Please consider signing this petition.

Several states plan to share confidential student data with a corporation funded by the Gates Foundation. This information may be shared with other entities, for purposes that are not clear.

As parents, grandparents and educators, we must protect our children’s rights to privacy.

We expect schools to understand the needs of children. We do not expect them to share this information with corporations, marketers, or other government agencies, except in the aggregate–not with individual identification– for informational purposes only.

It is understandable that government needs to collect data about enrollment and attendance and special education and trends.

There is no reason to release the names of individual students to outside entities.

Please protect our children and our students against commercial and governmental intrusion into their lives.

The petition begins as follows:

“New York State, along with Colorado, Illinois and Massachusetts, intends to provide confidential student information to a private corporation called the Shared Learning Collaborative, funded by the Gates Foundation, which in turn will make this data available to for-profit companies to develop and market their commercial learning products. 

This confidential data will include student names, addresses, test scores, grades, attendance, economic and special education status, IEPs, and disciplinary records. All this is being done without parents’ knowledge or consent, and represents a shocking violation of our children’s right to privacy.

Four more states have said they will soon follow in phase II: Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky and Louisiana, and the Gates Foundation is soliciting even more states to join in.”