The intersection of Common Core, inBloom, and the deregulation of federal privacy law is no accident.
Pay attention.
Archives for category: Privacy and Privacy Rights
Read this and prepare to gag unless you are the president of your regional Bill Gates Fan Club.
Did you know that Bill is warm and cuddly when he talks about how he plans to make US education the very best in the world without spending more? Don’t doubt for a minute that he knows how to do it. He has been reforming education for years, and think of all he has done. Well, let’s see, there is…..
The article begins:
“After almost two decades of pursuing improvements in U.S. education through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Gates maintains a sweeping and grand ambition. His goal for the next 20 years, he says, is to graduate roughly twice as many kids from college, move the United States up in the international rankings, and do so without spending more money. It’s as if Gates wants to apply a version of Moore’s law (in which the number of transistors that can fit on an integrated circuit double every two years) to education.”
Oh, and note his favorite Ed-tech start-ups: #1 is inBloom. In modesty, Gates does not mention that he put $100 million to underwrite a massive data warehouse designed by Rupert Murdoch’s Amplify. It will store the confidential information of millions of students and make it available for vendors without the permission of parents.
The writer received Gates’ funding in 2011.
Jersey Jazzman is really steamed about NY State Commissioner John King.
Is it because he wants to share the personal, confidential data of ll the state’s public school students with a marketing consortium?
Is it because he is pushing the Common Core standards without first determining how they will affect real children?
Is it because he came from the charter sector, from a no-excuses school with military discipline?
Or it because his own kids attend a lovely Montessori school that promotes respect, loving kindness, independence, critical thinking, and other things that most parents want for their children?
In 2011, when the U.S. Department of Education revised the regulations governing FERPA to allow third parties to access children’s data without the consent of their parents, the Council of Chief School Officers weighed in. Here is. Comment by Sheila Kaplan, whose organization (educationnewyork.com) is devoted to student privacy issues:
“Here’s Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) Comments on 2011 FERPA RULE CHANGE
CCSSO own the Common Core State Standards Copyright with the National Governor’s Association (NGA).
Also:
“The American Council on Education expressed concerns about the FERPA rule change:
The most bizarre was the Head Start opposed the rule change saying they’re under HHS authority, not he USED, and the USED was acting beyond their authority.
HEAD START says US ED acted beyond their authority. This one is interesting.
American education has always been characterized by the principle of federalism–until now.
Federalism meant a careful balancing among districts, states, and the federal governments. Schools had a fair amount of autonomy within that framework.
The federal government role was to level the playing field by providing resources for the schools with large number of poor kids. The state set general guidelines and supported the work of the schools. The districts oversaw their schools.
All that changed with NCLB. Now the federal government controls every school, tells it how to “reform,” punishes it if it fails to comply.
The state education departments mimic the federal government. They now tell the districts and schools what to do. They demand compliance.
Unfortunately many state commissioners are not experienced educators. Several have meager experience, coming out of the charter sector.
Peter DeWitt, a principal in upstate Néw York, decided it was time to stand up and ask questions, even to say no.
It is time for more principals and superintendents to say no to the blizzard of mandates.
Realize that you are on a runaway train and the engineer does not know what he is doing.
The Gates Foundation spent $100 million along with the Carnegie Corporation to create a massive database consisting of confidential information about students. The database will be created by Rupert Murdoch’s subsidiary Wireless Generation. It will go onto a “cloud” managed by amazon.com.
Several states and districts have agreed to turn over their student data. Last year, the U.S. Department of Education quietly changed the FERPA regulations so that the data could be released. According to this article, the data will be available to entrepreneurs to market stuff to children’s.
Here is one New York parent’s view:
“I have emailed and called [State Commissioner] John King’s office over 40 times the past month refusing to consent to allow the DOE to transfer my children’s personal information into InBloom to be bought and sold around the world so vendors get rich. King’s office refuses to allow parents to opt-out.
I consider InBloom Identity Theft. We need a class action law suit to protect students privacy.
Please see the extent of data that is being collected and entered to be sold without a guarantee of security. Even your billing address from credit cards can be entered along with birth weight, homework completions, medical reports for IEP’s, disabilities, discipline, and much more.
Crazy Crawfish has a devastating critique of Louisiana’s plan to turn over confidential student data to inBloom, the company created by Gates and Rupert Murdoch to assemble a vast database for vendors.
