*NYSED couldn't protect its own site *Can you trust its choice for housing your child's data?
*S**y B***h hack = a scandal of poor site security, John King's BridgeGate-sized Epic Fail
*Update: Syracuse teachers president endorses Iannuzzi's no confidence call vs. King
As broken by a parent's blog, Schools of Thought and its "Commissioner King Endorses “Sexy Bitch” Quizzes as Fun Test Prep For NY Students!," the New York State Education Department's site linked for much of a day this week to a salacious site called S**y B***h. Clearly, this demonstrated the NYSED's site hackability.
This incident, plus the Target massive security breach now up to 100 million customers' card data, plus the recently reported Nieman Marcus breach, plus the Sachem district, Suffolk, Long Island, breach of 15,000 students' records, dramatically demonstrates ONCE AND FOR ALL that sites can be hacked. More to the point, the NYSED's site's hackability is of looming significance because one would expect any site associated with NYSED should have iron-clad security, but this has been broken obviously. This bodes badly for the inBloom student data system. Yes, it will be run privately. But if NYSED cannot protect its own site, how can it vouch for inBloom's security. [As of blog press time, the NYSED is still down.] If Target and Nieman Marcus, who rests on credit or debit card use, cannot guarantee system security, how can parents have faith in inBloom?
NYSED's sites plug Common Core --this is a central objective for the sites at this point. This scandal of lax site security cannot help but steer more attention to Common Core and its flaws. King, Cuomo and Mulgrew must be breathing sighs of relief as the New Jersey Governor Chris Christie BridgeGate scandal roils on and on and on, devouring media attention, and preventing more attention to present New York State scandals, as opposed to past New Jersey scandalous acts.
Toward the end of the parent blog breaking the story the parent adds: King’s Sexy Bitch Quizzes are to NY what Christie’s Traffic Problems are to NJ!
"Damned straight" we can say to that!
No voters chose John King; Regents did. Maybe that's why he acts like a king.
I bring in NYSED Commissioner John King in first, as Common Core and inBloom are his pet projects. And as he in desperate moments falls into "besides federal law" requires CC and student data tracking, repeating Gatesean myths.
No Common Core, no need for souped up NYSED sites. No CCSS-linked tests and data collection, no need for inBloom. Make no mistake, this is the central project for John King and Merry Tisch.
Just as this week has been the epic fail for Chris Christie with his widely panned press conference performance, this site hack has been bad news for ed deform cheerleaders and NYS.
Now to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo: he cannot smell the coffee: parents hate Common Core; they loathe John King for his haughtiness. King must go. Yet Cuomo doesn't get the urgency. Parents noticing the NYSED site hack will no doubt spread the word as another collossal blunder by Cuomo, and implicit demonstration of his failure to tackle the human representation of the Common Core cancer, John King.
Remember it's not just his obnoxious aloofness to parental concerns at the Common Core town meetings. King:
*Repeatedly threatened to remove control of the Buffalo School District from elected representatives, his most recent threat here; and ally Cuomo's bullying rhetoric here, alleging that the District and the union's APPR restrictions were an "ethical and legal fraud"
*Blanket-characterized Common Core opponents as Tea Partiers
Make no mistake, teachers will notice. Some hard questions for Cuomo and Mulgrew
And questions: let's give up for a moment asking why JK is into CCSS.
Why is Cuomo so committed to John King? Passing the buck to the Regents or the legislature doesn't cut it. Cuomo is supposed to be the political leader of New York State. Sounds a little like Chris Christie: blame lots of allies; but assume no accountability yourself.
Why is Mulgrew so committed to Common Core? (And mere gripes for a better curriculum don't suffice.)
Why won't he absolutely draw a line in the sand against the inBloom program?
Why on earth is Mulgrew probably the most enthusiastic labor backer of Cuomo?
Why cannot Mulgrew get it that teachers in New York City --not to mention NYS for that matter-- are not happy with John King or Common Core?
So Mulgrew is trying to steal the MORE caucus' motto, Our working conditions are our students learning conditions? He should heed notice that Common Core is part of kids' learning package and he is part and parcel part of the hell for a learning experience that King and Tisch have imposed on young minds in NYS.
