Advanced by powerful philanthropies, educational technology companies, and the US Department of Education, a growing movement to apply "big data" (massive comprehensive databases of human behaviors and characteristics) through learning analytics to create "personalized learning" is currently underway in K-12 education. While critical scholars have offered extensive critiques of the corporate school reform agenda, the role of big data in the privatization of public education has not been critically examined. A content analysis of US Department of education reports, personalized learning advocacy narratives, and published research monographs reveals how big data is moving educational decisions from public school classrooms to private corporate spaces and changing the very conceptions of public and private. The analysis shows that in regard to personalized learning, all three types of documents minimize the role of the teacher while narrowly defining the purpose of education as preparing students for the 21st century workforce. The documents advocate for the expansion of data-driven instruction and decision-making, while defining the conception of learning as the acquisition of discrete skills and behaviors that can be easily entered into a comprehensive database, with little regard for privacy concerns.
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