New York officials say they will release confidential student data in July to Rupert Murdoch and Bill Gates’ inBloom, despite parental protests and a futile lawsuit. Why the unseemly rush to give away student information?
Meanwhile a California legislator has introduced a proposal to protect student privacy.
The California law is sponsored by Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg:
“A leading California lawmaker plans to introduce state legislation on Thursday that would shore up privacy and security protections for the personal information of students in elementary through high school, a move that could alter business practices across the nearly $8 billion education technology software industry.
“The bill would prohibit education-related websites, online services and mobile apps for kindergartners through 12th graders from compiling, using or sharing the personal information of those students in California for any reason other than what the school intended or for product maintenance.
“The bill would also prohibit the operators of those services from using or disclosing the information of students in the state for commercial purposes like marketing. It would oblige the firms to encrypt students’ data in transit and at rest, and it would require them to delete a student’s record when it is no longer needed for the purpose the school intended.”
What part of “privacy” do New York officials not understand or care about? Or is their zeal to share a part of the ill-fated Race to the Top project to build a massive data warehouse for vendors?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Impeach Cuomo.
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remember how we have looked at each other and said “Follow the money?”…
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I don’t know. This is heartbreaking. I don’t want my child’s data in the cloud.
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I’m heartbroken too. Is there any way that we can opt out of InBloom?
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Just called Sen Steinberg’s office to give his efforts a thumbs up. Full disclosure: he’s our state senator from the 6th district here in California. He’ll be introducing this next Thursday.
I am so glad. Parents don’t realize how much information is in the students’ cumulative files. For the sake of the child that information should NOT be available to people beyond custodial parents or guardians. Only people with the need and right to know.
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They need to take a look at the Uof MD data breach.”Brian Voss, vice president and chief information officer at U-Md., said officials think that whoever got into the database duplicated the information, which includes names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth and university identification numbers for 309,079 people affiliated with the school on its College Park and Shady Grove campuses.”(Svitek,Anderson)Wash. Post.
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As education expert Michele Rhee herself said, children are our most valuable assets.
And assets are to be monetized.
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Time for the Counter Rheeformation.
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Good one!
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Follow the $$$$$.
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Pull the damn plug on this thing already. There are immense commercial incentives to mine data. The amount of data about each of us is increasing at an astonishing rate. The technology will not be slowed and the business incentives will not be changed. Our privacy laws are massively outdated and moving in the wrong direction. We do NOT need government to grease the wheels on this trend.
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Government should be our protection, our safeguard against it, in fact. But it won’t be in a country in which government is for sale to the few who can afford to pay to play.
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Agree. Unfortunately there’s good reason to think government is ill-equipped to protect our personal information, even if the law required it to, which it doesn’t. And creating that law is a monumental task. It’s not an amendment to the U.S. Code, or a revised set of regs issued by a single government agency. I would argue that it’s akin to writing a new Constitution, or at least a new Bill of Rights. Who’s taking the first draft of that, Rand Paul? Any indications that we’re up to that task? Every year, computation keeps doubling, while we debate inBloom and FERPA and SCHMERPA like so many Dutch Boys at the dike.
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You make a good point, FLERP.
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So let’s see, Cuomo wants to confiscate the guns, indoctrinate children with the new National Sexuality Education Standards K-12 curriculum in school, and tell Christian homeschoolers they should just leave the state.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo says pro-life, pro-Second Amendment, and anti-homosexual marriage advocates should leave the state. He calls such Americans “extreme conservatives.” If you live in New York and hold any of these views, this is what your governor thinks of you — “they have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are.”
Read more at http://godfatherpolitics.com/14048/new-york-gov-andrew-cuomo-tells-conservatives-leave-state/#ODB0rGgKvgI6SRKD.99
Obama wants to confiscate the guns, teach sex ed K-12, and include homeschool children in the data collection system.
To further clarify Obama’s position on sex ed for kindergartner’s, Obama’s campaign spokesman, Bill Burton, pointed MSNBC to the “curriculum for those in kindergarten” produced by the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS). This curriculum suggested discussing same-sex relationships—in non-graphic terms–with kindergartners. – See more at: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/obama-sex-ed-kindergartners-right-thing-do#sthash.KRO4zHeY.dpuf
Hitler confiscated the guns, mandated sex education, encouraged youthful German reproduction, and banned homeschooling in 1938. (The ban on homeschooling is the only Nazi law that was not thrown out when the Nazis were defeated and is being used to persecute German Christians who would like to home school their children to this day.)
The League encouraged rebellion against parents….Ilsa McKee noted that the lectures of Hitler Youth on the need to produce more children produced several illegitimate children, which neither the mothers nor the possible fathers regarded as problematic. These and other behaviors taught led parents to complain that their authority was being undermined. In 1944, a group of parents complained to the court that the leaders of the League were openly telling their daughters to have illegitimate children. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_German_Girls
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Something is like Hitler?! Oh no!
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What part of “privacy” do New York officials not understand or care about?
A free people will resist this Orwellian database and the monopolistic computer-adaptive curriculum portal that it is meant to make possible. The consequences of inaction are grave. Do we really want our schools to be institutions for inuring kids to continual surveillance by unelected arbiters of the right and the true, of thought itself? Is this what an educational system in a democracy is supposed to be doing?
Silence about totalitarianism is complicity with totalitarianism. There are very, very powerful people behind thinks, but don’t be silent about it. Speak the truth about this even if your voice quivers as you do.
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cx: behind this, not behind thinks, of course. Sorry about the typo.
