When citizens in Maryland see the tag on public schools GREAT SCHOOLS-----they don't understand this tag is a corporation placed there by Wall Street Baltimore Development, Johns Hopkins, and the Baltimore School Board working for them. I call it the WHITE GUERRILLA GANG tag because it is simply the 1% Wall Street extreme wealth crowd literally STEALING OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS. They even went so far as to bind them to Wall Street bond debt just so this coming economic crash will send these school buildings and real estate to global private investment firms tied to national charter chains.
While Maryland Assembly is PRETENDING to be protecting Maryland public schools from charters and sending funding to create better environments and achievement in Maryland schools----it is not. Baltimore is worse because Bloomberg and Wall Street are using US cities deemed International Economic Zones as ground zero for this next fraud and privatization.
As I said, all of the establishment candidates for Mayor of Baltimore----and all the Wall Street Baltimore Development 'labor and justice' organizations working for Johns Hopkins always make sure to install pols MOVING THESE GLOBAL CORPORATE EDUCATION POLICIES FORWARD. We now have the top gun in doing this----CATHERINE PUGH -----in an election filled with fraud in order to continue with this global corporate education policy. McKesson----Bloomberg's right-hand man has been appointed HUMAN CAPITAL director in order to expand extreme wealth by enslaving people who are really CITIZENS.
As you see, GREAT SCHOOLS out of San Francisco is connected to the same area giving us the for-profit higher-education school fraud and all these global education corporations like PEARSON eminate from a very, very, very neo-conservative Stanford University-----
Snapshot
People
Company Overview
GreatSchools, Inc.
provides parents with information about k-12 schools and educational issues online for their children. It provides profiles of various public elementary, middle, and high schools; and charter schools, magnet schools, year-round schools, and continuation and alternative schools in the United States. The company also offers ratings, parent reviews, search and compare tools, and helpful advice. GreatSchools, Inc. was founded in 1998 and is based in San Francisco, California.
160 Spear Street
Suite 1020
San Francisco, CA 94105
United States
Founded in 1998
Phone:
415-977-0700
Fax:
415-977-0704
www.greatschools.org
Key Executives for GreatSchools, Inc.
Mr. Bill Jackson
Founder, Chief Executive Officer, President and Director
Mr. Matthew Nelson
Chief Operating Officer
Ms. Carol Lloyd
Executive Editor
Mr. Michael Schmier
Board Treasurer and Director
Mr. Anthony J. Colón
Board Secretary and Director
Compensation as of Fiscal Year 2016.
About GreatSchools
Our mission is to help millions of parents get a great education for their kids. GreatSchools.org is an independent nonprofit and the leading national source of school information for families.
Support GreatSchools in this effort! Donate Now!
Company
Media
Policies
Find the great schools in Maryland
The GreatSchools Rating
The GreatSchools Rating is a simple tool that helps you compare schools based on test scores and other available data, including student academic growth and college readiness. GreatSchools is always working to improve the rating and add more information when state education agencies make school quality data publically available.
GreatSchools Ratings in Your State
The GreatSchools Rating is on a 1-10 scale, where 10 is the highest and 1 is the lowest. Ratings are broken down into three categories: ratings 1-3 signal that the school is “below average,” 4-7 indicate “average,” and 8-10 are “above average.” Ratings for these categories are shown in red, yellow and green (respectively) to help you see the distinctions.
The foundation of the GreatSchools rating reflects how well students do on standardized tests compared to other students in the state, and ratings in most states are based exclusively on test scores. While test results give parents a good sense of how well students are performing at a given school, it only provides a limited snapshot of school quality. Therefore, in a growing number of states where data are available, the GreatSchools Rating includes additional information of student outcomes, such as information on how much students are learning in a given year and how prepared they are for college. The map below shows what data we include in the GreatSchools Rating by state — updated June 2015.
A Broader Picture of School Quality
As states make more data on school quality available, GreatSchools is committed to providing this information to parents and incorporating it into the GreatSchools Rating. Based on extensive research on what contributes to long-term success for students, we are currently focused on three measures of academic quality:
Calculating GreatSchools Ratings
In States with Only Data on Test Scores
In states where only student achievement is used to calculate ratings, the overall GreatSchools Rating is an average of how well students at a given school do on each grade and subject test. For each test, ratings are assigned based on how well students perform relative to all other students in the state, and these ratings are averaged into an overall rating of 1 to 10. The distribution of the GreatSchools Rating in a given state looks like a bell curve, with higher numbers of schools getting ratings in the “average” category, and fewer schools getting ratings in the “above average” or “below average” categories.
In States with Data on Multiple Student Outcomes
For states where ratings include student growth and college readiness information, the overall GreatSchools Rating is an average of how well students do on each sub-rating. Sub-ratings are weighted equally, though actual weights depend on the amount of data available per school and what grades that school serves. For instance, a K-5 school has no college readiness data, so the overall rating would be based 50% on student achievement and 50% on student growth. In contrast, the rating for a high school with data for all three measures would be based 33% on student achievement, 33% on student growth, and 33% on college readiness. Each sub-rating represents how a school compares to all other schools in the state on each measure, and these sub-ratings are averaged into an overall rating.
For more information on how GreatSchools calculates ratings, please see the GreatSchools Ratings Methodology Report.
Greater Data Transparency
At GreatSchools we believe that transparency builds trust. We believe that government education agencies have an obligation to make data on school quality available to parents and the public. Data transparency helps parents know how schools in their community are doing, where there is room for improvement, and what the best options are for their children. Of particular interest is information on student outcomes, such as student test scores, high school graduation rates, course completion rates, etc. Sharing school information — good and bad — also cultivates parent engagement and trust. Additionally, it's important that school data be made available in accessible, easy to use formats so that non-governmental organizations can use the information to inform parents and students about the quality of their local schools.
For more information on GreatSchools’ commitment to working with government education agencies to provide better information on student outcomes, please contact us.
_____________________________________
It is very frustrating having to listen to a discussion on education by two media groups working together towards global neo-liberal education privatization while sounding progressive or conservative when they are NEITHER----THEY ARE 1% GLOBAL WALL STREET.....Fox News and Media Matters---
Everyone in Baltimore knows the city's schools are bad because Baltimore spent these few decades channeling all Federal, state, and local funding for public schools ELSEWHERE----especially to grow Johns Hopkins globally and fuel corporate campus development. So, Baltimore public schools are bad---not because of students---not because of teachers----but because of extreme wealth and corporate power politics.
We already know school choice is bad---it is not used as it should be and for those using it for segregation by race and class----you will be the big losers soon if you continue being fooled. The riots and violence did not break out in our public schools----students wanted to join in PROTESTS which was absolutely NECESSARY. I wanted to share this article because MEDIA MATTERS---a Clinton neo-liberal outlet ---promotes the idea of Baltimore schools data showing achievement rising over several years when all research and education justice organizations have proved most of that data SKEWED AND FALSE. Baltimore was ranked extremely low in PARCC assessments of reading and math----and PARCC is Pearson----is GREAT SCHOOLS.
The point is this: we are already seeing these education testing and evaluation data figures being skewed to show success or failure as Wall Street and global corporations want them to.....THAT IS WHAT MARKETING POLICY DOES.....and Pearson/GREAT SCHOOLS is simply marketing. Meanwhile, it is GREAT SCHOOL's ratings of 'failed schools' allowing for massive closing of public schools----driven mostly by development and gentrification ---not by quality of life and education. Even well-performing public schools in Baltimore are now being shown 'inadequate' by these rating agencies.
THESE EDUCATION RATING INDUSTRIES WILL END UP LIKE MOODY'S AND STOCK ANALYSIS---where toxic subprime mortgage loans become AAA ratings======Great Schools/Moody's ----same thing.
LYING, CHEATING, STEALING BROUGHT TO OUR PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM COURTESY OF CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA
Fox News Figures Blame Baltimore's "Awful," "Worst Schools On Earth" For Riots
Blog ››› April 29, 2015 7:40 PM EDT ›››
Three Fox News figures touted "school choice" as an appropriate response to the recent riots in Baltimore, faulting the city's "awful" and "worst schools on earth" for the violence. But their allegations ignore evidence that Baltimore public school students have made significant achievement gains over the past several years.
OH, REALLY??????
Protests broke out in Baltimore over the weekend following the funeral of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who died on April 19 from a spinal cord injury he sustained while in police custody a week earlier. Peaceful protests that devolved into violence led Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake to impose a weeklong, citywide 10 p.m. curfew, and both the Baltimore Police Department and the U.S. Department of Justice are investigating Gray's death.
On Fox News, contributor Charles Krauthammer, frequent guest Rudy Giuliani, and host Gretchen Carlson touted "school choice" in separate discussions of the riots, insinuating that Baltimore public schools are to blame for the violence. On the April 28 edition of Special Report with Bret Baier, Krauthammer cited "the worst schools on Earth" as one of "two issues in the inner cities," concluding, "If you want to do something, let them choose their school."
On Fox & Friends on April 29, Rudy Giuliani echoed what he called Krauthammer's "brilliant" point and added that "the schools in Baltimore, like in most major cities, are awful." He went on to say that a mother who had been on the network "should have a choice of what school her son goes to."
Gretchen Carlson devoted her "My Take" segment on the April 29 edition of The Real Story to a push for school choice, citing an editorial by conservative journalist Terence Jeffrey that claimed Baltimore students have scored below the national average on math and reading tests. Carlson said the low scores are, "probably not for lack of spending" by the city and asked, "What might happen to these inner city kids if they actually had better schools and maybe even school choice?"
But these allegations ignore hard evidence that Baltimore schools are improving. According to the Baltimore City Schools website, over the past several years students have made significant gains in subjects like math and reading and graduation rates have improved. Some of the district's "student achievement" highlights include:
The spurious claims about Baltimore schools by Fox News figures seeking to promote school choice come as little surprise given conservative media's pattern of demonizing various aspects of public education, including the declaration by a Fox host earlier this year that "there really shouldn't be public schools." Such false narratives are unfortunately to be expected when the media so rarely turns to actual experts when covering education.