But note that when the Common Core Gospel of Faith traveling show came to Manhattan, it was only MORE caucus supporters (not Mulgrew-allied Unity caucus reps) among UFT members that spoke out against the Common Core. And remember that the tour was supposed to come to Queens and Staten Island. Could the delay against scheduling be that those boroughs are a little bit more "suburban"?
UPDATED: *Rank and file teachers chafe under Common Core's scripted lessons, test prep *Buffalo Teachers Federation Blasts Common Core Test Prep *UFT Should Show Same Solidarity and Attend Comm. King's Appearance At Elementary School *How Conditions Will Change Little in the Change from Bloomberg to deBlasio *Change the Stakes Calls for Bronx Cheer vs. King at his NYC tour *Burris: NYSED has lost its moral authority *UFT should support NYSAPE's 4 point action plan *Postscript: Disgraceful Pavlovian math lesson for Kindergarteners
Progressive teacher unionists have sought an alliance with parents. Chicago teachers built alliances with parents over school closings and other issues. In New York City teachers have an important opportunity to build a broad alliance with parents. The New York City appearance of New York State Education Commissioner John King and New York State Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch, Wednesday, December 11, 5:00 to 7:00 at P.S. 397, the Spruce Street School, 12 Spruce Street, between Nassau and William Streets, a block from City Hall park, Manhattan, is an important occasion for teachers and parents to stand shoulder to shoulder against Common Core, the associated test prep regimen, inBloom and APPR.
Principal Carol Burris in NSAPE video
At the beginning of November, 22 Unions across New York State backed NYSAPE's position on King's resignation. From Long Island to the North Country, from Western New York to the MidHudson, and from Central New York to the Capital Region. In addition, one of the state's largest teachers' unions, the Buffalo Teachers Federation (in the state's second largest city), has independently called on King to step down. The impetus for King to step down is his obstinate support for New York's continuation of implementation of the Common Core State Standards [more properly called the Common Core national standards or Common Core Gates Standards], constant test-prep, and the 400 data point collection inBloom, a Murdoch-run system for student data collection in a cloud hosted by Amazon.
(NYSAPE's video on NYSED officials' failure to listen to parents) The New York State Allies for Public Education, whose Steering Committee includes Carol Burris, Chris Cerrone and Leonie Haimson, has a four point plan of action, 1) for King's resignation, 2) for legislators to vote for better Regents, 3) against inBloom and excessive testing, 4) for alerting local school boards that parents do not want their children's information to be stored by inBloom.
[Postscript: Change the Stakes calls for a NYC welcome and a Bronx cheer for Comm. King as he makes his NYC tour Tuesday and Wednesday --details below. They noted that as of Dec. 8 there still is no word on how to address questions for the events
Class Size Matters has an update in anticipation of a Jan. 3 State Supreme Court session on their legal appeal for an injunction on any more children's information being uploaded onto the inBloom cloud.]
Buffalo's teacher union president Phil Rumore said, in announcing the union's call for his resignation, as reported in the Buffalo News:
By having them take a test that they weren't prepared for, hurt them. His focus on standardized testing is just ruining our kids. It's ruining our kids joy of learning, and the teachers joy of teaching.
The newspaper further reported:
Rumore said teachers across the state are under tremendous pressure to have their students perform on standardized tests. He sited the implementation of teacher and administrator evaluations based on those tests as another reason for the motion.
The News added that the last straw for the BTF was when King walked out on a parent's forum on the Common Core.
Already, mental health professionals are saying that Common Core and its curriculum is detrimental to the emotional well-being of students. See videos of statements by Mary Calamia, LICSW here and Dr. Gary Thompson here. In forum after forum in New York State, students speak of their lost enthusiasm for school, parents speak of confusing curriculum modules, teachers speak of alienation from their profession. Some of the curricular materials are culturally insensitive. The principal of a Mohawk nation elementary school reports that some of the Common Core curricular modules depict native Americans in culturally insensitive ways.
It's Not Just Common Core, How Conditions Might Change Little in the Transition from Bloomberg to deBlasio
King, Tisch, sitting impassively, but are they listening?