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Thank you, Darryl Steinberg. Now if the other states would only listen. I’m glad to be in Blue California. Take that, InBloom.
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I’m horrified and crushed by this news. Time to write more letters to my elected officials.
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Is it too early to say data breach class action lawsuit and reparations?
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After skimming through the lawsuit, it was pretty clear that the parents filed against only one issue-privacy in the collection of the data. InBloom said they were only doing what they were hired to do. There were no briefings or discourse or filings about the next step-what is going to be done with the data that is collected? Does it sit in a cloud? No. This is the real issue. If the data is collected and then used against the student in some way, you have a different animal. Under FERPA, PII is ALLOWED to be given to third party contractors. They re-defined school official to be almost any business, contractor, vendor, foundation. Children have become a commodity. So who has access to the data and what is being done with it? The future of performance ‘big data’ was not discussed. [There should be an investigation into FERPA that Obama changed without congressional authority]
Re-disclosure is the issue. The violation will occur when these vendors or third parties research or design curriculum for individual students. Eventually, every child will have an iep. Common Core is designed that way-students have to meet individual outcomes. So when a career pathway or student plan is designed around, lets say, grit, what happens next? NAEP has already decided that that was exactly what they were going to do. CCSSO already decided that that was what they were going to do in the Common Core. The violation comes next. What decisions will be made about my child that I have no control over? Remember when Diane said that she would “throw up” if it was decided to test attitudes. Grit is the new non-cognitive and affective domain testing. Who decides what THOSE standards will be? Government creating standards for changing personality will be the bigger violation, but it starts with the collection of data. We should concentrate on the legality of the transfer of data to outside vendors. We should request the Board of Regents for other MOU’s or written agreements with other outside contractors who have access to the data accessed from the cloud.
Page 2
Click to access tab11-saturday-board-policy-discussion.pdf
Click to access ILN%20Knowledge%20Skills%20and%20Dispositions%20CCR%20Framework%20February%202013.pdf
Missouri IEP bill
Click to access HB1357I.PDF
New York Psychological Test for Entering Kindergarten
http://www.whec.com/news/stories/s3314692.shtml
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I found the links you cite horrifying. They reveal a devilish intersection of ed-psych theory, data management mania, and government power. Based on these cites alone, I question your conclusion that concern & resources should be targeted only at the junction where data is released to third parties. My reaction as a parent is: data on behavioral/ mental issues should not be sent to the state under any circumstances.
In fact, if any of these ideas are written into law (such as A8186 bill proposed by M Markey D Queens – psych screening to enter K) – and if NY legislators cannot stop data from being uploaded to inBloom in July – & I were a NY parent of a school-aged child, I would seriously consider homeschooling or (if I could afford it) private school for any of my children who might ever be suspended, or have occasion to seek therapy or psychiatry.
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creepy creepy creepy
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Yes, it is not enough to mandate what people can think and teach (the Common Core), but we must also mandate what they are to feel. Here are the grit standards your students must attain if you are to keep your job.
From the Rheformish Lexicon:
1984. Rheformish public policy manual
data chat: local-level meeting to enforce the will of the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth (C^4MiniTru). See Waterboarding.
data-driven decision making. n. phr. numerology
education reform: periodic, as yet unsuccessful attempt to secure proper controls over the training of the children of the proles. See Those People. Syn.: the Rheeformation.
grit. n. Ability to persevere in an odious task despite alienation from the task, from the fruits of one’s labors, and from one’s fellow students or laborers who are, after all, the competition; a key 21st Century work skill to be measured via galvanic skin response bracelets and retinal scanners and recorded as data in the inBloom database
inBloom: cradle-to-grave repository of all information about citizens, including disciplinary records, psychological records, cognitive and affective responses; see Total Information Awareness
learning: mastery of the bullet list
Newspeak. constructed language created by members of The Party in Orwell’s 1984; the inspiration for the construction of the variety of Goblish known as Reformish
plutocrat: one who has “no seat whatsoever” at the policy table. –Arne Duncan
public-private partnership: backroom deal; more generally, any mechanism for subverting or circumventing democratic processes
standards: specifications for invariant, rigidly controlled outcomes; the bullet list to which education is to be reduced. See Powerpointing.
those people: proles and their barely trainable children (Usage note: to be used only among fellow crusaders for the Rephormation. DON’T PULL A ROMNEY!!!)
teaching: punishment and reward via summative testing and feedback delivered to students via computer-adaptive worksheets on a screen
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The compilation of the Rheformish Lexicon is proceeding apace. Many thanks to the thousands of members of the resistance who have braved harrowing and mind-numbing Rheformish waterboardings (in Rheformish, “data chats”) and coven meetings (in Rheformish, “conferences” or “investor conferences”) and waded through the corpus of Rheformish numerological treatises (in Rheformish, “studies,” “white papers,” or “reports”); propaganda (news stories, “teacher” testimonials, AFT and NEA Common Core position statements, etc.); and scriptures (The Bell Curve, The Nation at Risk Report, The Common Core State Standards) to conduct the necessary field work on this variety of the Goblish language. Their assistance to the Counter-Rheeformation has been essential.