_______________________________________________
We have spoken about the built-in discrimination in PARCC tests towards low-income and immigrant students. We know they are often not prepared to take tests----learning skills are weak and will be weak for students coming from poverty and instability environments---WE HAVE KNOWN THIS IS WHERE EDUCATION POLICY NEEDS STRENGTH WHILE PARCC TOTALLY IGNORES THIS----and that is the reason working class and poor students score lower than others. Asian students in the US often come from that Asian global corporate neo-liberal school environment where everything is tested----and Asian students are mostly English-speaking whereas Latino and other immigrants are not. So, these testing disparities are already known----they are no fault of the students---yet these PARCC scores will track them into vocational pathways towards extreme poverty. This is to where a 10% of US children will be determined advanced placement or exceptional and allowed benefit of an education leading to white collar employment vs those 90% pushed into corporate campus factory schools leading to being apprenticed at 6th grade. White collar students will only track to 9th grade before being apprenticed.
Wall Street Baltimore Development will use these PARCC scores to move what are a majority of working class/poor/immigrant students out of city center to make room temporarily for a middle-class then replaced by the rich. So, those middle-class in Baltimore City center thinking this is about segregation by race and class need to WAKE UP----because your children and grandchildren WILL fall into the lower-tier as extreme wealth takes city center.
As I said, ALREADY we see PARCC being used as a tool for wealth and profit---not as a REAL educational assessment tool and most teachers understand this. They understand it is bad for children----and that is why they are protesting all over the US. It is bad for them as employees as well----as PARCC will never be rid of bias in schools being allowed to CHOOSE BEST STUDENTS vs those taking both vs those warehousing the lowest achievers. Right now, the goal with HUMAN CAPITAL DEPARTMENTS for corporate school boards is to eliminate REAL professionally trained teachers with temporary adjunct staff, then moving to online education techs simply moderating online lessons----and finally the cheapest vehicle until global corporate campuses and global sweat shop factories are installed-----online home schooling where Baltimore City Board of Education pays nothing for staff----parents do the work.
THIS IS THE HUMAN CAPITAL GOAL OF GLOBAL NEO-LIBERAL RACE TO THE TOP IN BALTIMORE AND YES----THIS IS WHAT MCKESSON IS BEING INSTALLED TO DO----who is hurt most in Baltimore with these policies---teachers of color----
RACE TO THE TOP IS THE OPPOSITE OF BLACK LIVES MATTER------
'For instance, while 65 percent of Asian students passed the English test, only 23 percent of African-American students did. In addition, only 13 percent of economically disadvantaged students, and 5 percent of students who are learning English as a second language, passed'.
Less than half of students in Maryland pass PARCC
Liz BowieContact Reporter
First PARCC test results for elementary poorLess than half of Maryland elementary and middle school students passed the state's tough new standardized tests, a result school officials attribute to a major revision of teaching and testing standards.
Just 39 percent of Maryland students in grades three through eight met the reading standard set by a governing board of educators from Maryland and about 10 other states. Only 29 percent met the standard in math.
School system leaders across the Baltimore area said they believe the scores will increase quickly in coming years, as teachers and students adjust to the new test and Common Core standards put into effect by most schools three years ago. The new test is called the Partnership for Assessments of Career and College Readiness, or PARCC.
"We have set the bar high, and this data reflects that," interim State Schools Superintendent Jack Smith said in a written statement.
Smith said parents should not be too concerned if their children have not scored well on this first test, which is considered a baseline. The test, he said, is snapshot of how their child did on one test.
2015 Maryland PARCC scores: Grades 3 through 8
"I have five children, and I do not equate them to their test score," he said. At the same time, Smith said, he was dismayed at the continued disparities in achievement.
For instance, while 65 percent of Asian students passed the English test, only 23 percent of African-American students did. In addition, only 13 percent of economically disadvantaged students, and 5 percent of students who are learning English as a second language, passed.
The new Common Core standards require students to do more analytical thinking, writing and complex reading. The tests are scored on a five-point scale. Scores of four and five indicate that the student has met or exceeded expectations. A three is approaching expectations. Smith will ask the state school board to designate a four and five as passing scores in alignment with the national standard set by the governing board. A vote by the board is expected in January.
The results were not as good as for school districts in Massachusetts and New Jersey, but slightly better than those in Illinois, Louisiana and Rhode Island. Not all of the states that gave the test have released all of their data yet. Some education advocates found the local results disheartening.
"Maryland's 13 percent math pass rate for African-American students and for students from low-income families shows how many children are being left behind," said Bebe Verdery, Maryland education director for the ACLU. She said additional resources and experienced teachers will be needed.
MarylandCAN executive director Jason Botel, said he supported giving students a much tougher assessment, but he said the results make the disparities look "even more staggering," particularly in the city schools.
"The structure of city schools might need to be different, might need to change," he said. "I think these results show how aggressive we need to be in terms of doing things differently."
Even in school districts such as Howard County, where students have generally done well, less than half of students passed math. Baltimore City scores were the lowest in the region. CEO Gregory Thornton said the results "overall are concerning."
In the city, Anne Arundel, and some other counties, educators were pleased that third grade scores were among the highest of any grade. Those students, they said, have been given the Common Core curriculum since first grade.
Harford County had some of the best results. It ranked first or second in reading among school systems in the state; its students scored higher than they did on the old assestment tests. County officials attributed this to a strong curriculum and better teacher preparation.
"We put our teachers and students up against any in the state," said Susan Brown, executive director of curriculum and assessment in Harford.
Carroll County students had significantly higher pass rates on math than the other suburban Baltimore counties. Baltimore County schools had higher scores than the city, but lower than the other suburban counties, particularly in math. For instance, less than 14 percent of sixth-grade students in the county and less than 28 percent of fourth-grade students passed math. In reading, less than 50 percent of students passed. In Baltimore City, in all grades less than 20 percent of students could meet the expectations. In math, that dropped in some grades to 10 percent.
Baltimore County Superintendent Dallas Dance said he expects scores to increase by the 2016-2017 school year as teachers grow more comfortable with the new curriculum.
"If you talk with teachers ... they are feeling more confident with it now," Dance said.
Dance blamed the low pass rates, in part, on the fact that when he arrived three and a half years ago, the school system had not yet aligned its cirriculum with the Common Core curriculum, a step most school systems had taken. Dance then hired and fired a company to do the rewrite, setting the county even further behind. Dance said he will analyze the math data and make any needed curriculum changes.
Dance also attributed the low scores to leadership changes across the state in the past several years. There have been three state superintendents — two interim — in the past five years, and nearly every school district in the Baltimore region has a new superintendent.
Despite the overall poor results, schools in the state that were predictably high performers continued to show better results, indicating that students' socioeconomic backgrounds infuence test results. The new test provides a finer-grained look at individual school achievement. A smattering of schools in Anne Arundel, Baltimore, and Howard counties had grades in which more than 75 percent or 80 percent of students scored a 4 or higher. For instance, Severna Park Elementary, located in a high-income area, had 85 percent of its third-graders and 92 of its fifth-graders passing the reading test. At Shipley's Choice in Anne Arundel, 94 percent of third-graders passed.
In Baltimore County, Summit Park, Franklin and Timonium elementaries had high pass rates. In Baltimore City, elementary and middle schools including Hampstead Hill, Hampden, Mount Royal, Mount Washington, Tunbridge and Thomas Johnson continued to be high performers.
Schools that did poorly — and there were many — had less than 10 percent of their students passing. In addition, they sometimes had large numbers of students failing with a 1, the lowest score. In the city, 52 percent of students got a 1 in eighth-grade math. Such low scores indicate that the majority of students will have to make large gains in achievement before they are able to pass the test.
_____________________________________
You can see why Wall Street and CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA pols were desperate to paint MCKESSON as a Black Lives Matters leader when he is not----and as we see media MUST put that civil rights in front of McKesson's name because all of what is being done with Race to the Top/Common Core/and PARCC testing and evaluation VIOLATES CIVIL RIGHTS FOR EVERYONE IN ALL WAYS.
From student and parent having no voice especially in vocational tracking of the child----to teachers being busted to the lowest wage and breaking of professional status for teachers----to communities being forced to take this because there are no other school choices.
ALL OF THIS VIOLATES EVERY US CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT REGARDING EQUAL OPPORTUNITY, ACCESS, LABOR RIGHTS, CIVIL RIGHTS, RIGHTS OF DISABLED-----
This is why media must keep saying OVER AND OVER DeRay is a civil rights/black lives matter leader.
Maryland suspended the use of PARCC data for testing and evaluation because of mass protest against these tools but we knew Maryland and especially Baltimore would reinstate them and MOVE FORWARD no matter how much data shows these tools to be inaccurate and useless for goal stated. Wall Street doesn't care if it meets the goals stated----their goals are completely different. So, Baltimore teachers already under attack in the march to get rid of public union professionally trained educator to bring in TEACH FOR AMERICA and VISTA temporary employment ---will now see THE HUMAN CAPITAL DEPARTMENT find more ways to install Bloomberg's corporate instruction with McKesson spouting all the talking points to get there----IT'S ALL ABOUT THE POOR CHILDREN they always say.
This is simply a continuation from Bloomberg's assignment of Alonzo----Sonia is from Alonzo's staff---and as we see McKesson is from the same. Meanwhile everyone in Baltimore is shouting to get rid of Baltimore's School Board pushing all these policies.
Bloomberg has the same hold on Chicago with Rahm Emanuel but Chicago has a powerful REAL labor and justice activism doing a good job fighting all this-----and Bloomberg sending out people like Alonzo, Sonja, and McKesson to Chicago installing this same global Wall Street corporate education policy.
Civil rights activist DeRay Mckesson to join new city schools cabinet
Civil rights activist and former Baltimore mayoral candidate DeRay Mckesson was named Interim Chief Human Capital Officer by incoming schools CEO Sonja Santelises. (Emma Patti Harris/Baltimore Sun video)
Erica L. Green and Luke BroadwaterContact ReportersThe Baltimore Sun
DeRay Mckesson: "I am excited to return to city schools."Civil rights activist and former Baltimore mayoral candidate DeRay Mckesson will return to his old stamping grounds at city school headquarters to lead the district's office of human capital.
Mckesson was named interim chief human capital officer on Tuesday by incoming schools CEO Sonja Santelises. It was the second and most high-profile cabinet appointment made by the new chief, who begins her tenure Friday.
Santelises said Mckesson, who spent about two and a half years overseeing key reforms as a strategist and special assistant in the human capital office, would lead the office at least through the fall.
"He has the depth of knowledge of the system, and he has proved that he can lift the work in a short amount of time," Santelises said in an interview. "And he has proven his dedication to the children of Baltimore."
Mckesson called Santelises a "gifted leader" and said he was proud to join her team.
"At its core, this role is about finding great people, matching them to the right role, and helping them to develop and experience careers in the service of our kids," Mckesson said. "I am excited to return to city schools … and to continue doing the work to ensure that every child in Baltimore City receives a world-class education."