Beyond the issue of Common Core, King's
corporate-minded education "reform" policies drive a metrics-crazed regimen of myriad imposition of conditions driving teachers' alienation and exhaustion. The quantification and documentation mania that teachers are chafing under seem to come from New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, but really they are dictated by state laws and regulations, all coming from Race to the Top compliance with the Common Core. New York City teachers are not the only ones suffering; and it is critical that teachers remember that their working conditions stem from Albany, not simply from Bloomberg, and so they will continue under de Blasio, unless there is significant popular pressure directed at state education policy-makers.
Read the letter of resignation of Kathleen Knauth, a New York State principal that quit, seeking early retirement, due to the state's policies. The policies driving her to quit stem from APPR and other laws supporting New York's Race to the Top compliance.
View this video of a star teacher that also sought early retirement over the work conditions. Implicitly, the changes he cites stem from New York State's Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR).
Tisch's circular argument in Brian Lehrer's 8/15 radio show
The Common Core is only law in New York State because he and State Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch aggressively pushed for it along with other changes to comply with New York's Race to the Top, which states supported to get federal monies, in the wake of the 2008 Grand Recession. Effectually, the Obama administration is pushing something close to a national curriculum. Multiple federal statutes prohibit the exercise of such authority. As teachers learn in their American education history classes, such authority is the preserve of individual states.
King and other Common Core backers tell us that it is internationally bench-marked and essential for making all students college and career-ready. He is diverting education from education for the sake of being a well-rounded, independent thinker, healthy and creative young person. He cannot point to any nation that edges out fictional literature with a maximum 50 percent figure, that side-lines science and social studies, subordinating those topics to incidental discussion in English classes. He argues for the Common Core math standards, but skips over how the lead math author of the Common Core, Jason Zimba concedes that its level of math preparation would prepare students for a non-competitive community college, lopping off a high school year of math.
The Common Core's English component was written by David Coleman, someone who failed to get a teaching job and his Achieve, Inc. colleague Sue Pimentel, a lawyer by training and a test assessment professional. The math authors (including Zimba, a fellow alum of Coleman) have no kindergarten through 12 teaching experience. The lack of school experience and first hand understanding of young minds and personalities is a parallel to our modern era's replacing of a public voice with private institutions' shaping public policy.
Recent public attention has been given to how King and Tisch spearheaded the education policy setting role in New York State by the privately funded Regents Fellows, who in their founding years were provided $1 million by Tisch herself. Read "Regents Pay a Political Price for Their Free Advisers, Dissenters Warn
" by the New York Times. ALEC and too many other shadowy non-governmental organizations are driving public policy. We do not need an education commissioner who actively supports a private group shaping public education policy.
The UFT should re-schedule its December 11 Delegate Assembly business for another date and should attend the Wednesday forum at the Spruce Street School at Spruce and Nassau Streets, by the Brooklyn Bridge, supporting parents and teachers wishing to express the daily, lived experience of the Common Core and other misguided New York State education policies. Then again, this would be an about face, as the NYS PTA and the UFT-dominated NYSUT this fall uploaded a puff piece for parents promoting the Common Core, sounding all the stock buzzwords to rally the flock to Common Core compliance. (Their shilling for the Core is not surprising, as the NYSUT's national parent organization, the American Federation of Teachers and the national PTA received $5.4 million and $500,000 respectively from the Gates Foundation, which initiated the Common Core.)
Too bad, because the UFT members in an online poll do not like Common Core's curriculum at all. The poll is buried deep in the UFT website, at pages such as this one. The numbers are actually a little worse for CCSS from when I captured the poll image.
Further, it should encourage state legislators, Assembly Education Committee members listed here, to pledge to vote for Regents that oppose King's policies.