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The most effective thing we can do is put some new Regents on the board in NY. There are 4 openings in March. We can be thankful for regents Kathleen Cashin, Roger Tilles and Betty Rosa who advocate putting faith in teachers and traditional public schools. We need to pressure our legislators to elect new regents to the board. Michael Reilly, Regina Rose, Dr. Carol Mikado and Audrey Baker will fight for authentic education in New York. Replace the four Tisch toadies who are up for renewal. (Let your legislators know that even though the regents are not elected, they are, and they better use their power to select people who will be responsive to the people of NY not Bill Gates and his privately funded Regents Fellows)
That is another topic. We have to get rid of the “Regents Fellows” who are privately paid to “assist” the real regents by Bill Gates, Merryl Tisch and all kinds of other millionaires at $189,000/yr. Since when do millionaires get to hire unelected unappointed people to create and implement public policy with their own private funds? Since Merryl Tisch thinks she is adorable when she says, “What is not to like about free fellows?”
We can also pressure our Assembly person to cosponsor A. 7994, Al Graf’s bill to end the implementation of the Common Core and data collection in NYS.
The reason so many rotten things are happening in NY is because we have the perfect storm of corrupt individuals in very high places here:
Governor Andrew Cuomo – served on Clinton’s Presidential Council on Sustainable Development (Common Core is the required brainwash for our students to accept the limitations that are part of Sustainable Development previously known as……Agenda 21)
Chancellor Merryl Tisch – Her brother-in-law, Andrew Tisch, sits on the Board of K12, Inc., the largest on line learning company in America. As she approves charter schools, Andrew gets contracts for distance learning. She is also Michael Bloomberg’s neighbor (who has now become the special envoy to the U.N. for cities and climate change…….in other words the enforcer for………………..Agenda 21) She is also very good friends with Joel Klein who runs inBloom for Rupert Murdoch. She is friendly with Bill Gates (who created the data collection system in the first place and then handed it off to Joel and Rupert) as well who has partnered with her to hire the fake regents known as “fellows.” Of course, she doesn’t want to disappoint Joel and not allow him to get his hands on student data. That is how he is going to make a ton of money: by charging for storing the data ($5 per student/per year after 2015) and charging vendors to access it as well. He can smell the money. (Don’t blow it now, Merryl, I’m so close.)
Commissioner John King – lover of charter schools making it very easy for savvy business investors to make a killing on charter school investments (such as Robert Rubin….remember him …working under Clinton in 1999 to finagle the dismantling of the Glass Steagall Act so that Travelers Insurance could merge with Citibank where he promptly went to work)
Senator John Flanagan – head of Education Committee, member of ALEC
Michael Bloomberg – envoy for cities and climate change for the United Nations……propagandist for Agenda 21)
And then there is Wall Street itself with the billionaire boys club investing in charter schools as well.
How lucky are we?
.
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This is a question of ethics–I can’t believe that our children’s rights and privacy can be violated in this manner. Where is the ACLU and why are they not stepping up and defending our children’s right to privacy or have they been bought by the Gates Foundation and Pearson as well? What country are we living in? It seems as if we are losing our freedoms and privacy on a daily basis.
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One of the bottom lines is that as data gets released, voters will think differently about thier elected offcials, who did not fight hard enough for – or did not support – the resistance against this invasion of privacy for children and families.
Voters will remember and will be voting in upcoming elections.
There will be casualties.
Then let’s see how long they get to keep their jobs in the state senate, etc. . . . .
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We can’t let this get that far. Once the info is in….it doesn’t get out.
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Wakeup parents and opt your children out of the tests. It is the only solution to stop the testing madness we are facing today across the country. If no one took the tests then the politicians might get the fact that the people are fed up.
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Clearly, NYDOE is selling their souls to data mining predatory industry. Giving out student data to inBloom is like putting your fate in the hands of Doom.
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I grew up in NYS and used to be proud of it. I am shocked that the people have let things get to the point where NYS is now sticking out like a sore thumb, having allowed its governor first to ram premature Common Core testing down its throats and now to be the only state in the union stupid and greedy enough to plan to upload its students’ most private information– not just soc sec nos but suspensions, mental health data & more– to inBloom– IN JULY. Yes, the first fault is w/DOE for changing FERPA by fiat. Yes, NYS’ heavy-handed approach may well result in Cuomo & many other Dems losing elections, because the people see this behavior as ‘typical lib-Dem’ behavior. Yes, there are legislative plans afoot to defeat this. But what’s needed right now is a massive media revelation of what’s going on.
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Spanish & French Translator,
the people of Néw York have fought inBloom and data mining, led by parents and Leonie Haimson’s Class Size Matters. They sued to stop the release of their children’s data and lost.
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Crazy Crawfish has a lot of information on this subject. I have only included an excerpt.
I do not have detailed financials disclosing how these partnerships work, but I have been wondering how inBloom could continue to function without student data commitments. To be quite frank, there is no way they could operate as they’ve defined themselves (a centralized student data repository and intermediary) without obtaining data from someone. Initially inBloom was going to provide data to their partners like Kickboard. Now that virtually every state and large school district has pulled out of inBloom, thanks to the efforts of Leonie Haimson, Rachel Strickland, Debbie Sachs and others, the only available path I see to them is obtaining this data through vendors that already have access to it. Their most likely place for inBloom to acquire this data will be via and through their existing partners. There are currently not Federal laws to safeguard or prevent this, which is why State laws must be enacted in every state if you wish to prevent personal, student, teacher and parent data from falling into the hand of anyone and everyone who wants it.
For a current list of partnering companies with inBloom you can go here. If your parish does business with any of these vendors there is a decent chance inBloom and other data aggregators will be able to obtain your children’s data through them.
Please note: I do not have concrete proof Kickboard or any of these partners are actively sharing data with inBloom although I have had reports from sources that they are and have included one of those reports provided to me in this article. I have shown that there FERPA has no teeth to prohibit this, and US ED has no inclination or authority to address this issue. As every state and partner that I am aware of has pulled out of inBloom (or allowed parent opt outs or opt ins) and inBloom has not closed up shop it stands to reason they have plans to get this data another way. Bill Gates has 150 million reasons to see this venture succeed.