DeRay Mckesson finishes 6th in Democratic primary for Baltimore mayor The 30-year-old Baltimore native and Black Lives Matter activist is fresh from an unexpected run for mayor of Baltimore. He finished sixth in the Democratic primary.
Mckesson catapulted onto the national media stage nearly two years ago when he took a leave of absence from his job as senior director of human capital in the Minneapolis Public Schools system to protest the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.
Mckesson founded and leads We the Protesters, a group that advocates policy changes against police violence.
Mckesson, who will earn a salary of $165,000, will be the district's third chief of human capital in two years, and manage of a budget of $4 million and 56 employees.
A famous activist, mayoral candidate DeRay Mckesson tries to win over Baltimore In a release, school officials said they would conduct a nationwide search for a new chief of human capital. The current interim head of the department, Deborah Sullivan, will return to her former position as executive director of organizational development.
He is the second cabinet appointment for Santelises. In May, she announced that Alison Perkins-Cohen, currently an executive director of new initiatives, will serve as her chief of staff and earn a salary of $178,500.
McKesson returns to the district as Santelises' new administration prepares to open schools in August, a task that Santelises said was both challenging and crucial.
"We have no time to waste. Every day in class is precious for our students, and every school must be ready to go when the opening bell rings," she said in a statement. "Mr. Mckesson has the hand-on experience, leadership skills, and energy to help us make that happen."
The office of human capital has a history of failing to fully staff schools, process paperwork and produce reliable data. Schools opened last year without enough teachers and principals. Hundreds of teachers and school staff also did not receive their first few paychecks on time.
As special assistant to the director of human capital, Mckesson advised the district's top officials and helped manage the department's budget and day-to-day operations. As a strategist, he was instrumental in implementing the a pay-for-performance contract, building systems that linked evaluation data to compensation.
In Minneapolis, Mckesson helped restructure the district office, change the human capital office's recruitment and teacher selection process, and build professional development and orientation programs for new teachers. He served in that role for 15 months.
Mckesson was a surprise entrant this year in the Democratic primary for mayor — he filed his candidacy on the day of the Feb. 3 deadline — and struggled to catch up to opponents who had been running for months.
With nearly 420,000 Twitter followers and appearances on nationally televised late-night talk shows, Mckesson quickly gained thousands of small contributions from around the country — dwarfing the number of contributions from any other campaign. He received checks from people in every state and the District of Columbia, and from famous names such as actress Susan Sarandon, who endorsed him on Twitter.
He won praise from President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who dubbed Mckesson a "social media emperor."
But Mckesson found it difficult to win over Baltimore primary voters, some of whom said they viewed him as an outsider. He finished sixth in a crowded field won by state Sen. Catherine E. Pugh. He garnered more than 3,400 votes, or about 2.6 percent of the total.
Mckesson's tenure as a sixth-grade teacher through Teach for America drew skeptics during his campaign, requiring him to address charges that he was a champion of privatizing education.
He dedicated a portion of his campaign website to debunk claims that he's a puppet of the "Illuminati, George Soros, or Teach for America."
He called for expanding full-day pre-K to enroll all low-income 3- and 4-year-olds, the public release of all internal audits of the city school system, and reforming state funding formulas to prevent tax deals for developers from hurting school funding.
He also said he wanted to "radically transform" Baltimore's community college, create a fund for occupational skills training and fully incorporate arts education into all schools.
Baltimore writer D. Watkins, who observed Mckesson's mayoral run, said he was proud to see a fellow high-profile activist stay in the community. He said he understands some of the backlash Mckesson received from other activists who criticized him as an outsider.
"It's difficult," he said. "If you leave Baltimore, you're a sell-out, you're a phony. And if you stay, nobody's really willing to invest in you."
He called Mckesson "sharp and intelligent," and that the city needed people like him working in institutions like the school system just as much as it needs protesters to hold such institutions accountable.
"Anybody who's young and black and doing something positive, I support them 100 percent," Watkins said. "Hopefully, the whole activist community and the people who do positive work, we can all unite."
__________________________________________
This is where PEARSON/PARCC global education policies need to take us K-12 and it needs complete deregulation ----elimination of all equal protection and citizen rights----to become hyper-competitive for-profit driven designed to take parents for every bit of money they can bring home from their $20-30 a day job.
What PARCC will do in Baltimore is move all those low-income students out of city center schools to make way for middle-upper middle students. So, students will move from private schools around Baltimore to Margaret Brent or Barclay for example while the immigrant and low-income students not able to perform well on PARCC are pushed out to national charter chain schools. We know already many of these national chains are full of fraud ----so it will become the same as for-profit higher education colleges where students get no education quality and all those public school funds are misappropriated to profit.
I want to shout out to middle-class families waiting to take those city center schools-----this is the coming stage for global corporate neo-liberal education----and your disposable income is where Wall Street's eyes are now. Many of what are non-profit after-school programs will become FOR-PROFIT and the competition to get into a best school as more and more schools close will have parents paying to send their children to all kinds of after-school----for-profit tutoring----constant test-prep-----
ALL FOR NO REASON OTHER THAN US CITIZENS ARE ALLOWING THE BEST IN THE WORLD PUBLIC EDUCATION SYSTEM BE DISMANTLED BY WALL STREET PLAYERS.
Simply rebuilding public schools in each community----assuring all Federal, state, and local funding gets to each school----allowing students to achieve to the best of their ability ----brings the US back to being the best in the world in education achievement.
South Korea's schools: Long days, high results
By Reeta Chakrabarti Education correspondent, BBC News
Media caption
Hye-Min Park explains why she studies from 8am to 11pm each day
The results of the international school tests - known as Pisa tests - are to be published by the OECD on Tuesday. In previous years, South Korea has been one of the highest achievers. But it means long hours of study.
Hye-Min Park is 16 and lives in the affluent Seoul district of Gangnam, made famous by the pop star Psy. Her day is typical of that of the majority of South Korean teenagers.
She rises at 6.30am, is at school by 8am, finishes at 4pm, (or 5pm if she has a club), then pops back home to eat.
She then takes a bus to her second school shift of the day, at a private crammer or hagwon, where she has lessons from 6pm until 9pm.
She spends another two hours in what she calls self-study back at school, before arriving home after 11pm. She goes to bed at 2am, and rises in the morning at 6.30am to do it all over again.
How on earth does she cope with such a punishing schedule?
"I get tired usually but I can forget about my hardships when I see my results, because they're kind of good!"
She says she would like to get more sleep but it's her job to overcome it. To get the qualifications to follow her dream career as a teacher she has to work hard she says, and besides she likes studying, and learning new things.
Extra tuition
Hye-Min is not alone. For South Korean teenagers a double shift of school, every week day, is just a way of life.
Parents in Seoul pray for their children and grandchildren taking exams South Korean parents spend thousands of pounds a year on after-school tuition, not a private tutor coming to the home once or twice a week, but private schooling on an industrial scale.
There are just under 100,000 hagwons in South Korea and around three-quarters of children attend them.
Hye-Min's mother Yoon-Gyeong Hwang says she worries about her daughter, but they have no choice when it comes to having to compete.
"Korea has few natural resources, we don't even have much land, the only resource we have is people. So anyone who wants to be successful really has to stand out. As a mother I don't feel comfortable about this kind of situation, but it's the only thing she can do to achieve her dream."
This relentless focus on education has resulted in formidable exam performers.
Snap test
How would they compare with pupils who take the GCSE in England, Wales and Northern Ireland?
The anxious moments before a college entrance exam in Seoul As a quick test, a group of six teenagers - 15 and 16 year olds - from Ga-rak High School, Hye-Min's school, tried several questions from one of this year's GCSE maths papers.
All of them finished the questions in half the expected time, four scored 100%, the other two dropped just one mark. They then went on to do some more questions just for fun.
It's the sort of performance that makes education ministers in the UK and beyond look on with envy, and has them actively remodelling the curriculum and exams to try to emulate them.
The huge investment in education has also resulted in an economy that's grown at an astonishing rate since the end of the war with North Korea 60 years ago.
South Korea has in two generations gone from mass illiteracy to being an economic powerhouse. Brands like Samsung and Hyundai, Daewoo and LG are internationally known. The country has built itself up through the sheer hard graft of its people.
But it's come at a big cost. The relentless pressure means Korea holds another much less enviable record, that of having the highest suicide rate of industrialised OECD countries.
We still have a long way to go but we are doing some soul-searching in our society, and our goals now are about how to make our people happier
Nam Soo Suh, South Korean education minister
The most common form of death for the under-40s is suicide. The government understands the pressure, and in 2008 a curfew of 10pm was imposed on hagwons in Seoul. The Education Minister Nam Soo Suh said the government was trying to redress the balance:
"Korea has achieved miraculous growth within a short period of time. I think no other country has achieved such rapid growth within a half century as Korea. And naturally, due to that, we focused on and emphasised achievement within schools and in society, so that students and adults were under a lot of stress, and that led to high suicide rates.
"We still have a long way to go but we are doing some soul-searching in our society, and our goals now are about how to make our people happier."
Prof JuHo Lee, himself a former education minister, and now an academic at the KDI think-tank in Seoul, says intensive education may have been right while Korea was growing its economy, but now it's time for a new strategy.
"Test scores may be important in the age of industrialisation, but not anymore. So we look into the ways to reform our education system, not based on test scores, but based on creativity and social and emotional capacities," says Prof Lee.
South Korea's success is built on an extraordinary work ethic that has delivered rich economic rewards, but that's exacted a heavy price from its people and particularly its children.
It's a price the country is now gradually starting to weigh up.
_________________________________________
No matter how many times Wall Street global corporate pols tell us our education data is being protected----that it is only being shared in mega-data supposedly with no personal identifiers ----THOSE ARE THE SAME LYING, CHEATING, AND STEALING talking points from the Wall Street global corporate pols.
OF COURSE THEY ARE GOING TO PROFIT FROM ALL THAT DATA COLLECTION!
This is what GREAT SCHOOLS and PEARSON are in business to do ----market and profit from education. Add a dash of data-skewing to make bad education policy look like it's working----and VOILA---the modus operandus for global corporate education corporations totally unnecessary in providing quality public education.
'FYI: The DOE has no authority to levy fines on companies that violate FERPA. It can withhold federal funding from the district, but that’s considered such a drastic step, it’s never once been taken'.
'THE U.S. Department of Education ANSWERS questions about student privacy.
