{"id":589,"date":"2006-06-17T18:49:38","date_gmt":"2006-06-17T22:49:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=589"},"modified":"2006-06-17T18:49:38","modified_gmt":"2006-06-17T22:49:38","slug":"in-nsa-and-mcgraw-hill-we-face-problems-of-both-technology-and-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=589","title":{"rendered":"In NSA and McGraw-Hill, we face problems of both technology and democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>An <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/news\/wireservice\/1,71184-1.html\">Associated Press story today<\/a> on using cryptography to allow more data-mining while (at least in theory) protecting privacy has an important point buried deep in the story: many of us just don&#8217;t trust the cryptography. Without some external, independent, transparent review of the technology, a good many of us don&#8217;t want the NSA or other federal agencies having access to our phone or credit-card records without a court-approved search warrant. This is a problem where issues of technology and democracy collide.<br \/>\nSo, too, with testing. Whenever stories appear, such as the <a href=\"http:\/\/schoolsmatter.blogspot.com\/2006\/06\/mcgraw-hill-kelly-girls-and-bushs-fcat.html\">Florida Commissioner of Education&#8217;s see-no-evil approach to the qualifications of test graders<\/a>, we see a collision between issues of technology and democracy. Democracy demands transparency, independence, and accountability (precisely those qualities that lead proponents to defend high-stakes standardized tests). But the tests are produced and graded in secret, and every scoring error and other foul-up that is revealed from behind the veil creates the clear impression that these folks just can&#8217;t be trusted with something as important as accountability.<br \/>\nThe problem is that testing and accountability is a case where <em>both<\/em> the technology and the democratic issues are important. This is something that is hard both for defenders of high-stakes testing and some opponents to grasp. You can&#8217;t go full-bore with high-stakes accountability without understanding the serious limits of any assessment. But it&#8217;s close to Luddism to reject any attempt at assessment. It&#8217;s tempting, certainly, given the sad history of test misuse. But this is a dilemma we have to tackle, both democratically and technocratically.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An Associated Press story today on using cryptography to allow more data-mining while (at least in theory) protecting privacy has an important point buried deep in the story: many of us just don&#8217;t trust the cryptography. Without some external, independent, transparent review of the technology, a good many of us don&#8217;t want the NSA or [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-accountability-frankenstein"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-9v","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}