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I think they have put a hold on this. Mary Myers
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I feel violated.
And I am not alone.
It appears as if the inmates are running the asylum.
Remember the Bugs Bunny cartoon which ends with him clinging to what is left of the moon. It is a fitting metaphor, and I would like to echo Bugs’ words – “Get me out of here!”
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He sees you when you’re sleeping
He knows when you’re awake
The motto of the seal of the Information Awareness Office established by the NSA to create the Total Information Awareness Program was “Scientia potentia est.” Knowledge is power. Or data is power. Raw power.
From Wikipedia
“The Information Awareness Office (IAO) was established by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in January 2002 to bring together several DARPA projects focused on applying surveillance and information technology to track and monitor terrorists and other asymmetric threats to U.S. national security, by achieving Total Information Awareness (TIA).
“This was achieved by creating enormous computer databases to gather and store the personal information of everyone in the United States, including personal e-mails, social networks, credit card records, phone calls, medical records, and numerous other sources, without any requirement for a search warrant. This information was then analyzed to look for suspicious activities, connections between individuals, and “threats.” Additionally, the program included funding for biometric surveillance technologies that could identify and track individuals using surveillance cameras and other methods.
“Following public criticism that the development and deployment of this technology could potentially[sic] lead to a mass surveillance system, the IAO was defunded by Congress in 2003. However, several IAO projects continued to be funded and merely run under different names.”
inBloom will simply inur kids to total surveillance from Day 1. Might as well get the children of the proles used to this.
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Here’s another HUGE problem with inBloom that no one seems to be thinking about.
inBloom will serve as the ONLY repository of this student information. In other words, it will be a MONOPOLY. A state-mandated private monopoly.
Any educational publisher that wishes to have its curricula connected to this database system will have to go through inBloom and will have to have the deep pockets to pay whatever fees inBloom decides to charge for making such a connection as well as the money to do the technical work to make its material adaptive to responses in the database. Murdoch’s Amply will be able to do this. Pearson will be able to do this.
That little innovative publisher in Kansas or San Antonio or Austin or Syracuse or wherever will not.
If schools have adopted the inBloom model, and supposedly, every school in New York is going to be required to do so, then the publisher without that inBloom connection won’t have a chance. It will be impossible for that publisher to compete with the old boy network that has put together the new inBloom/Amplify/Engage + pals product suite. I don’t just mean difficult. I mean impossible.
So, this database will serve as a portal, a gateway, through which curricula must pass.
It will place in private hands enormous power of prior restraint on trade in curricula, in other words, a prior restraint on trade in IDEAS. inBloom will decide who plays and who doesn’t.
If people think that that’s acceptable in a democracy, then they have no clue what “democracy” means.
The common law looks very, very harshly on restraint of trade. And we have laws to protect us against monopolies. To my knowledge, no one has raised this issue with regard to inBloom; nor has anyone yet had to raise it in court. But it’s time for that to happen.
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Robo-Kid-1
We know your favorite cereal is Fruit Loops
We know you did not do your Math CC$$ Homework on Feb 21, 2014 because you
watched the Duke-Carolina Game
We know You were tardy to school on February 21, 2014
We know your Mother buys Peanut Butter every month
We know you had the Chicken Pox in September 2013
We know you you hide your toys under your bed and tell your mother you cleaned your room
We know you put that egg in the neighbor’s mailbox
We know you received a Level I on your Kindergarten CC$$ Test and you had to go to Summer School . Your grandmother kept you while your parents visited the Grand Canyon .
We know your favorite color is Carolina Blue but you are ok with the Red Wolf if they play the Blue Devils.
We know…We know…We know..
We know we can not hire you since you failed your K-CC$$ Test in Math…
We will be glad to consider your application if you retake your K-CC$$ Test online in our Virtual $Chool .
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Off Topic…but
The CC$$ is the biggest bunch of Mathematical gobbledegoop I have in my lifetime ever ever ever ever ever ever seen..
.
Wording like this mess-(below) is all over that CC$$
PARAGRAPH 4 ON EQUATIONS AND INEQUALITIES
http://www.corestandards.org/Math/Content/HSA/introduction
The entire CC$$ is full of this Crazy Talk.
They have worded it so that a person void of a mathematical background would never be able to understand one word of this mess.
I know what they are saying and if I said it the way they said it, students would think I was the worst teacher on this planet…and I would be…
I have been helping some teachers interpret this math C-C-R-A-P…and organizing it in the good old fashion way……deciphering …translating the gobbledegoop-gook
They are beating around the bushes while the $$$$$$$ keeps coming in.
Parents need not stand for this cr*p
OMG…Forgive them for they know not how to explain …………
You can not tell me that a Teacher had any part of writing this gobbledegoop……..You can not tell me that some Duncan is going to send a Duncan kid to a school that teaches this cluttered and chaotic curriculum………….This curriculum is schizophrenic!!
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ABC…
Anyone
But
Cuomo
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I am despairing of anyone’s paying any attention to the consequences for markets in educational materials on the CC$$ and of inBloom.
Perhaps we have become so used to people using political influence to fix markets in this country that they simply don’t think twice when they see another instance of this. Is that the problem? Or is it that people don’t understand why these dramatically reduce the number of players in the educational materials market? Or are people just fine with having a couple of all-powerful providers of educational materials and with having all the little companies go under. Maybe people are OK with curricula from the educational equivalent of McDonalds or Walmart or Microsoft.