Are student files private? The answer is no because of the Loopholes! The "educational record" isn't the same as "metadata". Meta data is whatever the kid is doing online.
Schools can disclose “directory information” without parental consent, including a child’s name, address, phone number, birth date, awards received and student ID number. Schools must notify parents once a year of the general categories of information that might be released and give them a chance to opt out. And finally, the third big exception: Schools can also release student records, without written consent, to other “school officials with a legitimate educational interest.”
In 2008, the Education Department expanded the definition of “school officials” to include for-profit companies. Student information that has been properly de-identified or that is shared under the “directory information” exception, is not protected by FERPA, and thus is not subject to FERPA’s use and re-disclosure limitations'.
PRIVACY INFORMATION
Student Privacy Bill:
No Parental Consent Needed for Data Mining
The big biz of spying on little kids
SELLING STUDENT INFORMATION and THEY DO NOT protect their rights to privacy !!2015 State Legislative Session:
Education Data Privacy Laws and Bills
Will FCC, FTC, care that GOOGLE continues to break its student privacy pledge per EFF
Internet Companies: Confusing Consumers for Profit Google’s Apps for Education contracts with schools suffer from gaping student privacy protection loopholes. School Administrators signed a contract that does NOT protect their students from data collection for the ultimate purposes of monetization as Google represents. Student Privacy Pledge requires Google to not collect and use student information for profit. However, most people don’t know that Google’s Apps for Education’s contracts only agree to not advertise to students on Google’s “core” education products like Gmail, Docs, Drive, etc., but the contracts exclude many Google student-popular products like YouTube, Maps, Android, Play, Google+, Chrome, etc. that students clearly could need or demand in their Google Apps for Education experience. This is a classic case of deceptive exceptions becoming the real rule.
2014 The big biz of spying on little kids
Intimate information about school children is in the hands of private companies — where it is highly vulnerable to being shared, sold or mined for profit.
The amount of data being collected is staggering. Ed tech companies of all sizes, from basement startups to global conglomerates, have jumped into the game. The most adept are scooping up as many as 10 million unique data points on each child, each day. That’s orders of magnitude more data than Netflix or Facebook or even Google collect on their users. Both Republicans and Democrats have embraced the practice. And the Obama administration has encouraged it, even relaxing federal privacy law to allow school districts to share student data more widely. A report by McKinsey & Co. last year found that expanding the use of data in K-12 schools and colleges could drive at least $300 billion a year in added economic growth in the U.S. by improving instruction and making education more efficient.
“When students become patients, privacy suffers” FERPA University students have less privacy for their campus health records than they would have if they sought care off campus. Schools say they are trying to seek the right balance between privacy and safety.
NATIONAL EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY PLAN
Student Data Privacy Bill won't protect children.
Privacy advocates, have expressed concerns that the pledge contains too many loopholes to be useful. Among their objections: The pledge doesn’t require companies to get parental consent – or even to give parents advance notice – before collecting intimate information on their children’s academic progress and learning styles. It also explicitly allows companies to build personal profiles of children to help them develop or improve ed-tech products. They can’t sell those profiles, but some parents are uncomfortable with any use of student data for commercial gain. A refresher on the pledge: http://politico.pro/192EYsW”
Teachers and School Districts MUST follow the law and protect children's privacy!!!privacy
rating system
Teachers often click “yes” that they agree with the privacy policy, but download apps for students without reading what the app developer actually does with student data. Common Sense Media APP is a rating system for educational apps has the potential to fill in a student data privacy gap between what school districts can control and what teachers can download. The Graphite platform includes ratings for more than 2,000 apps, games and websites. Then educators can check the rating before they download an app for students. This rubric allows app developers to evaluate how their apps measure up in five categories, including privacy, security, safety and social media, advertising and consumerism, and legal compliance with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. For example, the privacy category covers topics including whether they collect personally identifiable information or share it with third parties.
K12 Education SPYS
High-Stakes Testing Requires High Levels of Surveillance. Pearson & (SBAC) High Stakes Testing Makes Surveillance Necessary
Anthony Cody:Testing corporations are expecting teachers and administrators to help them spy on students’ social media. Apparently Pearson (and not Pearson alone) has a means of monitoring millions of students’ postings on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere, using key words as alerts. Pearson was also featured as a “case study” by one of the services they use, a company called TRACX.
2/26/15 PTAC Protecting Student Privacy While Using Online Educational Services: Model Terms of Service - 855-249-3072 PrivacyTA@ed.gov
Personal profiles of children can be sold as a product to the highest bidder on the open market. 5/14/14 The Education Department has been a major proponent of big data. It has used policy and financial incentives, including more than $500 million in direct grants, to prod states to build longitudinal databases that will track students’ progress from pre-K through high school and in some cases, into college and the workforce. States will mine the data to spot patterns; they might, for instance, be able to identify behaviors in 6-year-olds that indicate the child has an elevated risk of dropping out of high school a decade later. The department has also relaxed privacy rules to make it easier for school districts to share student records with state and federal officials, as well as with private companies, without parental consent. Privacy advocates sued to block some of those changes, but lost in court.
FYI: The DOE has no authority to levy fines on companies that violate FERPA. It can withhold federal funding from the district, but that’s considered such a drastic step, it’s never once been taken.
Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment, or PPRA, schools must obtain parental consent before requiring students to fill out surveys that ask about sensitive issues such as political affiliation, income or sexual behavior.
“Our objective is to produce succinct yet informative summaries that can be included in browser plug-ins or interactively conveyed to users by privacy assistants that inform users about salient privacy practices,” said Norman Sadeh, the lead principal investigator of the study. The results currently presented on this site were obtained using annotations crowdsourced from law students.
Why Privacy Matters Glenn Greenwald was one of the first reporters to see — and write about — the Edward Snowden files, with their revelations about the United States' extensive surveillance of private citizens. In this searing talk, Greenwald makes the case for why you need to care about privacy, even if you’re “not doing anything you need to hide."
THE U.S. Department of Education ANSWERS questions about student privacy.
Are student files private? The answer is no because of the Loopholes! The "educational record" isn't the same as "metadata". Meta data is whatever the kid is doing online.
Schools can disclose “directory information” without parental consent, including a child’s name, address, phone number, birth date, awards received and student ID number. Schools must notify parents once a year of the general categories of information that might be released and give them a chance to opt out. And finally, the third big exception: Schools can also release student records, without written consent, to other “school officials with a legitimate educational interest.”
In 2008, the Education Department expanded the definition of “school officials” to include for-profit companies. Student information that has been properly de-identified or that is shared under the “directory information” exception, is not protected by FERPA, and thus is not subject to FERPA’s use and re-disclosure limitations.
Privacy and Encryption companies gather and sell K12 student information.Check to see whether your school district has a policy about disclosing student information.School Districts and Companies are Data mining your children
Doug Levin, Executive Director
of the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA), the principal membership association representing U.S. state and territorial educational technology leaders.
202-715-6636 x700No one is protecting student privacy.
5/15/14 POLITICO examination of hundreds of pages of privacy policies, terms of service and district contracts — as well as interviews with dozens of industry and legal experts — finds gaping holes in the protection of children’s privacy. Students are tracked as they play games, watch videos, read books and take quizzes. The data revolution has also put heaps of intimate information about school children in the hands of private companies where it is highly vulnerable to being shared, sold or mined for profit. The most adept are scooping up as many as 10 million unique data points on each child, each day. That’s orders of magnitude more data than Netflix or Facebook or even Google collect on their users.
Ed tech insiders will not name bad actors in their industry. But they will say this: It’s quite possible to exploit student data.Web sites receive huge amounts of student information directly from schools or districts. They hand over children's data because they wrongfully assume it would be aggregated and anonymized even though the contracts makes no mention of that or they don't realize just how much date is actually turned over.
The data management site
A report by McKinsey & Co. last year found that expanding the use of data in K-12 schools and colleges could drive at least $300 billion a year in added economic growth in the U.S. by improving instruction and making education more efficient.
The NSA has nothing on the ed tech startup known as Knewton. The data analytics firm has peered into the brains of more than 4 million students across the country. By monitoring every mouse click, every keystroke, every split-second hesitation as children work through digital textbooks, Knewton is able to find out not just what individual kids know, but how they think. Private-sector data mining has galloped forward — perhaps nowhere faster than in education. Both Republicans and Democrats have embraced the practice. And the Obama administration has encouraged it, even relaxing federal privacy law to allow school districts to share student data more widely.
Parents AND School administrators are often in the dark, too. They don’t know which digital tools individual teachers are using in the classroom. And when they try to ask pointed questions of the ed tech companies they work with directly, they don’t always get clear answers. LOOPHOLE
LOOPHOLES IN AN OLD LAW
The U.S. Department of Education has called safeguarding children’s privacy a priority. “That has to be first, that has to be foremost, that’s absolutely paramount,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a recent video chat posted by the department. Yet the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, written when the floppy disk was just coming into vogue, offers only limited protections. The 1974 law, known as FERPA, explicitly gives school districts the right to share students’ personal information with private companies to further educational goals. Companies are supposed to keep standardized test scores, disciplinary history and other official student records confidential — and not use it for their own purposes. But the law did not anticipate the explosion in online learning. Students shed streams of data about their academic progress, work habits, learning styles and personal interests as they navigate educational websites. All that data has potential commercial value: It could be used to target ads to the kids and their families, or to build profiles on them that might be of interest to employers, military recruiters or college admissions officers. The law is silent on who owns that data. But Kathleen Styles, the Education Department’s chief privacy officer, acknowledged in an interview that much of it is likely not protected by FERPA — and thus can be commercialized by the companies that hold it.
10/1/14 ComputerCop dangerous internet safety software given away by hundreds of police agencies, does NOT protect your child online. ComputerCOP is actually just spyware, generally bought in bulk from a New York company that appears to do nothing but market this software to local government agencies. The way ComputerCOP works is neither safe nor secure. It isn’t particularly effective either, except for generating positive PR for the law enforcement agencies distributing it. As security software goes, we observed a product with a keystroke-capturing function, also called a “keylogger,” that could place a family’s personal information at extreme risk by transmitting what a user types over the Internet to third-party servers without encryption. That means many versions of ComputerCOP leave children (and their parents, guests, friends, and anyone using the affected computer) exposed to the same predators, identity thieves, and bullies that police claim the software protects against. Furthermore, by providing a free keylogging program—especially one that operates without even the most basic security safeguards—law enforcement agencies are passing around what amounts to a spying tool that could easily be abused by people who want to snoop on spouses, roommates, or co-workers.