King and Tisch's NYC tour of their faith-based Common Core (backed into a corner, King says that he has faith in the Common Core). (Still no details on Queens or Staten Island meetings. Do King and Tisch consider them pesky suburbanites?) Tuesday, December 10 in Brooklyn
Medgar Evers College 1650 Bedford Avenue (map here) 6:30-8:30 PM
Tuesday, December 10 in The Bronx
Evander Childs Campus 800 East Gun Hill Road (map here) 6:00-8:00 PM
[Postscript: Controversial Kindergarten math video shared by Chris Cerrone:
What is even more troubleing is that this robotic lesson is actually on the New York State Education Department engageny.org website as a Common Core math module ideal. Parents, do you want your children to be educated like trained animals? Teachers, do you want this to be the vision of model teaching? I hardly think that this flies for progressive teaching at the Montessori School of the King's children.]
*Prussian NYS ed leadership *Doing right CTU, contrasted against Petainesque UFT *Heroes or vulnerable incumbents?: the members of the Assembly's Education Committee
First, in Illinois the political leaders listen a little bit more to the people. But in New York State it is like 19th Century Prussia with Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch and NYS Education Commissioner John King not deigning to listen to those outside the privileged top class. Tisch, King, Governor Andrew Cuomo know they can get away with this. King and Tisch are only accountable to Regents. And the latter themselves are insulated, only accountable to the legislature, and only up for re-election in 2015, a year after the 2014 state elections. As the New York Times indicated in an article on the influence of the shadowy Regents Fellows, an unaccountable private clique that sets education policy behind the scenes, the Regents are split into a Bloombergian metrics-faith-based faction, and a more traditionally educator faction. The lag time between now and 2015 will give them time to regroup or at least plot to thwart a popular mobilization against them.
NYS Assembly Education Committee chair Catherine Nolan has distinguished her self in speaking for the public schools at out-going New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg's sham Panel for Educational Policy hearings. Surely, she must smell the acrid stench of the Common Core cafe. Thus, if she leads the Assembly charge against the Common Core and assists in the formation of a Senate caucus against the Core (in that chamber the parties are more evenly divided and it is there that the CCSS might be thwarted more quickly), she will be well positioned to catapult to the next political level, a US House of Representatives seat.
But which seat would she want? Not her own turf, her ally Joseph Crowley is there; not the Forest Hills/Flushing seat, new frosh Grace Meng is there. Money bags Carolyn Maloney of Upper East Side/Astoria would be a tough one to beat with her resources. Yet, the perniciously anti-Muslim Peter King would be a perfect target to challenge. Nolan, start shopping for a home in his district!
Sadly, while the Chicago Teachers Union has taken wise stands on inBloom and Common Core, in New York City we have the United Federation of Teachers leadership which as recently as this summer staunchly supported the Common Core. The UFT's president Michael Mulgrew's approach to co-opt the Common Core anxiety: just complain about missing curriculum and call for postponing associated high-stakes tests, note: not calling out of principle to reject the standards and the ancillary high stakes tests. Mulgrew, will you call on the next mayor to pull New York City out of inBloom's jaws?
Postscript: a Congressional seat is Nolan's to walk away with. The following are members of the New York State Assembly Education Committee, their district number and main communities in their district. Note how --aside from New York City, Long Island, as well as (by coincidence or design?) communities that were the site of tumultous town halls over the Common Core, figures prominently in the locales represented by the education committee. And to underscore the salience of this issue, we call attention to Perdido Street School's report that the Common Core has become a lightning from for voter discomfort and some state politicians are already running scared. The legislature members are sitting ducks for challenges, as the legislature failed to pass provisions that would have protected student privacy. Challengers, you want and issue to take down representatives? Study the Common Core and inBloom fiascos.
