A dozen parents in New York City have sued to stop the State Education Department from releasing confidential information about their children to data storage companies, such as the Gates-Murdoch group called inBloom.
One of the parents explained:
Karen Sprowal, a petitioner whose son is in fifth grade in a New York City public school, said in a statement that she’s been “unable to rest easy” since learning about the state’s plans to share information with inBloom.
She’s worried that information about her son, who has special needs, might get into the wrong hands and hinder his ability to get into college or succeed in a job in the future.
“Up to now, his confidential records have been protected by his principal, the school’s nurse and psychologist, but now the state intends to provide this highly private information to vendors, without consulting me or asking for my permission,” she said. “Commissioner King has shown a dismissive attitude towards the concerns of parents and indifference to the dangers facing my son and more than three million other children enrolled in the state’s public schools.”
Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters,an advocacy group who has spearheaded the opposition to the state’s sharing of students data, urged Gov. Andrew Cuomo to call on King to “halt … this unethical and dangerous plan.”
Cuomo’s office did not immediately offer a comment. The governor does not have direct authority over the Education Department, which is controlled by the Board of Regents.
“Commissioner King has ignored the protests of thousands of parents who have urged him to drop this plan and begged him to protect their children’s highly sensitive information,” Haimson said. “They have been joined by a growing chorus of school board members and superintendents throughout the state who say that his data-sharing plan is not only unnecessary, it poses huge and unprecedented risks.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
You go Parents!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Now look who will be Racing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Racing to Hire Lawyers..
Racing to Hide the Evidence..
Racing to..?????
If the decision is controlled by the Board of Regents, parents beware!
I understand that the President of the BoR is David Coleman, designer and profiteer of Common Core.
Can I join the suit? I have a teen and as you know teens don’t always make the best decisions. When teens make bad choices or react impulsively, I”m under the belief that teens should be spoken to and given appropriate consequences as decided by their parents/ teachers/principals. End of story. Now… you’re telling me that if a student makes a bad decision and repairs their mistake, that incident could follow them till they apply for college or employment??????? NO WAY.
I don’t see anyone from PAA in Arne’s Bold, ‘Innovative District Leadership’ event.
http://leaders.edweek.org/?intc=EM_LTLF14_11.13
Is anyone sick of the way Arne and the BBBs turn education reform into celebrity events?
What is PAA?
Parents Across America–parent groups from all over the country united under one umbrella. if you don’t know them, you can go to parentsacrossamerica.org and see all the good they’ve been doing!
Class Size Matters is, I believe, one of their affiliate organizations.
So is PURE (Parents United for Responsible Education ) in Chicago–PURE’s leader, Julie Woestehoff, is one of the founders of PAA.
Kudos to Karen Sprowal and the other signers of the suit. They are waving a red flag of concern about an issue that has been evident but has been systematically ignored until now but is nonetheless both appropriate and necessary. The very fact that those companies are “vendors” in more than one way makes their “care” of such sensitive date suspicious at best. Best wishes to all.
And the first dominoe has fallen. Justice will prevail. They can’t buy being right.
“They can’t buy being right.”
Quite correct. Unfortunately, they can buy “legal justice”.
I’m betting that “justice talks and money walks.”
Go, New York Parents!!!
BTW, if you would like to know the REAL reason behind the creation of the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic], here it is, from an insider who knows what’s really going on, Arne Duncan’s former Chief of Staff:
http://blogs.hbr.org/2011/03/the-innovation-mismatch-smart/
The standards were part of a business plan. They were a necessary first step in establishing a national database and portal for computer-adaptive curricula. In order for this portal to work, there had to be a single set of standards for student responses and curricula to be aligned to. That’s why so little effort was put into vetting the standards, into getting them right. All that mattered to the folks who paid to have these “standards” created was that they be uniform across the country. That’s what was needed in order for the national database and curriculum portal business concept to work.
If you like the idea of a distant, centralized, totalitarian authority completely controlling pedagogy and curricula, then you will love the whole inBloom concept–the standards, the database, and the computer-adaptive curricula are a single package. All are part of a plan to give U.S. education a thorough Microsofting.
Thank you Robert for the Harvard Business School link. If David Coleman will be making the decisions, it is in his and ALEC’s best interest to see to it that these brave parents fail in their attempt to overturn inBloom, the data mining appropriation of all our children’s life information.
In California, where members of the U. of C. Bd. of Regents actualy actively engaged in pressuring for the re-hirs of Supt. Deasy, we are seeing how out of our local control public education is.
Once again this site is messing with me and not letting me edit…guess I will soon have to change my name again to get on.
I tried to write above that…. Board of Regents members of the UC system, now headed by Janet Napolitano of Homeland Security, actively engaged in posting on this site to the benefit of Eli Broad’s annointed Supt. Deasy in LAUSD. The captains, nay, overlords of industry and the military industrial world seem to be taking over public education not only for investment profit, but to what other end????
We thought to produce ‘Widget Workers,’ but why else would these people, including the Regent husband of our Senator Diane Feinstein, the hugely powerful war and intelligence- minded committee head, want to have complete control in training America’s children and future citizens and voters?
Robert…are we on the same page?
Robert…it is Ellen Lubic writing as Woof…had to re-register to be able to post after my reporting on the farce of the Oct. 29 LAUSD BoE meeting. Only was able to get back here yesterday. Diane and her IT person have worked on this to help me.