Online privacy regulations for kids take effect 7/1/13
The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) of 1998 restricts websites from knowingly collecting personal information from children younger than 13 years of age. The FTC voted last year to expand the regulations to cover games, apps and ad networks. The new rules also expand the definition of personal information to cover photos, videos, audio recordings and location data. The rules apply to sites and apps directed at children, such as a Disney princess website, as well as sites where children disclose their age, such as Facebook.
Digital Literacy and Citizenship Classroom Curriculum by commonsensemedia.org
The U.S. DOESN'T have a Privacy Commissioner and the U.S. Department of Education remains disturbingly placid about all the breaches in the education sector.
If you thought that the NSA wanted too much personal information, just wait a few months. The EFF is reporting that the FBI's new facial recognition database, containing data for almost a third of the US population, will be ready to launch this summer. Codenamed NGI, the system combines the bureau's 100 million-strong fingerprint database with palm prints, iris scans and mugshots. Naturally, this has alarmed privacy advocates, since it's not just felons whose images are added, but anyone who has supplied a photo ID for a government job or background check. According to the EFF's documents, the system will be capable of adding 55,000 images per day, and could have the facial data for anything up to 52 million people by next year. Let's just hope that no-one tells the Feds about Facebook, or we're all in serious trouble.
2013 Supreme Court says Police can collect your DNA, from anyone arrested and without a search warrant. the FBI's Combined DNA Index System or CODIS - a coordinated system of federal, state and local databases of DNA profiles - already contains more than 10 million criminal profiles and 1.1 million profiles of those arrested. U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the court's opinion: "When officers make an arrest supported by probable cause to hold for a serious offense and bring the suspect to the station to be detained in custody, taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee’s DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment."
U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, along with associate justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Stephen Breyer went along with the ruling; while associate justices Antonin Scalia, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and and Elena Kagen dissented. Make no mistake anyone arrested for any reason will lose their privacy. The gov't is building the national database with your DNA.
DoDDS - EU breach
A previously reported breach that affected students at the Ramstein Intermediate School also affected students and sponsors at three other schools under the U.S. Department of Defense Education Activity– Europe (DoDDS-Europe). Until now, I didn’t know which other schools were involved, until a small item on Military.com provided their names.
Stars and Stripes: Jennifer H. Svan reports: The theft of five thumb drives from an unlocked vehicle may have compromised the personal information of hundreds of pupils, their parents and staff members at a Defense Department school in Germany, school officials said Wednesday. Parents of more than 900 students at Ramstein Intermediate School were notified of the possible data breach Tuesday night, more than three weeks after the information disappeared. The thumb drives were stolen overnight Oct. 26 from the unlocked vehicle of an American living in Landstuhl, according to German police. The data sticks belonged to an intermediate school employee, said Department of Defense Dependents Schools-Europe spokesman Bob Purtiman. [...]
Purtiman said officials were trying to determine whether the data on the thumb drives was protected by encryption, and whether the devices were personal or government-owned.
One may contact us with questions and concerns by sending an e-mail to Privacy.Office@eu.dodea.edu or addressing a letter to our APO address:
DoDDS-Europe
ATTN: Privacy Officer
Unit 29649, Box 7000
APO, AE 09002
The U.S. Department of Education established the Privacy Technical Assistance Center (PTAC) as a “one-stop” resource for education stakeholders to learn about data privacy, confidentiality, and security practices related to student-level longitudinal data systems.
The mission of the Family Policy Compliance Office (FPCO) is to meet the needs of the Department's primary customers--learners of all ages--by effectively implementing two laws that seek to ensure student and parental rights in education: the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA).
Parents and eligible students who need assistance or who wish to file a complaint under FERPA or PPRA should do so in writing to the Family Policy Compliance Office, sending pertinent information through the mail, concerning any allegations to the following address:
Family Policy Compliance Office
U.S. Department of Education
400 Maryland Avenue, SW
Washington, D.C. 20202-5920
Phone: 1-800-USA-LEARN (1-800-872-5327)
Final FERPA regulatory changes Published in Federal Register on December 2, 2011 Effective January 3, 2012
States collect far more information than parents expect, and it can be shared with more than just a student’s teacher or principal. Parents and students have very little access to that data. Data Quality Campaign, their idiot Directors and for profit business partners who support deforming education into a data-driven enterprise and advocate for expanded data use. All 50 states and Washington, D.C. collect long term, individualized data on students performance, but just eight states allow parents to access their child’s permanent record. Forty allow principals to access the data and 28 provide student-level info to teachers. "When you have a system that’s secret [from parents] and you can put whatever you want into it, you can have things going in that’ll be very damaging," says Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "When you put something into digital form, you can’t control where that’ll end up." Some states store student’s social security numbers, family financial information, and student pregnancy data. Nearly half of states track students’ mental health issues, illnesses, and jail sentences. Without access to their child’s data, parents have no way of knowing what teachers and others are learning about them. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act gives parents "certain rights with regard to their children’s education records, such as the right to inspect and review [their] child’s education records." But it also allows student information to be shared without parental consent. "Your child’s information may be disclosed to another school in which your child is enrolling, or to local emergency responders in connection with a health or safety emergency," it says.
usnews.com/news/articles/2012/01/19/who-should-have-access-to-student-records
School used the webcam to spy on children in their home without permission.
How 10 digits will end privacy as we know itTeachers: Does your district have a policy regarding students privacy?Parents: Check to see whether your school district has a policy about disclosing student information.Summary
The Secretary amends our regulations implementing the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which is section 444 of the General Education Provisions Act. These amendments are needed to implement a provision of the USA Patriot Act and the Campus Sex Crimes Prevention Act, which added new exceptions permitting the disclosure of personally identifiable information from education records without consent. The amendments also implement two U.S. Supreme Court decisions interpreting FERPA, and make necessary changes identified as a result of the Department's experience administering FERPA and the current regulations.
These changes clarify permissible disclosures to parents of eligible students and conditions that apply to disclosures in health and safety emergencies; clarify permissible disclosures of student identifiers as directory information; allow disclosures to contractors and other outside parties in connection with the outsourcing of institutional services and functions; revise the definitions of attendance, disclosure, education records, personally identifiable information, and other key terms; clarify permissible redisclosures by State and Federal officials; and update investigation and enforcement provisions.
When it comes to your student's personal information, who's in charge?
K12 Administrators: The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, enforced by the Federal Trade Commission, requires commercial website operators to get parental consent before collecting any personal information from kids under 13. COPPA allows teachers to act on behalf of a parent during school activities online, but does not require them to do so. That is, the law does not require teachers to make decisions about the collection of their students' personal information.
The No Child Left Behind Act includes a provision that requires high schools to turn over personal information on students to military recruiters. In addition, the Pentagon now maintains a database of some 30 million 16- to 25-year-olds, including their names, ethnicities, addresses, cell phone numbers, family information, extracurricular activities, and areas of study.
Citizens have lost Control over their children's information.
Privacy Concerns arise over Student Data.
Thanks to the 1974 federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act schools are allowed to sell (designate as public record) as much student data as they want to directories, yearbooks. Outside groups get it through public record. Debate prods some schools to alter policies of selling contact information. K-12 School Districts and Colleges are allowed to share and sell student contact information with outside sources. They sell names, ages, phone numbers and home addresses of students.
TAKE BACK CONTROL: WHAT PARENTS CAN DO
DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOUR STATE IS COLLECTING ABOUT YOUR CHILD?Shawn Bay, the founder and chief executive of eScholar, a software company has helped build successful student data warehouses in 20 states. State Education Technology Directors Association also build the database. Examples:
DEPT. OF EDUCATION PROPOSES EXPANDING IPEDS Inside Higher Ed, 1 December 2006
The U.S. Education Department has proposed significantly expanding the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), creating what it calls Huge IPEDS. In March 2005, the department proposed creating a unit-record database that would track students much more closely than current reporting does, allowing more accurate statistics for graduation and transfer rates among U.S. college students. Many in the higher education community resisted the unit-record database, saying it represents an invasion of student privacy, not to mention increasing the administrative workload. Some of the most vocal opponents of the unit-record database now see Huge IPEDS as a government tactic to move forward with the database by proposing another that is even more unpalatable. One official from a higher education association who asked not to be identified said, "It seems like a lever for the department to make an even stronger case why unit records make more sense." Mark Schneider, commissioner for education statistics at the Department of Education, declined to answer whether the new proposal is a decoy but did say that "people want and need more data, and were going to get it one way or the other."
Statewide data systems that could be linked.
2010 An infrastructure will make it possible for dozens of states to share data about the students in their K-12 and postsecondary education systems, creating the equivalent of a national system of data on students' educational progress. Once the "model common data standards" are developed, the State Higher Education Executive Officers and the Council of Chief State School Officers will -- using grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation -- build understanding of and support for the standards among their respective members, SHEEO announced last week.
Many policymakers say the ability to gather and analyze such information is essential to reaching the goal of getting more Americans into and out of higher education. After Congressional Republicans quashed the Bush administration's proposal for a truly federal "unit record" database as part of its existing Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, a coalition of foundations, research groups, and now, the Obama administration are looking to develop statewide data systems that could be linked. "There are a very small number of data elements that are really central to educational progress and achievement, and sometimes separate standards [and definitions] for K-12 and higher education," explained Paul Lingenfelter, president of the State Higher Education Executive Officers. "Where there needs to be communication between the two, like in terms of students' academic preparation and academic success, this would create consistent standards so that communication could take place." Some fear, however, that a massive receptacle of data on students would inevitably impinge on individual privacy. The Lumina report, by Peter Ewell and Marianne Boeke of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, follows a similar 2003 review of the status of state systems that track data at the student level, which found that 39 states had such databases for all or parts of their public higher education systems and that it would be feasible to link those databases into a comprehensive network.
SurveillanceSchool Districts' Staff installing spyware / adware on district-owned workstations. School District's staff seems to download and install all types of garbageware: Example: Hotbar, Webshots, Bonzi Buddy, Shopping Buddy, Comet Cursor, etc. with little regard or thought as to what these "programs" do in the background (advertising banners, stealing information from forms).
Should the district care if staff wants to personalize their workstation? Most of these kinds of programs have become very, very intrusive and invasive. Ad components don't uninstall, browser security settings are abruptly changed, ads added to personal email, etc. What is the district policy if secretaries & custodians who have installed "Hotbar" (which puts pieces into IE and Outlook) and who now cannot fill out district browser-based database forms, and other staff members who now have lost their default browser homepage settings to Webshots or related garbage (and, oddly enough, Win2000 Group Policies isn't preventing it or fixing it). Some staff members get popup windows with advertising as soon as they start their browsers to view the district private internal webserver. Garbageware is starting to prevent people from completing their job duties.