Even on this blog, when I post about these matters, there is very, very little, if any, response.
When I started in the educational publishing business years ago, there were 30 companies competing with one another. When the teachers at a school got together to decide what book they wanted to use, there were many, many options. Now, there are three big providers that have almost the entire market. What were previously competing companies are now separate imprints from one company.
And the CC$$ creates ENORMOUS economies of scale for those few remaining publishers, making it almost impossible for any other publisher to compete with them.
And inBloom creates a single monopolistic gateway through which computer-adaptive online materials must pass. A private monopoly created by the state.
Are people OK with this? Where are the articles and essays and speeches about these issues from those opposed to Education Deform? One can understand the silence from the deformers–they created these deforms precisely in order to ensure their monopoly positions. But . . . but . . . why the deafening silence from the other side?
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Robert, Every chance I get, I try to explain what direction this agenda is going. Remember, I filed a federal complaint against Pennsylvania’s (psychological) state assessment , EQA, resolved in 1991. We were the pilot for grit. After FOIA my own complaint, four years later, I received the scoring and definitions of what the government was looking for. It was collectivism. (The marketing for grit is just a name change.) It was scored toward group goals and NAEP called it Citizenship. The collection of data is the violation of privacy…but the scored data is the violation of freedom.
Yes, the key to this intrusion of privacy and freedom, is to opt your kids out of the tests. The government must have the data to make their decisions…on children, on teachers, on principals, on schools, on each state. TQM, total quality management.
But to be effective, everyone must opt out, not just a few. We must think of ways for teachers to meet up with parents to tell them to opt out. Parents must have meetings together that force rival power against the forces that want to make profits on their children. But, nothing can be in writing or emailed. Word of mouth. Opt out of the tests.
This discussion on Diane’s blog is crucial for parents and teachers to understand the power shift with Common Core and the tests. But there is more to come. ESEA and redefining educationally deprived to be anyone not meeting Common Core.
http://www.newswithviews.com/Hoge/anita104.htm
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Yes. Take a look at the DSM 5 (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. There is a diagnosis that could fit anyone in there. If they want to label someone crazy at this point, they can do it. Think of that in terms of political dissidents or children who don’t care for the Common Core.
Keep in mind the DSM is written by a panel of people who VOTE on what should be included in the book. They have to vote because there is actually no data to back up any diagnosis they come up with. Psychiatry is junk science, always has been, it just put on a suit and walked into the court room and somehow gained legitimacy. We the people need to expose this travesty for what it is.
Of all of the problems with the CC, this is the one that disturbs me the most. It is causing meltdowns in our youngest and most sensitive children. They are ending up in mental hospitals on heavy duty psychotropic drugs which will damage their brains permanently.
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I agree with you. Remember though that Sir Michael Barber and David Coleman worked at McKinsey & Company together before they started school reform. Barber is now the head of Pearson and Coleman is the head of the College Board, both making money hand over fist on CC aligned materials and tests. It was the plan all along.
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Robert,
Do you know anything about Vista Higher Learning?
Any information would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Duane
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What’s that gurgling you hear? That’s the sound of Andrew Cuomo’s poll numbers flushing down the toilet of lost ambitions.
Rushed Common Core/APPR
70% student failure rate
A death penalty for failing schools
Data mining the children of NYS
SAFE Act
$5K per prisoner college fund
He is running out of feet to stick in his political mouth.
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inBloom is a cash cow for Joel Klein, Rupert Murdoch, and the News Corp shareholders. New York needs an investigative reporter to follow the money and shed light on the actions and decisions made by News Corp board of directors.
What’s the status of Jay Rockefeller’s New Corp investigation?
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Yes, Yes. Yes. You can have all the investigative reporters you want though, what we need is a mainstream newspaper or TV that will broadcast it. Murdoch owns it all.
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This the language of FERPA regarding who should have access to student records.
Educational testing and product companies are not on the list. If inBloom breaks the law, they can and should be sued. The educational data of students should be protected and used only with their consent and for their benefit. This is directly from the state ed website.
Generally, schools must have written permission from the parent or eligible student in order to release any information from a student’s education record. However, FERPA allows schools to disclose those records, without consent, to the following parties or under the following conditions (34 CFR § 99.31):
School officials with legitimate educational interest;
Other schools to which a student is transferring;
Specified officials for audit or evaluation purposes;
Appropriate parties in connection with financial aid to a student;
Organizations conducting certain studies for or on behalf of the school;
Accrediting organizations;
To comply with a judicial order or lawfully issued subpoena;
Appropriate officials in cases of health and safety emergencies; and
State and local authorities, within a juvenile justice system, pursuant to specific State law.
Schools may disclose, without consent, “directory” information such as a student’s name, address, telephone number, date and place of birth, honors and awards, and dates of attendance. However, schools must tell parents and eligible students about directory information and allow parents and eligible students a reasonable amount of time to request that the school not disclose directory information about them. Schools must notify parents and eligible students annually of their rights under FERPA. The actual means of notification (special letter, inclusion in a PTA bulletin, student handbook, or newspaper article) is left to the discretion of each school.
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Dear Teacher Man, FERPA changed the definition of school official. See Section (B)
(Authority: 20 U.S.C. 1232g (b)(1) and (b)(2)(A))
§ 99.31 Under what conditions is prior consent not required to disclose information?
(a) An educational agency or institution may disclose personally identifiable information from an education record of a student without the consent required by § 99.30 if the disclosure meets one or more of the following conditions:
(1)(i)(A) The disclosure is to other school officials, including teachers, within the agency or institution whom the agency or institution has determined to have legitimate educational interests.
