Over the past few days, the leadership of the PARCC Common Core consortium moved forcefully to threaten bloggers with legal action who dared to describe the contents of its fourth grade tests. Even tweets were taken down, based on PARCC’s complaints to Twitter. One of my own posts was hacked late Friday night.
One of the board members of the Network For Public Education, Bertis Downs, is an attorney who represents the rock group REM and deals often with issues of copyright and intellectual property. He wrote to Laura Slover of PARCC to tell her that the testing company’s position had little merit. Most of what she objected to was descriptions of the test questions, which is not copyrighted. There is an issue as to whether the copyrighted material is subject to the fair use doctrine, which permits the reprinting of a limited amount of copyrighted material (up to 300 words) without violating the copright.
As the hacking and bullying and removal of innocuous tweets continued, we realized that we are not powerless. Leonie Haimson, another board member of NPE, posted the original post that PARCC objected to on her blog. That post was sent to NPE’s Education Bloggers Network, which consists of more than 300 bloggers. (Jonathan Pelto administers the Education Bloggers Network; contact him if you blog and want to join. He can be reached at jonpelto@gmail.com.)
Instead of being suppressed or redacted, the post on Celia Oyler’s blog is getting wide distribution.
They have the money. We have the numbers. There is power in our numbers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
You have to know attorneys or be able to afford one to have any hope of justice. I’m still waiting on a lawsuit against Ohio and Battelle for Kids for the unfair and punitive system in place to rank teachers in our state.
Hi Diane,
This has been very inspiring to have people stand up to PARCC.
On the question of your comment disappearing, can you as WordPress to look into this?
Ellen Lubic
May 16, 2016 at 4:15 pm
At this very moment, members of the Education Bloggers group are being having their tweeting accounts redacted by Pearson for informing others about PARCC. Just got this news in my email box. This is all very alarming.
I’m one of the bloggers in the network whose Tweet was taken down this afternoon. So far, my blog post is still up. You can view it here: https://elfasd.blogspot.com/2016/05/top-secret-parcc-test-exposed.html
Diane, thank you for not letting this go!
THIS IS DISGUSTING. PARCC IS DISGUSTING!
I ran a post about this and copied and pasted the original into it. Waiting on Pearson’s PARCC – maybe they learned this lesson and will try another method to further their fraud.
Lloyd, yesterday I sent your excellent column from Education Bloggers Network to every educator and every public school supporter I know. It was so validating to see so many of our member/ bloggers immediately send the PARCC info and their own comments into the greater world. I also want to mention other faves of mine, Steve Singer and Ken Preventi and Peter Greene whose comments I also forwarded to all university colleagues. Thank you all, and all the other wonderful bloggers….you are amazing.
Diane, your movement is totally viral and I thank you once again for all this. Without you and this site, we would each be a quiet and singular voice in the darkness….but with you, we are indeed, a MOVEMENT.
This situation also made me view my own google info…and lo and behold, I found various posts that had been redacted. Most had to do with politics, and comments on Hillary. These gave the info that “the page was not available”. Guess we all now must periodically review our own online material to see who was tampering with it.
The next thing we need to understand is if there is any way to stop this
destructive impingement on our First Amendment right of free speech. This is very scary stuff.
Our numbers give us great, even overwhelming power when we can get the engines up and running.
There are so many examples of the successes of grassroots against those who would harm public education and teachers. Washington’s getting the Supreme Court’s ruling that charters were unconstitutional is one example even though Gates was able to buy a new law to gain access to lottery money. I expect that one will follow the first to the supreme court and I hope the legislators who allowed that one to pass are totally outted. Then there’s the two towns in Colorado that threw out their reformer supporting school boards.
I suggest repeating the Matra “The Power of Numbers Beats Money”
Perhaps we can construct a list of such successes and share ways to grow our grassroots movements in every state.
Mary
I wonder if the people of this nation know what you , Carol, Leonie Anthony and the others like Jo Marley and BATS, are doing to fight this hidden assault on the future of an educated citizenry.
What you do is not about “schools,” or “education” or any of the categories that th e media chooses to drown the public in punditry.
You are working to ensure that our children WHO ARE NOT CHILDREN FOR long are skilled and educates, so they have a chance to participate in our democracy and to ensure they have the skills to have a decent life.
PARCC and the CC do not ensure that our citizens will HAVE the KNOWLEDGE BASE (THE PRIOR INFORMATION) plus THE CAPACITY to think , to compare and analyze, not merely memorize.
No other modern country is handicapping their future citizens as we are doing.
I say, Thank you!!!!
I’d guess that PARCC probably has their own lawyer(s) who were probably quite aware that their claim of copyright infringement by Diane and others had little (if any) merit when they sent the threatening emails.