Educational CyberPlayGround's Catching Digital Cheaters, how to COMBAT PLAGIARISM
SCHOOL PUBLIC ACCESS SYSTEMS -
prevent students from installing or deleting software on our public access systems.
Schools have tried to punish their students' online activities and failed. Learn Why.
ARMED FORCES COLLECT CHILDREN'S INFORMATIONMining for kids: Children can't opt out of Pentagon recruitment database
By Kathryn Casa | Vermont Guardian
Parents cannot remove their children's names from a Pentagon database that includes highly personal information used to attract military recruits, the Vermont Guardian has learned.
The Pentagon has spent more than $70.5 million on market research, national advertising, website development, and management of the Joint Advertising Market Research and Studies (JAMRS) database a storehouse of questionable legality that includes the names and personal details of more than 30 million U.S. children and young people between the ages of 16 and 23.
The database is separate from information collected from schools that receive federal education money. The No Child Left Behind Act requires schools to report the names, addresses, and phone numbers of secondary school students to recruiters, but the law also specifies
that parents or guardians may write a letter to the school asking that their children's names not be released.
However, many parents have reported being surprised that their children are contacted anyway, according to a San Francisco-based coalition called Leave My Child Alone (LMCA).
"We hear from a lot of parents who have often felt quite isolated about it all and haven't been aware that this is happening all over the country," said the group's spokeswoman, Felicity Crush.
Parents must contact the Pentagon directly to ask that their children's information not be released to recruiters, but the data is not removed from the JAMRS database, according to Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke, a Pentagon spokeswoman.
Instead, the information is moved to a suppression file, where it is continuously updated with new data from private and government sources and still made available to recruiters, Krenke said. It's necessary to keep the information in the suppression file so the Pentagon can make sure it's not being released, she said.
Krenke said the database is compiled using information from state motor vehicles departments, the Selective Service, and data-mining firms that collect and organize information from private companies.
In addition to names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and phone numbers, the database may include cell phone numbers, e-mail addresses, grade-point averages, ethnicity, and subjects of interest.
S.F. SCHOOL BOARD SET TO PULL TRIGGER ON JROTC
A majority of the San Francisco Board of Education is poised to end the district's 90-year relationship with the U.S. military and its widely popular Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps, with a vote expected next week. Four board members oppose the program on two grounds: the military's stance on gays and the desire to keep the armed forces out of public schools. "I don't think the military should be involved in civilian life," said board member Dan Kelly, a self-described pacifist who served two years in prison for resisting the Vietnam draft. "I know that children, the students, like the program," Kelly said. "I know they enjoy it. That doesn't necessarily mean it's doing a good thing for them." The program costs nearly $1.6 million per year, reports Jill Tucker. The military pays $586,000, or half the salaries of 15 instructors -- all of whom are retired military personnel rather than certified teachers. The district pays the other half of salaries and $394,000 in benefits. Most critics acknowledge that the JROTC helps reduce dropouts. Students learn leadership and problem-solving skills, first aid, money management, geography, civics and how to be a team player, among other topics -- some of which they learn in other required classes. Opponents say all that can be done without the military.
How to Protect Kids' Privacy from the Government
k16 to 25? Pentagon Has Your Number, and More By DAMIEN CAVE June 24, 2005
The Defense Department and a private contractor have been building an extensive database of 30 million 16-to-25-year-olds, combining names with Social Security numbers, grade-point averages, e-mail addresses and phone numbers.
The department began building the database three years ago, but military officials filed a notice announcing plans for it only last month. That is apparently a violation of the federal Privacy Act, which requires that government agencies accept public comment before new records systems are created.
David S. C. Chu, the under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, acknowledged yesterday that the database had been in the works since 2002. Pentagon officials said they discovered in May 2004 that no Privacy Act notice had been filed. The filing last month was an effort to correct that, officials said.
Mr. Chu said the database was just a tool to send out general material from the Pentagon to those most likely to enlist.
"Congress wants to ensure the success of the volunteer force," he said at a reporters' roundtable in Washington. "Congress does not want conscription, the country does not want conscription. If we don't want conscription, you have to give the Department of Defense, the military services, an avenue to contact young people to tell them what is being offered. It would be na12ve to believe that in any enterprise, that you are going to do well just by waiting for people to call you."
On Wednesday, The Washington Post reported that the notification in The Federal Register had drawn criticism from a coalition of eight privacy groups that filed a brief opposing the database's creation. Yesterday, many of those privacy advocates, learning that the database had been under development for three years, called its existence an egregious violation of the Privacy Act's rules and intent.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/24/politics/24recruit.html?ex=1277265600&en=10803fe5d6f59fe1&ei=5090
ARMED FORCES RECRUITER ACCESS TO SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS
Did you know that NCLB Title IX, Section 9528 requires school districts that receive NCLB assistance to share student information such as names and addresses of students to military recruiters? Another provision in Section 9528 allows parents and students to protect this information by requesting that it not be released. Schools must notify parents of their right to request that personal student information not be released, but many do not do so. NCLB requires school districts to provide military recruiters the "same access to secondary school students as is provided generally to postsecondary education institutions or prospective employers." Many states and school districts also have policies that regulate the privacy of student information, in addition to the NCLB requirements. With their parents written consent to the school district, a student may request that their name, address and telephone not be released to military recruiters, institutions of higher education or both. At the link below are sample forms that can be submitted to school districts to request privacy protection of student information.
Student Marketing Group Inc.
Deceived students into providing personal information. The company encouraged teachers to collect the data from students, which was then sold to marketers to pitch the students for items such as magazines, clothes, and credit cards. Suit
American Student List, LLC
New York: (888) 462-5600 • Florida: (888) 550-8548
E-mail: sales@studentlist.com
Privacy Policy
American Student List then sells student names and other information to companies that solicit students for a wide array of goods and services. ASL provides the largest, most authentic lists of students available. They target children for promotions by zip, county, sectional center and state, gender, age and class year. Many lists also include telephone numbers. All lists are available on magnetic tape, tape cartridge, diskette, pressure-sensitive or cheshire labels, or through electronic delivery: modem to modem.
School students are entitled fo First Ammendment Protection.American Student List pays for the information by helping to fund the National Research survey. Companies that buy student names from American Student List include shaving giant Gillette Co.; credit-card purveyors American Express Co. and Capital One Financial Corp.; Kaplan Inc., the Washington Post Co. unit that is the largest admissions test-coaching chain; Primedia Inc.'s Seventeen Magazine; and Columbia House Record Club, which is owned by AOL Time Warner Inc. and Sony Corp.
College-Survey Firm Quietly Peddles Student Information to Big Marketer[source]
Each year, more than one million U.S. high-school students take time out of their school day to fill out a survey asking their names, addresses, grade-point averages, races, religions and social views. The organization that sponsors the survey, the National Research Center for College and University Admissions, tells the schools it will broaden students' higher-education options by distributing their names and profiles to hundreds of colleges and universities across the country.
But colleges aren't the only recipients of the survey results. Generally unknown to high schools, colleges, students and their parents, National Research for at least a decade has also sold the personal information it gathers to the country's leading supplier of young people's names to commercial marketers, American Student List LLC.
UNIVERSITY2007 The ruling says the student had "legitimate, objectively reasonable privacy expectations" concerning the data on his computer even though he had connected it to the university network. University policies, no matter what they say, "do not eliminate [the student's] expectation of privacy in his computer," the decision said. Read the text of the decision, , written by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/opinions/
How They Manage
Student Data
The University of Texas at Austin manages student data confidentiality and disclosure in accordance with FERPA, the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (aka the Buckley Amendment) and the Texas Public Information Act. Under FERPA, universities designate certain formation as "directory information" that may be disclosed without the student's explicit permission (although students may elect to make directory information confidential, most students do not). Under the Public Information ("Open Records") Act, "it is the policy of this state that each person is entitled, unless otherwise expressly provided by law, at all times to complete information about the affairs of government ...." including student directory information. Texas Public Info Act: UT Austin's FERPA policies
2000 Privacy Law Forcing Changes to Children's Sites
WASHINGTON -- The first federal law governing privacy in cyberspace takes effect on Friday, when Web sites that gather personal data will be required to start getting parental permission before requesting personal information from children under 13.
Lawmakers, regulators, privacy advocates, Web companies and Internet users alike will be closely watching the introduction of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act to see if it is effective, how it changes the online experience of young Web surfers and whether similar rules should be expanded to cover teenagers or even adults.
The Federal Trade Commission, which wrote the rules for the new law and which will be responsible for enforcing it, has launched a media blitz both on- and off-line to educate parents, children and Web site operators about the new law.
The law that takes effect Friday was passed two years ago after an FTC survey found that the state of online privacy protections was generally dismal. It requires all Web sites that gather personal information from children under 13 to have clearly posted privacy policies stating how that data is used. And they must gain "verifiable" parental consent before gathering any information.
Web Sites Related to This Article:
Center for Democracy and Technology
Federal Trade Commission: Privacy Initiatives, with links to information about the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act
Immunity provisions of the federal Communications Decency Act (CDA).
Legal Liability for Internet Service Providers Under the Communications Decency Act By Edmund B. (Peter) Burke
http://www.gigalaw.com/articles/2001/burke-2001-05-p2.html
A Win for a Public Library
In this article we will examine some recent cases that throw light on the interpretation of the immunity provisions of the federal Communications Decency Act (CDA). The decisions generally involve the interpretation of Section 230(c)(1) of the CDA, which states: "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."
The leading case on this rule of federal immunity is, no doubt, Zeran v. America Online Inc., a 1997 case from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. In Zeran, the court found that Congress made a deliberate policy choice to immunize those persons providing Internet access from tort liability. According to the Fourth Circuit's decision:
Congress recognized the threat that tort-based lawsuits pose to freedom of speech in the new and burgeoning Internet medium.... Section 230 was enacted, in part, to maintain the robust nature of Internet communication and, accordingly, keep government interference in the medium to a minimum.
While Maryland Assembly is PRETENDING to be protecting Maryland public schools from charters and sending funding to create better environments and achievement in Maryland schools----it is not. Baltimore is worse because Bloomberg and Wall Street are using US cities deemed International Economic Zones as ground zero for this next fraud and privatization.
