This appeared on the New York City parent blog:
NYC Public School Parents
Independent voices of New York City public school parents
FRIDAY, JANUARY 18, 2013
Parents beware! NY and eight other states plan to share your child’s confidential school records with private corporations without your consent!
New York is one of five states that have agreed to share confidential NYC student and teacher data in Phase I with the “Shared Learning Collaborative” or SLC, a project of the Gates Foundation.
The other states and districts in Phase I include North Carolina (Guilford Co.), Colorado (Jefferson Co.), Illinois (Unit 5 Normal and District 87 Bloomington) and Massachusetts (Everett). Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, and Louisiana are in Phase II, according to the Gates Foundation, intend to start piloting the system in 2013.
The data to be shared will include the names of students, their grades, test scores, disciplinary and attendance records, and likely race, ethnicity, free lunch and special education status as well.
These records are to be stored in a massive electronic data bank, being built by Wireless Generation, a subsidiary of News Corporation. News Corporation is owned by Rupert Murdoch and has been found to illegally violate the privacy of individuals in Great Britain and in the United States.
Over the next few months, the Gates Foundation plans to turn over all this personal data to another, as yet unnamed corporation, headed by Iwan Streichenberger, the former marketing director of a company called Promethean that sells whiteboards, based in Atlanta GA.
This new corporation intends to make this confidential student information available in turn to commercial enterprises to help them develop and market their “learning products.” This new corporation is supposed to be financially sustainable by 2016, which means either states, districts or vendors will have to pay for its upkeep and maintenance. All this is happening without parental knowledge or consent.
There are serious questions as to whether this plan complies with the federal law protecting student privacy, called FERPA (the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act), which allows states or districts to disclose students’ personally identifiable education records without parental consent only in very limited circumstances and under stringent conditions, none of which apply in this case.
Moreover, we have learned that this confidential information is to be put on a cloud managed by Amazon.com, with few if any protections against data leakage.
After our press conference with our attorney, Norman Siegel in October, the NY State Education Department finally released its contract with the Gates Foundation. As we feared, it only reaffirmed our concerns about the lack of privacy for children, the weak protections against data leakage, and the denial of the parental right to consent. Here is a letter from our attorneys expressing our concerns.
We believe that any state that enters into an agreement with the Shared Learning Collaborative, or its successor corporation, should at the very least be obligated to:
Release its contract with the Gates Foundation, notify all parents of the impending disclosure of their children’s confidential records, and provide them with the right to consent;
Hold public hearings for parents to be able to express their concerns about the plan’s potential to risk their children’s privacy, security and safety;
Explain how families can obtain relief if their children are harmed by improper use or accidental release of this information, including who will be held financially responsible;
Affirm that they will respect the privacy rights of public schoolchildren more than the interests of the Gates Foundation, News Corporation, or any other company or vendor with whom this confidential information may be shared.
Please see below; video of Khem Irby, parent activist in North Carolina, speaking before the Guilford school board about this issue last week.
Here is a fact sheet with this information you can download and distribute. You can also leave a comment on the Gates website here, if you think parents should have the right to consent.
For more information, please email us at info@classsizematters.org or call us at 212-674-7320.
Leonie Haimson at 1/18/2013
NOOOOOO! What do I do? Who do I contact?
OKAY, there is a link at the end of the article! Thanks!
And watch the video…..so the man whose company hacks into the cell phone of a murdered, missing 13 year old is going to profit off our children. Really?
Well maybe Rupert, Bill and Melinda can willingly give out the data on their children including test scores….oops….they probably don’t take standardized tests.
Can someone please tell the Emperor that he is ruining our country and please just get busy with a day job and leave us all alone.
Of course children are for sale. That’s what the business model of education is all about.
All of the language used by so-called reformers demonstrates their perception of children as commodities. When Former GE head Jack Welch was hired to give pep talks at NYC’s Leadership Academy, he openly described children as “products.”
Here in NYC, schools are no longer community anchors and a place for the social and academic development of children, but assets in a (investment) “portfolio.”
When unions agree to a Value Added model of teacher evaluations, they are signing on to a policy that sees children as “… a product or service that is enhanced before being sold to a customer.”
Children are data, data is for sale, and BIg Data rules…
Parents who are concerned about this, especially from the 9 states that have already signed up to participate in this data sharing project, please email us at info at classsizematters dot org
Diane — I have some questions about the information that will be shared:
1.). Will children’s SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS be shared??
2.) If Social Security numbers are shared shouldn’t parents be concerned about identity theft?
3.) Is confidential health information going to be shared?
I have other questions as well, but this is a start. Parents need to really STOP AND THINK ABOUT THE RAMIFICATIONS OF THIS.
Marge Borchert
Maybe let PTA’s know to contact their parents with this info??