Catherine Nolan, Chair, 37 – Long Island City, Sunnyside and Ridgewood
Carmen Arroy, 84 - Bronx
Michael Benedetto, 82 - Bronx
James Brennan, 44 - Brooklyn
Karim Camara, 43 - Brooklyn
Barbara Clark, 33 - Queens Village and SE Queens
Jane Corwin, 144 – Clarence & NE suburbs of Niagara Falls and Buffalo
Steve Englebright, 4 – Coram, East Setauket, Stony Brook, Port Jefferson
Al Graf, 5 – Centereach, Farmingville, Holbrook, Ronkonkoma
Carl Heastie, 83 - Bronx
Earlene Hooper, 18 – Hempstead, Roosevelt, Freeport
Kieran Michael Lalor, 105 – hamlets east of Poughkeepsie: Wappinger Falls, Fishkill, Hopewell Junction
Peter Lopez, 102 – Cobleskill, Catskill, Saugerties
William Magnarelli, 102 – Syracuse and NW suburbs
Alan Maisel, 59 - Brooklyn
Shelley Mayer, 90 – Yonkers and towns to the east
David McDonough, 14 – Bellmore and Wantagh
Steven McLaughlin, 107 – Troy and most of Renssalear County
Michael Miller, 38 – Ridgewood and Woodhaven
Joan Millman, 52 - Brooklyn
Daniel O'Donnell, 69 - Manhattan
Amy Paulin, 88 – south White Plains, Scarsdale to New Rochelle
Edward Ra, 19 – Glen Head, Westbury, Mineola, Garden City
Phil Ramos, 6 - Brentwood, Islip and North Bay Shore
Robert Sweeney, 11 – Lindenhurst and other SW Suffolk County towns
Claudia Tenney, 101 – Utica to Walden in Orange County
Fred Thiele, Jr., 1 – Hamptons and Montauk
Matthew Titone, 61 – Staten Island
Michele Titus, 31 – South Ozone Park to Far Rockaway
Harvey Weisenberg- 5 towns, Oceanside and Long Beach
*Tech experts not confident with data cloud security *School boards developing discipline score to feed to colleges *Data breach is third for the Sachem district *Where does deBlasio stand on inBloom?
Not making the headlines of major media was the breach of approximately 15,000 student records in 18 elementary, middle and high schools in the Sachem school district in Suffolk County, Long Island, New York a couple of weeks ago. In fact, briefly, confidential information was posted on an external website "Sachem Unspun", as reported on the News 12 television station. A Holbrook 17 year old was arrested on November 22 in connection with the hacking of student data. For parents and other activists, this incident should serve as a matter of concern as to whether families can school systems can rest assured that student records wold be secure. That this has happened, even before the ambitious aggregation and indexing of data under inBloom, is a matter of concern for the security of future databases.
New York Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch summarily dismissed Regent Roger Tille's concerns that she was too close to Joel Klein, that it led to favoritism in the New York State Education Department's contract with Rupert Murdoch's Wireless Generation (today WG's unit tending to inBloom is renamed Amplify, as Andrea Gabor reported in "Will Rupert Murdoch's Media Empire End Up Owning Your Child's Student Data?"), the company handling inBloom; education commissioner John King dismissed no-bid contract concerns about the deal, saying that New York was under time pressure from Race to the Top deadlines. InBloom represents a big project objective of the shadowy, unaccountable Regents Fellows that set NYS education policies behind the scenes. The King-Tisch duo, deaf to parent security concerns, are being consistent with their tone of contemptuous disregard for parent, educator and student opinion on Common Core. See the videos at the right on parent and student reactions to the Common Core and their test regimen. Their tests data will be a central data point in the inBloom database.
Is it that urgent that inBloom be imposed on the people of New York State? Consider the variety of ways that the data could be misused. From bullying to extortion, it is risky to have so much data that could be stored in clouds, information that could be exploited. We have already seen how seen how many fragile many teens are, in the face of cyber-harassment, a number of students have taken their own lives. Are taxpayers comfortable with prospect of footing legal bills when parents (understandably) sue the state or districts following breaches of student data security? And never forget how Murdoch's News of the World was engaged in scandalous hacking of people's private information, as revealed in press reports last year? See this video in which New York State superintendents themselves say that many of the 400 data points have little relation to assisting students with learning.
Roughly 15,000 students enrolled in 18 Long Island elementary,
middle and high schools – comprising the Sachem School District – may
have had personal data compromised by an unidentified individual who posted the information on an online forum.
How many victims? Roughly 15,000. What type of personal information? Posted on the forum was a
list of 15,000 names with student ID numbers and school lunch
designations, student records on 360 students who graduated Sachem High
School East in 2008, and a report relating to approximately 130 students
who attended Sachem High School North who were receiving instructional
services in an alternate setting in the 2010-2011 year, the district
confirmed.
