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Exploring the complexities of private sector influence: the case of student data privacy policy
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Exploring the Complexities of Private Sector Influence:
The Case of Student Data Privacy Policy
by
Jahni Madrica Ann Smith
A Dissertation Presented to Committee Members
Patricia Burch, Chair
Estela Bensimon
Terry Cooper
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(EDUCATION)
August 2016
GS Form 14
(8/10)
iii
ABSTRACT
In 2013, Glendale Unified School district, in an attempt to address and stop
cyberbullying and other teenage issues, hired a specializing vendor, Geo Listening. The
procurement of Geo Listening’s service was in direct response to growing concerns as
two area teenagers committed suicide the previous year. Geo Listening came under
intense scrutiny for monitoring the public posts students make on social media. The
general critique that the usage of Geo Listening to monitor students online without their
knowledge infringes on privacy coincides with an increased national agenda pushing for
stronger public policies protecting student and family data. This embedded case study
uses the work of Kingdon (1984, 1995) to explore a unique policy window and the
agenda setting behaviors that led up to the passing of AB 1442, a California student data
privacy bill to govern social media monitoring contracts. The study extends current
research on educational contracting to demonstrate the viability of small firms as political
actors in policymaking, while elaborating on the definition and behaviors of political
actors in general.
iv
APPROVAL FOR SCHOLARLY DISSEMINATION
The author grants to the University of Southern California the right to reproduce,
by appropriate methods, upon request, any or all portions of this Dissertation. It is
understood that “proper request” consists of the agreement, on the part of the requesting
party, that said reproduction is for his personal use and that subsequent reproduction will
not occur without written approval of the author of this Dissertation. Further, any portions
of the Dissertation used in books, papers, and other works must be appropriately referenced
to this Dissertation.
Finally, the author of this Dissertation reserves the right to publish freely, in the
literature, at any time, any or all portions of this Thesis.
Author _____________________________
Date _____________________________
v
DEDICATION
First, giving all glory and honor to God, who is the author and finisher of my
faith. The scripture verse I found in my devotion on the day of my defense encapsulates
my PhD journey: “We can make our plans, but the Lord determines our steps” (Proverbs
16:9). This work is dedicated to my parents, whose belief in Christian education is
validated through this achievement. To my siblings, grandmother, aunts and uncles,
cousins, former teachers, colleagues and friends who constitute an unwavering support
system; this is for you. This is in special memory of my paternal grandfather, Newbold
Smith, and maternal grandmother, Lillian Horton-Goater, whose legacies I continue in
humble service to others. Finally, this is dedicated to every Bermudian who dreams of a
better Bermuda. We are small, but we are mighty.
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... iii
APPROVAL FOR SCHOLARLY DISSEMINATION .................................................... iv
DEDICATION .................................................................................................................... v
LIST OF FIGURES ......................................................................................................... viii
LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................. ix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. 1
CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................ 2
CHAPTER 2 BACKGROUND ......................................................................................... 6
Merging Theoretical Frameworks .................................................................................. 7
A Complex Institutional and Policy Landscape ........................................................... 16
Summary of Relevant Research .................................................................................... 30
CHAPTER 3 METHODS ................................................................................................ 32
Research Design ........................................................................................................... 36
CHAPTER 4 DATA ........................................................................................................ 49
Understanding the Emerging Market of Social Media Monitoring in Education ......... 50
Emerging Market of Social Media Monitoring in the Education Sector ...................... 57
The Perfect Storm: A Climate of Mistrust .................................................................... 64
Geo Listening and Glendale Unified School District ................................................... 76
What’s On the Agenda .................................................................................................. 98
Summary ..................................................................................................................... 108
CHAPTER 5 MOVING THE NARRATIVE FORWARD ........................................... 109
vii
Geo Listening: An Effective Strategy ......................................................................... 110
Implications ................................................................................................................ 127
Suggestions for Future Research ................................................................................ 132
Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 133
APPENDIX A PROJECT TIMELINE ...................................................................... 136
APPENDIX B DATA PLAN ..................................................................................... 137
APPENDIX C INTERVIEW PROTOCOL ............................................................... 138
APPENDIX D SAMPLE GEO LISTENING ADVISORIES.................................... 139
BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 144
viii
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 2-1. Kingdon's Multiple Streams Framework Flow Diagram (adapted from
Kingdon, 1984) ................................................................................................................... 9
Figure 2-2. Easton's Political System Framework (Easton, 1965) ................................... 15
Figure 3-1 - Intersection of Relationships in the Geo Listening case ............................... 40
Figure 3-2 Embedded Case of Geo Listening ................................................................... 41
Figure 3-3 Timeline of Data Collection Relative to the Development of the Case .......... 42
Figure 4-1. A Timeline of the Narrative of Geo Listening ............................................... 50
Figure 4-2. Big Data Market Forecast (Kelly, 2015) ........................................................ 56
Figure 4-3. Social CRM Process from Chess Media Group (2010) ................................. 56
Figure 4-4. Spectrum of Company Size ............................................................................ 62
Figure 4-5. School Board Agenda .................................................................................... 80
Figure 4-6. Timeline of AB 1442 ................................................................................... 102
Figure 5-1. Graphic of the Kingdon Framework Specific to the Geo Listening Case .... 113
Figure 5-2. Graphic Demonstrating the Plummeting Trust in Government (Pew
Research, 2015)............................................................................................................... 117
Figure 5-3. A Screenshot of Geo Listening's website promoting involvement in AB
1442................................................................................................................................. 121
ix
LIST OF TABLES
Table A-1. Project Timeline: ........................................................................................ 136
1
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to acknowledge and thank my faculty advisor and dissertation chair, Dr.
Patricia E. Burch. You have played a pivotal role in my development as a conscientious
scholar and academic contributor. Your authenticity and genuine desire to make a
difference are both refreshing and inspiring. I am grateful to have worked under and with
you over the past four years and I look forward to future opportunities to collaborate as
you continue to forge an indelible impression on education research. To the other
members of my qualifying exam and dissertation committees, thank you for participating
in the process with me, pushing me to engage with the material more deeply and setting a
standard of excellence, integrity and diligence in your own work. I also acknowledge the
other faculty of Rossier School of Education who have contributed to my development as
an engaged intellectual. I especially want to thank the PhD Program Director Laura
Romero, who is tirelessly dedicated to the success of all PhD students. To the 2012
Cohort of PhD students, I am eternally grateful to have walked this journey with you and
I look forward to the intersection of our work in the future.
2
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
In 2013, the California state auditor released a report on school safety and
discrimination law compliance. By both state and federal law, public schools are
obligated to provide students equal educational opportunity for a conducive learning
environment by combating racism, sexism, and other forms of bias in schools. The
California Safe Place to Learn Act —established in 2008 and amended in 2012—
reinforces these state and federal protections by requiring the California Department of
Education (Education) to assess whether local educational agencies (LEAs)—school
districts, charter schools, and county offices of education—have adopted policies in
compliance with the law to address this Act, among other requirements. This 2013 report
identifies that 80 percent of the responding LEAs have policies and procedures that
comply with recent changes in state law with regard to discrimination, harassment,
intimidation, and bullying. However, the report continues to suggest that based on field
visits, LEAs failed to maximize the use of readily available data—including survey data,
student behavior data, or complaint logs—to evaluate how effective their programs and
workshops were in preventing and addressing these kinds of incidents (California State
Auditor, 2013).
The rise of internet access and subsequently the number of opportunities students
have to interact with the digital space (Luke, 2000) create a new form of educational
policy problem. As schools, and students, transition away from textbooks and notebooks
to cellphones, laptops, and iPads, much of the education, socialization, and interaction of
students now exists in the digital space of the internet and a widening disconnect between
3
current education policies and the growing challenges of schools persists (Berson, Berson
& Berson, 2002; Levin & Arafeh, 2002; Shah et. al, 2005). When considering the many
interactions students have over the course of their school career, the internet creates a
new wave of socializing issues, and opportunities, for the classrooms (Nicholson, 2002;
Slonje & Smith, 2008; Smith et.al, 2008). For example, where students would often be
bullied on the basketball court or any other domain of school campuses, now there is
potential for bullying to occur behind the veil of secret online profiles. These secret
profiles can be other students, but are often strangers with whom they would not
otherwise interact on a daily basis. Still, the student is bombarded with a constant stream
of personal attacks on anything from their choice in clothing to the way they talk, walk,
or look.
Campbell (2005) characterizes the rise of cyberbullying as “an old problem in a
new guise”. Historically, when bullying occurs in the physical space of schools there are
opportunities for authority figures to intervene, counsel, and correct, however, in the
digital society there are no police, and often attacks go without consequence. The
antisocial behavior of students often traverses into the classroom in the form of acts of
aggression, property vandalism and destruction, and harassment and intimidation
(Sprague, Sugai & Walker, 1998). More than 97% of youths in the United States are
connected to the Internet in some way, and a significant unintended outcome of the
Internet’s pervasive reach is the growing rate of harmful offenses against children and
teens (Tokunaga, 2010). Still, with the shifting playing fields on which possibilities for
threats to school safety can originate, schools are expected never to get it wrong
(Rochman, 2012). “School threats are a fast growing problem. They send fear and panic
4
through a community” says Ken Trump, President of National School Safety and
Security Services, who directed a recent study of school threats across the country
(National School Safety and Security Services, 2015). More importantly, the rise in
antisocial behavior can be mistakenly attributed to the increase in technology and
forestall all progress that these tools afford (Magid, 2011). It then becomes necessary for
policies and schools to traverse the unchartered territory between the importance of using
technology and preserving the safety and conducive learning environment for students.
In 2013, the Glendale Unified School District, a southern California school
district, in an attempt to address and stop cyberbullying and other teenage issues, hired
the company Geo Listening, a social media monitoring company, in direct response to
growing concerns over two area teenagers who had committed suicide the previous year.
Geo Listening, located in Hermosa Beach, California, subsequently came under intense
scrutiny for monitoring the public posts students made on social media. The general
critique was that the usage of this vendor, in this capacity, infringes on privacy coincides
with the increased national agenda push for a look into public policies protecting student
and family data.
This study frames Geo Listening as a case for exploring the interactions of private
vendors in the policymaking space. The study uses the work of Kingdon (1984, 1995) to
explore a unique policy window and the agenda setting behaviors that led up to the
passing of Pupil records: Social Media (AB 1442), through the lens of a vendor. The
theoretical framework for distinguishing general and specific support for political
institutions was laid out by Easton (1965) and has been critical to the analysis of the
governmental dispositions and movements around education policymaking. However,
5
Easton’s framework does not account for an intersecting layer of the system as vendors
position themselves in the political system as actors. More closely, when utilizing Easton,
non-governmental actors are placed outside of the political system and act as tangential to
the process. This theory will be explored more deeply in chapter two.
By influencing the construction of California bill AB 1442, Geo Listening
becomes an exemplar of how an organization can transcend from typical non-
governmental actor, those who operate outside of the governmental structure and have
limited political influence, to become an influential political actor. Using the case study
methodology, I explore the movements and interactions of Geo Listening with the policy
space before and after the implementation of Pupil records: Social Media (AB 1442).
The narrative of chapter four is constructed from the perspective of Geo Listening and the
events that precipitated proposing AB 1442 and also captures external perspectives from
privacy experts in the field. As research on education contracting continues, there is a
persistent discussion surrounding the influence of vendors; however current theoretical
models have insufficient explanatory power for discussing the breadth and extent of their
influence. This study begins to explore that missing element.
6
CHAPTER 2
BACKGROUND
Much of educational contracting and privatization work focuses on the
encroachment of big business into education (Apple, 2006; Au, 2008, 2010; Ball, 2009;
Burch, 2006, 2009; Kohn, 2004; Lipman, 2004, 2013; Shipps, 1997; Sipple et al, 1997)
and how this encroachment brings with it curriculum and ideology shaping (e.g., Apple,
2013; Bartlett et al., 2002; Burch & Good, 2014; Lingard, Martino & Rezai-Rashti, 2013;
Lipman, 2011, 2013). Within education, privatization embodies a myriad of policies and
programs (Bulkley & Burch, 2011; Hentschke & Wohlstetter, 2007); however, there are
some policies that receive more public scrutiny than others, namely, charter schools and
vouchers (Bettinger, 2005; Bulkley &Fisler, 2003; Ford, 2005; Hoxby, 2004; Timpane et
al., 2001; Wells et al, 1999). Largely, the focus of educational contracting work
concentrates on readily identifiable, larger firms and their role in politics as typified by
the heavy amount of corporate lobbying behind No Child Left Behind (Klein, 2007;
Leistyna, 2007; Hoff, 2006). However, when considering corporate America, and their
influence on education and education policy, very rarely are smaller firms explicitly
considered or explored as active and powerful political players. The rise to relevance of
smaller firms became clear in a recent multi-year multisite study of supplemental
education services (SES) (Acosta et. al, 2013; Burch & Good, 2009, 2014; Heinrich,
Meyer &Whitten, 2010; Heinrich & Nisar, 2013; Heinrich et. al, 2014; Stewart & Good,
2016) as local and regional vendors competed for the opportunity to serve parents and
students and also demonstrated their influence in establishing instructional practices.
While the reporting from this study does not explore vendors in terms of firm size,
7
choosing rather to categorize them along the lines of district, non-district, online, offsite,
onsite, for-profit and nonprofit (Heinrich & Nisar, 2013), the raw data does reveal a wide
variety of size firms competing for contracts and offering services. Still, little educational
contracting literature attends to the small firm and their role in providing educational
services and much deeper how these smaller firms influence policy.
In this chapter, I explore theories allow me to make sense of the experience of a
small firm engaging in educational contracting in the context of student data privacy. I
continue here by outlining and discussing the theories of Kingdon (1984, 1995) and
Easton (1965) which are used as tools for exploring this phenomenon and provide the
theoretical context in which this work is embedded.
Merging Theoretical Frameworks
The theoretical frameworks of Kingdon (1984, 1995) and Easton (1965) are used
as a basis for exploring the case of Geo Listening, the service they provide, and their
interaction and intersection with the creation of AB 1442. This section outlines these
theories and explores them in the context of this particular case.
Kingdon’s Multiple Streams Framework
Kingdon (1984, 1995), drawing from the garbage-can model (Cohen, March, &
Olsen, 1972), argues that the public policy process is an amalgam of problems, policies,
and politics flowing along in independent streams. The problem stream is the genesis of
when attention is turned to a policy problem. This stream contains all the broad problems
and conditions facing societies, some of which become identified as issues that require
public attention. Notably, there are no clear indicators in this stream that determine which
problems deserve attention, and, as demonstrated prominently in our twenty-four-hour
8
news cycle, perceptions of problems change quickly. Still, problems become important
based on how they are ‘framed’ or defined by participants who compete for attention. In
some cases, issues receive attention because of a crisis or change in the size and
magnitude of the problem. However, despite the ebb and flow of attention to problems,
only a small fraction of problems receive policymaker attention. Therefore, if a problem
manages to get the attention of a policymaker, it must be acted on quickly, before the
attention shifts to a more prominent issue. Policy entrepreneurs and lobbyists can now
demonstrate that a well thought out solution already exists as they hold the attention of
policymakers. The policy stream refers to the set of policy alternatives that researchers
and others propose to address national problems. This stream contains the ideas and
technical proposals for how problems may be solved. Kingdon (1984, 1995) describes the
“policy primeval soup” (p. 117) where solutions evolve as they are proposed by one actor
then reconsidered and modified by other participants. The chances of a problem reaching
the agenda rise dramatically when the problem becomes attached to one of these roaming
solutions. Flowing independently of the problems and policy streams is the political
stream, composed of things like the public mood, pressure group campaigns, election
results, partisan or ideological distributions in Congress, and changes of administration.
At particular junctures, the streams merge, and in their confluence windows of
opportunity emerge. The framework contains five structural elements: problems, policies,
politics, policy windows, and policy entrepreneurs (Figure 2-1).
9
Kingdon’s multiple streams framework (MSF), which emerged in the mid-1980s,
today forms one of the most prominent analytical frameworks for understanding public
policy agenda-setting (Ridde, 2009). There has been recent skepticism about how this
model is useful, or simply popular, as the framework has been cited over 12,000 times
throughout public policy literature (Cairney & Jones, 2015). Cairney and Jones (2015)
conclude that Kingdon’s model gives two major contributions to the public policy space.
First, it provides a base for further development of policy theories. Second, it provides a
large, and often empirical, literature base. The framework’s heuristic value and related
concepts have also been used to study agenda-setting in various policy contexts including
health (Odom-Forren & Hahn, 2006; Reich, 1995; Shiffman, Beer & Wu, 2002),
Figure 2-1. Kingdon's Multiple Streams Framework Flow Diagram (adapted from
Kingdon, 1984)
10
international aid (Travis & Zahariadis, 2002), and education (Brown, 2007; Houlihan &
Green, 2006; Lieberman, 2002; Ness, 2010; Ness & Mistretta, 2009; Weiner, 2009;
Young, Shepley & Song, 2010). Its flexibility of use is demonstrative of the simplicity of
the model and the ease with which to adapt it to an analysis of policies in multiple
contexts.
Extending Beyond Multiple Streams
While the strength of Kingdon’s framework (1984; 1995) resides in its ability to
frame -- and capture -- the contributing components to establish an agenda, it is necessary
in this case to extend the framework by coupling it with a framework that explains how
policies are then realized and implemented through the various forms of political support.
There are four strata through which policies effectively realize social agendas (Domhoff,
2006). The first is the policy-planning arena and is comprised of foundations, think tanks,
and policy-discussion groups. Second is the special-interests lobby, which consists of
lawyers, lobbyists, and trade associations. Third, the candidate-selection arena works to
elect candidates who support the elite agenda. And fourth, the opinion-shaping process—
embedded with elements from the other three groups—tries to influence public attitudes
while also inserting some issues and keeping others off the public agenda (Domhoff,
2006, p. 16). This is not an exclusive process; even those citizens who are not members
of elite groups engage in advocacy and try to enact their preferences through elections,
community-based organizing, and appealing to their elected representatives to adopt their
preferred policies. This gives the indication that the formal government space is only but
one place where advocacy takes place. At the institutional level, think tanks and
philanthropies play an important role in the politics of education. At the social and
11
community level, grassroots organizations and participatory research shape national and
local politics of education by seeking to shape beliefs, while institutional politics act on
widely held beliefs (Goldberg, 2006).
There are multiple ways to supplement the work of Kingdon and explore the
political landscape after the agenda-setting process. In one case, using the advocacy
coalition framework (ACF) developed by Sabatier (1988) independently and jointly with
Jenkins-Smith (1993) shows potential. Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith advocacy coalition
framework (ACF) focuses on the interaction of advocacy coalition—each consisting of
actors from a variety of institutions who share a set of policy beliefs—within a policy
subsystem. Policy change is a function of both competition within the subsystem and
events outside the subsystem. The framework focuses on mapping the belief systems of
policy elites; referring to actors with some influence over the direction, shape, and timing
of policy making; and analyzing the conditions under which policy-oriented learning
across coalitions can occur.
The ACF, however, does not speak to the core of the problem being explored in
this case, that is how an individual vendor moved from offering a solution to a problem to
interacting with lawmakers on new policy. In this case, I intend to trace the actions and
interactions of Geo Listening and other players during the construction of California AB
1442. And while, Kingdon (1984, 1995) offers a conducive framework for exploring the
many components that lead up to the actual enactment. Kingdon does not describe
political institutions and their dispositions, and more closely how support for these
agenda items are garnered, sustained, and perpetuated.
12
A criticism of Kingdon’s (1984, 1995) multiple stream framework is the failure to
sufficiently acknowledge the significance of media effects, including the social media
(Stout & Stevens, 2000). Elder and Cobb (1983) contended that the media can escalate
issues on the policy agenda, increasing their chances of receiving government
consideration. According to the Theory of Agenda Setting in the field of communication,
the media does not reflect reality, but simply filters and shapes it according to audience
interest (Scheufele, 1999, 2000). As such, a failure to consider the role of the media is a
critical, as in theory policy entrepreneurs have the ability to manipulate stream
development by carefully managing the media (Shanahan et. al, 2008).
Another argument against the multiple stream framework relates to whether the
streams are truly independent (Sabatier, 1999). This is an area of uncertainty given the
ever-changing and ambiguous nature of reality (Robinson & Eller, 2010). However, the
streams provide good analytical categories, each with its own rules and flow largely
independently of the others (Guldbrandsson & Fossum, 2009).
It becomes necessary in this instance to leverage a framework that specifically
attends the way a political system, in this case a specific policy, gains support and is
influenced by other mediums unaccounted for in the traditional multiple stream
framework; for this I use the work of Easton (1965).
Easton’s Political Institution Theory
Easton (1965; 1975) established a theoretical framework that while explaining the
components of the political system creates two categories of support for political
institutions. Easton defines support as a way “in which a person evaluatively orients
himself to some object through either his attitudes or his behavior” (1975, p. 436).
13
Easton identified “diffuse” and “specific” support as the two primary forms of public
support for a political system. Diffuse support is defined as, “a type of support that
continues independently of the specific rewards which the member may feel he obtains
from belonging to the system” (1965, p. 1245). Diffuse support is vital to a political
system, “in that regardless of what happens; the members will continue to be bound to it
by strong ties of loyalty and affection” (1965, pp. 124-5). For example, in the case of
student and family data privacy, there is growing support around the basic premise that
student data should be protected. More to the specific case of this study, Glendale Unified
enlisted the support of Geo Listening to create a safe and conducive learning environment
through social-media monitoring.
In general, the quest to garner support for stronger student privacy laws is derived
from tapping into the diffuse support of the more general policy goal of security (Stone,
2002), and in this case focuses on protecting the vulnerable members of society. Diffuse
support can be thought of as a phenomenon that is established over a long period that
maintains a political system’s legitimacy (Dennis, 1976). According to Easton, building
such a “reservoir of support” is vital to political institutions if they are to survive the
inevitable trials and frustrations of their constituency (1965, p. 125). In education, diffuse
support for reform policies is undergirded by the perpetual coverage of the strain an
opportunity gap and chronic underperforming schools has on society in general. Still,
every referral by pundits, advocates, parents and community members to the core
principal of what it means to provide a quality education in America, in a safe and
conducive environment, hangs on the very fabric of a diffuse support for a quality
educational system in America.
14
“Specific support,” on the other hand, is defined as, “an input to a system that
occurs as a return for the specific benefits and advantages that members of a system
experience as part of their membership. It represents or reflects the satisfaction a member
feels when he perceives his demands as having been met” (Easton, 1965, p. 125).
Specific support, then, depends on the outcome of a quid pro quo relationship in which a
constituent anticipates outcome benefits (Dennis, 1976; White & Menke, 1982). In this
case, I explore the type of support that Geo Listening leveraged as they contributed to the
overall creation of AB 1442, trying to understand whether this was an exhibition of
diffuse support or specific support, and moreover what that means for the motivation of
firms in the policymaking space. Easton’s dichotomous approach to explaining support
becomes a theoretical basis for exploring the how Geo Listening demonstrated support in
both their relationship with the district and the newly constructed bill AB 1442.
Public policy is frequently viewed as a political system’s response to demands
arising from its environment (Anderson, 2014). The political system, as Easton (1957;
1965; 1975) defines it, comprises those identifiable and connected institutions and
activities in a society that distribute values that are binding on society (Figure 2-2).
Simply put, the political system is a network of interactions between institutions and
choices that creates the fabric of governance. The environment consists of all phenomena
– the social system, the economic system, the biological setting – that are external to the
boundaries of the political system.