I forwarded this information to my PTL President as well as my teachers. The education rheeformers seem to forget that teachers are parents too!!
Marge Borchert
Thursday I spoke to our House Education Committee about this. Dr Miller who is on the SBAC board dismissed my concerns. I’m emailing a link to this article to our committee chairman. Maybe my concerned aren’t unfounded.
Several months ago, I attended a meeting where Kenya Bradshaw, executive director of Stand for Children in Tennessee discussed how this would work in Memphis/Shelby County Schools. Students would be given a student id card that would be scanned every time they received a social service, went to an after school or extra curricular activity, checked out a library book, etc…. Data warehouses will not only have student’s personal information, school records, but will also have tracking information. The possible uses for this information strains my imagination. But in a business setting, it would be a great way to determine if a student’s achievement justified their costs.
“But in a business setting, it would be a great way to determine if a student’s achievement justified their costs”….is that what you said?
You mean to determine if they were worth it and if not, what? How does one decide they should have proven that their “achievement justified the costs”? Who decides? What should they have accomplished and by when?
There is a dystopian YAL novel titled Unwind….it is a society that kills the children that others determine are not worth investing in anymore. They then use their organs to save others…they are unwound and so their life doesn’t technically end. This is fiction.
Are you for real?
Looks like sarcasm doesn’t always translate well in print. I was trying to be very tongue in cheek when I said it would be a great way to decide a student’s worth.
Sorry. I didn’t pick up on the sarcasm.
I don’t know if students’ Social Security #s will be shared or not. Parents should ask and also demand to see a copy of their state’s contract with the Gates Foundation to determine what information will be open to sharing, whether the state will be providing parental consent, [which NYS is not] what are the safeguards against data leakage, and who will be held responsible if this occurs. The contract should be a matter of public record. You can also email the woman in charge of this project for Gates; her name is Stacey Childress and her email is stacey.childress@gatesfoundation.org and twitter handle is @NextGenStacey
Here’s the non-answer from the Gates Foundation:
Hi Michele,
Thanks for your note. I appreciate the questions and concerns in your email.
I know there are some confusing claims being made about the Shared Learning Collaborative, a nonprofit project that is designed to make education technology work better for teachers and be more affordable for states and districts. As one of the funders, the Gates Foundation does not have access to private student information through this project. For accurate information about the SLC, I encourage you to visit http://www.slcedu.org. You can go directly to information about privacy and security here.
Thanks again for the opportunity to respond to your concerns,
Stacey
Non-profit project? Sure!
When are people going to understand that Gates and the Gates Foundation, Broad and the Broad Foundation, HP, Walton et al are evil and have no good intentions for the public or children of the U.S. This is a total invasion of our constitutional civil rights to privacy. If you do not want to have outside forces have your or your childs information they should not be allowed to have it. Remember this is coming from Obama. He heads the federal government and his people are at the Ed dept. and the Justice Dept. He could stop this. I am sure that he is promoting it as he is by the policies he uses a right wing corporatist privatizer. Just look at his real history in Chicago as the head of the Annenburg Foundation for Chicago Public Schools since 1995 until he ran for the Senate. Also, Arne Duncan, who was the prior superintendent of Chicago who lied to the California legislature to promote mayoral control. I have the letters and Chicago budget to back this up.
Unfortunately, Obama and Duncan are not your friends just better devils than the other guys, but devils themselves none the less.
“The data to be shared will include the names of students, their grades, test scores, disciplinary and attendance records, and likely race, ethnicity, free lunch and special education status as well.”
I’m not even allowed to see the Free Lunch (FARMS) status of my students. That is confidential information in our state.
Make no mistake about it. This student information will be hacked and used for nefarious purposes.
There are at least 100 million credit card numbers and names and addresses on the black market (the “dark side” of the Internet), available for purchase to the highest bidder. There are companies that sell this information, and even specify a guaranteed percentage of how many credit card numbers will be valid, and also have 1-800 telephone support for when helping you use the numbers you buy.
If there’s any money to be made from this student information, it too will be accessed and sold like credit card numbers.
Oh my Lord, I’m sharing this with my staff AND also with my PTA and also with my school board. I’m from North Carolina and we are ALWAYS overeager to jump on the bandwagon if they think it will make our state look good! Thank you for this truth!
Diane,
Your title is quite misleading. No one is “selling your child”. It may seem small but to have the title be as it is, is wrong. I see this type of hype all around in marketing, advertising and those who wish to obfuscate how things really are. A better title would be “Is Your Child’s Personal Data for Sale?” (Which I am totally against without informed consent). Again, there is no “selling you child” as you imply in your title.
Please don’t go the route of those who prevaricate to make their points more palatable.
