Carol Burris, the articulate and prolific principal of South Side High School in Rockville Center, Long Island, New York, here responds to state officials about the importance of student privacy.

New York is one of the few–perhaps the only–state that has stubbornly insisted that all student data will be uploaded to the inBloom website funded by the Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation, engineered by Rupert Murdoch’s Wireless Generation, and managed by amazon.com.

Parent protests have caused other states either to cancel their commitment to turn all student information over to inBloom or to put their plans on hold (hoping, perhaps, that parents will forget and the whole thing will blow over).

But in New York, state officials say that schools have always shared student data, so this is nothing new. Thus, the state has no intention of backing away from inBloom.

Burris points out that the data her school shared in the past was not personally identifiable. The state collected data on many aspects of student test scores, race, ethnicity, disability, etc., but there was no personally identifiable information.

She writes:

The collection and reporting of school data is nothing new. We used to send data on scan sheets; test scores, drop out rates, the percentage of students with disabilities, etc., were all reported in the aggregate. As technology progressed, we began to electronically send data, not in the aggregate, but by student. Students were assigned a unique identifying number so that their privacy was protected, with identity guarded at the school or district level. More data, including race, ethnicity and socio-economic status, were added to what we sent. This allowed the state to disaggregate data by student group, while still preserving anonymity.

Now that wall of privacy is shattered. Names, addresses (e-mail and street) and phone numbers are to be sent. Schools are required to upload student attendance, along with attendance codes, which indicate far more than whether or not the student was absent or present. Codes indicate whether a student is ill, truant, late to school or suspended. Details about the lives of students are moving beyond the school walls to reside in the inBloom cloud.

As a high school principal, I am worried by the state’s ever growing demands for student information. I believe that all disciplinary records should be known only to families and the school. All teens are under tremendous strain to perform — sometimes for adults, other times for peers. Some live on the emotional breaking point — others visit that point now and again. Kids make mistakes. Some make bad decisions. Others lose their temper and get out of control. Such serious infractions result in suspensions. We have to keep our schools safe, even as we are concerned about the well being of the offender.

And here is what I add to her comments:

Why does the government need to track the movement of every single citizen? Why did the U.S. Department of Education’s Race to the Top include funding for a massive database? Why don’t they care about student privacy? What is their need to know? Will student data be rented, sold, or given to private vendors to develop commercial products?

Frankly, it is hard to think of any reason for inBloom or any other massive effort to aggregate personally identifiable information about every student.

In some spooky way, this seems to mirror the same thinking that lies behind the NSA program to monitor our emails and phone calls. If someone is on a terror list, it makes sense. But it makes no sense–and it seems to me to be unconstitutional, a violation of the Fourth Amendment–for the government to assume the power to snoop on every expression. Read this blog, if you wish; read my Twitter feed. But please do not monitor my emails and telephone calls. Do not open my personal mail. And do not put my grandchildren’s data into the cloud.

The irony for me in this current situation is that in the early 1990s, when I was Assistant Secretary of Education for the Office of Educational Research and Information in the U.S. Department of Education, I used to get scores of letters and emails from parents who accused the federal government of using NAEP to gather private information about their children. The letter-writers insisted that there was a secret government storage facility somewhere in Maryland that held all this information. I wrote them back, assuring them that there was no such project, that there was no such facility.

I wonder what my counterpart is writing to angry parents now.

Mercedes Schneider posted a critique of a webinar hosted by the Education Writers Association on the subject of data-mining and student privacy.

She was upset that the panel of three included two cheerleaders for data mining and the third produced research funded by Microsoft.

The post was strong, but the letters that followed are amazing. She got responses from the CEO of inBloom, defending it, from privacy experts, from the researcher whose viewpoint she challenged, and from parent advocates.

This is the best, most free-wheeling discussion, including all points of view, that I have seen on this vital subject.

This is from Leonie Haimson, who has been the national leader in the fight to derail the collection of confidential student data via inBloom, the Gates and Carnegie-funded program.

Read this:

http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2013/11/nyseds-new-scary-data-dic
tionary-with.html

They are not collecting blood type, voter status, and religious affiliation
(of course.)

They are collecting:

Students’ name, addresses, unique ID;
Their parents’ telephone number, email, and nature of their relationship
(i.e. whether mother, father, stepfather, foster mother, guardian etc.)
The date the student was born and if not born here, when entered the US;
Their family’s economic situation, including whether they participate in
public assistance programs and whether they get free lunch;
Their race, their ethnicity, their home languages, and whether they are
limited English proficient;
Their disabilities, and what services they receive (including special
education services, counseling, etc.)
What their 504 status is, which can include a wealth of medical and health
conditions;
When any of these conditions was first identified and when it was removed;
Every day the student was absent, and whether this was due to an
out-of-school, or an in school suspension, an unexcused or excused absence,
and the reason why;
Every course they took in every year, how many credits they accumulated,
and what grades they received;
Any and all assessments they were given, including achievement tests,
“attitudinal tests” and “cognitive and perceptual skills tests”;
The results of any and all those tests, including their scores and
performance levels;
Any subtests or assessments that relate to specific learning objectives
(or SLOs), and the assessment “response” (ie “a student’s response to a
stimulus on a test”, whatever that means)
The learning standards tested, the content standards and the grade levels
for which the learning objective is targeted.

Mercedes Schneider here examines the Data Quality Campaign.

Why is there so much demand for student data? Why now?

As she explains,

Corporate education reform is designed to turn profits for privatizers. That said, in corporate reform, there are two huge money makers that will ”outprofit” all other profiteering: standardized testing, and data sales and storage.

The two are inextricable. Consider the mandates for state participation in Race to the Top (RTTT). In order to compete for RTTT funding, states were required to demonstrate both a standardized testing dependence and establishment of a “statewide longitudinal data system.”

While the federal government insists that reform is being driven “by the states,” it is clear that the USDOE is actively clearing the way for reforms that it supports, one of which is the collecting of an unprecedented amount of data on America’s school children.

There are many funders of this unprecedented effort to collect data about the nation’s children.

But why?

When I was Assistant Secretary of the Office of Educational Research and Innovation in the early 1990s, I was often called upon to respond to parents who wrote to ask why the federal government was collecting data about their children. They thought that NAEP was the vehicle. I responded by saying that there was no such data collection, and all this was rumor and speculation and untrue.

But now it is fact. It is real. There will be a national database in which children have unique identifiers, and in which the uses of this information are unclear.

Again: Why?

This is an issue that transcends political parties or ideology. Teachers are not permitted to disclose personal information about their students. Why is it being collected? For what purpose? For whose purpose? Shouldn’t parental consent be necessary?