15
Some researchers challenge the usefulness of systems theory in studying public
policy, suggesting that it is limited by its highly general and abstract nature. However,
that has not prevented it from being employed as a means of exploring the formal
educational players (e.g. schools, neighborhoods, courts) (Bryk et al., 1998; Iannaccone
& Cistone, 1967; López, 2003; Summerfield, 1971). Further, in the case of this study,
Easton affords a theoretical lens to explore Geo Listening’s political interactions with
education agencies and to trace their political actions
1
(Friedland & Alford, 1975) outside
the traditionally defined political system. Without the contextualization of a political
system, and the structure of the system, it would be difficult to position all of the players
in this narratives as actors on that same system. The Geo Listening case is an intriguing
1
Friedland & Alford’s definition of political action is that “those past or present activities by private
citizens and private or public organizations and groups that are more or less directly aimed at influencing
the selection of governmental structures and personnel, and the actions they take or do not take” (1975, p.
430, emphasis in the original).
Figure 2-2. Easton's Political System Framework (Easton, 1965)
16
because of their size and the nature of the company’s rise to public awareness and
involvement in policymaking. Easton’s framework gives a platform for defining the
political environment and investigating the contributors who support a given issue within
the context of the larger political system. This provides greater flexibility for probing the
role, and implications, of local players in the political process.
A Complex Institutional and Policy Landscape
This study is an exploration of the institutional practice of vendor contracting that
is derived from a complex educational reform landscape that dates back to the
Elementary and Secondary Education Act. While this study does not explicitly trace the
history and changes of this policy over the past decades, it is necessary to highlight as the
policy provides a broader landscape to understand the current problem. More closely,
while the current study explores a particular form of vendor relationship it is important to
understand that the proliferation of contracting exists due to reform policies dedicated to
increased data creation, collection, and analysis that continue to drive the need for new
market solutions.
Education Reform
The 2001 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act
(ESEA), known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), has become a reference point for
innovation in education targeted to address educational outcome inequalities. NCLB
changed the interaction of the federal government with states and districts as it increased
the role of the federal government in guaranteeing the quality of public education by
directly linking spending conditions to testing outcomes (Apple, 2006; Au, 2008, 2010;
Ball, 2009; Burch, 2006, 2009; Lipman, 2004, 2013; Shipps, 1997; Sipple et al, 1997).
17
Under ESEA there was a strong emphasis placed on increased funding for poor school
districts, higher achievement for poor and minority students, and new measures to hold
schools accountable for their students' progress -- with NCLB the process dramatically
expanded the role of standardized testing in American public education.
Included in NCLB were testing and accountability provisions that elicited
questions about whether states would maintain control over their own standards and tests,
how the new mandates would be funded, how test results would be reported, where the
bar would be set for defining proficiency and adequate progress, how schools would be
held accountable, and whether states' test scores would be compared against an
independent national benchmark, the National Assessment of Educational Progress
(NAEP).
Rigorous research on No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has been conducted across
myriad contexts, some of which include the design of accountability policies, data-driven
decision making, and standardized testing (Bensimon, Rueda, Dowd, & Harris III, 2007;
Burch & Smith, 2015; Good et al., 2014; Ingram, Seashore Louis, & Schroeder, 2004;
Mandinach, 2012; Marsh, Pane, & Hamilton, 2006; Polikoff & Wrabel, 2013).
Accountability policies, like NCLB, are designed to promote continual improvement
towards achievement goals at the school level, and also more deeply to push teachers to
look for improved student outcomes for all of their students (Polikoff & Wrabel, 2013).
However, researchers from The Civil Rights Project pushback on the overall
effectiveness of accountability policies that promote evidence-based change, which they
state amounts to nothing more than a system of quotas and sanctions (Mintrop, Orfield &
Sunderman, 2009). More deeply, there is concern over whether these policies address
18
systemic issues such as racial and socioeconomic inequity (Burch & Smith, 2015).
Further research on accountability policies shows that another underlying assumption is
that results from standardized tests and other sources will be used to make decisions
about school and classroom practice (Ingram, Seashore Louis, & Schroeder, 2004).
Extensive discussion exists on the dangers of overreliance on testing as the sole indicator
of student achievement, learning, and success (Guilfoyle, 2006; Nichols & Berliner,
2007). As a result of accountability reforms that mandate such high levels of data
collection, schools and districts are using outside vendors to collect, store, and often
analyze data.
Under NCLB mandates states and districts were required to make significant
changes to continue having access to federal funding. The environment created by NCLB
created unique business opportunities in public education and propagated the notion that
privatization was a solution to mainstream problems (Apple, 2006; Burch, 2006, 2009;
Burch, Steinberg & Donavan, 2007; Burch & Smith, 2015; Ford, 2005; Lipman, 2007;
Lipman & Haines, 2007; Karp, 2002). Privatization is defined here as the transactional
use of public, governmental funding to acquire goods and services from non-
governmental entities and the policies that facilitate these transactions (Levin, 2001;
2012). The theoretical basis for privatization largely draws from the economic principle
of competition as a medium for improving a market’s offerings. That is, by allowing
private entities the market space to create alternative educational opportunities, we are
inherently increasing the likelihood of stronger educational outcomes for students.
While educational privatization is not a new phenomenon the extent and impact
have dramatically increased in recent years (Murphy, Glimer, Weise, & Page, 1998;
19
Rowan, 2001), requiring a deeper analysis of how to protect students and families in an
evolving landscape. This study works within the theories of the potential benefits of
relying on contracting out as a market mechanism to drive quality and efficiency in
public education systems (Hannaway, 1999) and the general assumption that
“Contracting creates clear, reliable, and legally enforceable relationships between school
operators and public officials” (Hill, Pierce & Guthrie, 1997, p. 121). Recognizing that
the private sector has always played a role in public education in some form.
Educational contracting research largely focuses on the growing concern of the
creep of big business into the educational space and the unintended consequences of
failing to adequately regulate their presence. For example, Burch and Good (2014)
provide a well-crafted exploration of the convergence of privatization and accountability
in the newly created digital education market building on Burch’s (2009) previous work
challenging the levels of accountabilities private firms have when entering education
service provisions. In another study, Lipman and Haines (2007) explore the challenges of
researching policies within the “context of dominant structures and ideologies—
contention at multiple levels, the power of residual and emergent ideologies to resist and
modify dominant agendas” (p. 495). They argue that the Chicago Renaissance 2010 is
part of a neoliberal corporate and financial urban agenda leading to gentrification and
displacement. The authors reinforce the notion that accountability policies have the
ability to create an atmosphere conducive for privatization thereby extending an open
invitation for firms to engage in educational contracting and shape policies and
communities through that engagement.
20
These contexts are all vitally important to the discussion and exploration of
educational contracting and by extension student and family data privacy because they all
focus and rely on the collection, analysis, and distribution of student-generated data
beyond the capacity of the district. Fundamentally, this case is about the ownership of
data, how that data is acquired, maintained and kept. Very little has been done to
understand how contracting markets develop and emerge out of national dialogues and
more specifically how these markets operate from the perspective of smaller, non-
national, corporations. This particular study falls neatly in this research opening as it
utilizes a growing national debate around student and family data privacy as a contextual
backdrop for exploring a new and emerging contracting space, the market for online
social media monitoring.
Privatization. Researchers have identified several factors influencing public
agencies utilization of privatization for the implementation of programs and services.
From a simply pragmatic perspective, privatization may lead to better cost-efficiency in
public services (Levin & Belfield, 2003; Turner & Simister, 2001; Savas, 2000; Miranda
& Lerner, 1995; Rothenberg-Pack, 1987). Another increasingly overriding reason public
agencies are moving towards privatization is a growing sentiment that government is too
large and untrustworthy. From this viewpoint, free markets would be a better option for
the ailments of society (Boyne, 1996; Hart et al., 1997; Moe, 1987; Rothenberg-Pack,
1987). The coverage of charter schools and voucher programs is so highly saturated that
often media reporting conflates privatization with these phenomena exclusively. A very
recent ruling by Washington State Supreme Court found that charters are not truly public
schools because they aren’t governed by elected boards and therefore not accountable to
21
voters and are therefore unconstitutional (Higgins, 2015). This ruling is demonstrative of
the constant public dialogue surrounding this form of privatization; that not only are
charter schools not public schools, but they also operate outside of the purview of
traditional public school governance.
To accurately understand the way that privatization influences public agency
services, researchers offer some definitions and provide rationales for its usage. From a
general public agency perspective, privatization primarily focuses on utilizing private
firms to perform functions for which public agencies still monitor and finance, with the
policy aspects of programs remains in the hand of government officials (Brown, 1995;
Doyle, 1994; Hefetz and Warner, 2004). This definition is useful for understanding
privatization in public agencies; however, when studying a newly developing
marketspace in educational contracting there is room for expanding this definition. For
the purposes of this research, there will be two definitions that indicate privatization’s
primary functions: (1) a shift of activities or functions from the State to the private sector;
and, more specifically, (2) a shift of the production of goods and services from public to
private (Savas, 2000).
Public organizations continue to utilize contract services as a part of their overall
administration and it is not surprising that this is also a regular fixture in public school
districts. The theoretical potential of privatization to alter organizational capacity has
increasingly compelled school district administrators to examine privatization as an
option. Like other public agencies, private firms offer district administrators the option to
relinquish control over service delivery in an effort to help improve processes and reduce
costs. Notably, there is still no substantial support to suggest any evidence of cost savings
22
for contracting in other areas (Sclarr, 2000). Further to this, in the case of services that
are new and unregulated there are questions about the true cost of these forms of
transactions, how these markets grow and expand their reach, and finally how states
respond to create adequate accountability practices.
The national debate providing background and context is around student privacy
and whether there is a need to update FERPA to accommodate or keep pace with the
evolving technology and demands of districts and schools. More closely, as outside
vendors and providers of educational services continue to enter the education reform
space, growing concerns mount surrounding the monitoring of these entities to ensure
quality and accountability (Burch, 2009; DiMartino & Scott, 2012; Heinrich, 2010;
Jacobsen & Young, 2013; Koyama, 2010; Lipman, 2013; Saltman, 2015). Historically
federal policies like NCLB create mandates for districts and schools that have embedded
assumptions about available resources and personnel. These same mandates consequently
sustain the market allowing third-party vendors to fill the void where districts or schools
do not have the capacity themselves (Arnold, 2004; Burch, Steinberg & Donavan, 2007;
Farley-Ripple & Jones, 2015; Lee & Reeves, 2012; Miller, 2010; Sunderman & Orfield,
2007). The growing concerns expressed over the past two years about the lack of
infrastructure for protecting the personal information of students mounts as more
companies look to offer services and products that respond to this capacity issue.
The case of Geo Listening provides a particularly interesting opportunity for
analysis as they initially entered a contractual relationship before any level of state
oversight. Over the course of the past three years, under the umbrella of a larger privacy
debate, the state has moved in and created parameters. This makes this particular case
23
rich as the national discussion on student and family privacy heats up and the states begin
responding to arising local issues.
Student Privacy Laws
The policy environment of this case is complex and segmented. On one level you
have accountability policies and on another level, you have federal laws that are all
operating as parameters to control and bound these particular contracting relationships.
The goal of the previous section was to provide the policy context that allows the issue of
student data privacy to become a critical issue and this section offers an overview of the
federal protective student and family privacy laws that cover all states and schools. While
this is not a comprehensive analysis of the laws, it is positioned here to provide more
context about the current state of laws under which this particular case developed.
FERPA. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (“FERPA”), §
513 of P.L. 93- 380 (The Education Amendments of 1974), was signed into law by
President Ford on August 21, 1974, with an effective date of November 19, 1974.
FERPA was enacted as a new § 4381 of the General Education Provisions Act (GEPA)
called “Protection of the Rights and Privacy of Parents and Students,” and codified at 20
U.S.C. § 1232g
2
.
Under FERPA, parents and eligible students have the following rights: a) the right
to inspect and review/right to access education records, b) the right to challenge the
content of education records, and c) the right to consent to the disclosure of education
2
Congress has amended FERPA a total of nine times over the past three decades since its enactment. One
of the more notable amendments was P.L. 107-56, Oct. 26, 2001 (USA PATRIOT Act of 2001), since it
was in direct response to the September 11
th
terrorist attack on the United States and extended the provision
of non-disclosure under FERPA to allow access to information without parental consent to governmental
organizations.
24
records. As with all laws, there are exceptions built into the FERPA law, specifically
addressing the right to consent, which we will later see are used in other policies as a
lever for sharing student information.
Research on FERPA is ramping up with the growing concern that the legislative
action as written is not current to meet the needs of the twenty-first century (Daggett,
2008a; Futhey, 2008; Plunkett, Solow-Niederman, & Gasser, 2014; Polonetsky & Tene,
2014b). At the recent 2015 SxSWedu conference, for example, the growing consensus
among many of the panelists and participants on student and family data privacy is that
FERPA needs to be updated to come into line with current technological advancements
and the shifting landscape of educational provisions.
FERPA is one of two laws that specifically attend to the issues of protecting
access to student and family data. The other privacy law, COPPA, begins to shift the
focal point on privacy away from the classroom and into broader social settings.
COPPA. The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act 15 U.S. Code Chapter 91
(COPPA), which has been in place since 2000 and is enforced by the Federal Trade
Commission, assures that children under 13 years of age do not share personal
information on the Internet without the express approval of their parents.
The law applies to (1) operators of commercial websites and online services that
are directed to children under the age of 13, or (2) general audience websites or online
services that have actual knowledge that they are collecting personal information from
children under the age of 13. Website operators are required to post privacy policies,
provide notice about collection practices, obtain verifiable parental consent before
collecting personal information from children under 13, and give parents the choice to
25
allow the sharing of their children’s information with third parties, deleting any of their
children’s information, and opting out of future collection or use.
Research on COPPA suggests that it was a responsive law built on the past
failures to protect students from over exposure online (Hersh, 2000). A vocal group,
Center for Media Education (CME)
3
, which no longer exists, published reports before
and after COPPA. The first report, “Web of Deception,” documents online marketing and
data collection practices directed at children (Montgomery & Pasnik, 1996) and was
catalytic in pushing the creation of COPPA forward (Hersh, 2000). The next notable
report was a year after COPPA, to mark the first anniversary of COPPA's
implementation. In this study, CME conducted a quantitative examination of 153
commercial Web sites directed at children under age 13 to determine if they were
complying properly with the letter and spirit of COPPA and following the guidelines
outlined by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). CME found that COPPA has brought
about significant changes in websites' business practices in data collection. In general,
they found that commercial websites for children modified their data collection practices,
limited the amount of data being collected, and posted privacy policies, and a handful of
sites even adapted to allow children to interact without divulging personal information.
Despite the positive changes in data collection practices that CME was able to identify, a
majority of sites did not obtain prior parental consent or provide parental notice as
required by the COPPA Rule (Montgomery, 2001).
While COPPA has very specific parameters and is regulated by the FTC, the most
recent concerns articulated about the law center on a key central issue. The concern is
3
The Center for Media Education (CME) was a national nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to
creating a quality electronic media culture for children, their families, and the community.
26
that parents and children often intentionally circumvent privacy disclosures and lie online
to gain access to popular sites like Facebook, and by extension these parents begin to
undermine the rigor of a law intended to protect children in the online world (Berlot,
Jaeger &Hansen, 2012; Hargittai, Schultz & Palfrey, 2011; O’Keefe & Clarke-Pearson,
2011).
PPRA. The Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment 20 U.S. Code § 1232h
(PPRA) restricts the non-educational uses of student data by requiring explicit parental
consent before students can participate in any government-funded survey, analysis, or
evaluation covering particularly sensitive topics ranging from political and religious
affiliations to sexual attitudes and behaviors.
Daggett (2008b) outlines a few scenarios under which FERPA is supplanted by
PPRA as the law-governing procedure. In each scenario, the school has intentions of
distributing the contents of some form of data—survey, vaccination, or mailing list—that
it feels is in the best interest of the student, but there are students and parents who do not
wish to participate. However, despite the minor coverage differences, FERPA and PPRA
operate largely the same with the intent to protect student data.
More Embedded Context
This case is not only embedded in the context of accountability policies and
privacy laws for education but also sits juxtaposition to ongoing and growing discussions
around privacy in general. One of the largest challenges in education policy is
capitalizing on the expertise of professionals and groups outside of education while
shaping and defining formal responses that are targeted to a specific issue. This study
again provides a unique opportunity to explore the intersectionality of the products and
27
services that exist in the space between education and the information technology
industry.
Information Technology Privacy. The issue of student and family privacy largely
sits against a larger backdrop of the technological advances afforded by the computing
industry. When schools moved away from the maintenance of records on pen and paper
to housing data on servers there was still a certain level of security and safety. However,
the introduction of cloud storage, which is an ethereal storage existing virtually on the
internet, creates a new dimension of concern for privacy. Even further concern arises as
actual schooling begins to transcend the classroom into remote classrooms and schools
hosted on the internet. Now, instead of creating policies that protect schools and districts
from loss files and finding safe ways to store boxes of data, policies are being created to
protect against multiple layers of privacy violations, most namely the utilization of
student information as a means of creating commercial opportunities (Nagel, 2014)
For the majority of information technology (IT) professionals holding IT degrees
or with backgrounds in computer science, there are entire course segments dedicated to
the importance of adequately attending to this issue. In the preface of the third edition
textbook widely used in these courses, Security in Computing, the authors capture the
entire spectrum of the shift in computing over the past 25 years, “When the first edition
of this book was published in 1989, viruses and other forms of malicious code were fairly
uncommon… In that era most people were unconcerned about--even unaware of--how
serious is the threat to security in the use of computers.” (Pfleeger & Pfleeger, 2002).
Privacy and Cloud Computing in Schools. An empirical study conducted in
2013 by Fordham begins to address this area of growing concern by exploring the issue
28
of privacy and computing in schools. Reidenberg et al. (2013) explore the national
picture of cloud computing in public schools; how public schools address their statutory
obligations as well as generally accepted privacy principles in their cloud service
agreements; and then make recommendations based on the findings to improve the
protection of student privacy in the context of cloud computing.
The Fordham CLIP utilized a national sample of school districts including large,
medium and small school systems across the country and via state open public records
laws requested all the district’s cloud service agreements, notices to parents, and
computer use policies for teachers.
The study found that 95% of districts rely on cloud services for a diverse range of
functions. Additionally, districts frequently surrendered control of student information
when using cloud services with fewer than 25% of the agreements specifying the purpose
for disclosures of student information and more alarmingly fewer than 7% of the
contracts restricted the sale or marketing of student information by vendors, and many
agreements allow vendors to change the terms without notice. In response to these, and
other, findings, Fordham CLIP proposed a set of specific, constructive recommendations
for school districts and vendors to be able to address the deficiencies in privacy
protection. The recommendations address transparency, data governance, contract
practices, and contract terms
4
.
4
Transparency: The existence and identity of cloud service providers and the privacy protections for
student data should be available on district websites, and districts must provide notice to parents of these
services and the types of student information that is transferred to third parties. Data Governance Districts
must establish policies and implementation plans for the adoption of cloud services by teachers and staff
including in-service training and easy mechanisms for teachers to adopt, and propose technologies for
instructional use. Address directly and publicly any policies on the use of student data for advertiser
supported services. Create data governance advisory councils for advice and industry should develop
mechanisms to help districts vet privacy-safe services and technologies. Larger districts and state
departments of education must designate a Chief Privacy Officer to provide advice and assistance.
29
Student Privacy Pledge. The Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) is a Washington-
based think tank committed to the advancement of responsible data practices, and the
Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) is the principal trade association for
the software and digital content industry. A collaborative effort between these two
entities to formulate, distribute, and promote the Student Privacy Pledge “with guidance
from the school service providers, educator organizations, and other stakeholders
following a hearing by U.S. Representatives Jared Polis (CO) and Luke Messer (IN)”
marks one of the most demonstrative actions taken towards staking claim on the expert
knowledge domain of student data privacy.
The purpose of the Student Privacy Pledge is to safeguard student privacy
regarding the collection, maintenance, and use of student personal information. The
pledge boasts the signatories of several large educational technology leaders. The public
commentary on the pledge is that it is intended to force the industry to go beyond the
federal requirements and to promote corporate buy-in from all the service providers
around the articulation of clear data practices. The pledge goes on to outline a series of
accountability practices each member agrees to uphold.
Contracting Practices Districts, as stewards of children’s information, must properly document all cloud
service agreements including maintaining fully executed contracts complete with all appendices and
incorporated documents. Contract Terms Vendors should include the following terms in their agreements:
specification of the purpose of the agreement and the authority to enter into the agreement; specification of
the types of data transferred or collected; the prohibition or limitation on redisclosure of student data; the
prohibition or limitation on the sale or marketing of student information without express parental consent;
the assurance that districts will have exclusive control over data access and mining; the prohibition on new
or conflicting privacy terms when parents are required to activate an account for their child; the allocation
of responsibilities for granting parental access and correction capabilities; the specification of whether
foreign storage and processing is allowed; the specification of whether other government agencies (such as
social service agencies) may have access; the specification of data security and breach notification
obligations; the prohibition on unilateral modifications; and the inclusion of a right for the district to
audit/inspect vendors for compliance with contractual obligations.
30
Summary of Relevant Research
The above research review reveals several important points in the literature on K-
12 public policy, data, and student and family privacy. Some researchers, particularly
those who have conducted reviews of the current laws on student data privacy, suggest a
change to current federal policies to reflect the changing technological demands of
society (Daggett, 2008a; Futhey, 2008; O’Donnell, 2002; Park, 2015; Plunkett, Solow-
Niederman, & Gasser, 2014; Polonetsky & Tene, 2014b). There is also mounting
consensus around a few basic principles that should govern states’ approaches to student
and family data privacy (Data Quality Campaign; Singer, 2013; Pledge to Parents and
Students). Finally, there is a growing ground swell to ensure that as these data take the
forefront of the student educational experience, the commercialization of data, and all
subsequent fallout, is adequately covered by either the federal or state laws.
There are also several distinct gaps in the research. For example, most of the extant
research on student and family data privacy speaks to the implemented laws on privacy
but falls short in tracing the economic and social implications of the policies. Further,
much of the research focuses on the laws and policy, rather than the students and families
that are most disproportionately affected by a lack of information or voice, limiting the
applicability to implementation and effectiveness research within local contexts.
Additionally, few studies attend to the relationship between public policy, political
agenda setting, and education policies that create a national stir (Cook et al, 1983;
Mazzeo, 2002; McCombs & Shaw, 1972). Finally, little attention has been paid to how
organizational context may influence the creation and adoption of educational policies on
student and family privacy from the vendors’ perspective. More research is needed to
31
gain a better understanding of firms’ and contractors’ roles in lobbying and co-
constructing policies and laws.
The reviewed research suggests that privacy law will continue to be a part of the
education landscape and that there are several key differences between the current public
policies that govern institutional practices around privacy decision making. Little
attention has been paid to how vendors influence policies that promote and sustain
educational contracting on the changing landscape of student privacy laws. This has
implications for all accountability policies built on market-oriented operational principles
with the embedded language of civil rights movements. NCLB is a prime example of this,
as it endeavors to close the opportunity gap by improving educational offerings and
opportunities through a more open educational market. In short, accountability policies
have opened the window for non-profit and for-profit private organizations to interact
with the data and educational experience of every child in the public school system.
Ultimately, this contributes to a growing area of research in education which
implements multiple theoretical framings to explain the complex movements of power
and politics across organizations, agencies, or individuals towards the goal of creating
policies and laws. Utilizing Easton’s (1965) and Kingdon’s (1984, 1995) adds one more
dimension to the exploration of intersections of government and non-governmental
entities. Both of the frameworks, as applied in this case of student and family data
privacy, afford me explanatory power in exploring some of the contextual factors
impacting policy implementation from the top down and the bottom up (Sabatier, 1986).