As I said, all of the establishment candidates for Mayor of Baltimore----and all the Wall Street Baltimore Development 'labor and justice' organizations working for Johns Hopkins always make sure to install pols MOVING THESE GLOBAL CORPORATE EDUCATION POLICIES FORWARD. We now have the top gun in doing this----CATHERINE PUGH -----in an election filled with fraud in order to continue with this global corporate education policy. McKesson----Bloomberg's right-hand man has been appointed HUMAN CAPITAL director in order to expand extreme wealth by enslaving people who are really CITIZENS.
As you see, GREAT SCHOOLS out of San Francisco is connected to the same area giving us the for-profit higher-education school fraud and all these global education corporations like PEARSON eminate from a very, very, very neo-conservative Stanford University-----
Snapshot
People
Company Overview
GreatSchools, Inc.
provides parents with information about k-12 schools and educational issues online for their children. It provides profiles of various public elementary, middle, and high schools; and charter schools, magnet schools, year-round schools, and continuation and alternative schools in the United States. The company also offers ratings, parent reviews, search and compare tools, and helpful advice. GreatSchools, Inc. was founded in 1998 and is based in San Francisco, California.
160 Spear Street
Suite 1020
San Francisco, CA 94105
United States
Founded in 1998
Phone:
415-977-0700
Fax:
415-977-0704
www.greatschools.org
Key Executives for GreatSchools, Inc.
Mr. Bill Jackson
Founder, Chief Executive Officer, President and Director
Mr. Matthew Nelson
Chief Operating Officer
Ms. Carol Lloyd
Executive Editor
Mr. Michael Schmier
Board Treasurer and Director
Mr. Anthony J. Colón
Board Secretary and Director
Compensation as of Fiscal Year 2016.
About GreatSchools
Our mission is to help millions of parents get a great education for their kids. GreatSchools.org is an independent nonprofit and the leading national source of school information for families.
Support GreatSchools in this effort! Donate Now!
Company
Media
Policies
Find the great schools in Maryland
- Rockville
- Severn
- Silver Spring
- Towson
- Windsor Mill
The GreatSchools Rating
The GreatSchools Rating is a simple tool that helps you compare schools based on test scores and other available data, including student academic growth and college readiness. GreatSchools is always working to improve the rating and add more information when state education agencies make school quality data publically available.
GreatSchools Ratings in Your State
The GreatSchools Rating is on a 1-10 scale, where 10 is the highest and 1 is the lowest. Ratings are broken down into three categories: ratings 1-3 signal that the school is “below average,” 4-7 indicate “average,” and 8-10 are “above average.” Ratings for these categories are shown in red, yellow and green (respectively) to help you see the distinctions.
The foundation of the GreatSchools rating reflects how well students do on standardized tests compared to other students in the state, and ratings in most states are based exclusively on test scores. While test results give parents a good sense of how well students are performing at a given school, it only provides a limited snapshot of school quality. Therefore, in a growing number of states where data are available, the GreatSchools Rating includes additional information of student outcomes, such as information on how much students are learning in a given year and how prepared they are for college. The map below shows what data we include in the GreatSchools Rating by state — updated June 2015.
A Broader Picture of School Quality
As states make more data on school quality available, GreatSchools is committed to providing this information to parents and incorporating it into the GreatSchools Rating. Based on extensive research on what contributes to long-term success for students, we are currently focused on three measures of academic quality:
- Student achievement: Student achievement tells parents how well students at a school are doing in academics. This is measured as the percent of students meeting state standards based on state standardized tests. While this measure tells parents how well students at a school are doing currently, it does not necessarily show how much students are learning at that school — that is, how much students are growing.
- Student growth: Measures of student growth tell parents how much students are actually learning in a year, rather than how much they already know. A school with high growth could be a school with students that started behind grade level and have now caught up. It could also be a school with students that started already above grade level and have moved even further ahead of similar students. Student growth is typically measured through gains on test scores year-over-year, comparing similar students with each other.
- College readiness: Data on high school graduation rates and performance/participation on college entrance exams (such as the SAT and ACT) show how well students are prepared for life after high school in college or career.
Calculating GreatSchools Ratings
In States with Only Data on Test Scores
In states where only student achievement is used to calculate ratings, the overall GreatSchools Rating is an average of how well students at a given school do on each grade and subject test. For each test, ratings are assigned based on how well students perform relative to all other students in the state, and these ratings are averaged into an overall rating of 1 to 10. The distribution of the GreatSchools Rating in a given state looks like a bell curve, with higher numbers of schools getting ratings in the “average” category, and fewer schools getting ratings in the “above average” or “below average” categories.
In States with Data on Multiple Student Outcomes
For states where ratings include student growth and college readiness information, the overall GreatSchools Rating is an average of how well students do on each sub-rating. Sub-ratings are weighted equally, though actual weights depend on the amount of data available per school and what grades that school serves. For instance, a K-5 school has no college readiness data, so the overall rating would be based 50% on student achievement and 50% on student growth. In contrast, the rating for a high school with data for all three measures would be based 33% on student achievement, 33% on student growth, and 33% on college readiness. Each sub-rating represents how a school compares to all other schools in the state on each measure, and these sub-ratings are averaged into an overall rating.
For more information on how GreatSchools calculates ratings, please see the GreatSchools Ratings Methodology Report.
Greater Data Transparency
At GreatSchools we believe that transparency builds trust. We believe that government education agencies have an obligation to make data on school quality available to parents and the public. Data transparency helps parents know how schools in their community are doing, where there is room for improvement, and what the best options are for their children. Of particular interest is information on student outcomes, such as student test scores, high school graduation rates, course completion rates, etc. Sharing school information — good and bad — also cultivates parent engagement and trust. Additionally, it's important that school data be made available in accessible, easy to use formats so that non-governmental organizations can use the information to inform parents and students about the quality of their local schools.
For more information on GreatSchools’ commitment to working with government education agencies to provide better information on student outcomes, please contact us.
_____________________________________
It is very frustrating having to listen to a discussion on education by two media groups working together towards global neo-liberal education privatization while sounding progressive or conservative when they are NEITHER----THEY ARE 1% GLOBAL WALL STREET.....Fox News and Media Matters---
Everyone in Baltimore knows the city's schools are bad because Baltimore spent these few decades channeling all Federal, state, and local funding for public schools ELSEWHERE----especially to grow Johns Hopkins globally and fuel corporate campus development. So, Baltimore public schools are bad---not because of students---not because of teachers----but because of extreme wealth and corporate power politics.
We already know school choice is bad---it is not used as it should be and for those using it for segregation by race and class----you will be the big losers soon if you continue being fooled. The riots and violence did not break out in our public schools----students wanted to join in PROTESTS which was absolutely NECESSARY. I wanted to share this article because MEDIA MATTERS---a Clinton neo-liberal outlet ---promotes the idea of Baltimore schools data showing achievement rising over several years when all research and education justice organizations have proved most of that data SKEWED AND FALSE. Baltimore was ranked extremely low in PARCC assessments of reading and math----and PARCC is Pearson----is GREAT SCHOOLS.
The point is this: we are already seeing these education testing and evaluation data figures being skewed to show success or failure as Wall Street and global corporations want them to.....THAT IS WHAT MARKETING POLICY DOES.....and Pearson/GREAT SCHOOLS is simply marketing. Meanwhile, it is GREAT SCHOOL's ratings of 'failed schools' allowing for massive closing of public schools----driven mostly by development and gentrification ---not by quality of life and education. Even well-performing public schools in Baltimore are now being shown 'inadequate' by these rating agencies.
THESE EDUCATION RATING INDUSTRIES WILL END UP LIKE MOODY'S AND STOCK ANALYSIS---where toxic subprime mortgage loans become AAA ratings======Great Schools/Moody's ----same thing.
LYING, CHEATING, STEALING BROUGHT TO OUR PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM COURTESY OF CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA
Fox News Figures Blame Baltimore's "Awful," "Worst Schools On Earth" For Riots
Blog ››› April 29, 2015 7:40 PM EDT ›››
Three Fox News figures touted "school choice" as an appropriate response to the recent riots in Baltimore, faulting the city's "awful" and "worst schools on earth" for the violence. But their allegations ignore evidence that Baltimore public school students have made significant achievement gains over the past several years.
OH, REALLY??????
Protests broke out in Baltimore over the weekend following the funeral of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who died on April 19 from a spinal cord injury he sustained while in police custody a week earlier. Peaceful protests that devolved into violence led Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake to impose a weeklong, citywide 10 p.m. curfew, and both the Baltimore Police Department and the U.S. Department of Justice are investigating Gray's death.
On Fox News, contributor Charles Krauthammer, frequent guest Rudy Giuliani, and host Gretchen Carlson touted "school choice" in separate discussions of the riots, insinuating that Baltimore public schools are to blame for the violence. On the April 28 edition of Special Report with Bret Baier, Krauthammer cited "the worst schools on Earth" as one of "two issues in the inner cities," concluding, "If you want to do something, let them choose their school."
On Fox & Friends on April 29, Rudy Giuliani echoed what he called Krauthammer's "brilliant" point and added that "the schools in Baltimore, like in most major cities, are awful." He went on to say that a mother who had been on the network "should have a choice of what school her son goes to."
Gretchen Carlson devoted her "My Take" segment on the April 29 edition of The Real Story to a push for school choice, citing an editorial by conservative journalist Terence Jeffrey that claimed Baltimore students have scored below the national average on math and reading tests. Carlson said the low scores are, "probably not for lack of spending" by the city and asked, "What might happen to these inner city kids if they actually had better schools and maybe even school choice?"
But these allegations ignore hard evidence that Baltimore schools are improving. According to the Baltimore City Schools website, over the past several years students have made significant gains in subjects like math and reading and graduation rates have improved. Some of the district's "student achievement" highlights include:
- "83 percent of children who entered kindergarten from City Schools pre-k were fully ready to learn."
- "In the past decade, City Schools students have made solid gains in performance as shown on the Maryland School Assessments (MSAs). In 2004, 48.8 percent of students performed at proficient or advanced levels in reading; in 2013, 67.9 percent did so. In math, the percentage of students performing at proficient or advanced levels rose from 33.5 in 2004 to 58.9 in 2013."
- "The graduation rate for students who started high school in 2008-09 and graduated within five years (by June 2013) was 71.7 percent, up 5 percentage points from two years earlier."
The spurious claims about Baltimore schools by Fox News figures seeking to promote school choice come as little surprise given conservative media's pattern of demonizing various aspects of public education, including the declaration by a Fox host earlier this year that "there really shouldn't be public schools." Such false narratives are unfortunately to be expected when the media so rarely turns to actual experts when covering education.