(B) A contractor, consultant, volunteer, or other party to whom an agency or institution has outsourced institutional services or functions may be considered a school official under this paragraph provided that the outside party–
(1) Performs an institutional service or function for which the agency or institution would otherwise use employees;
(2) Is under the direct control of the agency or institution with respect to the use and maintenance of education records; and
(3) Is subject to the requirements of
§ 99.33(a) governing the use and redisclosure of personally identifiable information from education records.
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They say Cuomo is a shoe in NYTEACHER, sadly no one else has the cash or power. His poll numbers are good. He does a great job of selling himself as something he’s not.
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Not so sure he is a shoe-in. A legit Republican opponent sure has lots of ad material to use against him. Just want to see it close. No landslide. No mandate. The last thing he needs is an ego boost. Love to see his presidential ambitions squashed sooner rather than later.
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It’s sad that you continue to manipulate the truth and tell lies to your minions. Show me PRECISELY where Rupert Murdoch has a stake in InBloom. You are incorrect there, Diane. And where is InBloom violating privacy policy? The data that is released is not personally identifiable and the data is passed to InBloom by the states, who control what data is made available. Please do not mischaracterize the mission of InBloom – you are doing a major disservice to public education. With your intellect, your legacy should be the champion of improving public education, but instead, your legacy will be the one who kept our education system from staying competitive with the rest of the world. I suggest that everyone on this blog read all about the Benjamin Franklin Effect and how to conquer the mob mentality: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/02/20/the-benjamin-franklin-effect-mcraney/
InBloom is not violating privacy policies. The responsibility rests with the states, but you have distorted their mission and instead of the education industry making the cloud their friend, you have vilified it, which is typical of the status quo. Again, you are showing your opposition to technological innovation. Why not embrace cloud-based systems but help the states enact sound privacy policies? Sad that you always fear change, Diane. I truly wish you would stop brainwashing educators who believe everything they see in print without verifying the facts.
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Click to access engageny-portal-data-dictionary.pdf
Klein, King and Murdoch ARE collecting students’ first, middle and last names, birth dates, race, sex, etc. (data elements) to create profits for News Corp shareholders and Amplify/inBloom using the private data of every public school student in New York and their families.
How is this information not personally identifiable? Please explain after you read inBloom’s 19 page data collection document found on the EngageNY website at the link above.
In addition to students, inBloom collects personally identifiable information on teachers and parents without consent.
I’m curious about how long the document will be available for readers to decide for themselves if privacy rights are being violated without consent.
Please know teachers think for themselves and are NOT Diane’s minions.
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Stop writing heresy and show me SPECIFIC EVIDENCE – links to articles, etc., that prove that these folks, many of which have no relationship to InBloom, are collecting personally identifiable data without consent. I have read InBloom’s policies countless times and you are incorrect in what they are doing. So again, believe the propaganda, which is sad.
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Reinvent: Do your own research about inBloom formerly known as the Shared Learning Collaborative with Murdoch’s related purchase of Wireless Generation (360 million).
Summary –
Wireless Generation developed the Shared Learning Collaborative. WG was renamed Amplify – directed by Joel Klein who sits on the board of News Corp the company that controls Amplify. Therefore, Murdoch owns News Corp, inBloom and Amplify (Wireless Generation). Klein works for Murdoch. The insiders are fearful inBloom will fail in NY and the dominoes will fall across the US.
Murdoch makes billions related to illegal access of personal information in the UK. Follow the criminal trials that are currently taking place across the pond.
inBloom data mining exists without parental consent as a result of potential corporate profits for News Corp. If you have read inBloom’s policies countless times, then I suggest you read the pdf at the link below on the EngageNY website (inBloom’s data elements).
Click to access engageny-portal-data-dictionary.pdf
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Dear Reinvent,
You obviously are very unaware about the data collection and what can be done with it. It just so happens that Obama, on Jan 19′ 2012 unlocked data through an executive order to allow this personally individualized information to third party vendors. FERPA was changed to allow this corruption to begin. Prior to that there was the Hanson Memorandum that said specifically that PII could NOT be shared except within education contracts. When the Privacy Act was changed to reward big donors and private companies [Murdock, Gates, & cronies] legal barriers were removed to protect privacy and the use of the data. We must demand a federal investigation into the changes of FERPA that were done to allow outside profit making contractors to access PII without Congressional authority.
Also, just because the data collection is said to be anonymous, that does NOT mean they cannot identify the individual with other data collected by the users. There are huge problems with ” anonymity.”
http://uxmag.com/articles/the-hubris-and-humility-of-opting-in
“Faced with suspect privacy policies, governments and institutions alike are scrambling to anonymize data, but this is proving to be a difficult—if not futile—endeavor. In an article for The Guardian this year, author Cory Doctorow illustrated how easy de-anonymizing data could be. He wrote, “There are lots of smokers in the health records, but once you narrow it down to an anonymous male black smoker born in 1965 who was presented at the emergency room with aching joints, it’s actually pretty simple to merge the ‘anonymous’ record with a different ‘anonymized’ database and out pops the near-certain identity of the patient.”
Also, Diane is right on. The data, once collected, will be used to design individual “pathways” or [small letter] iep’s that become high stakes. Teachers have already felt the pressures of unfair VAM. With the cross referencing capabilities, parents MUST have control over the information that is collected about their children. Just because the government can do this, should they? Do we want the government to test and score attitudes or grit? How will grit be remediated? Is it legal? Many questions must be answered before we agree to this data collection.