32
CHAPTER 3
METHODS
Research lags behind in exploring the full scope of the issue of privatization.
While much of the research continues to focus on large firms and their opportunistic
capitalizing on publicly available funding, little attention is paid to smaller more niche
market firms that also continue to operate within this space. Further, there is very little, if
any, research on how these smaller for-profit firms influence policy at the local and state
level (e.g., Apple, 2006; Au, 2008, 2010; Ball, 2009; Bettinger, 2005; Bulkley &Fisler,
2003; Bulkley & Burch, 201; Burch, 2006, 2009; Hentschke & Wohlstetter, 2007; Hoff,
2006; Hoxby, 2004; Klein, 2007; Kohn, 2004; Leistyna, 2007; Lipman, 2004, 2013;
Shipps, 1997; Sipple et al, 1997; Timpane et al., 2001; Wells et al, 1999).
Expanding knowledge of the current education contracting space requires deeper
and broader examinations of the relationships between corporations and policy. The
exploration of niche cases, such as the one provided in the relationship between Geo
Listening, Glendale Unified, and the state of California provide opportunities for greater
understanding of the nuances of the relationship between corporations, districts, and
policy. This study explores the nested nature of contexts with the implicit understanding
that isolating cases in the policy environment is difficult. Here, I use the window of
exploration created by the enactment of a piece of legislation surrounding the issue of
student and family privacy in the digital context. This study captures the movements of a
small vendor and their relationship with a local school district, and subsequently state
policymakers in direct response, to map a growing need for accountability over services
in the internet security space.
33
“Policies unfold in nested contexts” (Malen, p.89). This complex structure of
policy development and implementation means that tracing the early stages of a new
policy requires a case designed with an awareness and acknowledgment of the multiple
layers and embedded contexts. Here, I describe the many aspects of this particular case
study. On one hand, this is a case of how an outside vendor at the local level can
influence the direction, design, and policy response at the state level, through relationship
and public presence. On the other hand, this is a case of how data management
contracting as a niche market is expanding to include other provisional services like
analysis, social media tracking, and targeted responses to threats to school-level security
and safety. While, schools have already outsourced school safety and security, social
media monitoring bridges the space between school safety and the complex domain of
cyberspace.
The growing need for complex analysis of the policy process suggests that
studying this case affords a necessary opportunity to update and extend current literature
on both educational contracting and policy analysis. While most of the contracting
literature addresses the need to ensure greater oversight and accountability, much of the
research focuses on the influence of larger and more recognizable firms. This case is
particularly useful because it provides insight into the influence of vendors from a
smaller more niche market. However, it is problematic because it is likely to leave us
with little insight on how these relationships are forged, created and sustained. This case
also extends policy analysis literature as it explores how vendors need to, and do,
leverage policy to create new markets as they create and occupy newer markets in the
educational service arena. It extends earlier cautionary literature surrounding this highly
34
unregulated, and growing, environment recognizing that the iron triangle of policy
influence operates at all levels, local, state and federal, of policy creation.
This is a study of third-party cyber monitoring, which exists to extend school
security into the cyberspace world. Geo Listening is a social networking monitoring
service that focuses on public, private K12 institutions and Colleges & Universities. The
company offers the opportunity to monitor students’ social network profiles for
information that schools can use for interventions. Their rise to prominence occurred with
a 2013 LA Times news article raising concerns that this corporation had contracted with a
local school district for these services without the knowledge of the parents. The public
“outing” of this relationship was consistent with a growing concern around the privacy of
student data and how district relationships with outside vendors placed student privacy in
jeopardy.
The public exposure of Geo Listening at the hands of the LA Times only increased
its market share and public access. Instead of ending the relationship with the school
district, Geo Listening increased their presence with more relationships and subsequently
advised on the creation of CA AB1442, which was explicitly designed to speak to this
form of district-vendor relationship.
Exploring this run of events becomes critical in the policy space because it gives a
clear example of how vendors become influencers in the policymaking space.
Additionally, it is demonstrative of how education policy continues to look to vendors as
experts and prioritize their opinions on the construction of legislation that are intended to
monitor them.
35
This study is a purposeful case study of the implementation and potential effects
of student and family data privacy laws in the context of student accountability policies.
This study capitalizes on policymakers, advocacy groups, and private vendors jockeying
for position as privacy experts to gather critical data for understanding the organizational
perspectives of groups who shape the public discourse on student and family data
privacy. This study uses the recent adoption of CA 2014 AB1442 Pupil records: Social
Media in California on student and family data privacy laws as a window of opportunity
for studying and understanding how school districts, vendors and policymakers are
framing the student privacy as a policy issue. The study situates the state-level case
against the backdrop of the larger evolving legal and policy landscape. I addressed the
research questions by conducting a qualitative case study in California with supplemental
interviews with experts in data privacy, privacy law, and public policy. Accordingly, this
qualitative study is guided by the following research questions:
1. How does the California law reflect (or not reflect) the national climate on
student and family privacy and the role of vendors like Geo Listening in
establishing (or not establishing) rules and accountability in this new market
space?
a. How do these rules reflect district concerns for student safety?
b. How do these rules reflect the legislative response to Geo Listening’s
business model?
c. Where are these rules situated in terms of the national data privacy
conversation?
2. What political and social factors contributed to the policy window for the
creation of California AB1442 on student privacy?
a. How did the rules change to reflect privacy concerns?
3. How did Geo Listening enter, operate, and contribute to this new niche
market of social-media monitoring and subsequently influence accountability
policymaking at the local and state levels?
36
These research questions are derived from the intersection of Kingdon’s agenda
setting and Easton’s political framework with the absence of contracting literature that
explores the roles of smaller private firms in the policy process.
Research Design
In this section, I discuss and provide a rationale for conducting a qualitative,
instrumental case study (Stake, 1995; 2000). I first give a brief description of qualitative
methodology, followed by a general overview of case study design and policy discourse
analysis. Next, I describe in my particular study of Geo Listening, how case study will be
applied, paying particular attention to research setting, data collection, and how content
and discourse analysis will enhance the data analysis portion. I then focus on how case
study aligns with my chosen theoretical framings and with the research reviewed earlier
in this paper. Finally, I examine issues of transferability and trustworthiness, as well as
limitations to the case study method.
Qualitative Methods
Qualitative studies are an appropriate methodological choice for researchers who
are interested in issues of process and meaning (Bogdan & Biklen, 1992; Merriam, 1988).
By design, qualitative studies are geared towards unveiling and understanding the
participants’ situated experience (Creswell, 2012; Hatch, 2002). Also, a qualitative
research design has an embedded iterative nature that creates the flexible and fluid
dynamic necessary to explore and embedded case. There is an underlying assumption
built into the design that, as data are collected and analyzed and as the researcher spends
time in the field, data needs and research questions may evolve (Bogdan & Biklen, 1992;
Hatch, 2002; Lincoln & Guba, 1985).
37
Qualitative methods allow the researcher to focus on understanding participants’
experiences as they occur in their natural environment (Bogdan & Biklen, 1992; Denzin
& Lincoln, 2011; Eisner, 1991; Hatch, 2002; Lincoln & Guba; 1985). Qualitative inquiry
encourages researchers to collect a wide variety of data and spend extensive time in the
field (Erickson, 1986; Merriam, 1988), with the intent that extensive exposure to the
natural environment may garner a deeper, more descriptive understanding of the research
site and the participants therein (Erickson, 1986; Merriam, 1988; Stake, 1995). Because I
am interested in tracing the agenda-setting process through to the implementation of a
policy, along with capturing the impacts and experiences of those who engage with the
policy on the ground, qualitative methods are most appropriate for my study (Bogdan &
Biklen, 1992; Hatch, 2002). This study relies heavily on the experiences of Geo Listening
as they interacted with the school district and state officials and will use documented
history as a medium for tracing this exchange.
Case study. Case study is an in-depth, contextual, detailed exploration of a given
phenomenon of interest (Stake, 2000). In case study research, the dialectical nature of
interviewing, naturalistic observation, and in-depth document analysis is used to
illuminate the experiential knowledge of the participants (Stake, 1995). As I situate my
analysis in the frameworks of Kingdon (1984, 1995) and Easton (1965), case study is an
especially useful research method, as it is highly contextualized, encourages the
collection of a variety of data, and approaches problems of practice from a holistic
perspective (Merriam, 1988). Additionally, case study design encourages analysis of
external environmental factors that may impact the case (Stake, 1978; Yin, 2003), which
in the case of agenda setting is the primary focus of the theoretical frame.
38
A case study design is characterized by several features. First, case study scholars
place great importance on purposefully choosing and bounding the case by both time and
place (Stake 1995; Merriam, 1988). Second, case study design encourages collecting
extensive, multiple sources of data to develop an in-depth, contextualized understanding
of the case and of the participants’ experiences (Stake 1995; Stake, 2000; Merriam,
1988). Third, case study researchers often spend considerable time in the field, so as to
better situate the case and further contextualize participant experience (Yin, 1984;
Merriam, 1988). Finally, case study reports involve rich, thick description (Geertz, 1973),
so that readers better understand the context of the case and can determine the
applicability of the case to other contexts (Stake, 2000). In case study design, the focus
on experiential knowledge and contextualized understanding provides vicarious
experience for readers of the research, which allows for the co-construction of knowledge
both between researchers and participants and between researchers and readers (Stake,
2000).
Notably, this study differs from that of traditionally defined case studies, in that
there is more focus on interviews, public records, and meeting transcripts, than on actual
observation of the phenomenon. The rationale for this is because the nature of this case is
a retroactive analysis looking back over events that were chronicled during early 2013 to
late 2014. It was during this period that Geo Listening came to the public awareness of
Californians for their involvement in cyber monitoring and then they were subsequently
the motivation for the creation of AB 1442.
Type of case study. I situate my case study description in the work of Stake
(1978; 1995; 2000) and Yin (1984; 2009). Case study scholars differ in how they
39
categorize types of cases. Yin (1984; 2003) breaks case studies into three axes:
exploratory, explanatory, and descriptive; differentiating between single and multiple
case studies, and segmenting these into two categories of holistic (single unit of analysis)
and embedded (multiple units of analysis). Stake (1995; 2000) further posits that there are
three categories of case study: intrinsic, in which the case itself is of primary interest;
instrumental, in which the case is meant to glean a more general understanding of a
particular issue; and collective, in which the researcher studies several cases within a
project.
I conducted an instrumental case study (Stake, 1995), which I argue is illustrative
of a particular phenomenon and which may be used to provide insight into a particular
issue (Stake, 1995; 2000). Instrumental cases are chosen because of their
representativeness and then bounded according to the parameters of the issue in the
particular case. Here, I am capitalizing on the involvement of Geo Listening in the
creation of a policy window as a mechanism for exploring how small non-governmental
actors enter and operate the traditionally defined political system (Easton, 1965). Within
the definition of this study as an instrumental case, is the institutional case of the
behaviors of a small non-governmental organization’s(NGOs) as they use their political
action in the policymaking space. More clearly, Geo Listening is an exemplar of three
organizational and institutional relationships: the relationship between districts and
vendors, the relationship between vendors and student data privacy, and the relationship
between vendors and the policymaking space. Geo Listening as the unit of analysis
becomes a lens for understanding the intersection of these complex relationships (Figure
3-1).
40
This case is also an exemplar of an embedded case study. Yin (1994, p.41) makes
a distinction between a holistic and embedded case study where embedded case study
allows for multiple units of analysis where these different units of analysis allow for the
development of perspective across salient aspects of the case. Scholz and Tietje (2002)
adds to that by defining an embedded case study as one that is understood as a whole in
its real-world context. This study is an embedded case as it foregrounds the larger context
of a national discourse on privacy in an era of accountability policies, explores the
theoretical framework of Kingdon (1984, 1995) and agenda setting around the student
data privacy laws at the state level. It then captures and reframes part of the discussion of
privatization as evidenced in district contracting and then centers on the experiences and
example of one local institutional actor, Geo Listening. The nesting of these can be seen
in the following diagram (Figure 3-2):
District and
Vendor
Relationships
Vendors and
Policymaking
Vendors and
Student Data
Privacy
Figure 3-1 - Intersection of Relationships in the Geo Listening case
41
Research setting. Typically, case studies call for attention to a specific research
setting. This case looks at the movements of the organization Geo Listening and is bound
by their interactions with local school districts, through contracting, and the state around
the policy issue of student and family data privacy. Since this is a case study that will
largely rely on discourse analysis, much of the research will occur in the following types
of spaces: conference sessions, board meetings, public meetings, and in some cases
online forums.
Participants. The primary participants in the study are the actors, policy
entrepreneurs, and stakeholders at each phase of the agenda setting and implementation
processes. The sampling of participants begins with the vocal actors, media
spokespersons, organization leaders, and state officials responsible for AB 1442, and then
I utilized snowball sampling, referrals from current participants for future participants, to
make further connections. Additionally, early interview participants were sampled from
presenters and discussants from conference presentations on student privacy.
National
Discourse on
Student Data
Privacy
State Legislative
Response to
Privacy Concerns
District Concerns
for Student
Safety
The Case of Geo
Listening
Figure 3-2 Embedded Case of Geo Listening
42
Data collection. Yin (1984) recommends six types of information that a case
study researcher should collect: interviews, direct observations, participant observations,
documents, archival records, and physical artifacts. The development of this case along
the axis of time can be seen below (Figure 3-3).
For this study, I conducted seven semi-structured interviews with privacy experts,
advocates, and small vendor owners. I also spent time attending workshops and meetings
at a public conference, SxSWedu 2015 and 2016, where the focus of the sessions was on
student data privacy. There I conducted direct observation, passively listening for
discourse, collecting documents, taking pictures of pertinent slides, and watching
panelists as they exchanged dialogue with other attendees. Every session I attended
during the conferences was audio recorded. Regarding document collection, I collected
copies of publicly available corporate papers on student privacy, social media postings,
state and federal legislation, and public position papers from groups and individuals that
are extremely vocal in this space. I also collected copies of the progression of the bill AB
1442 and the documentation for each of the stages of bill analysis. Finally, much of this
research centered on the contractual relationship between Geo Listening and Glendale
National Data, Security and Privacy
Awareness Heightened
Emerging
Markets
• Social Media
Monitoring
School disctricts encounter threats to
school safety and student wellness
• Cyberbullying
• Campus bomb threats
• Student Suicide
A Local District
contracts with Geo
Listening
• Social Media Monitoring
• Early Intervention
Programming
Parents and
Media
Outcry about
Privacy
Violation
AB 1442
presented by
Gatto
(Agenda
Setting)
• Policy Stream
• Problem
Stream
• Political
Stream
AB 1442
Pupil
records:
Social media
• January –
August 2014
• Policy
Entrepreneur
s Contribute
SxSWedu
March 2015
- Privacy
Conference
Interviews
and
Document
collection
SxSWedu
March 2016
• Privacy
sessions
• 2 follow-up
offrecord
interviews
AEFP 2016
• Conference
focused on
privacy
• Preliminary
findings
presentation
and feedback
from
interested
parties
Figure 3-3 Timeline of Data Collection Relative to the Development of the Case
43
Unified School District, as such I utilized the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to
acquire copies of the contracts held by these two entities from 2013 - present (2015).
Keeping consistent with case study and in qualitative research as a whole, I
collected and analyzed data simultaneously (Hatch, 2002; Stake, 1995). My analysis of
collected data continuing to inform further data collection strategies and areas of focus. I
kept track of the extensive amount of data through field journals and interview protocols
(Creswell, 1998). Further, during data collection, I have memoed to keep a running log of
thoughts and lines of analysis, as well as to maintain a detailed evolving description of
the case, a continuing analysis of emerging themes, and possible interpretations of
assertions as they develop (Creswell, 1998; Stake, 1995). Because case study research
often results in a large amount of data, it is critical to have a basic plan in place to
organize the data, identify data that is relevant to the research questions, and to develop a
coding and memoing process that is iterative and focused.
Data analysis. For this study, I am choosing to utilize data analysis strategies
advocated by Stake (1995), with a few other strategies (discussed in further detail below)
to augment Stake’s process. Stake presents a four-step process: direct interpretation,
categorical aggregation, pattern recognition and correspondence of patterns, and
naturalistic generalizations (Creswell, 1998; Stake, 1995). In direct interpretation, the
researcher looks at single instances in the data and attempts to draw some meaning out of
it. Next, in categorical aggregation, the researcher aggregates these discrete instances
until statements can be made about these instances as a whole. In the process of pattern
recognition and correspondence, the researcher establishes patterns and looks for
instances of correspondence between categories (Creswell, 1998, p. 154). Finally, the
44
researcher develops naturalistic generalizations that can inform individuals about the case
or can be applied to similar circumstances.
To facilitate analysis, I utilized strategies employed in critical discourse analysis
(CDA). CDA investigates the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are
enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context.
Language use, discourse, verbal interaction, and communication belong to the micro level
of the social order. Power, dominance, and inequality between social groups are typically
terms that belong to a macro level of analysis. CDA situates itself theoretically to bridge
the "gap" between micro and macro approaches. The method emphasizes the inclusion of
voice from both interviews and written publications or documents from the same
individuals, with discipline in capturing what is meant by what is, and is not, said (Van
Dijk, 2003).
Policy discourse analysis. Policy discourse analysis grows from an appreciation
of the implications of post-structural perspectives (Allan, 2003, 2008, 2010). Specifically,
the methodology grows from a postmodern skepticism of frameworks or
conceptualizations that are universal, inevitable, or natural (Bloland, 2005; Falzon, 1998;
Tierney, 2001). This particular form of analysis is consistent with my point of view in
examining the role of Geo Listening in the agenda setting process. I do not view policy as
a rational perfect solution to a set of problems and maintain that holding a critical
perspective on the discourse surrounding policymaking will continue to enhance our
understanding. Principally, by examining the discourse and rhetoric underlying a policy
we can begin to unveil the assumptions and overlooked nuances, namely local actors and
their voice, that help us to understand why policy implementation falls short specifically
45
at the local level. A poststructuralist approach emphasizes language as the site of social
organization and meaning. A sense of self, or subjectivity, is locally and temporarily
established likewise through social discourse (Allan, 2008, 2010; Luke, 1995; Richardson
& St. Pierre, 2005f).
Coding. Stake’s (1995) process of analysis and my analytic questions also
undergird my coding strategy. In this study, I conduct both inductive and deductive
analysis throughout data collection and analysis, coding in cycles (Saldaña, 2012) that
allow for comparison across data, codes, and categories in a non-linear fashion. In the
first coding cycle, I conducted an initial read-through of the data and memo concurrently
to familiarize myself with the data and also to form initial reactions to shape the coding
process moving forward. In the second cycle, I developed inductive sub-codes as I read
through the data again, looking for patterns and themes. During this cycle, I memoed to
develop analytic summaries of the data, which allows me to formulate some responses to
my analytic questions and to synthesize what I have learned so far. In the next coding
cycle, I code using my theoretical framework, so I can begin to identify explanations for
the patterns and themes I am seeing.
Strengths of and Rationale for Case Study Design
My research questions and aim of inquiry are served well by case study
methodology. My proposed research questions are aimed at issues of agenda setting and
policy implementation, and they include “how” and “why” questions. Case study
research is highly contextualized, encourages the collection of a variety of data,
approaches problems of practice from a holistic perspective, and allows the researcher to
46
trace development over time (Merriam, 1988; Yin, 1984). These tenets of case study
align well with my research questions and with the literature that informed them.
Case study is an appropriate methodology for research that is theoretically
informed by Kingdon’s (1984; 1995) multiple streams. As noted by Yin (2009), case
study is desirable when “the boundaries between [the investigated] phenomenon and
context are not clearly evident” (p. 18). In this context, stakeholders often hold
overlapping roles as both advocates for students and parents, contributors to the ongoing
research and documentation of the process, and beneficiaries of the profits as their
organizations position themselves as experts. As data collection and analysis are
conducted simultaneously in qualitative research (Hatch, 2002; Stake, 1995), my analysis
continually informs my data collection as well.
Case study as a method supports a temporal study by encouraging extensive time
in the field and the ability to trace changes over time; case study is not limited to cross-
sectional or static assessments of a particular situation (Yin, 1984).
Limitations of Case Study Research
Case study as a methodology has multiple strengths, including in-depth
data collection, a close relation to my theoretical framework, and attention to issues of
trustworthiness. However, case study also has several inherent weaknesses. In this case,
the study will only be considering the privacy laws of California; this limits the overall
generalizability of the findings from this exploration. While the goal is to provide depth
to the analysis of student and family privacy, it is limited by the natural bounds of the
overall case.
47
Another limitation of case study is the possibility of bias introduced by my
subjectivity (Yin, 1984). Because case study involves extensive amounts of data and is
often characterized by extensive time in the field, case study could be subject to a
researcher picking and choosing which data to include and which to ignore (Guba &
Lincoln, 1981). This could result in incorrect assumptions or biased interpretations of the
findings or a general leading of the analysis to suit the preconceived narrative. While my
personal bias is unavoidable, to mitigate the impact of that bias I intend to rely on the
rigor of discourse analysis and foregrounding the participants’ voices.
Trustworthiness
Trustworthiness is a way to demonstrate the rigor of the research (Guba, 1981;
Lincoln, 1995; Lincoln & Guba, 1985). Lincoln and Guba (1985) state that to ensure
trustworthiness, the researcher determines that her or his research meets the following:
transferability, or how well the research transfers to other, similar contexts; credibility, or
confidence in the findings of the research; dependability, or the consistency of the
findings; and confirmability, the extent to which the findings are free from researchers’
biases (Lincoln & Guba, 1985).
Case study design speaks to every one of these components. First, case study
facilitates a process of triangulation by requiring that researchers collect and analyze
multiple sources of data (Stake, 1995). This process increases credibility, dependability,
and confirmability. Second, member-checking helps to ensure trustworthiness. I plan to
share patterns, claims, and written reports with participants, particularly key informants,
as this engenders trust between researcher and participant, and also increase both
credibility and confirmability (Stake, 1995). Third, transferability and dependability can
48
be increased by extensive data collection and multiple data sources that can be transferred
to similar situations. Finally, prolonged engagement with the participants and extensive
time in the field can increase the transferability and credibility of the research as patterns
can be checked and re-checked against the data throughout data collection.
49
CHAPTER 4
DATA
This study was conducted to understand how a private company interacts with the
policymaking space from the non-traditional perspective of a small firm. Specifically, the
study explored how Geo Listening went from relative obscurity and simply operating in
the vendor space by providing a service to a local school district, to being a great
motivating factor in the creation of a bill that would govern the special contract
relationship that they maintain. The study answers the questions: How do non-
governmental actors, specifically vendors, move into the political arena and in this case,
what was the motivation? More closely, I explore the ways that these motivations – e.g.
altruism, market-based opportunism, utopianism, etc. – allow a firm to leverage its
support in the larger community to carve a deeper niche in the market, and, by so doing,
shore up its position as a product- or service-provision leader.
This chapter reconstructs the narrative of the events, details and description of the
data and findings surrounding the Bill AB 1442 through the lens of the company Geo
Listening and positions that narrative in the context of the emerging social media
monitoring market. It begins with exploring the emerging market of social media
monitoring, setting the national climate around data and security. The story moves on to
merge the contextual motivation for the creation of a new company called Geo Listening,
in the context of that market and the storytelling of news outlets that brought Geo
Listening to the public’s attention. I situate my analysis of this narrative within the
theoretical framework of agenda setting (Kingdon, 1984, 1995). Constructing and
portraying a detailed recounting of the events leading to the creation of Bill AB 1442.
