business Section to boot!

Here is the story that organizes itself around a district divided (sound familiar?) in Colorado by a Superintendent's willingness to embrace inBloom and outsourced data collection:http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/business/deciding-who-sees-students-data.html?nl=todaysheadlines&e...

It will be an eye-opener for parents relatively new to education reform and the multi-billion dollar industry trying to shape your kids' future. "Education technology software for prekindergarten to 12th grade is an $8billion market," we are told, in part because of the introduction of the Common Core. Districts nationwide are scrambling to meet to meet data collection requirements for assorted metric games being staged at state houses.

Parents have little say or "choice" here. Remember field trip permission slips? How cute.

Updated "21st" century rules of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act allow for enormous collection of data from pre-k through high school. The NYTimes, believe it or not, isn't completely buying this is just "for the kids." Business minded as the business section is, they point out this metadata is to help vendors market and increasing array of learning products.

The featured Colorado Superintendent has the data craze in her eye: "Think how you useful your car dashboard is, " she says, " You know if you are going to too slow...." Cynthia Stevenson here seems to have confused the literal and the figurative, the "data dashboard" so many administrators and boards were dreaming of 5 years ago, and the car "dashboard" invented right here in Detroit.

Uh.....who needs training in reading metaphors, they are only the stuff we think with.

But, again, the reporters here have slowed down a bit. They are citing actual parents, including Leonie Hamison who has done so much to resist "market" driven reforms of "public" education that allow for assorted non-educational parasites to make fortunes on schools all the while deriding high teacher pay and unions.

The Times reporter (Natasha Singer) seems to have a sense that this "data" collection isn't helping to educate anybody. The concerns here are largely about privacy. But the story reveals as importantly the massive corporate "investment" in education and how the story of so-called education reform here to date has been driven by forces outside the classroom at the expense -- literally and figuratively -- of the classroom.