Dear Change.Org,
You told the world that you stopped collecting the signatures of unknowing people for StudentsFirst.
You didn’t tell the truth.
You informed me that I was a member of StudentsFirst because I signed a petition on your website a year ago.
I never knowingly signed on as a member of StudentsFirst.
I was duped.
Apparently StudentFirst has cynically used your website to dupe a million other people as they duped me.
When will you stop facilitating this deception?
The letter below says you are still running three different StudentsFirst petitions.
StudentsFirst claims 1.3 million members. According to the letter sent to my blog, 1.275,700 of those members were gathered at Change.Org, using the same deception that fooled me.
Michelle Rhee uses these numbers to raise millions of dollars from rightwing donors and to intimidate politicians to accept her agenda. She then spends these millions to bash teachers and promote privatization.
If my math is right, StudentsFirst has 24,300 members nationwide, not 1.3 million members.
No one can tell me how to resign as a member.
Enough is enough.
I will report you to the Federal Trade Commission and to consumer fraud agencies if you don’t sever your ties with these deceptive tactics.
Please contact me as soon as possible to let me know how to get my name off the rolls of StudentsFirst. It was put there by Change.Org.
Diane Ravitch
| Dear Diane, your concern SHOULD be with Change.org’s policy as much as with Rhee’s deceptive tactics. The business model of Change.org enables the abuse, and so long as that’s true the progressive image of Change is nothing but a pitch to draw in more honest grassroots campaigns that can become automated recruitment vehicles for their (paying) opposition. Despite a statement to the press implying a response to concerns, Change. org continues to run 3 StudentsFirst petitions. Those active campaigns and all 34 StudentsFirst petitions on record on Change.org, whose 1,275,700 signatures (on last count) were obtained by misleading viral-marketing features provided by Change.org only to paying clients, ought to be disabled immediately and their contact lists withheld from StudentsFirst. And we ought to be asking, furthermore, how many other causes are being subverted in this way on Change.org. If we think of the sheer configuration of honest campaigns from around the country and the world that become the infrastructure for Change.org profits, routing for-pay campaigns like Rhee’s to identified supporters of “related” causes, the scheme passing as the Change.org policy begins to emerge in its disturbing fullness. As things stand now, Change.org is a bait advertiser’s (and a bait lobbyist’s) dream. |
Diane Ravitch's blog 
More evidence that the so called reformers are nothing more than opportunists more interested in their own coffers, than anything else.
Change.org needs to publicly announce how people can withdraw their names from the membership rolls of StudentsFirst, since Change is responsible for the unwitting inclusion of our names on their membership list to begin with, and those of us who’ve tried could not find where StudentsFirst allows “members” to opt out of anything but email.
Diane and readers:
Why can’t we have a reverse petition?
For example…The following people have been or believe they may have been duped into supporting Students First and we would like our names withdrawn or have it be known that we DO NOT support Michelle Rhee and Students First.
Someone advise me on how we set that up. Do I simply go to the change.org website?
A petition on another, nonprofit site would be a better way to change Change, I think. Pro-education petitioners know now that we must be vigilant about protecting our campaigns from the kind of subversion noted above. How sad would you be if your honest petition on Change gained Rhee or another corporate front new “supporters”? I can say from my experience that it is a very unhappy feeling. In addition, because in Change.org you are dealing with a for-profit venture, highlighting the competition is a pretty good feature of an effective action. SignOn worked well for the Chicago teachers’ cause that catalyzed this discussion. http://www.signon.org/
A petition on another, nonprofit site would be a better way to change Change, I think. Pro-education petitioners know now that we must be vigilant about protecting our campaigns by the kind of subversion noted above. How sad would you be if your honest petition on Change gained Rhee or another corporate front new “supporters”? I can say from my experience that it is a very unhappy feeling. In addition, because in Change.org you are dealing with a for-profit venture, highlighting the competition is a pretty good feature of an effective action. SignOn worked well for the Chicago teachers’ cause that catalyzed this discussion. http://www.signon.org/
I suggest writing a comment on Change.org’s Facebook page. If enough people comment, the comments will be noticed. This was a technique that helped to remove Glenn Beck’s vile television program from Fox. Thousands of people bombarded the Facebook pages of sponsors with demands for them to cease supporting Beck’s hate speach.
