The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy and the BadAss Teachers Association collaborated to create this useful information.
We’re excited to let you know that today we released the Educator Toolkit for Teacher and Student Privacy: A Practical Guide for Protecting Personal Data with the Badass Teachers Association (BATs).
The toolkit is a user-friendly guide to help educators make informed decisions about the use of ed tech and social media in schools to help them protect their students’ privacy and their own.
There is also a good article about the Toolkit in today’s Ed Week.
We hope you’ll download a copy and share it with the educators in your life.
Also please tune in this Saturday, October 20th at 10:50 AM Eastern on the NPE Action Facebook page for a livecast discussion from the Network for Public Education’s annual conference in Indianapolis, led by Leonie on Outsourcing the Classroom to Ed Tech & Machine-Learning: Why Parents & Teachers Should Resist, with panelists Audrey Watters and Peter Greene.
Later that day, at 2:40 pm Eastern, you’re invited to join both of us along with Marla Kilfoyle and Melissa Tomlinson of the BATS, when we will presenting our new Educator Toolkit to the public for the first time. To view the event on the BATs open Facebook page, click here.
For more information about the toolkit, please see our press release below.
Thanks!
Rachael Stickland and Leonie Haimson
Co-chairs, Parent Coalition for Student Privacy
http://www.studentprivacymatters.org
info@studentprivacymatters.org
@parents4privacy
Diane Ravitch's blog 
(Not on topic). I hear some scuttlebutt about a possible strike by teachers in Los Angeles. Can you provide an update on the situation? A strike by the largest school district in the USA , would have national repercussions.
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I posted that UTLA members have authorized a strike and then posted the superintendent’s offer.
I can’t write about a potential strike until it happens.
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Thanks to the BadAss teacher organization and the Parent Coalition … for their valuable work.
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We were told this by our high school guidance counselors, in 1982:
“A fascinating recent paper by David Deming and Kadeem Noray, however, suggests that the payoff to students for pursuing STEM may be short-lived. STEM workers initially experience elevated salaries and rates of employment, but the skills their occupations require change so rapidly that their training quickly becomes obsolete. While most workers in other occupations tend to experience a significant rise in earnings as experience enhances their skills, STEM workers tend to have flatter career earning trajectories”
Why do we do the same things over and over? When I was in high school they pushed STEM too and I remember this- I remember being told exactly this- that we would start with better wages but it would tail off. I took a technical/vocational track anyway and I don’t regret it, but why do have to do the same dumb faddish following every 20 years, like clockwork?
Why repeat the same experiments over and over?
You knew the STEM craze was over-hyped if you’re older than 40. How did you know? Because you had seen it before. There has to be an opportunity cost to this lemming-like behavior. It’s a waste. They could be doing something other with their time and money than parroting whatever CEO’s tell them. They’re not God-like oracles, CEO’s. They’re self-interested. They want the public to pay to train their employees. They always have. The difference is people used to know that instead of stupidly accepting whatever they’re pushing as fact.
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YES; and it feels more and more as if our nation’s ed. policy has been fully swallowed by the tech giants who simply cannot fathom/imagine why creative non-statistics-based thought is useful.
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Wow, Chiara, that makes complete sense. Thank you for your comment. And great thanks to the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy and BATS. Teaching young people to code algorithms is setting them up for only partial success at best. And given that less than half of computer science grads today can even find a job in computer science, I’d say we’re setting many of them up for failure and debt. I’ll add that the original purpose of public education had little to do with industry (because it’s what I’ve been teaching in U.S. history lately), but everything to do with civic engagement.
The 18th century English and French philosophers on whose writings were based the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution believed that popular sovereignty could be achieved by educating the People to care about others, and be literate and civic minded. Nowadays, we’re throwing away social studies and important, historically significant literature in favor of programming software and robots for a fictional robotic future. We’re failing to fulfill the original promise of widespread education as the foundation of democracy. And while we’re doing it, we’re surrendering our future’s privacy rights, the data, compounding the damage to society.
Thanks a whole stinking heap, NCLB and Common Core.
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Yes the “STEM Shortage is a Myth” as reported in 2013 by IEEE’s Spectrum Magazine. Here’s another article in that discussion, relating findings to h(1)b visas:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/at-work/tech-careers/stem-crisis-as-myth-gets-yet-another-workout
Trump admin has helped by increasing challenges to the application/ approval process, & has slated “redefinition of ‘specialty occupation'” for imminent reg re-writes. Vague regs have allowed employers to abuse the original intent to bring in ‘best & brightest’, using h(1)b’s to bring in low-paid mediocre IT ‘grunts.’
But perhaps the bigger issue in engrg & mfg is near-elimination of in-house training over last 25 yrs. Corps responding to global price pressure have cut O.H. (Incl OTJ training) to the bone, poaching or importing experienced people instead of developing their own cadre. This short-sighted policy leaves them in dire need, not of general STEM workers, but of highly experienced specialty people to replace those now retiring.
On a recent call-in show on current labor picture, a mgr of a med-size mfg biz actually called in to extol the virtues of hiring those in their 70’s, who can ‘run circles around’ younger employees– Duh! Just rotate the oldsters thru, using up their last couple of working yrs on current needs like kleenex, instead of using them to develop inhouse training!
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