What InBloom is doing is NOT technological innovation, this is using technology for collection and control. It is the sorting and cross re fencing capabilities to link data together. It is a decision making authority. There is a difference you know. No one is against technology. It is what you do with it.
Data can be used for good or evil….depending who controls it.
http://www.edge.org/conversation/reinventing-society-in-the-wake-of-big-data
Click to access ed_data_commitments_1-19-12.pdf
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InBloom is a major player in the rewriting and reinterpretation of data privacy policies. Their database was crafted by a Rupert Murdoch company and it is quite likely these two entities still have a working relationship. Nothing would prevent this and as the architects of the inBloom database if would be highly unusual if they had no involvement now or going forward unless their relationship ended on unfavorable terms. InBloom has chosen on their own terms to define themselves as a major, prominent peddler of the idea they should hold all student data for other companies to access. They have the backing of one of the richest and most prominent technology businessmen, in Bill Gates, the world has ever known. They staked out their position that privacy is not their priority or in their self-interest and no laws govern them or their use or abuse of data in any significant way. There is also every possibly, every likelihood ( if not certainty ) that once they get everyone’s data we will never get it back and it will be shared far and wide; way beyond the scope they are claiming to want to use it for (which is in and of itself highly disturbing and offensive to me as a parent and possible victim of their unauthorized hijacking of data that I did not give permission to those who collected it to share, sell or barter away for their own purposes.) So chill out reinvent_ed. You appear to have a financial or career stake in this fight. Care to reveal your real name and position? I will start. My name is Jason France. I am a public school parent that used to work at LDOE that believed privacy and control of data was important. I believe I had a public trust and responsibility to parents and children to safeguard their data, and my own children’s data. What I see is an offensive and inexcusable violation of that trust. Just because something is not illegal does not make it right. At least, that’s what my parents and church taught me. Did you learn something different?
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Again – you lie. Show me a link to a verifiable source showing Murdoch has a stake in InBloom. So sad you believe everything written herein.
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??? Do you understand what a lie is? Please provide your real name and job. I don’t need to provide a link to general knowledge. No one is disputing what I said related to their previous relationship. You are not behaving civily and resorting to bullying and name calling behind an anonymous name. Everyone knows who Diane is. I told you my name. I am not involved in the education industry. You appear to be. True? Your emotional maturity seems to be lacking though. If you want to continue discussing please try to behave civily and rationally. What exact thing I said do you believe to be untrue?
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It’s my understanding that Murdoch’s company is a contractor for inBloom.
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Exactly. That is no secret. Can we know if at this very instant they are doing work? Of course not. But no reason to think they aren’t either or that they won’t in future. That’s not really the big issue as I see it. Real issue is inBloom’s assertion that they should gather all this data and share with countless vendors, contract with countless vendors, without oversight or regulations and no responsibility to children or parents whose data they possess.
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inBloom is not violating federal law because it got its windup toy in the Department of Education to rewrite the FERPA rules to make its grotesque violation of student privacy and parental rights legal. EVERYONE knows this, “Reinvent.” You fool no one with this equivocation.
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Lol. Exactly. The issue is just because law allows it, does not make it ok, nor do we parents and citizens have to blindly accept this. There also used to be laws that prevented interracial marriages and allowed men to own other men. Laws do not make things right nor do they excuse companies from wrongdoing for exploiting them, especially when they and their allies had the law redefined in the first place.
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If you click on Reinvent_Ed’s name, you will find that he is an Atlanta entrepreneur named Al Myers. He is involved in developing video games as a platform for teaching and in organizing Tedx events in Buckhead, Atlanta, the home base of inBloom.
Video games, btw, do have enormous potential as learning platforms.
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Nice. I was curious to see how he would describe himself though. Obviously he had hoped to work directly with inBloom if he doesn’t already have a relationship. I wonder if he has any kids in public schools himself or if he just is upset he can’t use ours as gunea pigs? I don’t have a problem with him providing games to schools or kids, I have a problem with inBloom and his company gaving access to my kid’s SsN, home address and phone, picture, biometrics, special education status, name, test scores, discipline records, my name and phone number, attendance, etc. That info is not needed for a game developer and represents an everpresent danger to my children.
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Dear Reinvent,
Here are the definitions in FERPA:
Dear Reinvent,
Read the regulations that were changed:
Authority: 20 U.S.C. 1232g(b)(1)(C), (b)(3), and (b)(5))
“Biometric record,” as used in the definition of “personally identifiable information,” means a record of one or more measurable biological or behavioral characteristics that can be used for automated recognition of an individual. Examples include fingerprints; retina and iris patterns; voiceprints; DNA sequence; facial characteristics; and handwriting.
Authority: 20 U.S.C. 1232g(b)(4)(A))
“Personally Identifiable Information”
The term includes, but is not limited to–
(a) The student’s name;
(b) The name of the student’s parent or other family members;
(c) The address of the student or student’s family;
(d) A personal identifier, such as the student’s social security number, student number, or biometric record;
(e) Other indirect identifiers, such as the student’s date of birth, place of birth, and mother’s maiden name;
(f) Other information that, alone or in combination, is linked or linkable to a specific student that would allow a reasonable person in the school community, who does not have personal knowledge of the relevant circumstances, to identify the student with reasonable certainty; or
(g) Information requested by a person who the educational agency or institution reasonably believes knows the identity of the student to whom the education record relates
(Authority: 20 U.S.C. 1232g)
“Record” means any information recorded in any way, including, but not limited to, hand writing, print, computer media, video or audio tape, film, microfilm, and microfiche.