Maybe you should start a petition on change.org for a campaign against StudentsFirst pro corporate, anti union privatization campaign. We could send in thousands of emails to Students First using change.org. It might be useful and fun to use their weapons against them
A petition is best. I want my name removed too. Now! And I am sure there are many others who don’t even realize they have been duped. I didn’t realize until I started getting all these emails from Rhee, like we were fighting for the same cause!
To an earlier commenter, there is an effort to raise the visibility of these issues on Change.Org’s facebook page. The idea is to post right into whatever is the active comment stream:
https://www.facebook.com/change.org
I contacted Students First on Thursday 6/21 to ask them if I was a member and to tell them to remove my name if I was. Aside from an automatic reply, I haven’t heard back yet.
Let me know if you find a way to get your name removed from the Students First membership roll. I will do the same.
When there is money to be made, why should they stop? However, I’m in full agreement that something needs to be done. I like the idea of going directly to the facebook page.
I’m thoroughly confused. What happened? Is there an original story here that I can read? I see no references to the original.
Sorry for not linking to the original. Here it is.
Thank you for the link! 🙂
I added two earlier links to the blog so it makes sense.
Ok, now that I’ve read the back-story here, how do I know if I’ve been a victim of this scam?
I figured out when I sorted my received email by name and discovered several from Michelle Rhee, from last fall, in which she referred to petitions at the Change.org site that I’d signed and my resulting membership in StudentsFirst. There’s a link to unsubscribe from email, which I had done previously, but there’s no link to withdraw membership that I could find.
Well, I just searched my email for Michelle Rhee, and found nothing. But that might not mean anything, since I delete my emails as soon as I read/reply, unless they’re important.
I never got an email from StudentsFirst but I learned from Change.Org that I had “joined” a year ago. No one ever told me about this, but she was able to add one more name as a member. I have heard that most of her “members” were collected the same way.
This new article from Reuters states: “Last week the liberal website Change.org, under pressure from union backers who consider Rhee’s group anti-union, said it would wind down its relationship with StudentsFirst once their contract ends in several months.” So the actual end is “months,” away. Further, it is seeming as if, contrary to its own Privacy and “Terms of Service,” Change.Org allowed signer e-mails to be transferred directly to StudentFirst ownership; that would seem to leave Change vulnerable to a class action lawsuit.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/26/us-usa-education-reform-studentsfirst-idUSBRE85O1CN20120626
http://www.change.org/about/privacy
“If you would like to receive direct communication from the organizations you support, you may choose to have us pass your Personal Information to such organizations; please note that whenever you choose to have us pass such Personal Information to an organization, we will additionally inform the organization of the source campaign where you made this election. Please also be advised that the default settings for many of our campaigns assume that you wish to receive communications from the organizations you support; if you do not wish to receive such communications, please uncheck the box “Keep me updated by [name of organization]” (or other language of a similar nature) before signing such campaign. If you choose to receive direct communications from the organizations you support, please be advised that: (i) Change.org has no control over the content, frequency and/or any other aspect of such communications; and (ii) although we do not sell or trade our contact lists, it is fairly common practice for organizations to rent or trade the names and addresses of their donors with other organizations. Accordingly, we strongly urge you to review the terms of service, privacy policies and/or other like policies of any organization prior to consenting to our transmission of your Personal Information to such organization. ”
Yet this default Direct Communication opt in…. is not the same as becoming a member of StudentFirst. Diane, please have an attorney review if you can.
At the end of the article, there is a correction saying that signers can opt out when they sign, but this is not true. There is no provision for withdrawing your signature, particularly because you won’t necessarily be informed that you just joined StudentsFirst. If they don’t tell you, you can’t opt out. I am a member, and I didn’t join knowingly, and I can’t resign or opt out.
They seem to be violating their own TOS (Terms of Service) and Privacy requirements. It’s a potential legal minefield for them.
FYI when I tried to visit your site just now, I got a notification that it’s an “untrusted site”. Thought you should know.