Please join this free webinar on protecting your privacy and the privacy of students.
SIGN UP FOR OUR FREE JAN. 20 WEBINAR ON HOW EDUCATORS CAN BETTER PROTECT THEIR STUDENTS’ PRIVACY — AND THEIR OWN
A few weeks ago, it was reported that the personal information of 500,000 San Diego students, former students and school staff was exposed in a massive breach. At about the same time, education institutions and organizations were rated as the worst sector for cybersecurity in a 2018 report.
We invite you to join us for a short webinar on Jan. 20, with important tips on how teachers and district/school staff members can better protect their students’ privacy of and their own.
We will be offering guidance along with Marla Kilfoyle of the Badass Teachers Association from our Educator Toolkit for Teacher and Student Privacy, released this fall. Educators will receive a certificate of participation. Don’t miss out! Space is limited!
When? Sunday, January 20 from 6-7 PM EST (3-4 PST). We’re saving lots of time for questions!
How? Sign up here – it’s free!
We hope to see you on the 20th.
Leonie Haimson and Rachael Stickland
Co-Chairs, Parent Coalition for Student Privacy
Diane Ravitch's blog 
SUPER!
And, “Oh shucks.” Checked my calendar and I am busy from 4:30 – 7:00 pm.
Hope there is a discussion about this Webinar on Diane’s blog.
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America has few consumer friendly laws. Most of our representatives front for corporations, not people. The EU enacted a strict privacy laws essentially giving people ownership of their data. We have no such law, nor are we likely to get one any time soon. In our country data is sold and resold. I recently read that 23 and Me, a company that does DNA testing, is selling data to Big Pharma for $300 million. After that, it will possibly go to insurers who can refuse someone a policy because they have a predisposition for certain illnesses. Privacy, as we know it, no longer exists without some level of regulation.
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Privacy issues are important. Use whatever means of communication you can to keep this issue front and center, especially for parents and workers in schools. Privacy policies for educational software are a farce.
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A Public Service Announcement for Watchers of Tonight’s Sit-Down Stand-Up Routine
I’ve interviewed a number of leading psychologists, and they’ve revealed to me a subtle tell that will reveal with 100 percent certainty whether a person is lying. Professor Roberta Herder of Indiana University explains:
“Is that person Donald Trump?”
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Yes, Mr. President. Certainly. You can restart the government now. We’ve built the wall. And best of all, it’s invisible.
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To all educational gurus in Dr. Ravitch’s blog:
I sincerely admire and appreciate the kindness, understanding and generosity in advice and in all of your expressions.
Theoretical advice and practically action requires knowledge (high reading level in many different subjects), experience (= been there and done that in many different stages of unexpected rich and poor living lifestyle in reality), and most of all a solid logical mind (= compassionate mind, loving soul, and let all sentient beings to be what they strive to achieve with a clear scientific consequences) without any emotional attachment.
For instance, IMHO and in 50 years of living experience of my own life, I honestly and humbly express to all of my educational gurus. From 5 years old until now, almost 65 years old, being immigrant for the past 40 years, being trusted in the care and intelligence from authority’s leadership. I can see that people suffer or enjoy life without acknowledging or a clear understanding the cause and effect of their own actions.
Today, over more than 8 years of suffering from a mild stroke, my weaken physical strength and my intermittent memory teaches me the absolute truthfulness about the weakness of the emotional state in human beings. Regardless how rich like billionaire , smart like Steve Job, academic presidents, corporate owners, all scientists, and all famous skillful people in martial art like Bruce Lee, famous Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Royce Gracie and many others, all of these famous people have been fell for fame, fortune and and beauty (lust, not true love).
In short, to be safe, healthy, and happy, we need to have a happy and compatible in mind and in morality) marriage, a stable and meaningful career, most of all, a moderate desire to be compassionate = NOT GULLIBLE, and all filial children.
Respectfully yours,
May King, Back2basic
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California’s outgoing Governor Brown suggests children’s data is being sucked into a black hole to render a relic of this idea known as FREEDOM.