50
The narrative also includes a detailing of the creation of the law Pupil Records: Social
Media from AB 1442 and the unique political streams that allowed for the law to be
expedited. The objective here is to examine the backstage policymaking process that is
increasingly important in privatized settings as they exert influence and shape emerging
market accountability measures. This work builds on existing research on how corporate
behavior intersects with accountability policies (e.g. Burch, LaFave, & Smith, 2016;
Hess, 2007; LaFave, 2016; Valor, 2005), but shifts the focus away from the traditional
approach of examining larger firms to the role of local firms in this context. This chapter
is organized around the following events which use the case of Geo Listening to highlight
the emergence of the social media monitoring contracting market in education and the
concerns with student privacy because of this (Figure 4-1).
Understanding the Emerging Market of Social Media Monitoring in Education
In general, companies that engage in the social media monitoring market fall
within one of two distinct segments: software companies who provide the tools for social
media monitoring and companies who provide the service of social media monitoring
(Frydrych, personal communication, 2015). In 2011, Social Media Biz, a social media
Figure 4-1. A Timeline of the Narrative of Geo Listening
National Data,
Security and
Privacy
Awareness
Heightened
Emerging Markets
• Social Media
Monitoring
School
disctricts
encounter
threats to
school safety
and student
wellness
• Cyberbullying
• Campus bomb
threats
• Student Suicide
A Local District contracts
with Geo Listening
• Social Media Monitoring
• Early Intervention
Programming
Student
discovers on
Facebook that
social media is
being
monitored
Parents and
Media create a
public outcry
over potential
privacy
violation
AB 1442
brought forth
by Glendale
representative
Gatto (Agenda
Setting)
• Policy Stream
• Problem Stream
• Political Stream
AB 1442 Pupil records: Social
media
• January – August 2014
• Policy Entrepreneurs Contribute
Geo Listening
continues
contracting
51
new and trends site, made a top 20 list of firms involved with social media monitoring
from the over 200 tools and platforms available. The list included a combination of both
the standalone tools and companies offering monitoring services (Lasica & Bale, 2011).
Since then, several of the companies have been acquired by larger firms as a part of the
growing trend to offer social media monitoring as a product line and more directly tap
into that growing technological market. As recently as February 2016, Sprout Social, a
six-year-old Chicago company specializing in social media management software, had
more than doubled its venture backing with a $42 million infusion led by the merchant
banking division of Goldman Sachs (Clancy, 2016). Even the government has In-Q-Tel,
the CIA’s venture capital firm distributes funding to a portfolio of companies specifically
dedicated to social media monitoring. Geofeedia, a company I discuss later, is one of four
companies in this specific portfolio (Fang, 2016). The purposeful investment of the
government, investment firms, and technological firms highlights a simple fact: social
media monitoring is a big deal.
Three of the companies that topped the 2011 list of emerging companies have
been acquired by technological giants in this space. The companies Salesforce.com,
Nielson, and Oracle, as representatives of the scope of the market, ranging from the
innovative technological newcomer Saleforce.com to the technological stalwart Oracle.
What becomes clear is that tools are being advertised to, and used by, any company
which would like to leverage social media data to increase productivity. In addition, there
is a wide range of companies providing social media monitoring and even more entering
the market to purchase the solution.
52
Salesforce acquired Radian6 which is a social media “listening” tool that was
ranked highest on the emerging technology list in 2011(Lasica & Bale, 2011). The tool
was designed to “listen” more intelligently to consumers, competitors, and influencers
with the goal of growing a business via detailed, real-time insights. Salesforce is the
number two ranked innovative company on Forbes Lists with a market cap of $44.2B. By
acquiring Radian6, Salesforce made a clear assertion about their intent to increase their
market share by developing cloud solutions through innovation. The company boasts
broadly about the potential of Radian6 “by joining Marketing Cloud's suite of social
media marketing products, Radian6 — a powerful social listening technology — has
accelerated Salesforce's growth and leadership”. Salesforce advertises that tool will allow
companies to meet customer demands as they “listen to the social conversation — even if
your brand isn't being mentioned by name.” Salesforce, in this statement, captures the
essence of what social media monitoring does, operating as a digital eavesdropping tool.
Salesforce is joined in the market by well-established corporate giant Oracle, who
acquired Collective Intellect, another top ranking company. Oracle, traditionally known
as a database management company, has a $187.6B market valuation in the software and
technology industry and is ranked the seventeenth most valuable brand on Forbes List.
Oracle is best known for being a robust technological firm and a perennial leader in
business solutions. And, like Salesforce, Oracle is clear that their technology is about
providing a solution which bundles social listening, social engagement, social publishing,
social content & apps, and social analytics in one cloud service. Unlike Salesforce,
Oracle targets their existing consumer base by ensuring that the newly acquired
technology works seamlessly with all other Oracle product offerings.
53
Nielsen is a renowned TV ratings corporation with a $17B market valuation. They
provide ratings on consumer trends and habits worldwide. Nielsen Social is a product
launch to become one of the leading providers of social TV measurement, audience
engagement and advertising effectiveness solutions for TV networks, agencies and
advertisers. The corporation leverages their market dominance to deliver Nielsen
SocialGuide Intelligence, a Twitter TV analytics and engagement platform and Nielsen
Twitter TV Ratings, the first-ever measure of the reach of Twitter TV conversation,
helping the industry measure, understand and act on the activity and reach of TV-related
conversation on Twitter. Nielsen, part of the printing and publishing industry, is a
representative of the case that while social media monitoring is largely housed in the
software market, other industries are acquiring capabilities to position themselves
competitively in an increasingly technological world. More closely, other industries are
looking for ways to capitalize on the treasure trove of data that exists in the public
domain of social media, to target consumers more astutely.
Again, these are just a few of the companies that topped the aforementioned list of
emerging companies, but they begin to establish a baseline for understanding the market.
The types of companies discussed are not only representative of the scope of the market,
but also demonstrate a commitment from the technology and business sector to enter and
sustain a newly forming social-media monitoring market. The hidden market (Burch,
2009) of social-media monitoring is embedded within technological solutions that are
designed for the improvement of customer service, public safety, and in the context of
education, student safety. Burch frames hidden markets as it pertains to the encroachment
of private vendors on the educational sector to take advantage of the revenue made
54
possible by No Child Left Behind. Extending on this work, I frame the hidden market to
include all newly emerging, unregulated markets that become embedded in educational
services as is the case of social media monitoring. Burch and I both call for greater
attention needs to be paid to these areas as they pull on state and federal funds, influence
educational outcomes of students, and largely shape the educational agenda through
lobbying.
Big Data the Market Driver
The idiom “Data is Big Business” is a fixture in most IT industry narratives as the
corporate sector deals with large data sets or produce large data stores (Berthold & Hand,
2003; Herodotou et al., 2011; Keim, 2002; Lavalle et al., 2011; Marr, 2016; Zikopoulos
& Eaton, 2011). The essence of the data business boom is captured by an article targeted
to Chief Information Officers which begins with this statement: “The big data hype cycle
is well and truly over, and CIOs need to lead big data projects or risk getting left behind
by competitors that are gaining business advantage from analyzing the goldmine of data
that lives in databases and on the corporate network” (Why Big Data is Big Business,
2015).
The IT industry is the understandable trendsetter when it comes to data collection
and storage, and the departure from simply hosting data in lieu of becoming miners of
data is consistent with the push for dealing with data as a “goldmine” in the educational
space. Moreover, the characterization of data as a commodity is of growing concern as
educators and researchers grapple with acquiring, storing and analyzing large student data
stores.
55
When David Nagel penned an article in 2014, “Student Data Not a ‘Product’ to be
‘Sold the Highest Bidder’” in THE Journal, an education technology journal, he joined
the ranks of several voices, like Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), Data
Quality Campaign, and National Education Policy Center, decrying the
commercialization of student data, where commercialization of student data is defined as
the use of student data for saleable purposes (Polonetsky & Tene, 2014a). The issue that
Nagel begins to introduce into the student data conversation is the notion that data are a
commodity.
Social media monitoring, however, is about data, and it is big business. Notably,
in 2013, it was estimated to be a $2.2 Billion market, comprised of 0.9bn Social Media
Analytics/ Monitoring and 1.3bn Social CRM (Uniqloud, n.d.). Subsequently, in 2015
salesforce.com was estimating that adding analytics and business intelligence would
increase the total addressable market by $13B in the 2014 fiscal year (Columbus, 2015).
Big Data is now a driving force for increased productivity allowing companies to become
more responsive and attentive to customers’ wants and needs. According to Wikibon, a
worldwide community of practitioners, technologists, and consultants dedicated to
improving the adoption of technology and business systems through an open source
sharing of free advisory knowledge, The Big Data market continued its maturation in
2014 (Figure 4-2). The market experienced both significant growth with the sale of Big
Data products & services and increased adoption of Big Data tools and technologies by
large enterprises across vertical markets (Kelly, 2015).
56
Big Data analytics is fueled by a major push for improved Customer Relations
Management (CRM) systems that integrate feedback from social media platforms (Figure
4-3). Big Data is a large driver in the social media market as CRM systems look to
integrate consumer information on these platforms into their productivity loop.
Understanding the components of the CRM model becomes vital as we explore
exactly where social media monitoring intersects with the educational technology market.
Currently, according to the model, the community publishes various pieces of personal
Figure 4-2. Big Data Market Forecast (Kelly, 2015)
Figure 4-3. Social CRM Process from Chess Media Group (2010)
57
information on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, blogs, and
LinkedIn which is captured by the listening tool. This link between social media and
actionable data becomes a pivotal contribution to the ability of companies to be more
responsive to consumer needs and desires.
While companies like Oracle, Salesforce, and Nielsen are providing the listening
tool to companies looking to drive business decisions and improve customer relations,
there are other companies poised to capitalize on that information. The differences
between these specific corporations who operate within the social media monitoring
market illuminate the sheer volume of industry power, billions of corporate dollars,
behind this growing market. Social media monitoring touches every facet of life, from the
entertainment sector to education, and most industries are determining a way to capitalize
on the tool for economic gain. Now, with the emergence of the ability to use social media
to understand people and their tastes, schools and districts are at the center of an
emerging niche market that uses targeted social media monitoring in education.
Emerging Market of Social Media Monitoring in the Education Sector
As the larger social media monitoring market develops and grows, there is also a
growing hidden niche group which specifically targets the K-12 and Higher Education
domain as a part of their business plan. This emerging market targets the challenges of
cyberbullying and other social media posts as a means for creating meaningful
interventions to maintain a safe and conducive learning environment for students in a
technological era. While using social media for clues about what is happening in schools
is not a new phenomenon, contracting with vendors specifically for this service is an
emerging market.
58
Outside of this new emerging social-media monitoring market, social media
monitoring is already intersecting with educational interests. For example, a 2013 release
from the department on its website, “California Department of Education Monitors Social
Media During STAR Tests”, compares 2013 social media activity to the previous year,
suggesting a pattern of behaviors by students to posting to social media during tests and a
pattern of monitoring by the state. The article proceeds to list the names of the districts
and schools who offended. The purpose of this reporting was to indicate that despite the
social media posts, none of the school test results were affected (California Department
of Education, 2013).
Consistent with the California Department of Education (CDE) acknowledging
social media monitoring, is the fact that Pearson also admits that social media monitoring
during testing is "contractually required by states"(Woolfe, 2015). The company argues
that whatever it sees during the monitoring is available to any person browsing the Web -
an argument consistent with what Geo Listening has put forth – and used to allay fears of
privacy violations. In these examples, the issue of testing validity in the information age
is paramount as are the logistical challenges created by technological advances, in that
states, and vendors, are attempting to keep up with the technology and in the case of
testing, the challenges to reliable and sustainable results. Speaking with Edweek, Wayne
Camara of ACT stated, "There's an urgent need for states to create and adopt clear and
comprehensive regulations that reflect the changing role of technology in assessments.
Administering assessments digitally offers the potential to minimize many test security
risks, but other types of risks may often emerge" (Herold, 2014, para. 2).
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The growing education sector of social media monitoring specifically uses the
tool to address concerns for school districts and school campuses mainly focusing on
issues of cyberbullying, harassment, and other threats to safety and security. Traditionally
schools could deal with student climate and social issues in the halls and classrooms, but
with the emergence of digital technology, online social media has become a forum for
increased anti-social behavior. With growing concern about school shootings, student
suicides and threats to the well-being of the school community, districts and schools
search for tools that allow them to get in front of threats and create interventions.
There are a few players within the growing educational sector of social media
monitoring: Geo Listening, Social Sentinel, Geofeedia, and Snaptrends. These companies
are used because they are all dedicated to educational clientele and have been in direct
competition with each other for district contracts (Frydrych Interview). Since this study
uses Geo Listening as a mechanism for both understanding this emerging market and to
understand how smaller vendors are interacting with, and influencing, the policy process
it becomes necessary to explore the vendors they are directly competing with in this
space. Geo Listening is the pivotal case because it gives a clear and simple example of a
small vendor in an emerging market acting as a catalyst for new education policies in the
educational technology arena and as a result this study positions them as an under-
analyzed form of policy actor.
Before I explore the Geo Listening case, I will profile the other companies along
these criteria: marketing placement, targeted sector, and growing prevalence of
contracting in this space. The purpose of this discussion is to get a clearer picture of what
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the educational social media market looks like and how corporations participating in that
market are advertising themselves to schools and other education agencies.
Social Sentinel is a company of “Security Experts Building the Social Threat
Alert Industry.” The characterization of cyber security in terms of a threat to safety is
consistent with general policing policies that this brand of social media monitoring
promotes. The company is built on this, “Every aspect of the Social Sentinel® service has
been built by safety and security experts.” Additionally, they have hired individuals who
operate in the law enforcement and security industry to create their brand of social media
monitoring. “We are trusted advisors who have been in the field, and we want to continue
to be there with you, bringing new strategies to help you expand how you approach your
community's long-term safety and security initiatives — with social in mind!” The
company goes on to outline three distinct segments that they cater to K-12, Higher
Education, and Public Safety. Social Sentinel positions themselves on the social media
monitoring landscape like an arm of law enforcement, which is consistent with the
industries they target. The wide cross-section of expertise on their executive team and
board of directors includes former law enforcement personnel and lawyers. Additionally,
they have an advisory board that is comprised of a Chief of Police for a university, the
superintendent of a school district, and a university professor and national center chair in
computer and information sciences is representative as their market targets include
schools and districts (Social Sentinel website, 2016). The targeted nature of the advisory
board is indicative of a company who is intent on becoming an industry standard in this
form of cyber policing.
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Another player in this market, Geofeedia, positions their business as “on a
mission to transform the way organizations leverage social media.” Further reiterating,
“Wouldn’t it be incredible if we could gather social data coming from a specific location,
across multiple social sources, in just a matter of seconds? We could then go anywhere in
the world, right now, and understand exactly what’s happening.” Geofeedia steers clear
of the strong policing overtones, but rather focuses on shifting from the traditional use of
social listening tools that previously only gathered data by keywords and hashtags to
something more meaningful and informative.
Our first launch was met with tremendous excitement and our technology was
openly dubbed as unique, disruptive, and transformative. Journalism groups,
brands, public safety groups, and other organizations finally had a powerful way
to mine the social cloud that was fast, powerful, and generated relevant and
actionable data.
Geofeedia plays up the location aspect of social media monitoring, with the
landing page of their website showing a target map with several pins for individual’s
locations overlaid by a flashing bullseye-crosshairs graphic. The visual and message is
clear; you can tightly hone in on a location and listen in on the social media chatter based
on whatever your interests are in the data.
The other major player, Snaptrends was founded in 2012 by Brandon Burris and
Eric Klasson with one purpose in mind – “to help organizations in all industries leverage
social media conversations and posts when and where they happen.” Snaptrends is in
alignment with the purpose of the larger social media market, and this explains their
competitive advantage as they’ve become one of the leading providers of location-based
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social insights to industries worldwide. They hold contracts across the country with
police departments, school districts, and even a $16,600 contract with the Drug
Enforcement Administration. They are rapidly becoming a major player in the larger
market while having ties to the smaller education market. This company boasts that their
“location-based social media insights system makes it possible, for the first time, to
monitor, analyze and visualize this public data quickly and easily so users can make
informed decisions and implement effective strategies.” According to the company, they
have a “patented technology” that “processes billions of geo-tagged social media posts
every month and translates more than 80 languages, so nothing is out of reach.” This
company appears to have the most diverse industry customer base including education,
corporate security, healthcare, law enforcement, sports & athletics, and energy & utilities.
If there were a depth chart (Figure 4-4) of corporations from small business local
vendor to big business multinational corporation, Snaptrends is moving towards the deep
end of the industry pool. This is extremely important to acknowledge, because while
social media monitoring can largely be considered an industry outside of the educational
domain, these corporations are indicative that we have a new hidden market to give
attention (Burch, 2009). More deeply, while the majority of educational contracting
literature focuses on larger firms and their influence, this case affords the opportunity to
use a small business as the exemplar of a newly formed vendor-district relationship.
Small business | Big Business
Figure 4-4. Spectrum of Company Size
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Much of the discussion in this study focuses on the services of Geo Listening and
their use of a listening tool to monitor social media. However, understanding the
emergence of this tool outside of education, and the developing market conditions that
surround its utilization, gives greater clarity on the complexity of social media
monitoring and creating policies for accountability purposes in this new space. More
closely, while the listening tool is currently used for information gathering around student
safety in the educational sector, it must be noted that the larger market commercializes
the data gathered.
This use of data for commercial purposes is at the core of parents’ concerns about
the introduction of this tool into the educational arena. What remains challenging, is the
larger market use also gives insight into the lack of control, and by extension privacy, the
individual has when using social media platforms without explicitly using private profile
settings. As the business world has already moved past simply using the tool to collect
social media posts towards a process that operationalizes data, including the cultivation
of tools and systems that integrate it seamlessly into corporate productivity feedback
loops, the future of this tool in education is largely undefined. The question of student
data privacy becomes more central to the discussion on how educational vendors will
operate in both the social-media monitoring market and the provision of student safety
solutions in a technological age. Specifically, educational vendors have the challenge of
operating under a completely different set of oversight, accountability, and consumer
expectations; the next section traces these conditions.
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The Perfect Storm: A Climate of Mistrust
In chapter two I began to explore the complexities of student data privacy laws, I
continue that discussion. It is difficult to paint a clear picture about why student data
privacy catapulted to such prominence, and is now so important, without understanding
how the discussion of data privacy and security reached the public forefront and held our
attention. The rise of the internet allowed for communication of individuals, friends, and
families across various forms including social media and data exchanges like email. As
more families gained access to the internet at home and on their phones, increased work
productivity, data and information sharing, and distributing the highlights of our personal
moments seemed to be a point and click away. While there were members of society who
held a healthy skepticism over how ‘plugged in’ we had become, society ticked along
with the gentle purr of keyboards clacking, mouse clicking, Facebook likes, emails
whirling, and Twitter retweets. A storm was brewing behind all of this data and the
beginning of that shift was still largely unseen by the general public.
In isolation, none of the events in this section would have been sufficient to create
a national agenda on student data and information privacy. However, the confluence of
factors set the stage for a policy window of increased pressure on leaders in both
government and industry to address concerns over the privacy and security of student
data. While attending SxSWedu 2015, which is a conference dedicated to “foster
innovation in learning by hosting a diverse and energetic community of stakeholders
across a variety of backgrounds in education” (SxSWedu, 2015), I was able to observe as
policymakers, privacy experts and researchers engaged around the issue of student
privacy during the height of the privacy concerned charged climate.
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During one of the sessions at the conference, an audience participant responded
to the panel and introduced himself as a former Chief Information Officer for a school
district. He described his role as a former Chief Information Officer, and his transition to
becoming an independent consultant with school districts, where he specifically
addresses issues of security and safety. I interviewed him about the general framing of
the student data privacy policy problem. His response, while lengthy, supports the
general framing of the student data privacy policy problem as I will discuss in more detail
following:
I think there's several reasons. I think, certainly there have been multiple media
reports in the last couple of years around security and data breaches on the
consumer side. I think that people are just much more aware of it, that your data
necessarily isn't secure when it's in the cloud. I think certainly the issue with the
NSA that came up a couple of years ago, again, heightened awareness on the part
of people that what you think may be private might not really be private. Closer to
education, certainly as inBloom was trying to get traction, one of the issues that
those who were opposed to the inBloom effort in states such as Colorado raised
security and privacy as one of their significant concerns, that you would have so
much data in one system. They suggested that the security protocols maybe were
not what they should be. That raised questions about that, so as inBloom then
went through the period of where they kind of imploded if you will, I think that
for some people seemed to almost validate, maybe there really were concerns
there.
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Then you've had some market issues within the education technology space where
some education technology vendors have seen that as they saw privacy becoming
a concern on the part of parents and others, they then wanted to use privacy as a
competitive advantage in some way in the market. It's this whole range.
The respondent gives an overview of a very complex problem, what follows is deeper
exploration of this overview beginning with the catalysts that charged the climate for the
issue of student data privacy to gain traction on the policymaking radar.
Then Came Snowden
In June of 2013, Edward Snowden shifted the public awareness of data and
security as The Guardian, a news outlet responsible for covering American and
international news for an online and global audience, released secret documents that he
had shared with them (Guardian, 2015). Snowden, who had previously worked for an
NSA subcontractor, called Booz Allen, created a major shift in the national consciousness
around how data are collected and monitored and the degree of access given through
technology. Using his access, he acquired documents showing that Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court had implemented an order that required Verizon to release
information to the NSA on an "ongoing, daily basis" culled from its American customers'
phone activities. Additionally, he leaked information on PRISM, an NSA program that
allows real-time information collection electronically. A flood of information followed,
and both domestic and international debate ensued.
Before Snowden’s disclosure, the depth and breadth of data privacy was not fully
understood by the general public. While many had become quite accustomed to signing
privacy agreements for using applications and quickly scrolling to the bottom of terms
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and conditions notices when they opened up a new account, very few people realized just
how much information was being ceded to other companies and by extension to the
government. Everyone largely operated under the assumption that private conversations
were still private and personal information belonged to the individual.
Snowden had single-handedly popped the bubble. He destroyed the illusion of
security that every interaction we have with technology was built on. The governmental
response to the leaks only heightened the awareness of the public. His sharing made
every American with the ability to read a newspaper aware of the fact that someone was
listening, recording, and analyzing every conversation they had. While many Americans
had suspected that the federal government possessed these advanced intelligence-
gathering capabilities, Snowden’s unequivocal assertion that digital surveillance not only
existed but was widespread provided a significant disruption in the ways that we handled
our daily interactions. Nevertheless, Snowden was not the first to say that information
was being used or abused without the public knowledge.
Microsoft vs. Google
In November 2012 Microsoft began a series of targeted “you’re being scroogled”
advertising campaigns against Google complete with a website,
http://www.scroogled.com, which now redirects to a “Why Microsoft” site. The goal of
the campaign was to target Google consumers and challenge their awareness of their
vulnerability after Google moved to a “paid inclusion” or pay-to-play model of accepting
listings for its Google Shopping site. Pay per click (PPC), also called cost per click, is an
internet advertising model that is used to direct traffic to websites wherein an advertiser
pays a when the ad is clicked; this approach is commonly associated with search engines.
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The purpose of this campaign was to drive Google users to choose Microsoft’s competing
product line, Bing, and Outlook.