Superintendent John White sent out a letter to county superintendents, trying to assure them that there is nothing unususl or invidious about outsourcing private student data to a national database.
Crazy Crawfish used to work in the state department of education. He gives a line by line of John White’s little white lies.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters in New York City has prepared the following report about threats to the privacy of children, families, and teachers.
She reports as follows:
“The Gates Foundation and Wireless Generation (owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation) have formed something called “Shared Learning Collaborative,” which has now been turned into a new corporation called inBloom, Inc.
This corporation will collect confidential student and teacher data provided by states and districts across the country and will share it with software vendors and other commercial enterprises.
Your child’s data will be used to develop and market products.
Data will be gathered about students and teachers in New York City; Guilford County, North Carolina; Jefferson County, Colorado; Normal, Illinois and Bloomington, Illinois; Everett, Massachusetts; and Louisiana (the entire state).
In phase II, data will be collected in Delaware, Georgia, and Kentucky.
What will be collected and disseminated for marketing purposes?
Personally identifiable information, including student names, grades, test scores, disciplinary and attendance records, and possibly race/ethnicity and disability status.
The records will be stored in an electronic data bank built by Wireless Generation, a subsidiary of News Corporation. News Corporation is owned by Rupert Murdoch and is currently under investigation in Great Britain for hacking into private communications of individuals.
InBlooms Inc. will retain this information and make it available to commercial vendors to help them develop and market “learning products.”
All of this confidential information will be “put on a cloud managed by Amazon.com, with few if any protections against data leakage. inBloom, Inc. has already stated that it “cannot guarantee the security of the information stored…or that the information will not be intercepted when it is being transmitted” to third party vendors.
Haimson makes the following recommendations:
“1. Notify all parents of this impending disclosure, and provide them with the right to consent;
2. Hold public hearings for parents to express their concerns about the plan’s potential to violate our children’s privacy, security, and safety;
3. Explain how families can obtain relief if their children are harmed by improper use or accidental release of this information, including who will be held financially responsible;
4. Affirm that the privacy rights of public school children are respected more than the interests of the Gates Foundation, the Shared Learning Collaborative, News Corporation, inBloom, Inc., or any other company or organization with whom this confidential information may be shared.”
Haimson urges all parents to contact their PTA, their local school board, and their state board of education to protest “this unprecedented violation of the privacy right of children and families.”
Sheila Kaplan of Education Néw York is a specialist in student privacy issues.
She recommends this model law to protect children from marketing of their personal data.
If you live in NewYork, contact your elected state officials. If you don’t, find a state legislator to introduce similar legislation. Our children’s personal data must not be released to inBloom (Gates and Murdoch) to give or sell to marketing corporations.
Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters reports:
Great news! on Wednesday, Assemblymember Daniel O’Donnell introduced a bill, A6059, to protect student privacy that would block the NY State Education Department and DOE from sharing our children’s confidential personally identifiable data with corporations without parental consent.
Please call your Assemblymember today and ask him or her to co-sponsor this bill, A6059, to Protect Student Privacy. Contact information for your Assemblymember can be found here; just plug in your address here: http://assembly.state.ny.us/mem/?sh=search Tell him or her that children’s personal data should not be shared with third party corporations without parental consent.
Our press conference on the steps of Tweed yesterday morning was terrific. Among those who spoke out against this reckless and outrageous plan to distribute our children’s highly sensitive information without parental consent included civil rights attorney Norman Siegel, Council Members Steve Levin, Tish James, and Daniel Dromm, and Tom Allon. Here is an article in the Daily News about this outrageous plan; here is my accompanying oped.
Other newsclips from our press conference are from Schoolbook/WNYC, CBS News, AP , Politics 365, and a follow-up from the Daily News about the O’Donnell bill.
Parents Tory Frye, Karen Sprowal, Molly Sackler, and Lisa Shaw were among the fifty or so parents who attended, and they expressed their personal outrage that their children’s names, grades, emails, phone numbers, test scores, health, special education and disciplinary records could be so recklessly shared, without even consulting them about it. We also showed how all this data is being provided to for-profit vendors, with no thought of how this could leak out, stigmatize and endanger our children’s privacy and their success for years to come.
Our press release, with quotes from many other elected and public officials, including Comptroller John Liu and Public Advocate Bill DeBlasio, is posted on our blog here: http://shar.es/ecV4P
But please contact your Assemblymember today! And share this message with others who care.
Diane Ravitch's blog 