Duane
It also weakens your position as those who against you will rightly say “Why listen to Ravitch, she believes that we want to sell your children”.
who are against
Do you have children? As a mother, if all of the information above was being captured and given out to other entities without my consent, that to me, is selling my child. They don’t have my permission and it is none of their business. So I disagree.
Three! Two sons, one’s a chef and the other’s still in college and a beautiful auburn haired very tall (6’2″) daughter. Thanks for asking!
I may seem a matter of semantics but the title as it stands is quite misleading and hyperbolic.
Proud papa! Okay…so we disagree. That’s okay…have a relaxing Sunday..I hope.
Duane — I agree re: the hyperbole of the headline, but that seems par for the course to me. This is advocacy, right?
“This is advocacy, right?”
EVEN if it’s advocacy it’s still not right. And to me it’s quite sad that “it’s par for the course”.
I thought G. Buzzetti’s comment (in the posting “Milwaukee, no model. . .”) about how common the lies have been and are have had disastrous effects on governmental policies for the last 13 years to be quite correct.
I see validity to both sides, here:
1) Semantics are extremely important if you want to establish an effective dialogue with anybody. Even more so when you’re dealing with people who have money and influence. When you’re dealing with the business world, you’re well served to speak a cut and dried, down to business vocabulary that states the facts. Your words can be used against you if you’re not careful.
2) On the other hand; the title resonates clearly with many of us who see our everyday decisions and lifestyles being taken over by those with ever increasing wealth and power. The title of this article is meant to attract the attention of those people, imo. And, hopefully, garner enough outrage that some action will be taken on a large scale. The meaningful dialogue can be established between the lawyers and politicians from that point on.
And here’s a link to an idiotic video on what SLC plans to do with the data they obtain without parents’ consent: http://slcedu.org/blog/what-we-are-building-teachers
Thank you for linking. I left a comment. Like we don’t do that already and keep it all in our heads. They want to create robot Stepford teachers who input data into a device which then tells you what to read, copy and say. How insulting to think we don’t know our kids and we don’t already do that every single school day and without their educrap.
Exactly! I found the whole thing very offensive, to kids, teachers, and those of us who teach teachers. This data movement has got to be stopped before it chokes the life out of schools.
I think this is all you need to know about this venture (From the SLC site): “The Shared Learning Collaborative (SLC) is led by the vision of the Council of Chief State School Officers and nine participating states and is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Carnegie Corporation of New York.
“Teachers are ‘free’ to teach ‘personally’ “… that is if we and our kids are willing to sell their identity for products and to data consolidators.
We need to stop web-based education. Period. Dangerous stuff. Incorrect and manipulated numbers that will cause kids to fail, teachers to be fired, schools to close, communities to wither…
Financial and societal costs that we can’t begin to imagine.
I am reading a book titled “I Know Who You Are And I Saw What You Did; Social Networks and the Death of Privacy.” Commercial enterprises are all looking for data to mine and sell–even if it has nothing to do with their so-called product.
For example, MyEdu (a virtual counselor for higher education) claims to help the student “Manage college. Get your degree faster.
Land the perfect job or internship. It’s FREE! forever!)
https://www.myedu.com/students/
Check out their privacy policy. https://www.myedu.com/about/myedu/privacy/
It doesn’t matter that their claims selling their education snake oil would never be brought to a court of law. Heck! That’s corporate free speech to hawk garbage and make claims…
Margaret Spellings (former US Secretary of Education and now on MyEdu’s Board was right when she said,“It’s a gold mine of data.”
http://www.statesman.com/news/news/local/ut-system-sought-quick-wins-with-myedu-partnership/nRkBj/
All the data can be sold to data consolidators like, Aexiom (described by former CEO John Meyer as “the biggest company you have never heard of”) and LexisNexis (which bought competitor ChoicePoint for $4.1 billion in cash).
We have electronic avatars that negatively impact our real selves. Spokeo is a website that is loaded with errors that employers and potential landlords use.
While the internet seemed like the perfect tool for democracy, Eli Pariser (“The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You”) wrote, “Personalization has given us something very different: a public sphere sorted and manipulated by algorithms, fragmented by design, and hostile to dialogue.”
Great to know this website exists! Blogs and News on Data Mining, Web Mining and Text Mining
http://www.kdnuggets.com/websites/blogs.html
From this link, I see a new one posted on JAN 10, 2013.
Smart TV and Data Mining “data mining coming to our home…” http://www.aboutdm.com
Let’s call this what it is: “Virtual human trafficking.”
In SBAC states, Murdoch’s paws will be all over the data reported from that consortium since Wireless Generation got the contract for reporting assessment data. http://www.smarterbalanced.org/news/smarter-balanced-awards-reporting-system-contract-to-wireless-generation/
Think that poses a conflict of interest when it comes to the intentions of Amplify, Murdoch’s education division, run by Joel Klein? http://www.hackeducation.com/2012/07/24/amplify-news-corp-phone-hacking/
The claim is that we must do more with less education dollars. What is really happening is that corporate privateers will do less teaching, taking more money coming from the public troughs.
