A pro-voucher group called School Choice Wisconsin has asked school districts to turn over the names and addresses of students, presumably for recruitment to private and religious schools.
“Oshkosh Area School District parents have until Monday to decide whether they want their children’s personal information released to a statewide school voucher group.
“District leaders notified parents Monday about an open records request from School Choice Wisconsin, a Milwaukee-based nonprofit that advocates for school choice programs. Oshkosh is one of about 30 districts statewide to receive such a request.
“The group is seeking a portion of the district’s school “directory data” for each student, including name, address, telephone number, grade level and the school each student most recently attended.
“The data is collected and used for a variety of purposes, but the scope of the group’s request is uncommon, Superintendent Stan Mack II said.
“It’s so unusual; we don’t get blanket requests like this,” Mack said.
“School Choice Wisconsin President Jim Bender said the group likely would pass the information it requested to private and parochial schools that are part of the state’s voucher program.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“School Choice Wisconsin President Jim Bender said the group likely would pass the information it requested to private and parochial schools that are part of the state’s voucher program.”
And what else I wonder? And since when did that type of information fall under an open-records request? Can I ask the state for the names of people receiving WIC, public assistance, public housing, failed a drug test, etc.? This is unbelievable.
Voucher expansion was a big bust in Ohio:
“Even as Ohio’s private school vouchers remain dramatically underused, there appears to be no rush to re-examine their need.”
Even as ed reformers work to bash, undermine and defund public schools in this state, the schools remain extraordinarily resilient 🙂
http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/education/2015/01/24/ohio-vouchers-expand-thousands-remain-unused/22292553/
For those concerned about data security, here’s a story that broke today that’s moderately more disturbing than an open records request:
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/02/19/great-sim-heist/
Excerpt:
AMERICAN AND BRITISH spies hacked into the internal computer network of the largest manufacturer of SIM cards in the world, stealing encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications across the globe, according to top-secret documents provided to The Intercept by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The hack was perpetrated by a joint unit consisting of operatives from the NSA and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. The breach, detailed in a secret 2010 GCHQ document, gave the surveillance agencies the potential to secretly monitor a large portion of the world’s cellular communications, including both voice and data.
The company targeted by the intelligence agencies, Gemalto, is a multinational firm incorporated in the Netherlands that makes the chips used in mobile phones and next-generation credit cards. Among its clients are AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint and some 450 wireless network providers around the world. The company operates in 85 countries and has more than 40 manufacturing facilities. One of its three global headquarters is in Austin, Texas and it has a large factory in Pennsylvania.
In all, Gemalto produces some 2 billion SIM cards a year. Its motto is “Security to be Free.”
With these stolen encryption keys, intelligence agencies can monitor mobile communications without seeking or receiving approval from telecom companies and foreign governments. Possessing the keys also sidesteps the need to get a warrant or a wiretap, while leaving no trace on the wireless provider’s network that the communications were intercepted. Bulk key theft additionally enables the intelligence agencies to unlock any previously encrypted communications they had already intercepted, but did not yet have the ability to decrypt.
As part of the covert operations against Gemalto, spies from GCHQ — with support from the NSA — mined the private communications of unwitting engineers and other company employees in multiple countries.
Gemalto was totally oblivious to the penetration of its systems — and the spying on its employees. “I’m disturbed, quite concerned that this has happened,” Paul Beverly, a Gemalto executive vice president, told The Intercept. “The most important thing for me is to understand exactly how this was done, so we can take every measure to ensure that it doesn’t happen again, and also to make sure that there’s no impact on the telecom operators that we have served in a very trusted manner for many years. What I want to understand is what sort of ramifications it has, or could have, on any of our customers.” He added that “the most important thing for us now is to understand the degree” of the breach.
Leading privacy advocates and security experts say that the theft of encryption keys from major wireless network providers is tantamount to a thief obtaining the master ring of a building superintendent who holds the keys to every apartment. “Once you have the keys, decrypting traffic is trivial,” says Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union. “The news of this key theft will send a shock wave through the security community.”
Beverly said that after being contacted by The Intercept, Gemalto’s internal security team began on Wednesday to investigate how their system was penetrated and could find no trace of the hacks. When asked if the NSA or GCHQ had ever requested access to Gemalto-manufactured encryption keys, Beverly said, “I am totally unaware. To the best of my knowledge, no.”
According to one secret GCHQ slide, the British intelligence agency penetrated Gemalto’s internal networks, planting malware on several computers, giving GCHQ secret access. We “believe we have their entire network,” the slide’s author boasted about the operation against Gemalto.
“Security to be Free”.
In other words
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
The Stasi are weeping in their graves for not having been able to have that kind of spying capabilities.
YES, Dienne. Right on.
And the majority of Amerikuns think that Snowden is a traitor. A true AMERICAN patriot is Snowden.
This might help: Project TOR
https://www.torproject.org/
I don’t know why they even bother to change their titles when they go from government to lobbying government. We all know it’s an absolute freaking charade. The only people who are fooled by this are the people in this exclusive little club.
“Jim is the former Chief of Staff and spokesman for former Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald. He previously operated a communications firm working both for corporations and non-profits. Jim joined SCW in December 2010 and was responsible for lobbying Governor Walker and the legislature during the 2011-12 session.”
http://www.schoolchoicewi.org/index.php/about/leadership/staff/
The process should be that parents choose to opt IN to release of this information, not opt OUT.
Agree! And the districts should have held off emailing parents until their own questions were answered. It’s reprehensible to do as Green Bay did– raising questions as to the appropriateness of the request in an email to parents, yet simultaneously giving them a mere week in which to opt out of a request to disseminate private info to who-knows-who for purposes yet to be verified! What a cop-out.
What hubris. What balls. What audacity. At least the district had the forethought to advise the parents of the request and give them a CHOICE to say….no thanks. The deformers continue to amaze me.
I think these folks who like ALL that personal data really have no life of their own. Thus, they are voyeurs…who are ONLY marketers who get their kicks by invading others’ lives.
So, their plan is what? Paying off the 25-year-accumulated debts for failing investment in voucher program by selling data to the third parties? Well explains why vouchers are vultures.
Good one: Vouchers – VULTURES!
Very interesting. In Louisiana, charter schools are not required to release any of their students’ information to public schools, not even a list of names. The state charter office claims it’s a privacy violation.
That way, charter schools do not have to prove to public school districts who is really in the charter schools and can claim as many as they want and get funds for them.
Where I live, the type of information requested is published in a public directory that parents can choose not to participate in. I am much more concerned about maintaining years worth of data, include student test scores, in a multi-state or national database that could possibly be accessible to someone not directly connected to me or my child. FERPA seems weak to me. I want the ability to opt out of having my students’ test score data tracked (whether the tracking purports to be anonymous or not).
When a deadline is this short, maybe 10% of the parents will vote. The rest will wake up too late to protest. Still, they can claim a democratic process.
There should be only opt-in for this.
They want to do something similar at my university: release all student data to Relay advertisers.
What does FERPA protect?
Utterly outrageous.
I’ll be switching soon. Project TOR
https://www.torproject.org/
“District leaders notified parents Monday about an open records request from School Choice Wisconsin, a Milwaukee-based nonprofit that advocates for school choice programs. ”
This is part of the sunshine law: anybody can get to student personal data?
What part of the law says this?