The next waves of advertising demonstrated how deeply Microsoft had dug their
heels in about bringing down Google. The February 2013 incorporated elements of
advocacy as Microsoft attacked Gmail for using the contents of messages to generate
targeted advertising, and again took the opportunity to recommend the alternative
Microsoft Outlook.com instead (Keizer, 2013). By April 2013, Microsoft demonstrated
that this was not just about desktop Google users, but mobile phone users too, as they
attacked Android. This particular wave was directly relevant to the larger privacy issue as
Microsoft used recent allegations that Google Play Store had been, without disclosure,
leaking basic personal information about users - including names, email addresses, and
phone numbers - to application developers (Arthur, 2013; Warren, 2013). In August
2013, concurrent with a launch of the Bing for Schools initiative, Microsoft argued that
Google's use of advertising on search results pages in an educational environment could
"distract [students] from their studies", unlike the ad-free version of Bing that can be
enabled through the Bing for Schools program (Keizer, 2013). Essentially, Microsoft
echoed the sentiments of every advocate who feels that students should be able to
navigate the internet in a non-commercialized environment. In November 2013,
Microsoft started merchandising Scroogled through Microsoft Store, selling shirts and
mugs featuring designs attacking Google's privacy practices. That same month, Microsoft
also released a Scroogled ad starring Rick Harrison in parody of his television series
Pawn Stars, where Harrison rejected a Chromebook at his pawn shop due to its reliance
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on web-based software, as opposed to a "traditional" computer with Windows and Office
(Ingraham, 2013).
As the Microsoft campaign rolled into 2013 it converged with the rising
prominence of Snowden’s document release and sustained its momentum. Now, with the
general public more aware of concerns about privacy and the unveiling of educational
products, Google and Microsoft were the front players on the educational stage playing
for prominence in schools and homes, through products and solutions. While these larger,
more visible players, spent money on advertising campaigns against each other, the
growing educational technology was already gaining momentum, and would soon come
face to face with a hypersensitive society, informed parents, and student advocates.
Education and Tech Startups
While the public storm around data and privacy was brewing, technological
advances and improvements had already impacted the education space, as recordkeeping,
and even content delivery, transitioned from paper and pen to computers, servers, and the
cloud. While the digital storage of data makes records readily accessible to parents, the
use, storage, and access to this data created a growing potential for unintended
consequences in the form of unregulated access to data.
The non-profit organization inBloom Inc., which ran a data service that facilitated
school districts’ management of student information, became the poster child for this
issue; when it ceased to exist in the spring of 2014, it was largely due to concerns over
student privacy and data security (Burch, LaFave & Smith, 2016). However, with the
increased scrutiny of security and privacy policies, no student-data startup could hope to
avoid close examination by community stakeholders and educational leaders. InBloom’s
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open admission to a general lack of security and privacy coupled with the relationships
the corporation held with commercially-identified entities like The Gates Foundation
elicited visceral public responses. There was grave concern with the kind of data being
collected and stored and, more deeply, how personalized learning would be driven by the
use of this deeply intimate data (Singer, 2014). This did not bode well for inBloom, who
later closed, during the growing fervor of public distrust around data and privacy.
Companies like inBloom were not the only entities that came under scrutiny; any
other policy or initiative, such as the Common Core State Standards, which was based on
large amounts of student data, received significant backlash as parents waged war.
Parents were against the idea that large corporations would be heavily engaging with
schools through initiatives like Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium and PARCC
testing and were poised to control student data (Cavanagh, 2014; Waters, 2014). Steeped
in the unsettling reality of headlines flashing across newspapers and nightly news about
Snowden’s breech, a security breach at Target, and the concurrent attack ads by
Microsoft on Google, there was simply no way that anything related to data, no matter
the intent, would be accepted easily. The case of Geo Listening becomes an interesting
counterpoint in a firm’s ability to manage scrutiny and the political pressure once they
come under scrutiny by advocates or other stakeholders (Burch, LaFave & Smith, 2016).
Privacy and the On the Ground Narrators
In discussing the same question about the urgency the issue of student data
privacy with Horton, a small vendor owner and operator attendee of SxSwedu, his
response echoed the CIOs almost verbatim. Horton’ position further reinforces the
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constructed narrative that the issue of student data privacy has become a larger obscure,
hot agenda item, simply because people are just more aware.
That's a big question and I think there's a lot that factors into that. I'm trying to
think of what I would see as the biggest drivers of this. There's been a lot of
media attention that was played on some particular cases of student data and
education technology uses recently, which brought the issue to peoples’ attention
I think. That's kind of helped fueled some of the debate. I think prior to that
people weren't aware to a large degree of what was going on. I think there's to
some degree a confluence or a convergence of concerns about student privacy and
use of student data, and conflation of that with other very legitimate debates, but
unrelated debates about the standards and testing, and all sorts of things that are
not privacy issues, but that people tend to combine together because they all relate
to data and data driven decision making. I think one of the biggest factors is that
we're dealing with children. If you look at the news about student privacy, you
hear a little bit about privacy in the post-secondary space but mostly when people
are talking about student privacy issues in the news today, they're talking about
kids. Parents get very protective justifiably, when you're talking about their kids
and their kids’ safety and the like. As part of the broader privacy discussion as a
society, there's always trade-off; that we give away our information in return for
certain value.
What becomes particularly striking about the conversation with Horton, is that
while he has some of the same perspectives as the former CIO, he extends the discussion
with two intriguing points about this privacy debate. The first was brief, “there’s always
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trade-off; that we give away our information in return for certain value.” This statement
underscores the general notion that data are commodities and inherently hold some
exchangeable value. It is also demonstrative of a situational awareness and political
savviness that may not be readily attributed to smaller market players.
Horton began to outline how his company faced the challenge of responding to
the growing concerns of the public and the fact that they actually did not think it would
remain such a big issue. “We've had internal meetings where we've talked about if this is
going to stay a big issue… most of us thought it was going to blow over. It has blown
over if you're Google and Microsoft. The rest of the EdTech companies and the districts,
state DOEs, even some legislators, for them it's still going….”
He offered an example to provide context for how the changes from state to state
were creating an issue for vendors without the capacity to respond adequately. By
highlighting a major difference in the strain this inconsistency and strong demand places
on vendors, and districts, of varying sizes and positions in the larger market this
particular vendor draws the discussion on policymaking closer to the ground and those
who are affected by what can often be reactive implementations. Further, Horton’s
perspective echoes much of the literature that speaks to the willingness of “on the
ground” actors to cooperate in the policymaking process but the difficulties they often
face with some mandates. He further stated:
I know what my districts care the most about. It's not student data privacy. It's
about how to, basically, save money and keep jobs, and how to educate students
and increase test scores. Student data privacy, it's a small issue relative to what
districts most care about. I see all the time where a school district will evaluate
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five different companies for a product, and they'll just choose the lowest priced
product even though they know it's not nearly as good a service, and it's not likely
to be around in a few years. That's the reality of the marketplace.
Vendors are not the only agencies that have vocal positions about where the focus
of districts is, and in the context of this discussion the value of data. The Data Quality
Campaign (DQC), a nonprofit, nonpartisan, national advocacy organization based in
Washington, DC is one of a handful of advocacy groups dedicated to reclaim data and its
use in schooling. DQC promotes a vision of an education system in which all
stakeholders—from parents to policymakers—are empowered with high-quality data
from the early childhood, K–12, postsecondary, and workforce systems to make decisions
that ensure every student graduates high school prepared for success in college and the
workplace. Notably, the position of the DQC that data are power—“Empowered with
education data, stakeholders are better poised to improve system performance, increase
transparency, and most importantly improve student achievement” (Data Quality
Campaign)—is consistent with the growing concern over the commercialization of data.
There are also interest groups who have dedicated time and resources to the
education of students in the digital space. Above the Fray, for example, is a group
dedicated to educating parents nationwide about what life is like online for young people.
A similar company, Common Sense Media, is also dedicated to helping families make
smart choices in a technological word. Both of these groups maintain a constant presence
on social media, dispensing warnings and bulletins to keep the public informed about
social media issues and the need for increased vigilance and awareness of laws
concerning student behavior and interaction through that medium. For example, Above
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The Fray, on February 23, 2016, tweeted a series of relevant reminders about digital
monitoring, teaching empathy about bullying, and the challenges of dealing with
cyberbullying. This is consistent with their daily presence, a steady stream of informative
reminders about increasing parental engagement around issues with the use of social
media.
Consensus about student data privacy is, however, still being drawn, with many
EdTech personnel and privacy experts feeling that the issue has been overblown, while
others feel there still needs to be tighter accountability surrounding the protection of
student information, and still others are tackling the issue through information and
instruction. Many groups, like Data Quality Campaign, Electronic Privacy Information
Center (EPIC), Above The Fray, and Common Sense Media, have taken strong and vocal
positions about their intent to protect students’ privacy and have staked out claims on
what to do with, who should have access to, and the importance of protecting student
data. For example, the non-profit organization Electronic Privacy Information Center
(EPIC) promotes its Student Privacy Bill of Rights, which calls for greater rights for
students (or their parents, if students are under the age of 18) over information about
them that is collected, stored, and used by others in and around the educational system
(Barnes, 2014). The Student Privacy Bill of Rights requires both schools and companies:
to make their data collection transparent, secure, and private; to specify in advance the
purpose for which they collect any information and to refrain from reusing that
information for any other purpose; to provide students the opportunity to see and correct
any information collected about them; to secure any information collected; and to be held
accountable by students for maintaining their rights (EPIC, 2014). These are more non-
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governmental, “on the ground” stakeholders interacting with the policy process. The
scope of this study investigates a particular intersection with student privacy that occurs
when students use the internet to express themselves via social media.
Vendor relationships are created based on a need to engage with the outside
market for solutions that cannot be achieved by a district and school because of limited
capacity (Datnow & Honig, 2008; Honig, 2004; Jacobson, 2008; Willyard, 2013).
Schools and districts utilize the professional marketplace as an opportunity to supplement
their own services. This encapsulates how Geo Listening becomes relevant within the
context of educational contracting and subsequently a case of student privacy intersecting
with educational contracting. The story of Geo Listening begins against the backdrop of
both an increasingly prevalent piece of technology, social media monitoring, and the
challenges of creating a safe and conducive environment for schooling with unknown
exposure on social media
Geo Listening operates under the following mission statement according to their
website:
Everything we do empowers more effective engagement with children. We
illuminate the social and emotional needs of children, so they can be provided
timely attention and guidance when facing challenging situations for which they
lack the necessary coping skills or life experience. We believe that enabling a
deeper connection to students will keep them more positively engaged in their
education and with their peers. Addressing the social and emotional needs of
students improves school climate, provides safer learning environments and
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disrupts negative foundational pathways that can limit opportunities for them.
(Geo Listening, n.d.).
What follows is the story of how Glendale Unified School District contracted with
Geo Listening and the layers of policy problems and solutions that unfolded as a result of
this new contract.
Geo Listening and Glendale Unified School District
Glendale is the third largest city in California’s Los Angeles County. The
Glendale Unified School District (GUSD) operates the public schools in Glendale, and is
responsible for twenty-one elementary schools, five middle schools, six high schools and
eight specialized programs. GUSD has over 2,620 employees and serves 27,000 students
with very culturally diverse backgrounds. The district’s mission statement is “The
Glendale Unified School District provides a high-quality education that addresses the
unique potential of each student in a safe, engaging environment” (Glendale Unified
School District, 2015). Glendale Unified’s mission statement underscores the fact that
they hold a very strong position on the issue of safety in schools, declaring zero tolerance
for criminal-related activities in and around the schools. Their messaging to the
community is clear and direct: "We have a responsibility to provide safe schools to
everyone we serve. And we are going to keep them safe." In support of this strong
declaration about student safety, the district has outline a series of operational safety
polices.
Safety Policies
GUSD has made one of the primary focuses of their district the maintenance of
the safest possible campus for students, employees and visitors (Glendale Unified School
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District, 2015). Subsequently, they have implemented extensive preventive measures and
tough discipline policies to operate as deterrents against any form of criminal activity on
and around their schools. Glendale was an early adopter of policies that allow for having
uniformed police officers working daily on a school campus. Currently, every senior high
is served by a School Resource Officer (SRO) specially trained to work with young
people. In addition to the SROs, uniformed security guards patrol the middle and senior
high campuses to assist administrators with supervision and help prevent trespassing.
Additional security measures like metal detectors are available for use as needed on
middle and senior high campuses.
These policies paint a picture of a school district that appears to be taking great
efforts to protect students and create a safe learning environment and points to why the
district invests resources into products and services that tie into issues of safety.
GUSD Meets Geo Listening
Glendale Unified’s focus on student safety is challenged in the technology age,
where the threat to security may not be as visible as a student with a weapon, but rather
something far more subtle like cyberstalking or cyberbullying. The challenges of dealing
with social issues cultivated in cyberspace have become more prevalent as attention is
drawn to specific cases of teenage suicide, school shootings and other similar otherwise
unexplained socially destructive phenomena that intersect with schooling.
In 2013, GUSD found themselves trying to address growing concerns of getting
students help and preventing destructive behaviors directly. Geo Listening’s service
spoke directly to their fear and desire to catch the warning signs for these unfortunate
incidents before it was too late; with the fresh motivation of preventing what had
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happened earlier that year when two students in neighboring school districts had
committed suicide. In an attempt to address and stop cyberbullying, which had also been
identified as the cause of another nationally covered middle school student suicide from
Florida, and to acquire help in identifying students in social and emotional distress, the
district initiated a pilot service program with Geo Listening.
Geo Listening was founded by Chris Frydrych in January 2013. Frydrych has
moved on to serve as the Director of Sales in the US Public Sector for Spikes Cavell,
which takes raw data and transforms it into actionable analytics and business intelligence
for the public sector and education organizations. Frydrych has a well-documented track
record in the education technology space dating back to the first dot-com bubble in the
late nineties. His professional resume includes some small startup service and product
companies: Geo Listening, Online Education for Me, K12MBA. Before these startups, he
worked as an independent education consultant for The Network of Educational Access
and the Director of K12 for SciQuest.
In discussing the motivation behind the creation of his Geo Listening company,
Frydrych stated, “there was a much higher purpose for some of the information that is put
out there”. When I probed further about what he meant by that, in the context of his
service, he positioned himself as an extension to a flaw in the system, a hall monitor or
watchful eye, where the traditional design of the social network providers only looks
provide the product but nothing to ensure the safety of users. “I find it dramatically
irresponsible that the social network providers provide a venue, and do so they can
generate advertising revenue, and then turn around, and disregard all of the leading
indicators where somebody, a partner could totally help a lot of situations.”
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Unfortunately, despite the stated motivation for the securing of the service with
Geo Listening, the district’s failure to hold a public hearing or to adequately disclose to
parents or students that they were being monitored contributed to a growing skepticism
about who had access to student data and how this access was regulated and controlled.
There was definitive public outcry and the tenor of the news reporting and headlines
lumped Geo Listening in with every other form of technological vendor service that was
“spying on kids” without the knowledge of parents (Center for Media and Democracy,
2015). Geo Listening subsequently became a public example of companies hired by
schools to monitor students’ social media accounts as the news report was picked up by
other major outlets.
In speaking with Stephen Caesar, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, then-
superintendent of the Glendale schools Richard Sheehan said, “We think it’s been
working very well. It’s designed around student safety and making sure kids are
protected” (2014). The motivation for the article in which the Superintendent is being
quoted was to expose to the public this new contract and to heighten awareness and
suspicion around what these forms of contracting mean for student safety. Specifically,
that after the Glendale Unified School District hired Geo Listening in a pilot program, the
school board then proceeded to vote on August 13, 2013, without any public discussion,
to expand the program to track about 13,000 students' posts across its four middle schools
and four high schools. School officials said it would enable them to intervene if students
were at risk of hurting themselves, committing suicide, hurting others, using drugs or
engaging in violent activity.
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Glendale School Board: The Actor
The Glendale School Board becomes an actor in this particular story as they made
the decision to vote for the contract with Geo Listening without a public hearing.
Understanding the function of the School Board and their engagement with parents, and
community stakeholders, gives deeper insight into just how large a blunder this failure to
communicate was.
The Glendale School Board public meetings of the Board of Education are usually
scheduled on the first and third Tuesdays of each month. The board is comprised of five
elected members who serve for four years with four of the five current members also
operating during a time when the decisions were made to adopt Geo Listening. There is a
detailed explanation for the function of the school board, according to Glendale Unified,
which is to “act as a bridge between the community and public schools” offering an
example of “local representative and participatory government”. The website articulates
clear rules for participating at a school board meeting which require adherence to the
agenda. The agenda is standard, as pictured in Figure 4-5.
Figure 4-5. School Board Agenda
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To address the board, members of the public must be within the jurisdiction of the
board and also complete a request card before public communications. Speakers are
requested to state their name and address before speaking to the Board and a maximum of
five minutes may be allotted to each speaker and no more than twenty minutes to each
subject, except by unanimous consent of the Board of Education. Board Members may
question the speaker, but there will be no debate or decision. The Superintendent may
refer the matter to the proper department for review. The agenda for the meetings is
available in the Superintendent’s office, on the district website, in the local newspaper,
and in the lobby of the Administration Center 72 hours in advance. The formal structure
of the board meeting gives clarity about the decision not to publicly discuss the Geo
Listening contract by the district. Further, because of the decision not to identify the
contract as an issue for discussion, parents and community stakeholders would not be
aware of a need to probe for further details about the extent and impact of the newly
acquired service. The posture of the school board on this matter was that the contract with
Geo Listening was so benign in the context of school operations that it was simply a
voting measure.
At the meeting on August 13, 2013, where Geo Listening was voted as a consent
item, there was a period for public discussion that allowed parents to voice concern to
specific items as is outlines in the formal proceedings above. One by one parents spoke to
a handful of key issues troubling the school district at the moment and one of the issues
that were discussed focused on the shifts in district policies around school safety.
Specifically, parents were concerned about a change in how students would be dropped
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off at elementary schools. The response of the school board was that the initiative was to
make the drop off policies consistent with policies that controlled who had access to
campus in light of concerns for student safety. Despite the parallelism in the policy being
adopted with the contract for Geo Listening, which was also adopted specifically for
improved student safety, no one on the school board made the connection to the Geo
Listening agenda item which was based on the same ideology of improved student safety.
Anecdotally, one of the parents raising the concern noted that he had a
background in safety and security and wished the district could have consulted him, and
other parents, for alternative ideas. This statement is a harbinger of the same sentiments
of parents when they found out about the scope of the Geo Listening contract long after
this hearing date. The reading for the Geo Listening contract occurred as line item 17 of
the Consent Calendar, which, as noted in Figure 4-5, are “items considered to be of a
routine nature and are acted on with one motion” (Glendale Unified Board Meeting,
2013). This contract was anything but routine, as it both introduced a new form of
contracting and opened up students’ personal social media accounts for the direct
supervision of a third-party to be reported to the school. Geo Listening was included in
the consent calendar with personnel reports, renewals of agreements with Los Angeles
film corporations, and other service renewals. The only indication of what Geo Listening
was, can be found in the annotation in the Board Meeting agenda which states that, “The
Superintendent recommends that the Board of Education approves an agreement with
Geo Listening for the monitoring, analyzing, and reporting of public posts to social
networks to aid the efforts of prevention and intervention” (Glendale Unified Board
Meeting, 2013).
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As stated earlier, the public outcry around the lack of information about the
decision to adopt this new contract was captured by media reporting that characterized
Geo Listening as a form of big brother encroaching on the privacy of students. The blame
was also rightfully exacted on the school board for entering into a contract with a vendor
without proper notification to parents and without affording them the opportunity to
discuss the initiative. Despite the multiple actors in the failure to properly inform parents,
Geo Listening bore the brunt of the scrutiny being featured on local and national news
from Kcal9 to CBS This Morning. Although the school board ratified the contract, the
framing of the issue in reporting focused predominantly on the encroachment on student
privacy by third-party monitoring more than the lack of communication that allowed this
contract to even exist.
Strong Opposition to Monitoring by Geo Listening
Some experts in digital media and privacy took exception with the operation of
Geo Listening. In speaking with CNN, Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that defends privacy, free speech, and consumer rights,
stated “This is the government essentially hiring a contractor to stalk the social media of
the kids. When the government -- and public schools are part of the government --
engages in any line-crossing and to go and gather information about people away from
school, that crosses a line. People (referencing the Geo Listening supporters) say that's
not private: its public on Facebook. I say that's just semantics. The question is what is the
school doing? It's not stumbling into students -- like a teacher running across a student on
the street. This is the school sending someone to watch them.” (Martinez, 2013)
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Tien raises the stakes on an age-old discussion about the distinction between
public and private, but now in the context of schooling, the clarity of boundaries about
what elements of a students’ life and interaction with the world are directly under the
purview of schools. Sandy Russell, then president of the school district's PTA, weighed
in on the issue from the perspective of the parents, who from local news reporting had no
knowledge of the service or its function. This is evidenced by her discussion with CNN
reporter Martinez,
If it supports a child in a difficult situation -- whether it's bullying or stress level --
and if it helps, any parent would be thrilled to have the help. But how is that
happening? When you find something you're concerned about, what are you
doing? Do you approach the child, with or without the parents? What does this
mean? When people don't have information, they make up scenarios. Some of the
concerns I've heard is when kids say something nasty about a teacher, will they
get in trouble? I understand that's not even remotely possible.
Geo Listening: Controlling Their Narrative
Geo Listening has a vastly different perspective on the predatory persona created
for them by the media in the context of violating student privacy. When responding to the
negativity, Frydrych moves quickly to results and reports of the successes of Geo
Listening. According to formal documentation, during the 2013-14 school year, Geo
Listening reported more than 1,400 incidents in which Glendale students discussed a
variety of the flagged antisocial behaviors such as drug or alcohol use, bullying, suicide
or cutting, and other negative topics. Closer analysis showed that 20 reports referred to
despair or suicide and another four mentioned self-harm or cutting. More than 150 reports
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were tied to bullying, and nearly 350 were related to substance abuse. About 380 cases
involved students being profane or vulgar.
In probing Frydrych further about his motivation for creating Geo Listening, he
offered a contrasting example between the level of protection and instruction that
surrounds educating children about “drinking, voting, and driving” in comparison to the
lack of education around the usage of social media. His chief concern was that
significantly more resources are spent on educating children about making wise decisions
with issues where we understand the risk, but from his perspective little is understood
about the dangers of social media interactions. Frydrych is consistent across various news
interviews and reports in the way he presents this narrative about the need to use this
proprietary technology as a mechanism for creating hall monitors in cyberspace to protect
the students just as there are monitors in the physical halls of schools.
Formal documentation about Geo Listening, often distributed to schools as a part
of marketing and product introduction, offers a polished rationale for securing the
service. Included in this statement is a description of what the service provides and how it
functions in connection with the schools and districts:
Never before in history has there been such a stark contrast between how
students communicate and how those that are raising and teaching them to
communicate. There is always a divide between generations, but pervasive access
to devices accompanied by the advent of social network popularity has made this
divide an almost unbridgeable chasm.
Consequently, public posts are being shared by students every day with everyone
in the world. Unfortunately, the adults that are in the best position to respond to
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the specific needs of these students are not seeing this much needed information.
This results in the social and emotional needs of students going unnoticed and
unmet.
Geo Listening reviews public posts made to social networks and provides custom
reports to school sites on a daily basis. These reports provide staff with timely
information aligned to existing policies so that they may better respond to the
social and emotional needs of their students. We have demonstrated that the
announcement and implementation of our services have had a definitive positive
impact on student behavior.
