Parents in Connecticut, pay attention and take action!
The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy has sent out an urgent message to parents in Connecticut.
The legislature is holding hearings on Monday (tomorrow) on a bill that would strip privacy protections from your children.
In January, a legislator proposed to remove all privacy protections from student data. Because of outrage expressed by parents, he withdrew his bill.
But now another bill has emerged. The hearings were hurriedly scheduled. Are they trying to put something over before parents know about it?
This past week a new bill, 7207 to “revise” the student data privacy law, was introduced, and will be heard by the CT Joint Education Committee this Monday, March 6. This kind of a rush job could imply that they are hoping to pass this bill without giving parents time to react. This new bill, 7207, wants to repeal the data privacy law and delay further implementation until July 1, 2018. This would remove existing protection of school children for over a year. WHY?
The Student Data Privacy Law has been in effect since Oct. 1, 2016; it only applies to NEW contracts, only asks for transparency, the CT Edtech Commission has already done the work to implement it. WHY, would Connecticut want to now repeal protection and transparency?
Please email your comment or testimony in Word or PDF format to EDtestimony@cga.ct.gov . Testimony should clearly state your name and the bill you are commenting on: Bill 7207- AN ACT MAKING REVISIONS TO THE STUDENT DATA PRIVACY ACT OF 2016.
Connecticut citizens please contact your legislators directly. If you are not sure who they are or how to contact them you can look that up here: https://www.cga.ct.gov/asp/menu/cgafindleg.asp
Is it asking too much that when a company contracts with a school and collects and uses and shares children’s data, that the data be kept safe and parents be able to see how that data is used, breached, and not sold?
By repealing or delaying this law, who are they protecting?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What? What???
Why are children’s privacy rights even being discussed? Of course children have rights to privacy.
Let’s just say, they should have at least as much privacy rights as everyone who visits a doctor has under HIPAA. Every time I go to the doctor, they give me notification of my rights under HIPAA. Why aren’t our children being treated the same way?
Might this also apply to the schools giving out personal. private data to military recruiters?
I would have hoped so, Will, but the schools have been doing this for a long time, including back in the day when there was still the draft.
Cross posted at OpED news https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/URGENT-MESSAGE-TO-PARENTS-in-General_News-Connecticut_Data-Mining_Diane-Ravitch_Education-170305-926.html
Is this in order to sell the data to commercial companies to use in target marketing? Or who or what?
In the link below you will find some pretty graphics about student privacy in Connecticut, who is responsible, the cost of securing student data, and how many leaks in the system are present given the number of ‘vendors.” http://www.sde.ct.gov/sde/lib/sde/pdf/evalresearch/studentdataprivacyv2.pdf
The venders really do not want privacy laws to interfere with their data mining. They keep up the drumbeat for data-driven instruction as if that is some sort of panacea. They are aided in this marketing of tech and data by many private foundations created as tax havens for tech gurus and entrepreneurs.
In reality, the people who are designing software for use in schools depend on weak or easy-to-breach privacy rules in order to tweak their algorithms and “tailor” products for various markets. “Personalized” instruction through technologies usually means that instruction is outsourced to software engineers, “quants,” and technicians who want courseware and assessments to be fully programmable.
See for example one of the 2016 grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to the Data Quality Campaign, Inc. (an organization set up by the Gates Foundation)
Date: June 2016 Purpose: to make data work for students by ensuring policymakers prioritize building the culture, capacity and conditions to use data in service of student learning from early childhood through K-12, postsecondary and the workforce. $4,500,000
Also look at the services and clients of outfits like http://www.kitamba.com (Gates funded at about $3 million since 2015)
Everyone at Kitamba “passionate” about data.