Data mining your children

The National Security Agency has nothing on the education technology startup known as Knewton. The data analytics firm has peered into the brains of more than 4 million students across the country.

By monitoring every mouse click, every keystroke and every split-second hesitation as children work through digital textbooks, Knewton is able to find out not just what individual kids know, but how they think. It can tell who has trouble focusing on science before lunch -- and who will struggle with fractions. Even as Congress moves to rein in the National Security Agency, private-sector data mining has galloped forward -- perhaps nowhere faster than in education. Both Republicans and Democrats have embraced the practice.

And the Obama Administration has encouraged it, even relaxing federal privacy law to allow school districts to share student data more widely. The goal is to identify potential problems early and to help kids surmount them. But the data revolution has also put heaps of intimate information about school children in the hands of private companies -- where it is highly vulnerable to being shared, sold or mined for profit.