Geo Listening controls the internal narrative among their clients with these distributions
by being explicit about what service they offer and how they execute their service. They
also craftily position the service as a bridge between the data shared in the vastly
unregulated and unmonitored social media space, and the indicators of distress, antisocial
behavior, or potential danger those data contain.
If taken at face value, the motivation behind the creation of Geo Listening is
consistent with the messaging that comes out of the other media and technology
companies dedicated to closing the awareness and protection gap created by the existence
of technology in the hands of children and young adults. The corporate messaging often
also includes rationalizations relating to increased vigilance in the social media and
digital space; emphasizing that this vigilance requires the efforts of multiple agencies. It
is this multipronged approach to vigilance, education, and protection that has caused
school districts to seek out the services of companies like Geo Listening.
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Geo Listening’s product offerings reflect the bifurcated market of social media
monitoring discussed earlier in this chapter. While other companies are offering either the
service or a software alternative, Geo Listening offers both options. In providing services
that are consistent with the larger social media market, Geo Listening is uniquely
positioned in the current education market, as many of their competitors only offered one
or the other. In describing both offerings they outline the following:
(1) Our Service Model empowers today’s busy school administrators by
providing them with timely information to increase the effectiveness of
intervention without increasing their workload. Geo Listening’s expert
analysts take on 95% of the workload while working as part of a team for all
K12 schools. Our experienced analysts review raw data and deliver social
intelligence to your staff so that they may effectively intervene on behalf of a
child. Geo Listening analysts will filter out non-relevant information about a
great “shot” in a basketball game, instead of needlessly placing that burden on
critical staff members. Our Service Model avoids the creation of a dynamic
“False Alert” scenario that mandates attention by your staff. 98% of reported
concerns to our client schools are not geo-tagged or keyword matched, but
rather they are discovered by an analyst using manual methods.
(2) Our Monitoring Software option is ideal for schools/districts that can
appropriately staff an in-house monitoring administrator/team. This person(s)
would be responsible for utilizing the “keyword hit” software and curating
through publicly available posts that meet the district criteria for action as well
as analyzing the data to eliminate “False Alerts.” Because your principals,
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AP’s, and SROs are currently inundated with competing high priority
responsibilities – and limited time to accomplish it all, it is strongly
recommended that you designate a separate individual(s) to assume this role.
You will be able to utilize the expertise of our analyst team so that you have a
foundation of best practices upon which to build. Your team will utilize the
exact system that we use every day.
There are clear distinctions between these two options. The first option offers the
districts the expertise of the company to facilitate the monitoring and report back, and the
second option offers the tool with embedded language that not so subtly steers districts
towards the selection of the service model. Phrases like “analyzing data to eliminate
“False Alerts” are intentionally embedded disclaimers to ensure the districts understand
that purchasing the monitoring software engages them on a steep new learning curve, one
they likely do not have the time or resources to spend on. The selection of the service
model is more consistent with what many under-resourced schools might be seeking: a
simple contracted relationship with an industry expert where the vendor does the majority
of the heavy lifting and provides information that can lead to actionable decisions.
The Contract Strategy: Before and After AB 1442
The examination of the contract here is of significance, as it is rarely studied and
explored in the context of district vendor relationships and builds on a growing segment
of contracting literature that explores the analysis, and impacts, of contracting language
(Goldhaber, Lavery & Theobold, 2015; Governatori & Milosevic, 2006). Moreover, this
particular contract has the distinct value of offering a comparison of the direct impacts of
policies on contract as there is was a contract before and after the new law took effect.
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The initial contract was created between the vendor and the district before there were any
regulations to consider. The subsequent contracts then offer the ability to analyze how, or
if, the vendor was responsive to the new oversight and accountability policy. In this vein,
the contract now becomes a type of actor as it facilitates the agreement and is the actual
embodiment of the relationship between the district and the vendor while also being a
direct output of the political system (Easton, 1965).
Geo Listening has held a contract with Glendale Unified from 2013-present, and
copies of these were acquired under the Freedom of Information Act. The intent of
getting a copy of each contract year over year was to identify if there was any notable
difference in the structure of the contract using AB1442, Pupil records: Social Media as
a point of reference. Essentially, this is creating a timeline of contracts that is juxtaposed
against the public narrative of Geo Listening, Glendale, state law continuum, allowing for
a formal language about the change, or lack thereof, of relationship between the vendor
and the district subsequent to the implementation of a new accountability law.
The first contract, which was executed on August 8, 2013, and read into action
during the board meeting held on August 13, 2013. The contract introduces Geo
Listening as, “a provider of unique professional services that monitor, analyze and report
public posts to social networks such as (Twitter, Youtube, Instagram) that originate from
school campuses”. The company then articulates seven bulleted descriptors about the
services they would be contracting with GUSD. The legal responsibilities of the contact
are defined and discussed in four main categories: Social Media Content, Intellectual
Property Ownership, Confidential Information, and Negligence.
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Social media content. This portion of the contract explicitly states that Geo
Listening has “no ownership rights in, or control of, content available through the Service
from the social media websites.” They also state that they are dependent on the providers
in that “if a provider of any Social Media Network ceases to make the Social Media
Content available on terms acceptable to Geo Listening, Geo Listening may cease
providing such Social Media Content without entitling the Client to any refund, credit or
other compensation. This includes outages, no available relevant content and end users
privatizing accounts, etc.”
Intellectual property ownership. Here Geo Listening identifies themselves as
sole owner of all right, title and interest, including all related Intellectual Property Rights
for their technology. This includes “any suggestions, ideas, enhancement requests,
feedback, recommendations or other information provided by Client or any other party
relating to the Service.”
Confidential information. This is another section that almost exclusively attends
to protecting the assets of Geo Listening. Confidential information is defined in two parts
and covers the technology and any business or technical information including but not
limited to plans, designs, costs, product prices, and research. Geo Listening also reserves
the right to interview employees and employ former students. They do restrict access to
client information, stating “at no time will any current or former student or employee or
their respective family members have access to data or information specific to client
reports.” The notable exception here is for those current employees who may be
designated as executors of the agreement.
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Negligence. A simple clause stating that any proven breach of confidentiality and
Geo Listening will reimburse the Client and other damages will be determined by CA
court ruling or mediator.
In reading the contract signed prior to the Pupil records: Social media law, it is
clear that Geo Listening, nor Glendale Unified, gave very little attention to the issue of
student privacy. In fact, Geo Listening is operating from the premise that public posts are
fair game and can be used for any purposes which in this case is to identify anti-social
behavior. The contract has no explicit reference to privacy, nor do they explicitly state
any plans for dealing with students’ records during and after the service contract window.
The contract that followed Pupil records: Social media, was executed in the form
of a standard “Services Agreement” and was heavily rewritten to respond to the law in
explicit outlined terms. It is clear when looking at these contracts side by side that Geo
Listening is attempting to offer the most descriptive language possible around the
definition of Geo Listening Services:
Geo listening is a provider of social media monitoring and communications
solutions and services to third parties, via Geo Listening’s proprietary social
media monitoring management services, including the software and related
information technology resources (the “Monitoring Services”). Geo Listening also
makes available certain optional applications (the “Optional Services”). The
Monitoring Services and Optional Services, to the extent elected by the Client, as
well as any dashboard, platform, tools and any other hardware and software
associated with the provision of the Monitoring Services or Optional Services, are
collectively referred to as the “Geo Listening Services”.
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Geo Listening then explicitly shows that they have taken stock of the law and
have revised their contract to speak to the concerns of security and privacy. The bulk of
the contract attends to the following key vendor-client relationship components:
Licensure, Security, Ownership, Privacy, Fees, Terms, Publicity, Indemnity, and
Limitation of warranty and liability.
License. The contract specifically outlines the non-exclusive, non-transferable
license that the district acquired as a result of the contract with Geo Listening, which is
not uncommon for service contract but includes explicit restrictions on the attempting to
“reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to discover the source
code, object code or underlying structure, ideas or algorithms of the Geo Listening
Services; modify, translate, or create derivative works based on the Geo Listening
Services; or use the Geo Listening Service for timesharing or service bureau or otherwise
for the benefit of a third party.”
Ownership. Critically, “Geo Listening owns all rights in and to the Geo Listening
Services and Optional Services.” Other than the rights expressly granted to the Client
through the licensure agreement, Geo Listening maintains all rights including all
intellectual property rights. As was previously noted in the licensure, this explicit
contractual stipulation ensures that the services contracted with Geo Listening will never
be reproduced by the licensee.
The balance between licensure and ownership, while common in service contract
agreements, ensures that districts are tied into the service in perpetuity to maintain a level
of function, once they have come to rely on the service. More clearly, these forms of
stipulations in market-based contracts diminish the ability to compare easily and
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distinguish the best product for a school needs without first buying in, at least on a trial
basis.
Security. In short, after Geo Listening grants access to the service, the district is
responsible for security. The district is responsible for “maintaining security of its
Account and the equipment needed to connect to, access or use the Geo Listening
Services”. Further to that, Geo Listening commits to “use commercially reasonable”
efforts to protect the security of Geo Listening Services, “in accordance with industry
standards for information of such type.”
Privacy. The issue of privacy is by far the most exhaustively discussed element of
the contract. Covering issues of confidential information, defining the meaning of
personal information, acknowledging applicable privacy and data security laws, limited
use, disposal and remedies for breach of Obligation of Confidentiality.
The difference between the contract before and after AB 1442, Pupil records:
Social Media, is clearer when looking at the detail of the second contract. Specifically,
inclusion of definitions and explanations about the distinction between security and
privacy, speaks to the larger narrative of whether or not this is actually an issue of
securing data or indeed an issue of privacy. Geo Listening is explicitly laying out who is
culpable on issues of security and privacy effectively redefining the relationship of the
service with the district in the context of the law.
Notably, with such a vast difference between the contracts, it is important to point
to the relevance of the accountability policy that resulted from the public outcry. If there
were no Pupil records: Social Media there would have been no reason for either the
district or Geo Listening to entertain what was necessary to adequately secure the data of
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students and to properly define the parameters of the contract relationship. The contract
prior to Pupil records: Social Media reads like a basic contract for a service, without any
consideration for the sensitivity of dealing with the information of students. While the
contract offers insight into the relationship between the district and the vendor at a
service level, it does little to explain how the data are actually handled, analyzed and used
to create actionable interventions.
Whose data is it anyway?
Following through on the general concerns about what Geo Listening was
capturing and how personal data were handled, I asked Frydrych to give clarity on how
his company handled personal information and what the protocol was for the reports
being sent to schools and their contents. Here Frydrych positions Geo Listening as an ally
of the school system in figuring out how to counteract anti-social behaviors:
We're very much a partner in that sense to make sure that we're responding
to the needs of our clients, so we cast that big net, but we can also work
dynamically because it is a very fluid environment. As you've seen on our website
we keep people up to date. We do advisories and in LA County I'm talking about
school legislation back in 2013 there was no rules on vaporizers.
We actually went and found the kids who were getting high in class, and the
administration went to Los Angeles County of Education. They talked to them
about what they were finding. They crafted a county wide policy on vaporizers, e-
cigarettes, and they were able to get out in front of the wave that got hit down in
Orange County where a year later on the news in Orange County, Orange County
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Department of Education got called out for none of the school districts in Orange
County having a policy about vaporizers.
The posture that Geo Listening takes as an ally is supported by the documented
content of the advisories they dispensed to school districts, alerting them to emerging
anti-social trends including new drugs. Examples of these advisories are contained in the
Appendix D. However, despite positioning themselves as offering a good service, there
was still a lack of clarity to me during the interview about how Geo Listening saw
themselves in the context of privacy. In particular, it was not clear what made Geo
Listening persevere in this contracting space, under such scrutiny and pressure from the
public and with the swift response of the government in the form of the new law. When
comparing Geo Listening to inBloom, the EdTech company who faced similar public
scrutiny and eventually folded, this becomes particularly striking. I wanted to understand
further how Frydrych framed himself in the context of privacy and the market he was
essentially creating. Asking a clarifying question of Frydrych elicited quite a lengthy and
involved response:
The issue of privacy. If you understand how the technology works, and that the
user themselves has opted to put it in the public domain you have no argument
about the privacy of the content because when the user signed up to the social
media account it says that anything that they post can be used by the social
network in any way they see fit even where some images have been used as
advertising sold, resold, and re-purposed. Also, the users of the social network can
also reuse any content that's posted.
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If your account is private, and you post something, and then I re-post it, while
your account was private, and I'm your friend, my page is public, the content now
becomes in the public domain, and it's out of your control, and you said that that
would be okay when you signed up for the social network. So when I see it in the
public domain I'm not infringing upon your privacy. You surrendered it way
before I ever saw the content.
This characterization of how social media accounts work is general seems to be important
to Frydrych, especially when I challenged about the potential breach of confidentiality of
privacy. He tries to simplify his point further by highlighting that even students
understand that the type of service Geo Listening is offering is not infringing on the
personal space of students or violating their privacy.
This has been the Achilles heel of explaining this to parents because parents feel
like you’re reading a kid's diary. I love the fact that I've seen kids get on social
after that comes out in the articles, and the kids will say: "Get over yourselves, it's
not your diary. You posted it in the public domain for God's sake." The kid will
say: "My diary is next to my bed in a paper form, not in electronic form." There's
not a privacy issue, there's a perception of a privacy issue.
Frydrych then turns his stance towards making the individual accountable in the context
that we cede rights and controls every day to participate in our community. From this
perspective, Frydrych invokes a form of the same sentiment the small vendor earlier in
this chapter stated, “there’s always trade-off; that we give away our information in return
for certain value.”
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Because you want to be a part of that society, or that community, so you've
surrendered some of your rights. That has been brushed over so much that I don't
even know how to address it. I think it would be a very interesting topic that does
a student code of conduct put aside freedom of speech when a child says: "I will
not use hate speech. I will not curse." Does that code of conduct itself infringe on
the constitutional rights of the student, or can the student, and guardian surrender
those rights to participate in that society
5
.
Frydrych’s response is telling about the way that Geo Listening pursued, and
persisted in, this new market space. First, because the company holds the position that
their service does not pry into student’s private accounts, from Frydrych’s perspective
there can be no invasion of privacy. In his mind, and by extension the ethos of the
company, public is definitively public and private is private. This underscores his
unapologetic tone on actually offering the service. Frydrych, and Geo Listening, persisted
because they believed in the value of the service they were providing. Second, in
discussing the issue of helping parents to understand that whether he is looking at their
child’s post or not, someone else still has access, his tone is both sympathetic and
resolute in making the justification that he wants to change the perception of what is and
is not a privacy issue. Finally, Geo Listening was unaffected by AB 1442 in terms of
maintaining their contract with Glendale Unified. Even with a change in superintendent,
and a new member on the school board, awareness of parents, and public meetings for
5
The supreme court offers a response to Frydrych’s query in the Tinker v Des Moines Independent
Community School District ruling. The Supreme Court held that the armbands represented pure speech that
is entirely separate from the actions or conduct of those participating in it. The Court also held that the
students did not lose their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech when they stepped onto school
property. To justify the suppression of speech, the school officials must be able to prove that the conduct in
question would "materially and substantially interfere" with the operation of the school.
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discussion the contract still persists to date, and this is indicative of the deeper and more
telling point, to be discussed further in chapter five.
Despite the clarity of the business owner on the service of Geo Listening, the
issue of parents being left out of the discussion where they could have been given the
opportunity to explore alternatives and the media firestorm discussing this categorically
invasive new form of student monitoring created a perfect coming together of a national
agenda on privacy and a local encounter with privacy. It was under these amplified
conditions, nationally and locally, that the intersection of social media monitoring and
student privacy issue became hot button issues on to the political agenda of Glendale
Assembly member Gatto.
What’s On the Agenda
While much of this narrative has captured the political position of Geo Listening,
the story continues into another dimension of the political process when the local
assembly member in Glendale came into the picture. In this moment, the problem stream,
political stream and policy stream converged into a policy window.
It’s Political: A Savvy Politician and Community Influencers
The narrative of Geo Listening continued into 2014 as Glendale Assembly
member Gatto proposed bill AB 1442 to the California House of Assembly. As a matter
of introduction, Assembly member Mike Gatto was elected to represent the 43rd District
in a Special Election in June 2010 having worked extensively in government and the
private sector. For five years, he served as District Director to a United States
Congressman representing the San Fernando Valley and Burbank. He also served in the
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administrations of three Los Angeles Mayors. In the private sector, Gatto worked as an
attorney representing small businesses in California (Gatto, 2015).
In discussing AB 1442 with the LA Times Gatto states,
As a parent myself, you always want to know what is going on with your children
and what other people are doing when it comes to monitoring. Hopefully, this will
spark a lot of different things. It will spark meaningful conversations between
parents and high school children on what is appropriate to put on social media and
what is not” (Caesar, 2014).
He said it could also drive parents to ask school board members questions about "whether
this is a good use of resources."
Gatto’s pattern of interest in protecting children and families has been a major
theme in his legislative career; as recently as January 5, 2016, Assemblyman Gatto
introduced legislation that would allow parents to protect their child and family from
identity theft. The proposed AB 1580 allows a parent to freeze their child's credit with
the three credit bureaus, preventing identity thieves from opening fraudulent credit
accounts and ruining their credit at an early age.
It’s a Matter of Law
AB 1442, formally Pupil Records: Social Media, has a few interesting
characteristics to note, the issue about Geo Listening rose to the public attention in late
2013 and by early 2014 a bill was presented with Geo Listening as the central case
6
.
Historically, vendor relationships and the conditions for the use of information are
already covered under California law. In fact, the earlier versions of AB 1442 attempted
6
It is of note, that legislation aimed concretely at people (or organizations) are illegal in the United States
under Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution; they call them “bills of attainder.”
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to attach the law as an amendment to the preexisting Information Practices Act of 1977 to
shoehorn the legislation into the more robust privacy framework that would give more
depth to the protection of information use by the private vendors (California Assembly
Committee on Judiciary, 2014).
There are currently six categorical privacy laws in California: Constitutional
Right to Privacy, General Privacy Laws, Health Information Privacy, Identity Theft,
Unsolicited Commercial Communication and Online Privacy. In 2003, California
established the landmark California Online Privacy Protection Act, which was the first
law in the nation to require operators of commercial websites, including mobile apps, to
conspicuously post a privacy policy if they collect personally identifiable information
(PII) from Californians.
There is a specific law that governs the collection and use of PII. Pursuant to
Section 1798.83 of the California Civil Code, residents of California can obtain certain
information about the types of Personally Identifiable Information that companies with
whom they have an established business relationship have shared with third parties for
direct marketing purposes during the proceeding calendar year. In particular, the law
provides that companies must inform consumers about the categories of Personally
Identifiable Information that have been shared with third parties, the names and addresses
of those third parties, and examples of the types of services or products marketed by
those third parties. Even with laws that cover the privacy of individuals, reinforcing the
protection of student data in light of the concern about this particular vendor/district
relationship facilitated the creation of a new law. The bill was drafted to address the
loopholes that allowed Glendale Unified to use federal dollars to contract with Geo
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Listening without the knowledge of parents and without governmental oversight through
regulation and the contents of the bill motivation use Geo Listening as an example of the
relationship the law targets.
Policy: The Creation of AB 1442- Pupil Records: Social Media
Despite a robust privacy law framework in California, there was still a major push
for the creation of AB1442, signed to modify the privacy laws specific to Education and
add a layer of protection in the technological age that was not covered under any of the
existing legal code. The summary of the bill is as follows:
Existing law requires school districts to establish, maintain, and destroy pupil
records according to regulations adopted by the State Board of Education. This
bill would, notwithstanding that provision, require a school district, county office
of education, or charter school that considers a program to gather or maintain in
its records any information obtained from social media, as defined, of any pupil
enrolled in the school district, county office of education, or charter school to first
notify pupils and their parents or guardians about the proposed program, and to
provide an opportunity for public comment at a regularly scheduled public
meeting before the adoption of the program. The bill would require a school
district, county office of education, or charter school that adopts a program
pursuant to these provisions to, among other things, gather and maintain only
information that pertains directly to school safety or to pupil safety, provide a
pupil with access to any information about the pupil obtained from social media,
and destroy the information gathered from social media and maintained in its
records, as provided. If a school district, county office of education, or charter
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school contracts with a 3rd party to gather information from social media on an
enrolled pupil, the bill would prohibit the 3rd party from using the information for
purposes other than to satisfy the terms of the contract, prohibit the 3rd party from
selling or sharing the information with any person or entity, except as provided,
and would provide additional restrictions on the destruction of the information by
the 3rd party, as specified
7
.
The bill moved quickly from first reading to signing (Figure 6) and is indicative
of how quickly consensus can be drawn given the perfect combination of problem, policy
and political stream (Kingdon, 1984, 1995). It also passed without any documented
opposition in every single hearing and committee meeting.
7
http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/13-14/bill/asm/ab_1401-1450/ab_1442_bill_20140929_chaptered.pdf
Figure 4-6. Timeline of AB 1442
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The pertinence of this particular graphic is that it provides insight into the
political stream decision-making that occurred after the student privacy issue reached the
agenda, the step-by-step account for the movement and momentum of this bill
substantiates the notion about how important it is in the political process to maintain the
attention of the policymakers when trying to address a particular issue. The conditions
for creating AB 1442 were perfectly acclimated for a policy actor like Gatto to carry a
bill swiftly through to signing. As described below, the bill moved through committee
after committee, with revisions, and into law without a single nay vote.
State Funds, State Rules
The Assembly Committee on Judiciary memo begins with the description of the
issue the bill covers and the synopsis of the bill. In this synopsis, the Glendale Unified
and Geo Listening contracting relationship is cited as the motivation for the bill.
According to the author, this bill was introduced in response to concerns raised by
students and parents in the Glendale Unified School District
8
when they learned
that the district hired a company to monitor student's social media accounts,
compile information about the students, and then report this information back to
the school” (California Assembly Committee on Judiciary, 2014).
In one hearing, Gatto states the name ‘Geo Listening’ skeptically highlighting the
irony of a company with that kind of name entering into a contract with a school district
to monitor students. In creating an argument for the necessity of AB 1442 Gatto’s pièce
8
The specific inclusion of Glendale Unified School District as an exemplar solidifies that this particular
policy was a bill of attainder. It also underscores the political savvy of Geo Listening as discussed further in
chapter five.
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de résistance includes two major points. First, taxpayer dollars are being siphoned out of
the Proposition 98 funds to acquire the services of a third-party for social media
monitoring and by virtue of using governmental money require legislative oversight. And
second, schools are creating a sub-internet, “an intranet of sorts” he says, and this
secondary storage of information, that may otherwise be deleted from the “regular
internet,” is dangerous. The base of the bill is grounded in the idea that these secondary
forms of storage should not be allowed to exist in perpetuity, but should have explicit
expiration terms for deletion timed to a student’s leaving or age, 18 being the cut-off.
This bill was narrated by Gatto with a heavy tone for sensationalism, and in some
cases overselling the issue. In the April 23, 2014, hearing Gatto began with his daughter
seated on his lap. Explaining “tomorrow is take your daughter to school day but I’ll be on
a jet plane and so I’ve decided to bring her with me today,” he then placed a disclaimer,
“otherwise she has nothing to do with this bill.” If this bill were not about the importance
of protecting students and their privacy, the child’s presence would not be presumed
suspicious but from the outside, it looks to be nothing more than a visual representation
of the language used to encapsulate the importance of the bill, protect the children. On
other occasions, the message still being the same, Gatto used the committee members as
examples to drive home how “serious this listening could really be.” Stating in one case,
“imagine if you went and gave a talk at a local school and then you tweeted about it,
because you referenced the school or the mascot or some other trigger word, your tweet is
probably swept up by the algorithm and being stored somewhere too.”