But regardless of whether their claim of copyright infringement had merit, using the threat of a copyright lawsuit to pressure Celia Oyler into giving up the name of the teacher who revealed the test questions was unequivocally unethical (if not illegal).
What kind of people do this sort of heavy handed arm-twisting?
Come to think of it, PARCC is it’s own parody, so posting the complete test should fall under the parody exception.
oops, should have been below.
Ethical?! You expect them to behave ethically? What does ethics have to do with profit?
“A PARCC in a Par-o-dy”
A parody of PARCC
Is really what we need
A test that’s filled with snark
To do the dirty deed
Cuz parody’s protected
Or so the SCOTUS said
Infringement is rejected
When parody is played
Ah, the Streisand effect. Fab.
What is that?
“PARCC Parody #1”
If elements of structure
In passage and the poem
Have really got you stuck here
You’re really not alone
Cuz teacher couldn’t do it
And neither could the Prof
So, really, let’s just screw it
And take the morning off
“the leadership of the PARCC Common Core consortium” a.k.a. the angry pineapples.
PARCC might be in trouble!
In its most general sense, a fair use is any copying of copyrighted material done for a limited and “transformative” purpose, such as to comment upon, criticize, or parody a copyrighted work. Such uses can be done without permission from the copyright owner.
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/what-is-fair-use/
U.S. Copyright Office Fair Use Index
“Fair use is a legal doctrine that promotes freedom of expression by permitting the unlicensed use of copyright-protected works in certain circumstances. Section 107 of the Copyright Act provides the statutory framework for determining whether something is a fair use and identifies certain types of uses—such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research—as examples of activities that may qualify as fair use. Section 107 calls for consideration of the following four factors in evaluating a question of fair use:
http://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/
The Ninth Circuit ruled copyright owners must consider the fair use doctrine before sending a takedown notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in Lenz v. Universal Music Group. Read the case here: Lenz v. UMG – 9th Circuit
Fair use is not easy for laypeople to understand because judges and lawyers have a hard time with it. Fair use is a factually-specific inquiry and there is no bright line test. Courts consider these four factors:
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
http://www.emedialaw.com/fair-use-and-the-dmca-yes-you-need-to-think-about-it-before-sending-the-takedown/
PARCC is clearly in trouble, but it has nothing to do with copyright.
They have dropped from almost half the states plus DC to just a handful in only 6 years.
Within a year or two, their copyright is pretty much ALL they will have left.
A test and no one to take it.
PARCC is a consortium of losers.
PARCC is a Center of C.R.A.P-py site that is put into rogue gallery.
LOVE IT!
A new subtitle, Diane?
Diane Ravitch’s blog
“They have the money. We have the numbers. There is power in our numbers.”
The Classroom Doors
As reform gets old
Well we get stronger
May take a week
And it may take longer
They got the fund$
But we got the numbers
Gonna win, yeah
When testin’s over
Reblogged this on stopcommoncorenys.
I’ve had 3 tweets/threads deleted and received 3 warning emails so far. So I retweeted all the ones they deleted. I no longer have a blog, so I can’t post anything, but I’ll keep tweeting as much as I can. I do have a 2nd, unused Twitter account associated with an old email I can start using if my primary one is shut down. Plus I’ve emailed to friends & family far & wide, including the relatives currently residing in Germany.
It would be interesting to see how they do public education Germany!
Suggested reading to discover the differ types of schools in Germany
http://www.young-germany.de/topic/work/jobs-career/applying-for-vocational-training-in-germany
And “What Germany Can Teach the U.S. About Vocational Education”
“For years now, U.S. educators have invested massive amounts of talent and money on two goals: preventing students from dropping out of high school and increasing the percentage of high school graduates who go on to college.” …
“Americans often see such students as victims (thanks to Bill Gates, the Waltons, Eli Broad, and their minions, etc.). Germans see these students as potential assets who might one day shine if they’re matched with the right vocation. And it has a system in place—a partnership of employers and unions with government—to do the matching and provide the necessary training.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-04-29/what-germany-can-teach-the-u-dot-s-dot-about-vocational-education
I’ve had a series of Tweets and re-Tweets taken down, but my blog post (I reposted the Oyler post) is still up (or was as of last night when I went to bed). It would be interesting to see a concerted effort of those who’ve been threatened and whose Tweets have been taken down to also uniformly respond to the DMCA notice. Hey, if we can post the same blog post, why not post the same response? 🙂
Tweet this
“The Fascist Bird”
Twitter is a fascist bird
That censors all your tweets
Depositing a fascist turd
On everyone it meets
re-posted on my blog,
http://goo.gl/8NCACY
so far no legal threats 😉
Of course my readership is in the single digits, but that might help evade the corporate lawyer radar..
rickbobrick56, thanks – the Doors song was in my mind too.
They got the fund$
But we got the numbers