AND: Consent is NOT needed for redefined definition for “school official.” This is where InBloom and others come into,play:
(Authority: 20 U.S.C. 1232g (b)(1) and (b)(2)(A))
§ 99.31 Under what conditions is prior consent not required to disclose information?
(a) An educational agency or institution may disclose personally identifiable information from an education record of a student without the consent required by § 99.30 if the disclosure meets one or more of the following conditions:
(1)(i)(A) The disclosure is to other school officials, including teachers, within the agency or institution whom the agency or institution has determined to have legitimate educational interests.
(B) A contractor, consultant, volunteer, or other party to whom an agency or institution has outsourced institutional services or functions may be considered a school official under this paragraph provided that the outside party–
(1) Performs an institutional service or function for which the agency or institution would otherwise use employees;
(2) Is under the direct control of the agency or institution with respect to the use and maintenance of education records; and
(3) Is subject to the requirements of
§ 99.33(a) governing the use and redisclosure of personally identifiable information from education records.
I suggest you read the regulations. There is quite a lot of abuse going on here that most people do NOT know about.
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Anita, inBloom is not violating FERPA! I have read the regs countless times. It is the states who control what data is made available, and InBloom does not sell this data. I think you’re going to lose the legal argument, which has no merit. The states control the data – don’t forget that. I can have five lawyers verify that InBloom is not violating Federal Law. It is the responsibility of the states to encrypt the data, and it is the responsibility of InBloom to ensure the data security. WRONG, WRONG – you are just quoting regs without understanding them.
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the NY legislators that are pro data release are most likely being bribed with money etc. by the data collectors.
Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence.
-Thomas Jefferson
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Also:
These are the training materials for outside vendors to write written agreements to access PII. FYI.
FERPA Written Agreements-or How to give your child’s data for free to outside contractors.
Click to access data-sharing-agreement-checklist.pdf
Click to access reasonablemtd_agreement.pdf
Click to access webinar-data-sharing-011112_final.pdf
Training Videos on FERPA
http://ptac.ed.gov/
Click to access data-sharing-webinar-transcript.pdf
Data Privacy ToolKit
http://ptac.ed.gov/toolkit
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@Reinvent Ed- You’re in the wrong room dude. In this blog only the truth matters.
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Dear Reinvent,
That was the whole point of putting the regulations on this blog. Obama changed them so that they can be used by third party contractors. InBloom is not violating FERPA. But that does not mean that they are not accessing Personally Identifiable Information, and accessing It through written agreements without the knowledge of parents. And it doesn’t mean they are not violating privacy. Why would the DOE have entire training videos, tool kits, and checklists for written agreements if they are not used. Of course there is re-disclosure of PII data that parents are not aware of.
We can easily agree to a compromise to see if PII is re-disclosed to any outside contractor. I challenge you to a test. Let’s request through the FOIA all MOU’s, all written agreements, contracts, or one way data transfer agreements that the NYDOE, the Board of Regents, or the Secretary of Education has with any or all,”Third Party Data Users,” any one-way data feeds to approved service providers to carryout goals of the New York Board of Regents to access PII. These may be data feeds that are sub-sets of the data system limited by executed agreements or individual Memorandums of Use (MOU), who has signed the agreements, and to what use is being made of the PII.
We would have to have a parent request the info for standing or perhaps a Board of Regents Director or legislator who would follow through. Perhaps your 5 attorneys would request this info for us to determine if written agreements are executed or not with outside vendors. These MOU’s would define whether money changes hands or not.
We should also request any criteria or policies for “External Data Requests”.
Request any managed external data request procedures managed through the NYDOE and/or Board of Regents. We should request any pre-determined set of qualifiers that includes, but are not limited to, applicability to the goals of the Board of Regents for data availability, report format ability, and cost of report development.
Then we can settle this debate.
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We can have computer-adaptive learning without having a single Orwellian repository of student data, a single gateway through which computer-adaptive learning materials must all pass, and a single proprietor of that gateway whose monopoly position is enforced by state fiat.
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Exactly. Who determines the predetermined outcome?
Can we trust who is re-wiring our children’s brains?
Seminar on re-wiring brains
Using Video Games to Assess Students’ Noncognitive Skills
“Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison believe new video games like Crystals of Kaydor and Tenacity can measure student learning in real time while literally rewiring kids’ brains to help them pay better attention and improve their behavior. It’s digital media meets big data meets state-of-the art brain research. But can a role-playing video game about aliens change the way U.S. schools think about testing students and boost the noncognitive skills that are critical to success later in life? Join our discussion led by a pair of prominent academic scholars as they discuss the implications of games designed to develop and assess grit, tenacity, and persistence.”
Guests:
Angela Duckworth, associate professor of psychology, University of Pennsylvania
James Gee, presidential chair and professor of literacy studies, Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University
This webinar will be moderated by Benjamin Herold, staff writer for Education Week.
Underwriting for the content for this webinar has been provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Register now for this free live webinar.
Webinar Date: Friday, Sept. 27, 2 to 3 p.m. ET
Can’t attend? All Education Week webinars are archived and accessible “on demand” for up to four months after the original live-streaming date.
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Here’s the bit of truth in the “disruptive idea” that is computer-adaptive learning:
When possible, learning should be adapted to the needs and interests of the individual student.
Here’s how that great idea can go terribly, terribly wrong:
A single set of invariant standards is created, and individuation is carried out only for the purpose of identifying how the student does not yet fit a predetermined outcome.
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