All of this will be sold as “personalized” education. e-Learning will save the day… even though Intel’s 2012 white paper (“The Positive Impact of eLearning–2012 Update”
http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/white-papers/world-ahead-positive-impact-of-elearning-paper.pdf) on this topic states:
“However, despite a large body of research evidence, there are no longitudinal, randomized trials linking eLearning to positive learning outcomes. Reasons may range from economics to ethics–if you have a limited budget for educational interventions, do you spend the money on the students or the evaluations?”
Of course, the White House has already arranged for no-bid contracts that head us in that direction… Microsoft, Pearson, Houghton-Mifflin. Even a company named Personal!
Click to access ed_data_commitments_1-19-12.pdf
Personal, which gives individuals the tools to create a private, personal network built on a secure data vault where they can aggregate, manage and control access to their data and online identity when connecting with people, companies and organizations, commits to joining the effort to liberate student data records. Personal’s platform will allow individuals to easily import their own education records into their data vault and grant secure access to trusted recipients.
https://www.personal.com Get started for free!
Wonder how this all gets monetized (economic speak for “convert or to express as a form of currency”)?
Take a hint from Frank McSherry. https://simonsfoundation.org/features/science-news/mathematics-and-physical-science/privacy-by-the-numbers-a-new-approach-to-safeguarding-data/
“We’ve learned that human intuition about what is private is not especially good. Computers are getting more and more sophisticated at pulling individual data out of things that a naive person might think are harmless. Privacy is a nonrenewable resource. Once it gets consumed, it is gone. There’s another resource that has the same property — the hours of your life. There are only so many of them, and once you use them, they’re gone. Yet because we have a currency and a market for labor, as a society we have figured out how to price people’s time. We could imagine the same thing happening for privacy.” Frank McSherry of Microsoft Research Silicon Valley in Mountain View, Calif.
This is beyond frightening–we thought “1984” was about government spying on and controlling individuals, but 2013 is about corporations spying on and controlling CHILDREN. I’m sure private schools will not be supplying data to Gates–wealthy, powerful parents wouldn’t stand for this kind of intrusion into their children’s privacy. This is unconscionable.
So the Federal Mandates are ignored and overlooked without concern for the privacy
clauses for some movements or separation of church and state for others. So forth and so on. A new day in America for children and their horizon.
Desensitized to a police state and valued for their productivity and
their creativity squeezed from under them. I find it hard to believe President Obama
would follow this plan but then this may not have been his focus and left too much
to the unseen power elite. If this sounds conspiratorial, look around and open your eyes.
The net which has been thrown over the children is tightening and parents are now
scrambling to pull them back from the nets undertow. It may not be too late to try and
hold back the movement but reversing it seems unlikely. I grieve for what we might
have thrown away and for the innocense of the children who have no choice but to
follow.
Wake up American parents, before it’s too late. What will it take?
How does this student data help develop whiteboards and technology. I skimmed the article but am mystified. What on earth is going on in this country? I certainly don’t believe anything put out by the Gates foundation at all. They are extremely dishonest
The Billionaire Boys Club is hard at work. Disgusting. Too much power in the hands of a select few. Dollars does not equal intelligence.
Our country is not a corporation and shouldn’t be treated that way.
I’ve sent an email to our Public Advocate (Bill de Blasio). See where this takes us.
This is what I have done to protect my child’s future:
I am meeting with the Administrators in my district to ask some questions in relation to the new Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) which were accepted as of January, 2012. Specifically, FERPA expanded of the purpose for sharing data as well as the definition of who can access personal digital information that is maintained on my children at the local, state and federal level without parental notification. You have to understand what your district releases.
Ask these questions now and have the PTA get involved:
1) What is the district data policy regarding the security and definition of our child’s digital information (i.e. test scores, portfolios, etc.)
2) What is shared with the State or Federal Government?
3) What 3rd parties have access to that data at the local, State or Federal level?
4) Is it shared at the “Personally Identifiable Level?”
5) What does their record contain?
6) Are they aware of the new FERPA regulations???
A key component of Race to the Top is that states have to set up a longitudinal database to receive information from local schools for audit/evaluation and research. A key component of the FERPA change is that personally identifiable information can be released without parental consent to non-government entities.
There are many unanswered questions, but once digital information leaves your district, the new FERPA rules expand who can see it. The penalties for misuse are there but not strong enough. Once digital data is out there, your child is for sale – marketing, victim identity, etc. That isn’t too strong of a term!
I read that Klein (now working for Murdoch in this and other education related areas) was awarded a 10 million dollar, no bid contract for this service.
Is it already a done deal?