On a separate forum, a concerned user posted
about having seen medical records, doctor's letters, report cards,
district registration documents that include names, addresses, dates of
birth and parent information, and disciplinary records. What happened? On separate occasions, student documents were
posted on an online forum by someone who claimed the Sachem School
District database had been hacked. What was the response? Sachem School District audited its
firewalls and intrusion detection systems. The website that hosted the
forum has been contacted and has removed any posts containing school
data. The school district is mailing letters to affected families. An
investigation is ongoing with local and federal law enforcement. Details: Sachem School District first became aware in July
that school documents were being posted online. An official
investigation into the schools' firewalls and intrusion detection
systems revealed that a breach did not originate from the outside.
Additional information was posted online in August and again a breach
was not deemed to have originated from the outside. Student information
was posted most recently on Nov. 8. Quote: “The district has devoted every available resource to
cooperate with and to assist law enforcement,” according to a post on
the Sachem School District website. “Access to student records is an
important daily internal function of any school district. This is a
necessity, but can unfortunately render our data vulnerable to a
determined criminal actor willing to misuse access to our systems.”
The bipartisan "Moms Against Duncan" Facebook group ("a NONPARTISAN, NONPOLITICAL, PRO-PUBLIC EDUCATION, ANTI-COMMON CORE place for parents to connect, find local groups and actively fight for their children" --caps in original) had this statement in recent weeks. It gets to concerns about the ultimate governmental and commercial uses of student personal data:
As the co-founder of MAD (Moms Against Duncan) we are linking groups of parents all over this country together. Our ultimate goal is a 10% standardized test opt out rate in every school K-8. We will corrupt the data so it is useless. No school scores, no teacher scores, no student scores. No databases, no prison planning data, no economic development data. Pearson, Gates and Duncan can kiss our multicolored backsides. Our children are NOT data. We want all this wasted money back in the hands of our teachers.
Patrick Sullivan, noted for his civic integrity on New York City's Panel for Educational Policy, drew attention this week to how the New York State School Boards Association is planning to develop an "inBloom score" on student to inform colleges on how students behaved in school. The school board's plan is troubling, because many students grow up to be responsible and academically proficient in college, despite having discipline issues in their school careers as minors. It is for this issue that student discipline records until recently have been sealed, off-limits after graduation.
deBlasio, Which Side Are You On?
[Postscript: NYC Public School Parents has a piece on the opposition in Chicago against the inBloom system. Leonie Haimson wrote on how Herricks Superintendent John Bierwith reported that all the Nassau superintendents are solidly against inBloom, “I don’t think there’s a person in Nassau County who thinks InBloom is a good idea." . So, how do things stand for next year in New York City? "Which Side Are You On?" Will de Blasio's chancellor support or oppose inBloom? Also, will deBlasio disband the private arm working inside of New York City education that Haimson referred to, Fund for Public Schools, that just in last year received $1.8 million from the Gates Foundation? We do not need the continuation of private, unaccountable operations setting government policy.
The
story of Common Core and data mining begins as most stories do, with
a huge, unmet need.
Self-appointed
“stakeholder” know-it-alls at the federal level (also at state,
corporate, and even university levels) determined that they had the
right, and the need, for open access to personal student data– more
so than they already had.
So,
without waiting around for a proper vote, they did it. The CEDS
(Common Education Data Standards) were created by the same people who
created and copyrighted Common
Core:
the Council
of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO).
No surprise.
.
. . .
SIX
SNEAKY THINGS THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION DID TO DEPRIVE YOUR
CHILD OF PRIVACY:
1.
Sneaky Thing Number One: It bribed the states with ARRA Stimulus
monies to build 50 linkable, twinlike State
Longitudinal Database Systems (SLDS).
This act created a virtual national database.
2.
Sneaky Thing Number Two: It altered the (previously
privacy-protective) federal FERPA (Family Educational Rights Privacy
Act) law to make access to personally identifiable student data
–including biological and behavioral data– “legal”.