Gatto did not come without support. Throughout all of the hearings there is vocal
support from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the California Federation of
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Teachers (CFT), and the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. Additional support was received
from the Internet Association, with the caveat that the law be attentive to the situation of
accounts that were used for educational and non-educational purposes and how data
destruction would work in that specific case.
In speaking with Frydrych about the position of Geo Listening during this
process, and after reviewing video of the bill hearings, it is clear that the company did not
interact directly with the crafting of the bill nor were they a vocal presence during the
hearings. However, Frydrych’s response about Geo Listening interacting with the bill
revealed more of the individual ethos behind the corporate response to the governmental
crackdown. Frydrych opines that he could have “made the bill better”, and this is
consistent was his corporate position about Geo Listening being a resource to help make
things better. He continues, by stating that he reached out to contribute but was stalled
and turned away because the bill was “too far along.” So I asked him to offer insight on
the law from his perspective, as the vendor who would be most impacted:
The challenge that I had with the law is several fold. One, it really doesn't do what
the perception is that it does. If I delete all of the content that I purchase from a
third party the third party still holds all the content. The social network still holds
all the content. Anybody else that's sitting in a garage collecting all of the public
content, holds the content. The fact that I'm forced to create a lot of procedure and
policy, so a child, or a guardian can query whether I've collected information on
little Johnny, and then allow them to edit, or delete it they can't edit the content
because I don't own the original record of the content. I just have a copy of it, so I
can delete it if they ask me to, but the interesting thing about it is the bill gives the
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perception that they're protecting children by forcing us to delete the content. My
big problem with the law is that the content still exists in perpetuity elsewhere, so
wasting my time in deleting the content when I built a company to help kids
thinking I'm gonna get hacked, or I'm gonna resell the information later on when
the kid is trying to get a job, and blackmail them. It was absolutely the most
ridiculous premise for legislation I've ever seen. I do agree with the fact that the
school district should discuss it openly, and publicly in advance of the contract.
Nowhere in the law does it talk about the fact that if I report a kid for vandalism,
or a crime, that becomes a permanent part of their student record. If I report a kid
for something that creates an intervention that becomes a permanent part of the
student record. Those can't be deleted. Those are protected by California
Education law. You can't depersonalize the content because you have to have it in
context in case anything ever comes up for however many years they have to keep
it.
The position of Frydrych, in response to the bill, is consistent with a CEO feeling
that his company was unjustly made the example of by the government, but purely used
to score emotional points and get the bill passed. More importantly, Frydrych is clearly
informed about the data practices of educational institutions and is clear to make the point
that this is more than a vendor deleting information, this about other nefarious actors
gaining access to data and using it maliciously. Here, again, Frydrych is controlling the
narrative of the characterization of Geo Listening.
Frydrych mentioned earlier in the interview that at one point there was the feeling
that the bill would be killed. However, the position of Gatto is consistent with a policy
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actor responding to the request of his constituents and the nature of the bill fit within the
appetite of the current house to create bills that addressed issues of privacy. The bill
survived, with supporters, gained momentum and the media scrutiny of Geo Listening
had only a marginal impact on continued business. Frydrych spoke about this directly as
he felt that disclosure of how rapidly the company would grow, which he demonstratively
stated he would no longer publicly state, allowed for further scrutiny on the idea of
another private firm capitalizing on the education industry and took away from what the
service actually provided.
Whether or not AB 1442 is the most adequately crafted bill for the purpose it
serves is largely irrelevant, in this case, it feeds into a larger narrative about how outside
vendors are demonized, deservedly or not, and the momentum of accountability sustained
and perpetuated. Of note, part of the motivation for this study was that Geo Listening
offers a link on their website to the press release of Gatto about the new bill, eluding that
they contributed to the process, when in fact records of the hearings and further questions
posed to Frydrych reveal their contribution was merely as the motivating case for the law
and not in direct consultation on the construction of the bill itself.
Geo Listening is a unique actor, in that even as a small firm they controlled the
narrative as much as they could by being clear and direct in response to public scrutiny.
This extends the narrative of contracting literature to include all non-governmental actors
as players in the marketplace and on the policy landscape. Geo Listening is not the only
company to come under scrutiny for dealing with student data; inBloom also had a
similar media firestorm with which to contend. However, while inBloom did not
adequately navigate the political space by either engaging strategically or avoiding it all
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together, Geo Listening did this masterfully (Burch, LaFave & Smith, 2016; LaFave,
2016). Despite making no direct contribution to the law, they are embodied in the law as
a case rationale for the need to have a law that attends to pupil records and social media.
The simplest version of this story is that without Geo Listening there would be no AB
1442, and Pupil Records: Social Media would not exist if there was no national appetite
for tighter control over government spending, as the districts use Prop 98 funds, and the
need for stronger policies on privacy. Still, Geo Listening offers a counterpoint to the
narrative of direct opponents and proponents of accountability policies and oversight in
the educational contracting space to be discussed further in chapter five.
Summary
This case of Geo Listening gives the opportunity to explore a complex and layered policy
problem from a unique vantage point of a local, smaller vendor. The data paint a
comprehensive picture of how one case of reactive policymaking was enabled because of
the convergence of perfect conditions and a sudden policy window. The case
demonstrates the viability of the Kingdon (1984, 1995) framework for exploring the
policymaking process, and extends the original players in the policy making space to
include the small vendor.
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CHAPTER 5
MOVING THE NARRATIVE FORWARD
As the previous chapters have demonstrated, the case of Geo Listening is largely
shaped by the national climate for stronger policies on student privacy. In large part, this
study demonstrates that while the national agenda sets the context for this particular case
it is more than just a backdrop but a constantly evolving space that allows the policy
process to unfold in situ. In the span of a year, between SXSWedu 2015 and 2016, the
conversation among EdTech professionals moved from simply identifying student
privacy as an issue to exploring the intersectionality of privacy with polices. The
conference took the task of going to work on the notion that, “Our job is to imbue this
digital ecosystem with America's time-tested values of privacy, respect, fairness and
accessibility for all regardless of race, income or disability” (Markey, 2014). There was a
clear departure from focusing on an over-hyped privacy agenda to a more directed
approach to evaluating how to create an EdTech space where policies, technology, and
innovation can coexist.
Schools and districts utilize the commercial marketplace as an opportunity to
supplement their own services and the relationship between Glendale Unified School
District (GUSD) and Geo Listening is an example of this. While this relationship between
GUSD and Geo Listening is a contracting relationship derived out of necessity, the
heightened awareness of student and family data privacy in the context of a growing
national debate around individual privacy brought this new contracting relationship and
subsequently the data access of Geo Listening under intense scrutiny. I use Alford &
Friedland’s definition of political action as a basis for analysis: “those past or present
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activities by private citizens and private or public organizations and groups that are more
or less directly aimed at influencing the selection of governmental structures and
personnel, and the actions they take or do not take” (1975, p. 430, emphasis in the
original). This study used the creation of a new form of vendor relationship – one
between schools and social media monitoring firms – as a lens for exploring the
complexities of the evolving policy context of student privacy. The study also begins to
rethink the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the policymaking space as
these firms often act politically while executing scrutinized contracts and services. NGOs
and private firms are an important part of the political process of policy implementation.
Current research reflects the growing need for better understanding of how companies
attempt to influence the political environment in ways that are not just framed as
adversarial. Additionally, the policymaking process and environment are multi-layered
ranging from a national level debate to a local level school board meeting and including
multidimensional elements like privacy conferences. Discourse is happening at these
multiple levels and corporations are strategically engaging with this very important part
of the implementation process.
Geo Listening: An Effective Strategy
Geo Listening offers a divergent perspective on corporate influence, contributing
to the ongoing dialogue on corporate elites as a counter-indicator about size and
influence. Geo Listening did not begin as a nationally known corporation with recognized
political affiliates or influencer on the board. Rather, it began as a smaller, organic
provider of a critical service – social media monitoring. Geo Listening’s rise to national
attention occurred directly at the nexus of a growing agenda on privacy in general and the
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concerns of student data privacy generated by the highly scrutinized inBloom case and
the leaks of Edward Snowden. The general discourse about the services Geo Listening
offer reflects much of the same rhetoric that applied to inBloom (cf. LaFave, 2016),
specifically that parents wanted greater control and authority over who had access to their
children’s personal information (Burch, LaFave & Smith, 2016).
Political Response and Organizational Adaptation
The legislative response to the scrutiny of Geo Listening was swift, designing a
law that regulates the vendor/district relationship of contracting for social media
monitoring. AB 1442 specifically addressed social media contracting, and mandated that
these types of contracts would be held to a standard of accountability similar to all other
contractors. Specifically, it echoed the general phrasing and outcry around student data
privacy by specifying that vendors are not allowed to use the data for any other purposes
than those specifically stated in the contract and for the contracted period.
The responsiveness of Geo Listening during the legislative proceedings, and the
corporation’s willingness to engage with the political system demonstrates a new way to
frame the operation of corporations. This framing positions vendors and external
contracting corporations in a position where they are neither proactively seeking
regulation nor actively opposing them, but simply existing in the grey area of
permissiveness until a policy is created. In a political system heavily influenced by
lobbyists and activist groups, vendors continue to exist outside of this space in the way
that they engage with policymaking. This works to disadvantage policymakers as they are
always responding to a new market technology, and legislation continues to fall behind
the pace of technological advancements.
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Another key way in which Geo Listening is an exemplar of the trend is that
instead of crumbling under media scrutiny and the closing of legislative loopholes, its
managers embraced the opportunity to explain the service, and engage with concerned
parents and advocacy groups as much as possible. Despite being the motivation and clear
target for the bill, the company was not contacted for advice. However, they purposefully
sought to engage with every step of the process up until the Governor signed the bill
through emails and phone calls to various offices, offering contributions that would make
the new legislation as rigorous and comprehensive as possible (Burch, LaFave, &Smith,
2016).
Exploring Geo Listening Within the Theory
As chapter four indicated, the increased national attention on the issue of privacy
created the perfect window of opportunity for the creation of AB 1442. Kingdon’s (1984;
1995) framework on agenda setting posits that societal predisposition is the primary
initiate in creating the three streams – problem, political, policy – towards setting an
agenda. The following diagram (Figure 5-1) is useful in understanding the complex
conversion of multiple streams, and the contributing factors that exist within each stream
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using descriptors relevant to this specific case.
In looking at the case of Geo Listening against the backdrop of a heated national
debate on the issue of privacy, it is not surprising that AB 1442 gained both enough
attention and enough traction to become a law. As the country was held in an ongoing
discussion and deeper focus on student and family data privacy and a heightened
awareness of the frailties of security and privacy in the digital world, any educational
technology that intersected with this space would inevitably face scrutiny. Geo Listening
was the case that allowed parents, and the general public, to become more aware of the
potential persistent use of social media monitoring in the context of schools and not just
the occasional monitoring during standardized testing.
Figure 5-1. Graphic of the Kingdon Framework Specific to the Geo Listening Case
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The market conditions under which Geo Listening rose to prominence also led to
increased scrutiny from the policy community and intersected with California’s move
towards a more heavily-regulated data privacy regime. California has been leading the
country as a state willing to directly address the concerns of privacy generally, and
student privacy directly, and this case was an additional legislative response in a legacy
of progressive privacy laws. For example, subsequent to the case of Geo Listening, in
October 2015, California closed the back door of access even more comprehensively as
Governor Jerry Brown signed the landmark Electronic Communications Privacy Act
which bars any state law enforcement agency or other investigative entity from
compelling a business to turn over any metadata or digital communications—including
emails, texts, and documents stored in the cloud—without a warrant. This law continues
in a long-standing tradition of forward-thinking privacy laws as it also requires a warrant
to track the location of electronic devices like mobile phones, or to search them.
Geo Listening’s case, as documented in this study, occurred in a district, Glendale
Unified, governed by an eager political professional whose agenda includes a strong
focus on education. Assembly Member Mike Gatto positioned himself as a political actor
concerned with creating “substantive and innovative pieces of legislation” that improve
the way of life and “how government works for hard-working Californians” (Gatto,
2015). He also prides himself on being attentive to his constituents, characterizing
himself as “A different type of public official;” he answers all correspondence from
constituents. Gatto’s personal website also lists several issues that are a part of his
platform while holding office, with regards to education he states his goal as “Improving
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Our Education System for Our Students” with one of his key accomplishments listed as
authoring the bill AB 1442 (Gatto, 2015).
AB 1442, Pupil Records: Social Media, demonstrate how states are responding to
the outcry about privacy concerns. It was swift, direct, and impactful legislation. Further,
California is one of several states to create multiple privacy based laws. Another law
created in 2014, and more acknowledged as attending to student privacy is SB 1177
(2014).
The Student Online Personal Information Protection Act, which prohibits an
operator of a website, online service, online application or mobile application
from knowingly engaging in targeted advertising to students or their parents or
legal guardians. These services and applications also may not use covered
information to amass a profile about a K-12 student, sell a student’s information
or disclose covered information. The law also addresses security procedures and
practices of covered information in order to protect information from
unauthorized access, destruction, use, modification or disclosure.
These laws are a part of a national movement by states to address student privacy through
a variety of policies, including creating governance structures to oversee transparency,
protecting the privacy of student data, and prohibiting specific uses.
AB 1442, also demonstrates how vendors are “made examples of” as the
legislature looks to close loop-holes in vendor regulation in the educational technology
market. While Geo Listening did not contribute directly during the hearings of the
creation of the law, their business model was studied and used as a baseline for
determining how to hold all companies that would occupy this particular market
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accountable. This demonstrates the reactionary nature of policymaking in educational
contracting and the danger of relying on the government to discover new markets that
require regulation and addressing that through law.
Societal Predisposition. This is an exploration of the socio-cultural beliefs and
constitutional structures that allowed for the Bill AB 1442 to even come to the foreground.
It utilizes the recollected narrative of the vendor and the concurrent news reported story as
a basis for understanding. The case highlights the importance of power and controlling the
narrative when it comes to hot button issues, as ultimately the strongest and loudest voice
is captured more clearly. Notably, power and controlling the narrative play significant roles
in establishing a baseline for societal predisposition. There were four perspectives to
consider when exploring predisposition.
Public: Distrust. The American public is skeptical of the government. A poll
released by the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs shows a solid
majority of Americans, about 61 percent, has little or no confidence in the federal
government fixing what people consider to be the biggest problems facing the nation
(cite). The list of public priorities includes both threats to security and safety and a
concern for education. This poll is consistent with the following graphic (Figure 5-2)
provided by the Pew Research Center from a study demonstrating the plummeting trust in
government. Confidence in government has clearly suffered over time, with wars, ‘gate
scandals, energy crises, economic troubles, and messy partisan behavior in Washington.
In addition to this, is the myriad stories of administrative breakdowns, personnel
problems, and computer hacking.
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In more recent history, the looming shadow of the national privacy debacle of the
NSA leaks and the emergence of more individual intersections with privacy and security,
individuals are skeptical of the government’s ability to protect them through the
uncertainty of not knowing who is watching, collecting, and using their personal
information. In the local case of Geo Listening, that skepticism was activated when
parents became aware that, without consultation or their express permission, students
were being monitored under through a contract with the school district.
Vendor: Downplay the Negative. Corporate dispositions matter when it comes to
dealing with crises (Burch, LaFave & Smith, 2016), and in this case Geo Listening
demonstrates qualities that allow them to persist during conditions that were less than
favorable for sustaining a company. In comparing Geo Listening with other companies
who have faced scrutiny as private corporations encroaching on the public purse through
educational contracting, they become a representative of resilience and a strong business
model.
Figure 5-2. Graphic Demonstrating the Plummeting Trust in
Government (Pew Research, 2015)
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Geo Listening was founded specifically to provide the service of ‘cyberspace
hall-monitor’ and with the clear objective of getting districts to buy into the dangers of
unsupervised online interactions on social media. When the public began to question why
the district needed to encroach on the personal space of students digitally by monitoring
them, Frydrych rose up as one of the voices proclaiming the necessity for monitoring
students in this way.
Geo Listening’s management took every opportunity to speak with the media
because they wanted to control the narrative surrounding their product and service. They
reached out to interested parties, offering an interview, and showing a strong desire to
explain the benefit of the service more than the harm. It is clear that the company grew
quickly in the way they handled information requests under the spotlight the national
attention they were receiving as a result of the Glendale contract. They strategically
funneled all information requests through three distinct channels: press, sales, careers.
Geo Listening’s official corporate position concerning the Glendale case, and student
monitoring in general, was that they are doing absolutely nothing wrong in offering a
service that the district needs and though there was a mistake in not communicating with
parents, they explained the service as many times as necessary to allay all fears of abuse
of information or access.
Assemblyman: Use Public Fear. When Gatto took to framing the issue of social
media monitoring in the most sensational way possible, attaching the futures of students
to the collected data, he reiterated the already established rhetoric from the media. His
approach was to make every voting member as afraid of not providing oversight as the
general public was afraid of the technology watching them. Further, he deliberately
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emphasized the threat to each student’s reputation and future employment prospects as a
major consequence of a brief lapse teenaged judgment. And while these concerns were
legitimate on their own, Gatto’s clear strategy was to over-dramatize the issue to gain
widespread support for his bill. Responses and queries from other assembly members
reflected their willingness to buy into anything that protects students’ despite being
unclear of the actual scope of the bill. During the first hearing of the bill, the chairman of
the Senate Judiciary committee offered one of the most powerful questions of all the
hearings, “Does the service help?” It was a question evoked not to derail the
conversation, but rather to ensure that the importance of these kinds of services was not
lost in the ongoing dialogue of everything that could go wrong with a service like the one
Geo Listening was offering.
In a particularly striking moment during a different hearing, Gatto sat with one of
his daughters on his knee as he spun through his notes on AB 1442 and championed the
cause of protecting the young and vulnerable. Although his daughter’s appearance was
not a staged theatrical moment, it was actually take your daughter to work day; he did not
miss the opportunity to use the optics to drive home the importance of protecting
students. A crafty wordsmith, Gatto continuously played up the notion that if government
funding was being used by districts for these kinds of services then the government
should have policies to hold companies accountable. More importantly, rules had to be
established that governed the parameters of these kinds of contracts to protect the future
reputation of students.
Gatto understood the power of representing an issue that was both supported in
the larger context of the California legislature’s penchant for creating laws to address
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privacy issues and the local context of parents asking their representative to get a handle
on a situation that they were powerless to attend to themselves. A direct result of this was
a bill that moved swiftly through the House and into law and effectively changed the
structure, although not the general terms, of the contract between Geo Listening and
Glendale Unified.
Media and Others: Stake Their Claim on the Narrative. The media, as with much
of public debate, provided fertile ground for constructing a narrative based on popular
opinion. The initial news article set the tone and stage for the discussion and
characterization of how the narrative around the issue should be portrayed to the public.
With headlines like “Glendale district says social media monitoring is for student safety”,
“California school district hires firm to monitor students' social media”, “Your school
may be watching everything you do on social media”, and “School system hires former
FBI agent to probe social media” the media established that someone else was watching,
policing even. These headlines were not all specific to Glendale Unified and Geo
Listening alone, and this was the media’s way of establishing how pervasive this new
form of service was, as it was discovered in use in districts across the country. They
made it clear that whether parents knew or not these outsiders were hired by the district
and had access to their children’s names and social media profiles.
Operating from the premise that whoever controls the narrative controls how an
issue is framed in addition to the way solutions are defined, lobbyists and agencies were
quick to lend their voice in these articles, as they weighed in with heavy scrutiny of the
necessity for any company to be listening or watching to students on social media.
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), cybersecurity specialists, and district officials
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can be found on record throughout the news articles and interviews carving out their
expert domain on privacy and security. Some of these very same voices later engaged in
the process of AB 1442, testifying at hearings about the necessity to curb access and
control how records were acquired, maintained and destroyed within a specific time
frame. Notably absent from the hearings, but present in the news media, was the school
district, who for all intents and purposes was most culpable.
Policy Entrepreneurs/Policy Actors. The response of parents, and Gatto’s action
on their behalf, gives strength to arguments that explore citizen participation and
individual agency. Research on policymaking and policy implementation often caters to
governmental actors and highlight visible individual actors but very little has been done
to understand local actors in the form of small vendors in the policymaking process. Geo
Listening positioned themselves as an actor in the political process, at least for
advertising and promotion purposes (Figure 5-3).
Figure 5-3. A Screenshot of Geo Listening's website promoting involvement in AB 1442
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Geo Listening, as a non-governmental, small-vendor, political actor characterized
their support (Easton, 1965) for the new legislation that would effectively monitor the
new market that they were operating within according to what suited their business
model. My analysis suggests that Geo Listening oversold their influence on the
policymaking process in advertising that they contributed expertise during the crafting of
the new law on storage of student social media, further discussion on this nuanced
positioning follows in the discussion of contested policy terrain: what I call “grey space”.
During my interview with Frydrych, he stated that he attempted to make contact
several times as the bill moved through the house and spoke with members of Gatto’s
office but did not have any of his suggestions directly addressed. There is no way to
directly confirm or deny this but the records of the bill analysis and hearing show no
evidence of contact or influence, outside of Geo Listening being the motivation for why
the law needed to exist. In this case, while viewing the vendor as a policy actor, Geo
Listening did not exert the full force of its position by failing to engage at the hearings as
a clear and recorded objector, despite the imprints of their influence on the process
through documentation in the background memo for AB 1442. Geo Listening, in
contracting with Glendale Unified, illuminated an emerging market and highlighted, once
again, the need for stronger conditions and regulations around educational contracting
space. While it is clear that Geo Listening did not attend the hearings the language
similarities between the law and the post-law contract are strong. I argue that the contract
was written in direct response to the law as a means of answering back the best way Geo
Listening could in this particular case. This study gives agency to these forms of written
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documents, the law, and the contracts, treating them as actors in this particular case
because they hold a particular power in the vendor district relationship.
Grey Space. When discussing the creations of new policies, it is common to see
the argument for a policy drawn along the lines of proponents and opponents. The case of
Geo Listening reveals how vendors may choose to operate in educational contracting
outside the purview of the government or any regulation. Vendors are not waiting for the
government to innovate new tools, services, and products to create and enter markets.
Instead, they are innovating and allowing the government to play catchup as necessary
(e.g. LaFave, 2016). These companies do not necessarily target unregulated spaces; they
simply do not delay creating service and product provision where the market is
undefined. Here, the company operates in the grey space between the market being
created and the acknowledgement of government that there is a need to update laws or
regulations to govern the new space.
The case of Geo Listening illustrates a practice of school districts entering into
new contractual relationships without any specific provisions for how those relationships
should be acquired, maintained or governed. In this case, the district was responding to
the threat to safety of cyberbullying and antisocial declarations on social media. Geo
Listening had a tool that allowed them to monitor students in a way they would not have
otherwise been able to do so. More deeply, it reveals how companies are neither overt
proponents nor opponents for increased regulation, but rather seek to play the middle. On
one hand, one might think that firms seek out unregulated markets to score a quick profit
in a market blitz before the government can come in and regulate their business models
out of existence. On the other hand, one might also think that firms purposely avoid
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unregulated markets because they want to be sure that they aren’t wasting money
developing a product that will get cancelled out by subsequent legislation. The case of
Geo Listening offers a counterintuitive finding in that firms actually have another
political strategy to enact: do neither of these things. The case of Geo Listening, as with
other EdTech firms, demonstrates the result of firms that are simply more innovative and
flexible in creating solutions than the policies and laws that govern educational
contracting and therefore strategically create and enter niche markets. The action of firms
to operate in the grey space can be interpreted as a political choice that actors make rather
than just the function of an organization from the market perspective. The grey space
affords the best of both worlds, as the vendor has the capability of aligning with both
those for and against dependent upon what is suitable for the business model. In the case
of Geo Listening, Frydrych went on record about the necessity of the service and also
agreed with the importance of having parental consent and awareness.