From his interview with Politico, Brown’s warning is dire. He understands the future of education data as the goldmine being used to monopolize and control society. He fears authoritarian rule and says it smells of eugenics.
ON TECHNOLOGY
Harris: Do you think American politics is more transparent, more amenable to the citizens expressing their will through democracy now than it was when you got started?
Brown: I find that a difficult question. A citizen expressing their will, that’s assuming there’s a collective will. And what you have is a fragmented—it’s being distorted by the new technologies of media, by all the information flow, by the contending forces, by the lack of any elite agreement on what way to proceed. I mean, there’s a profound disagreement among the well-educated, well-positioned people. And even on the right, you have people who distrust Trump. You have people on the right who distrust our foreign policy. And then on the left side, the Democrats, you have a lot of division. So, it’s hard to say what would be the populist uprising, since the populace is sliced and diced into so many different pieces. It’s fragmentation. And usually in that kind of environment, people look to external threats to mobilize. And that can be very dangerous. Because if we get into combat, it may not be manageable.
Harris: Out of this moment, is there a new politics to be born?
Brown: I hope there is. I don’t know what it’s going to be. … It’s not the deliberations of our Founding Fathers at Independence Hall, which when you go there, it’s shockingly small and intimate, and there you could have the give and take. But today, it’s just digital flows of noise and information that sounds the alarm and scares the hell out of people but doesn’t have a real, clear sustainable path forward.
Harris: Has your own view of that changed? You are governor of California, where many of the big tech companies are located. It seemed to me that 20 years ago, even maybe 10 to 15 years ago, we would have seen technology and the big technology companies as fundamentally benevolent forces, that they were going to make society more transparent; they were going to be instruments to individual empowerment. They may still be some of those things, but I think now there’s much more a sense that they can also be kind of instruments of surveillance, instruments of manipulation and, in the hands of many foreign governments, instruments of oppression.
Brown: And that’s—well, that’s the ebb and the flow. I remember a picture—maybe it was in Time magazine—of Henry Kissinger in the form of Superman, “Super K.” And then a few years later, he became the Lone Ranger. And no one wanted to talk to him. And that’s true of almost everything. Google and Apple and Facebook could do no wrong, and now people in the European Union and Washington, they’re actively starting to attack them. This seems to be part of the distraction of modern society. And there are problems. And I would say the totalitarian capacity is being built up every day and being pushed by the liberals as much as the conservatives.
Harris: What’s an example of that being pushed by the liberals?
Brown: An example would be measuring each individual child from preschool to beyond college, and keeping those as permanent records in the computer, that would measure discipline and mental attributes. Just the general centralization of information, which is being billed as the way to help the poor but which will enable an authoritarian to totally monopolize and control the society.
In fact, we have something called “Cal-PASS,” a state computer, which I kept in check. And I think now it’ll be full throttle to collect as much possible data and measure people in all sorts of ways. I think it’s dangerous. I don’t think it’s very useful, except for academics who have to write theses and do research. We had one on the teachers, which we stopped.
See, the trouble is the computer can collect a lot of information and regurgitate it in many different ways, and people are fascinated by that. Controlling and measuring everything. … We’re all ranked. And who’s it for? Now, if it’s for the academics, they’re relatively harmless. But then it’s going to ultimately be used, at some point, and it has kind of a smell of eugenics, that we want to purify this kind of motley race called human beings and if we can measure all the different attributes, we can then make normative the right path and the right way to be. I think that is the absence of diversity and the absence of freedom.
I would just say, spoken in a somewhat abstract level—it’s not just me who says that. I mean, there are political theorists who notice that the welfare state and the warfare state work hand in hand. They both want to see more power. They want more engineering of things. And, in many ways, that’s mass society, that’s an inevitable trend. But we do need to—we, the government—so that it can function is guard against that. And some of these big issues are not thought about. –
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/01/06/jerry-brown-politico-magazine-interview-223757?fbclid=IwAR0l5Qd-ikCI81F0eLH-fryPD_2O4NiIaA9ujD7FgQLrPblpInZ7PcoCeok
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