So
now, the act of requiring parental consent (to share personally
identifiable information) has been reduced from a requirement to just
a “best practice” according to the altered federal FERPA
regulations.
.
. . .
3.
Sneaky Thing Number Three: The US Department of Education partnered
with private groups, including the CCSSO (that’s the Council of
Chief State School Officers –copyright
holders on Common Core–) to
collect student data nationally.
The
CCSSO, or “Superintendents’ Club” as I like to call it, is a
private group with no
accountability to voters.
This makes it in-valid and un-American, as far as governance goes.
The CCSSO has a stated mission: to
disaggregate student data. Disaggregate
means to take away anonymity.
.
. . .
4.
Sneaky Thing Number Four: It used private-public partnerships to
promote data linking among agencies. The Data Quality Campaign is one
example. The National Data Collection Model is another example. The
Common Educational Data Standards is another example.
.
. . .
5.
Sneaky Thing Number Five: The Department of Ed created grants for
Common Core testing and then mandated that
those testing groups synchronize their tests, report fully and often
to the U.S. Department of Education, share
student-level data,
and produce “all student-level data in a manner consistent with
an industry-recognized
open-licensed interoperability standard that
is approved by the Department”.
So
federally funded Common Core tests require Common data
interoperability standards.
6.
Sneaky Thing Number Six: The Department of Education directly lied to
the American Society of News Editors. In a June
2013 speech given to the American Society of News Editors,
Secretary Duncan mocked the concerns of parents and educators who are
fighting Common Core and its related student data mining:
Despite
what the state school board and the federal Department of Education
claim, corporations do know that Common Core and student data mining
are interdependent.
CEO
of Escholar Shawn
Bay spoke at a recent White House event called “Datapalooza.” He
said (see
his speech on this video,
at about minute 9:15) that Common Core “is
the glue that actually ties everything together” for
student data collection.
Last Sunday’s New York Times ran a fascinating story on the controversy surrounding inBloom, which promises to serve as a one-stop warehouse-in-the-cloud for student data, but which many educators and parents worry might compromise the privacy of kids in grades K-12. Like a number of major education-reform ventures, this one was launched by a group of funders led by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Now that most states have signed onto the Common Core State Standards, which will use computerized assessments, the allure of creating a central repository of student data is more compelling than ever. The NYT lays out the potential benefits of the inBloom system, including the ability to store large amounts of student information and provide tools for analyzing the data–information that will be available not only to educators, but also to education-technology developers who can tailor products to student and school needs. The article also explores the privacy concerns raised by the easy access that large numbers of companies will have to a vast array of information, ranging from academic achievement to disciplinary problems, for potentially tens of millions of students.
The story touches, though only obliquely, on important questions about the balance-of-power between commercial vendors and public schools and school districts, which inBloom is supposed to facilitate.
But one of the most intriguing aspects of the story is one that the NYT does not address at all. No where does the NYT mention that the operating system for inBloom is being developed by the Amplify division (formerly Wireless Generation) of Rupert Murdoch’sNews Corp. This is a striking omission given that that the NYT is the paper of record in New York City where the CEO of Amplify/Wireless Generation, Joel Klein, recently served as schools chancellor. And this despite the fact that New York is one of only three states out of an original nine that, according to the article, “continues to pursue the service.”
In a brief phone conversation, Natasha Singer, the author of the article, explained that the aim of her story was to focus on “one small district in Colorado” and how technology and privacy concerns associated with inBloom play out in an area with much fewer resources than New York City. She also noted that, as is often the case, much was cut from her original story during the editing process.
inBloom itself seems eager to downplay News Corp./Wireless Generation’s involvement, in the venture, even though it was a key partner in the Shared Learning Collaborative, which gave rise to inBloom. (inBloom was launched earlier this year with $100 million in funding.) Although a March press release announced that Wireless Generation would be one of 24 software providers, the “partner” and “provider” tabs on the company’s website lists 21 providers, but NOT Wireless Generation or Amplify.
For New Yorkers, inBloom may seem like something of a son-of-Frankenstein B-movie sequel (non-New Yorkers will want to know why…) inBloom traces its roots to a technological lemon. Several years ago, IBM and Wireless Generation developed ARIS(Achievement Reporting and Innovation System), a portal for the New York City Department of Education, which was widely seen as a failure.