David and Goliath. Typically, in legislation related to third-party vendors, large
amounts of money is spent on lobbying to create legislation that is favorable to big
business contracting. For example, Center for Media Democracy’s research reveals that
companies—Pearson Education, ETS (Educational Testing Service), Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt and McGraw-Hill—have collectively spent more than $20 million lobbying in
states and on Capitol Hill from 2009 to 2014. This lobbying includes wining and
dining—even hiring—policymakers in pursuit of big revenues from federal and state
testing mandates under "No Child Left Behind" measures and the Common Core
curriculum. The expanded testing has fueled a testing boom worth an estimated $2 billion
annually. Pearson alone spent more than $4.5 million lobbying in Washington, DC, and a
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further $3.5 million lobbying state legislatures, primarily in Texas, Florida and California
(Center for Media Democracy, 2015).
In August 2015, KQEd ran a two-part editorial on how local governments are
California’s largest lobbying player and demonstrating the lack of transparency in how
private companies lobby for state contracts. The editorial used the case where California
education officials awarded a $240 million, three-year contract to conduct Common Core
testing for millions of school children to Educational Testing Service (ETS) as an
exemplar. ETS has a long and lucrative history with the California Department of
Education, one worth $800 million over the past 15 years. ETS has held the state
Department of Education’s main standardized testing contract for more than a decade.
The current contract is a new version of that 13-year-old document; ETS was also
awarded a three-year, $38 million contract to oversee English language testing (Lagos,
2015).
Geo Listening, being a smaller firm, tackled this issue differently. Instead, they
utilized local trust and nuanced language to their advantage; they did not lobby at all.
Where Easton (1965) requires actors to engage directly with the political system in some
form of support, Geo Listening suggests that nongovernmental actors have alternative,
indirect, ways of influencing the political system. Geo Listening offers insight into this
more nuanced approach, by responding clearly and directly to media about their service,
demonstrating their willingness to support legislation that would govern this form of
contracting and encouraging further dialogue on the “real threats” to student security,
Geo Listening used their control of the narrative and their support to their advantage. Geo
Listening emphasized trust with the vendors with whom they had existing relationships,
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and as a result, even though the concerns of Glendale’s parents precipitated the
controversy, Geo Listening is still under contract with the Glendale Unified School
District.
Market Behaviors and Support Service Innovations
This story of the educational social media monitoring market starts with a
concerned citizen with technological skills, identifying a vacuum and creating a product –
as innovators do – to occupy the space. Before the creation of the education social media
monitoring market, students were largely unsupervised and unprotected on social media.
Geo Listening created a product and service that responded to the needs of schools and
districts to create a safe learning environment in the changing landscape of the
educational space. The larger social media monitoring space was already growing, and it
was a natural progression for an inquisitive EdTech pioneer like Frydrych, with a history
of looking for opportunities to create new products in the EdTech space, to create a
business model that leveraged that tool in the educational domain.
Still, no tool or service is quite viable until there is an event that shows how
useful and necessary it is to the consumer. This was the case with Geo Listening, after
two highly visible student suicides reinforced the district’s primary focus to ensure
student safety by any means necessary. After a trial, and in making a case for the service
then Superintendent Sheehan stated:
Geo Listening provides timely and definitive information related to students and
the community. By providing critical information as early as possible, GUSD
staff are able to disrupt negative pathways and make any intervention more
effective. Geo Listening was used at some of the GUSD’s high schools in 2012-
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2013 and due to positive responses from administration, it is being expanded to all
secondary schools 2013-2014.
With that statement, Geo Listening went from offering GUSD a trial to engaging in a
district-wide agreement in this newly provisioned form of educational contracting. While
Geo Listening is not the only company who provides this form of service, the media
response due to the lack of transparency placed the firm at the center of developing an
accountability policy to govern the emerging market. More deeply, the development of
the product to monitor students was itself a political act (Alford & Friedland, 1975), and
the subsequent decisions about how to deploy the monitoring software and how, where,
when to enter the market were also political choices.
Implications
The response of the key stakeholders is consistent with the current national
narrative on how best to navigate the narrow strait between privacy and security. As
recently as February of 2016, national news reports are saturated with the juxtaposition of
an election and a knockdown, drag-out fight between Apple and the federal government
over what levels of access should be given to personal information that is password
protected (Digital Trend Staff, 2016; Kharpal, 2016). The discussion heightened by the
government having access to the phone of the suspect in a mass shooting in San
Bernardino without the ability to gain access, asks questions about individual privacy
rights when that said individual becomes the subject of a federal investigation. The
government legitimizes its request under the banner of security and Apple legitimizes its
restraint under the banner of privacy. Naturally, polling conducted by the Pew Research
Center suggests that the general public, in the face of terror, sides with the government
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(Elmer-Dewitt, 2016). Yet, on the ground, just a short while ago these very supporters
were desperately concerned about their children’s privacy on the very public social media
platform. And this conflicting concern for privacy protection against the backdrop of a
‘do what is necessary to keep me safe’ disposition post 9/11 America (Davis & Silver,
2004) is precisely what plays out in the educational contracting space.
With the arrival of Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), it becomes more
important to get student data privacy right. ESSA opens the educational contracting
market door wider as it creates the opportunity for more vendors to creep into the
educational technology market as they seek to provide options dedicated to competency-
based and personalized learning. ESSA extends the same provisions of No Child Left
Behind (NCLB) for vendor relationships by reaffirming a dedication to innovation in
order to address the inequities in educational outcomes based on race, income,
background, and demographic. ESSA diverges from NCLB as it moves away from the
“one size fits all federal identification and interventions” for accountability, interventions
and support of struggling schools towards a “state developed” identification system.
ESSA introduces a number of “competitive programs” that have the potential to increase
the district/vendor relationship currently exhibited under NCLB. These programs are: 1)
to evaluate and reward effective educators (Based on student learning) in High-need
schools, 2) for innovation and evidence building, 3) to replicate high-quality charter
schools, and 4) a competitive program to encourage wrap-around support systems for
vulnerable communities (U.S. Department of Education, 2016). As has already been
discussed, vendor relationships largely exist in direct response to mandates and issue of
capacity, and the emergence of innovation as a lynchpin in the ESSA agenda serves as an
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opportunity to further embed these forms of relationships. Consequently, it becomes
critically important to cultivate laws and policies that step beyond targeting a particular
form of contracting but rather work comprehensively across multiple forms of vendor
relationships.
Political Implications for Contractors
One of the key lessons to be taken from the case of Geo Listening is that
governmental legislation will not keep pace with technological innovation if the intent is
to create a piece of legislation for every single form of contracting. Pupil Records: Social
Media (AB 1442) is a useful example of a law that targets specific contracting
relationships about social media monitoring because the current laws governing the
vendor relationships were not robust enough to require a reasonable level of
accountability prior. Still, the policy community’s focus should not be on legislation and
its impact on the larger context; the private sector cannot be regulated by sanction.
Instead, policymakers and stakeholders need to work with emerging discourses and
leverage them for change at the societal level. Focusing on the supply side alone is a
Sisyphean task. When new technologies emerge, and new forms of contracts are
established with districts, with the current structure, it becomes necessary to create a
formal accountability policy in the form a law for each variety. Instead of this current
approach, states and the federal government need to consider a more comprehensive
overhaul of existing laws, including FERPA, that will cover the changing landscape of
technological innovation and educational contracting.
As it stands, with the slow bureaucratic process stalling any changes to federal
laws, states are trying to answer questions about what new forms of contracting mean for
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them in terms of accountability. This means that state-level privacy legislation will
remain caught between increased levels of technological components in classrooms and
being persistently behind the evolving and changing demands of technology. Even in Geo
Listening’s specific case, the law does nothing to address how students’ social media
profiles still have a lingering presence on the internet long after they – or the vendors –
decide to delete the content.
While the education technology world is intent on "moving past privacy to trust,"
9
the onus is on advocates, policy makers and researchers to try and keep pace. Former
Governor Bob Wise said, “this is much like building a plane in several different places
and simultaneously trying to fly” (SXSWedu panel 2016). Legislators must now think
forward about the potential of technology in schools and create a conducive privacy
environment proactively rather than reactively. This means making partnerships with
vendors of all shapes and sizes and understanding that market trends that exist outside of
education often find their way into the educational contracting space in one form or
another. This case suggests just that as companies are willing to move the needle on how
social media monitoring is used to play in the education market. Those who are
committed to EdTech continue to invest in products and services designed to target this
niche, but lucrative, space. As such, policies need to continue to evolve to protect
students from a legacy of inequity, inequality, and misuse of personal information.
Geo Listening, and companies like them, brings states face to face with the issue
of privacy and protection in the context of market-oriented solutions to capacity and
service provision. Here, we see that the conditions for legislation were largely reactive
9
A title of a session at the 2016 SxSwedu sessions on student data privacy.
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and dictated by how the market had already established itself, more directly they were
drawn in direct response to one company’s vendor relationship with a school district.
Subsequently, the question would be how the legislation changed the relationship
between vendors and districts? I argue that it did not. While the news story may have
caused other districts who were considering engaging Geo Listening for contracted
services to be slower on the uptake, Geo Listening’s contracts persist with Glendale
Unified.
Geo Listening represents a new form of policy influencer and actor, one who
simply operates in the space between the proponents and opponents and manages to find
favorable conditions for growth. These kinds of vendors may not be large enough to draw
the attention of advocates targeting large market reformers, but they are still large enough
to make an impact on the kinds of policies and legislation are formed around their kinds
of service.
For Every Action a Reaction
When considering student privacy, as with other policy implementation, it now
becomes imperative to move beyond the emotive and reactionary responses to full
consideration of intended and unintended consequences. Unintended consequences of
privacy laws are already being seen across the country and while AB 1442 does not
appear to have caused any for Geo Listening directly, it still remains to be seen what the
ramifications of the law will be on future companies attempting to enter in this new
market space. Technology is a realistic and constant expectation in the everyday life of
each individual. Technology is also increasingly central to educational and social
experiences.
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This study brings into focus one key fact, in choosing to engage with social media
platforms, an individual leaves a digital footprint that to some degree is largely out of
their control. While parents and adults can encourage students to have a deeper awareness
of just how much information they are sharing on these, the awareness that someone is
listening on the other side may be the deterrent necessary to mitigate some of the
antisocial behavior among young adults in the highly unregulated open hallway of
cyberspace.
While the case of Geo Listening centers on the importance of regulating firms as
they enter and operate in the educational contracting market, it also serves as a general
reminder of the evolving practices of schools and students away from the traditional
textbook and pencil school experience. The intent of the school district in acquiring the
services of Geo Listening was to ensure the protection of students through targeted
interventions based on social media posts. Still, the fallout has been an increased
attention and oversight in a previously unregulated market, and the proliferation of this
service across southern California, as other districts adopted a form of the service.
Suggestions for Future Research
Educational contracting is a permanent fixture of the educational domain and
greater attention needs to be focused on market research in the educational technology
space. More closely, there is more to understand in how the market grows, changes and
adapts in the face of district needs, federal and state mandates and accountability policies.
Further exploration of the vendor relationship with the policymaking space as a
political actor is also necessary to have more empirical knowledge on how these
relationships are initiated, cultivated, and sustained. This case gives an indication of how
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some vendor owners are simply entrepreneurial innovators, creating solutions, setting
them in motion and then moving on to the next innovation. This becomes critical in the
context of smaller and larger vendors, given that large companies are notorious for
acquiring new forms of technology, further research in understanding how smaller firms
operate in a similar manner may help to decouple the “big-bad” from corporation when
criticizing privatization.
Finally, a comparison of educational technology contracts across of states of
varying degrees of privacy laws would serve to understand further just how dislocated the
country is on the issue of privacy and how vendors adapt to varying demands from state
to state to maintain relevancy. This work in particular would tie in well with work done
about privacy laws varying from state to state by Data Quality Campaign.
Conclusion
Student data privacy is a murky and complicated issue to understand in the
context of educational contracting. The case of Geo Listening offers a small lens into the
nuanced interaction one small vendor had with a district and how a failure to
communicate, coupled with a national appetite for stronger oversight and regulation, led
to the creation of a law that invariably governs a newly formed educational contracting
market.
Despite this case being tightly wound and containing multiple layers, the
simplistic nature of the issue of privacy concerns is constant, communication and
transparency are non-negotiable. Vendors and contractors often struggle to negotiate the
demands of the district for products and services with the demands of the government, or
lack of structure in some cases, and sometimes they fail miserably. In this case, Geo
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Listening survived a storm that could have derailed their business. Although they are not
a perfect example of the vendor-district relationship, they do possess qualities that
contribute to our understanding of market-oriented solutions in education.
Geo Listening in this instance becomes the embodiment of the following, “It is
the struggle itself that is most important. We must strive to be more than we are. It does
not matter that we will not reach our ultimate goal. The effort itself yields its own
reward” (Roddenberry,1990) as they imperfectly navigated the complex conditions of
sustaining a company during a climate when firms associated with data collection in
various forms are sinking under the pressure of a highly skeptical society.
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APPENDIX A
PROJECT TIMELINE
Table A-1. Project Timeline:
Project timeline – proposed calendar
Time Frame Study Events
March 2015 Develop proposal Gain preliminary access to
field experts through
contact at SxSWedu
June 2015 Qualifying Exam Defended
December
2015
Propose study Collecting data and begin
analysis of preliminary
documents
Follow up preliminary
interviews
December –
March 2016
Continue data
collection
Conduct follow up
interviews
Continue data analysis
Draft early dissertation
chapters
March –
August 2016
Draft findings and
conclusions chapters
Present study findings
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APPENDIX B
DATA PLAN
– Semi-structured interviews with privacy experts, Geo Listening Founder
– Multiple Documents: bill analysis, newspaper articles, 3 years of Geo Listening
contracts, a single example of the contract that Geo Listening has with another
district, an example of contracts held by competitors of Geo Listening, public polls on
issues of privacy and trust, twitter account of Geo Listening, twitter account of vocal
data activism and privacy groups (Future of Privacy, DataQuality Campaign, Above
the Fray, Common Sense Media)
– Videos: Hearing video for AB 1442 and Glendale Board Meetings
– Audio and Observation from SxSW2015 and 2016 and AEFP 2016(conferences
focused on Privacy)
Bill Analysis of AB 1442:
08/26/14- Assembly Floor Analysis
08/25/14- Senate Floor Analyses
07/02/14- Senate Floor Analyses
06/23/14- Senate Judiciary
06/09/14- Senate Education
05/07/14- Assembly Floor Analysis
04/22/14- Assembly Education
03/28/14- Assembly Judiciary
01/06/14 - Introduced
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APPENDIX C
INTERVIEW PROTOCOL
Exploring the Complexities of Student Data Privacy
Privacy ‘experts’ interview protocol
General context
1. Let’s begin by discussing your background. Could you tell me about your
professional history?
2. What are your responsibilities in your current role?
3. How does the issue of student and family data privacy directly affect you?
4. Tell us about the inBloom case if you are you aware of it. Can you give a timeline
from your perspective of what happened? Why did this happen?
Agenda Setting
5. Why is the issue of data privacy now capturing a kind of national attention, based
on your experience?
6. Were there specific events that triggered this, has there been slow buildup of the
issue or a mixture both.
7. Who or what groups is driving the agenda here at the national and state level.
8. Can you identify some of the similarities and differences in how people you
interact with frame the problem of student and family privacy?
Closing
9. Are there issues that are not on the table about privacy that should be?
10. Is there anything else you would like to add? Perhaps you have a question or
suggestion for me about an angle that I have not considered.
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APPENDIX D
SAMPLE GEO LISTENING ADVISORIES
Geo Listening School District Advisory
August 15, 2013
From time to time Geo Listening will discover information from client school site posts
on social networks that is reposted across the nation. When this information poses a
danger or disruption to education we will create a national or regional advisory.
Geo Listening will notify client and non-client school district leaders when it has
discovered safety or disruptive actions trending on Social Networks. These advisories
will be sent to leadership via email. Geo Listening analysts have found posts about
school wide walkout.
There are a growing number of posts regarding the use of “Wax” in text, picture and
video form. We ask that you research and ask law enforcement to educate your personnel
on the substance that is growing quickly in popularity among students.
“Wax”
Definition: Definition: Highly concentrated form of THC. Experts tell us most wax is more than
80% pure THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. Compare that with the average marijuana leaf
with 20% to 30% THC, according to reports.
Wax is established as the most powerful marijuana concentrate on the market.
Depending on method, making wax can be dangerous and cause explosions. The kitchen
chemists who make wax use long tubes packed full of marijuana leaves. They then shoot
compressed butane through the tube. The butane leeches the THC from the vegetation and it
flows out in a greenish muck into a pan.
The finished product “wax” is often stored in a plastic camera lens case that can be easily sealed.
Consult with your local law enforcement to learn more and inquire if the dogs are trained to
detect the substance.
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Geo Listening School District Advisory
November 21, 2013
From time to time Geo Listening will discover information from client school site posts
on social networks that is reposted across the nation. When this information poses a
danger or disruption to education we will create a national or regional advisory.
Geo Listening will notify client and non-client school district leaders when it has
discovered safety or disruptive actions trending on Social Networks. These advisories
will be sent to leadership via email. Geo Listening analysts have found posts about
school wide walkout.
There are a growing number of reposts and encouragement from students across the
nation with regard to a school wide walkout at 12:00PM on November 22, 2013.
It has not gone viral, but since it spans the country we are notifying as many as we can
reach. We are also reaching out with more specifics that you can see here when specific
schools are mentioned. We are working to find out what is behind the walk out and will
forward when and if we find basis for it. Nothing wrong with students exercising their
rights, but certainly this can pose as a disruption to education if staff are not aware and
know what to do if an entire class gets up and walks out. We won’t be able to predict
magnitude as kids may fear discipline and others may join in once a few take action.
We are suggesting that school leadership reach out to class leaders for a sense of what is
happening in each school. It is expected that this will mostly affect High School, with
some Middle school participants as well. We will contact districts where we have been
able to positively identify a student or school/district name with more detailed
information. Here are several of the images/links that we have seen thus far.
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Geo Listening School District Advisory
December 4, 2013
Geo Listening will notify client and non-client school district leaders when it has
discovered safety or disruptive actions trending on Social Networks. These advisories
will be sent to leadership via email. Geo Listening analysts have found posts about the
use of ecstacy drugs commonly known as “Molly.”
Emergency Room admittances have doubled in the last six years due to the increased use
of "MOLLY"
What is Molly? Ecstasy is the pill form of MDMA, whereas “Molly” is the powder
form. Molly is a drug made up of cocaine, crack, ecstasy, meth, and bath salt. MDMA
is an empathogenic drug of phenethylamine and amphetamine classes of drugs. MDMA
has become widely known as "ecstasy, X, E", usually referring to its street pill form,
although this term may also include the presence of possible adulterants. It is classified
as highly addictive (and, illegal) by the Federal Drug Association.
We will contact districts where we have been able to positively identify a student or
school/district name with more detailed information when we find communication
threads discussing the use of these drug s. Here are several of the images/links that we
have seen thus far.
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Geo Listening School District Advisory
January 28, 2014
Geo Listening will notify client and non-client school district leaders when it has
discovered safety or disruptive actions trending on Social Networks. These advisories
will be sent to leadership via email.
Geo Listening analysts have discovered a new forum where individuals (Current &
Former students) post confessions anonymously using social media. It began on
Facebook as “IMConfessions” and gained popularity almost immediately. Confession
pages have popped up on other social network sites, including Twitter and askfm. The
site names usually contain the school acronym such as ??HS Confessions or ??confess
to attract followers and visitors.
Here’s how it works:
Each page administrator has a Google Document where you can “confess” or express
your views about something that you might have done, want to do, or tell someone
something that you cannot talk to under normal circumstances. The confessions get posts
on the page and are there for the entire world to see.
They have become successful because individuals can rant about someone anonymously.
Also, people like to read racy, controversial news/confessions, or gossip. The sites are a
platform for some students to post derogatory comments, sexually explicit content, and
opinions on controversial topics.
Geo Listening will contact districts where we have been able to positively identify a
student by name, username, school location engaging in the practice of posting
maliciously on confession pages.
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Geo Listening School District Advisory
Effective Date: February 27, 2014
Geo Listening will notify client and non-client school district leaders when it has
discovered safety or disruptive actions as well as trends on Social Networks. These
advisories will be sent to leadership via email. Geo Listening analysts had captured a
post during the Arapahoe, CO HS shooting lockdown that we felt was relevant and
important to share.
As many of you engage in Active Shooter drills and have lock downs for various reasons
throughout the school-year, this video shows a danger that we may not have been aware
of. We understand that children and adults will continue to have their communications
devices active during these incidents. However, we must offer better guidance to
students, staff and parents as well as first-responders to avoid potential mistakes of a cell
phone in a hand being viewed as a weapon in hand.
In the video, you will see the moments just before officers enter a classroom after the
shooting. You will note the announcement of officers and specific instructions of
showing hands to the officers. What was concerning for us was the student that recorded
the video was holding a device up above the desk prior to and during the officers entering
the room.
We felt that this presents an opportunity to improve and better prepare those that may be
a part of any incident or response team. Understanding that any incident requiring a lock
down and clearing of schools is a tense situation we wanted to raise the issue so that you
could use the information for awareness and improvement for all.
This is a link to the video on our
webpage:
https://geolistening.com/active-
shooter-video/
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Abstract (if available)
Abstract
In 2013, Glendale Unified School district, in an attempt to address and stop cyberbullying and other teenage issues, hired a specializing vendor, Geo Listening. The procurement of Geo Listening’s service was in direct response to growing concerns as two area teenagers committed suicide the previous year. Geo Listening came under intense scrutiny for monitoring the public posts students make on social media. The general critique that the usage of Geo Listening to monitor students online without their knowledge infringes on privacy coincides with an increased national agenda pushing for stronger public policies protecting student and family data. This embedded case study uses the work of Kingdon (1984, 1995) to explore a unique policy window and the agenda setting behaviors that led up to the passing of AB 1442, a California student data privacy bill to govern social media monitoring contracts. The study extends current research on educational contracting to demonstrate the viability of small firms as political actors in policymaking, while elaborating on the definition and behaviors of political actors in general.
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Smith, Jahni Madrica Ann
(author)
Core Title
Exploring the complexities of private sector influence: the case of student data privacy policy
School
Rossier School of Education
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
Urban Education Policy
Publication Date
08/01/2016
Defense Date
06/26/2016
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
AB 1442,California,contracting,data,education,K-12 education,Kingdon,OAI-PMH Harvest,policy,policy making,political actor,privacy,privacy bill,privatization,social media,social media monitoring
Format
application/pdf
(imt)
Language
English
Contributor
Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
Burch, Patricia (
committee chair
), Bensimon, Estela (
committee member
), Cooper, Terry (
committee member
)
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jahnismi@usc.edu,jahnismith@gmal.com
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https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-288635
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UC11281267
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etd-SmithJahni-4695.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-288635 (legacy record id)
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Dissertation
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Smith, Jahni Madrica Ann
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Tags
AB 1442
contracting
data
education
K-12 education
Kingdon
policy
policy making
political actor
privacy bill
privatization
social media
social media monitoring