Then Cisco began building a rival prototype portal that the company offered to the NYCDOE and that many teachers and principals said was much more useful than ARIS; but the city killed the project in August of 2010. At the time, officials at the NYCDOE said that when work on the Cisco portal fell behind schedule, the education department pieced together an in-house version and took over the professional training that Cisco had been providing for schools that were part of the much ballyhooed innovation-zone (or izone) initiative. More recently, NYCDOE insiders have said that the department pulled the plug because of investments it had already made in ARIS, which came to total about $100 million.
The Murdoch connection, then and now
In 2011, The Daily News disclosed that Wireless Generation was poised to win a no-bid $27 million contract to build an ARIS-like portal for New York State as part of the requirements for the state’s Race-to-the-Top bid. Joel Klein had just left his post as schools chancellor to become CEO of Wireless Generation. (The company noted that it had been in talks with the state long before Klein officially departed the NYCDOE for News Corp. in November of 2010.)
Following the hacking scandal at News of the World, a News Corp.-owned British tabloid, New York State declined to approve the Wireless Generation contract.
But by then, the Gates Foundation had already announced plans to help fund and develop the data-collection platform that would become inBloom and that would have a Wireless Generation-developed operating system. At the time, Sharren Bates, the official who had “launch(ed)” and “led” NYCDOE’s ARIS, was working as a Senior Program Officer at the Gates Foundation. Earlier this year Bates became the chief product officer for inBloom.
Much of the NYT’s story focuses on the privacy concerns of both Coloradans and New Yorkers (including the indefatigable Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters, one of the leading crusaders for children’s privacy rights) about inBloom’s plans to store student information in the “cloud” (on Amazon’s cloud servers, it turns out, though this is not mentioned in the NYT) and to allow private companies access to that data.
These concerns include the fact that new laws no longer require states to obtain a parent’s permission before sharing information in a child’s records:
“Recent changes in the regulation of a federal education privacy law have also helped the industry. That law, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, required schools to obtain parental permission before sharing information in their children’s educational records. The updated rules permit schools to share student data, without notifying parents, with companies to which they have outsourced core functions like scheduling or data management.”
. . . .
And while information gleaned from individual students is supposed to provide the vital information need to develop and hone products, schools will pay dearly not only for the products that are made possible by inBloom, but for using the portal itself. As Leonie Haimson notes, starting in 2015, inBloom says it will charge states and districts between $2 and $5per student each year for storing data on the site.
Nor do technology companies need inBloom in order to innovate and “customize” software. As part of New York City’s technological push during the Klein years, the city purchased masses of software for online learning. As the largest urban education market, that presented a unique opportunity to examine, and customize products to, the needs of city kids. Yet, one of the major complaints about the NYCDOE portal and the education software available to New York City public schools was that most software developers did nothing—and the NYCDOE did not use its clout to force them—to tailor programs, which were originally designed for the home-school market, for the needs of inner-city kids.
Common sense suggests that states and school districts should be championing both the educational and privacy interests of their students—especially if they want to benefit from the technology synergies of products like inBloom. But that doesn’t seem to be happening—at least not without considerable public pressure—in part because of the close ties between government officials and industry.
Consider the strange case of Louisiana, where Joel Klein’s former NYCDOE deputy, John White, is the superintendent of schools. This article describes a remarkable string of email exchanges among White, Amplify/Wireless Generation, the Gates Foundation and New Schools for New Orleans, a leading charter-school gatekeeper. It shows how the close ties among state officials and the private sector led Louisiana to become one of the first to give inBloom access to all of its student’s data. Four months later, following widespread protests, Louisiana removed the kids’ information from the inBloom database.
Indeed, New York has a history of making hasty education decisions. It was one of the first states to push through a new “common core”-focused standardized test last spring. Theassessments were rushed through before teachers had any meaningful training in the new standards and before students had much exposure to them. The result was much anguish on the part of students, families and teachers; a huge drop in test scores without much apparent benefit; as well as an open rebellion by principals.