_______________________________________________
We have spoken about the built-in discrimination in PARCC tests towards low-income and immigrant students. We know they are often not prepared to take tests----learning skills are weak and will be weak for students coming from poverty and instability environments---WE HAVE KNOWN THIS IS WHERE EDUCATION POLICY NEEDS STRENGTH WHILE PARCC TOTALLY IGNORES THIS----and that is the reason working class and poor students score lower than others. Asian students in the US often come from that Asian global corporate neo-liberal school environment where everything is tested----and Asian students are mostly English-speaking whereas Latino and other immigrants are not. So, these testing disparities are already known----they are no fault of the students---yet these PARCC scores will track them into vocational pathways towards extreme poverty. This is to where a 10% of US children will be determined advanced placement or exceptional and allowed benefit of an education leading to white collar employment vs those 90% pushed into corporate campus factory schools leading to being apprenticed at 6th grade. White collar students will only track to 9th grade before being apprenticed.
Wall Street Baltimore Development will use these PARCC scores to move what are a majority of working class/poor/immigrant students out of city center to make room temporarily for a middle-class then replaced by the rich. So, those middle-class in Baltimore City center thinking this is about segregation by race and class need to WAKE UP----because your children and grandchildren WILL fall into the lower-tier as extreme wealth takes city center.
As I said, ALREADY we see PARCC being used as a tool for wealth and profit---not as a REAL educational assessment tool and most teachers understand this. They understand it is bad for children----and that is why they are protesting all over the US. It is bad for them as employees as well----as PARCC will never be rid of bias in schools being allowed to CHOOSE BEST STUDENTS vs those taking both vs those warehousing the lowest achievers. Right now, the goal with HUMAN CAPITAL DEPARTMENTS for corporate school boards is to eliminate REAL professionally trained teachers with temporary adjunct staff, then moving to online education techs simply moderating online lessons----and finally the cheapest vehicle until global corporate campuses and global sweat shop factories are installed-----online home schooling where Baltimore City Board of Education pays nothing for staff----parents do the work.
THIS IS THE HUMAN CAPITAL GOAL OF GLOBAL NEO-LIBERAL RACE TO THE TOP IN BALTIMORE AND YES----THIS IS WHAT MCKESSON IS BEING INSTALLED TO DO----who is hurt most in Baltimore with these policies---teachers of color----
RACE TO THE TOP IS THE OPPOSITE OF BLACK LIVES MATTER------
'For instance, while 65 percent of Asian students passed the English test, only 23 percent of African-American students did. In addition, only 13 percent of economically disadvantaged students, and 5 percent of students who are learning English as a second language, passed'.
Less than half of students in Maryland pass PARCC
Liz BowieContact Reporter
First PARCC test results for elementary poorLess than half of Maryland elementary and middle school students passed the state's tough new standardized tests, a result school officials attribute to a major revision of teaching and testing standards.
Just 39 percent of Maryland students in grades three through eight met the reading standard set by a governing board of educators from Maryland and about 10 other states. Only 29 percent met the standard in math.
School system leaders across the Baltimore area said they believe the scores will increase quickly in coming years, as teachers and students adjust to the new test and Common Core standards put into effect by most schools three years ago. The new test is called the Partnership for Assessments of Career and College Readiness, or PARCC.
"We have set the bar high, and this data reflects that," interim State Schools Superintendent Jack Smith said in a written statement.
Smith said parents should not be too concerned if their children have not scored well on this first test, which is considered a baseline. The test, he said, is snapshot of how their child did on one test.
2015 Maryland PARCC scores: Grades 3 through 8
"I have five children, and I do not equate them to their test score," he said. At the same time, Smith said, he was dismayed at the continued disparities in achievement.
For instance, while 65 percent of Asian students passed the English test, only 23 percent of African-American students did. In addition, only 13 percent of economically disadvantaged students, and 5 percent of students who are learning English as a second language, passed.
The new Common Core standards require students to do more analytical thinking, writing and complex reading. The tests are scored on a five-point scale. Scores of four and five indicate that the student has met or exceeded expectations. A three is approaching expectations. Smith will ask the state school board to designate a four and five as passing scores in alignment with the national standard set by the governing board. A vote by the board is expected in January.
The results were not as good as for school districts in Massachusetts and New Jersey, but slightly better than those in Illinois, Louisiana and Rhode Island. Not all of the states that gave the test have released all of their data yet. Some education advocates found the local results disheartening.
"Maryland's 13 percent math pass rate for African-American students and for students from low-income families shows how many children are being left behind," said Bebe Verdery, Maryland education director for the ACLU. She said additional resources and experienced teachers will be needed.
MarylandCAN executive director Jason Botel, said he supported giving students a much tougher assessment, but he said the results make the disparities look "even more staggering," particularly in the city schools.
"The structure of city schools might need to be different, might need to change," he said. "I think these results show how aggressive we need to be in terms of doing things differently."
Even in school districts such as Howard County, where students have generally done well, less than half of students passed math. Baltimore City scores were the lowest in the region. CEO Gregory Thornton said the results "overall are concerning."
In the city, Anne Arundel, and some other counties, educators were pleased that third grade scores were among the highest of any grade. Those students, they said, have been given the Common Core curriculum since first grade.
Harford County had some of the best results. It ranked first or second in reading among school systems in the state; its students scored higher than they did on the old assestment tests. County officials attributed this to a strong curriculum and better teacher preparation.
"We put our teachers and students up against any in the state," said Susan Brown, executive director of curriculum and assessment in Harford.
Carroll County students had significantly higher pass rates on math than the other suburban Baltimore counties. Baltimore County schools had higher scores than the city, but lower than the other suburban counties, particularly in math. For instance, less than 14 percent of sixth-grade students in the county and less than 28 percent of fourth-grade students passed math. In reading, less than 50 percent of students passed. In Baltimore City, in all grades less than 20 percent of students could meet the expectations. In math, that dropped in some grades to 10 percent.
Baltimore County Superintendent Dallas Dance said he expects scores to increase by the 2016-2017 school year as teachers grow more comfortable with the new curriculum.
"If you talk with teachers ... they are feeling more confident with it now," Dance said.
Dance blamed the low pass rates, in part, on the fact that when he arrived three and a half years ago, the school system had not yet aligned its cirriculum with the Common Core curriculum, a step most school systems had taken. Dance then hired and fired a company to do the rewrite, setting the county even further behind. Dance said he will analyze the math data and make any needed curriculum changes.
Dance also attributed the low scores to leadership changes across the state in the past several years. There have been three state superintendents — two interim — in the past five years, and nearly every school district in the Baltimore region has a new superintendent.
Despite the overall poor results, schools in the state that were predictably high performers continued to show better results, indicating that students' socioeconomic backgrounds infuence test results. The new test provides a finer-grained look at individual school achievement. A smattering of schools in Anne Arundel, Baltimore, and Howard counties had grades in which more than 75 percent or 80 percent of students scored a 4 or higher. For instance, Severna Park Elementary, located in a high-income area, had 85 percent of its third-graders and 92 of its fifth-graders passing the reading test. At Shipley's Choice in Anne Arundel, 94 percent of third-graders passed.
In Baltimore County, Summit Park, Franklin and Timonium elementaries had high pass rates. In Baltimore City, elementary and middle schools including Hampstead Hill, Hampden, Mount Royal, Mount Washington, Tunbridge and Thomas Johnson continued to be high performers.
Schools that did poorly — and there were many — had less than 10 percent of their students passing. In addition, they sometimes had large numbers of students failing with a 1, the lowest score. In the city, 52 percent of students got a 1 in eighth-grade math. Such low scores indicate that the majority of students will have to make large gains in achievement before they are able to pass the test.
_____________________________________
You can see why Wall Street and CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA pols were desperate to paint MCKESSON as a Black Lives Matters leader when he is not----and as we see media MUST put that civil rights in front of McKesson's name because all of what is being done with Race to the Top/Common Core/and PARCC testing and evaluation VIOLATES CIVIL RIGHTS FOR EVERYONE IN ALL WAYS.
From student and parent having no voice especially in vocational tracking of the child----to teachers being busted to the lowest wage and breaking of professional status for teachers----to communities being forced to take this because there are no other school choices.
ALL OF THIS VIOLATES EVERY US CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT REGARDING EQUAL OPPORTUNITY, ACCESS, LABOR RIGHTS, CIVIL RIGHTS, RIGHTS OF DISABLED-----
This is why media must keep saying OVER AND OVER DeRay is a civil rights/black lives matter leader.
Maryland suspended the use of PARCC data for testing and evaluation because of mass protest against these tools but we knew Maryland and especially Baltimore would reinstate them and MOVE FORWARD no matter how much data shows these tools to be inaccurate and useless for goal stated. Wall Street doesn't care if it meets the goals stated----their goals are completely different. So, Baltimore teachers already under attack in the march to get rid of public union professionally trained educator to bring in TEACH FOR AMERICA and VISTA temporary employment ---will now see THE HUMAN CAPITAL DEPARTMENT find more ways to install Bloomberg's corporate instruction with McKesson spouting all the talking points to get there----IT'S ALL ABOUT THE POOR CHILDREN they always say.
This is simply a continuation from Bloomberg's assignment of Alonzo----Sonia is from Alonzo's staff---and as we see McKesson is from the same. Meanwhile everyone in Baltimore is shouting to get rid of Baltimore's School Board pushing all these policies.
Bloomberg has the same hold on Chicago with Rahm Emanuel but Chicago has a powerful REAL labor and justice activism doing a good job fighting all this-----and Bloomberg sending out people like Alonzo, Sonja, and McKesson to Chicago installing this same global Wall Street corporate education policy.
Civil rights activist DeRay Mckesson to join new city schools cabinet
Civil rights activist and former Baltimore mayoral candidate DeRay Mckesson was named Interim Chief Human Capital Officer by incoming schools CEO Sonja Santelises. (Emma Patti Harris/Baltimore Sun video)
Erica L. Green and Luke BroadwaterContact ReportersThe Baltimore Sun
DeRay Mckesson: "I am excited to return to city schools."Civil rights activist and former Baltimore mayoral candidate DeRay Mckesson will return to his old stamping grounds at city school headquarters to lead the district's office of human capital.
Mckesson was named interim chief human capital officer on Tuesday by incoming schools CEO Sonja Santelises. It was the second and most high-profile cabinet appointment made by the new chief, who begins her tenure Friday.
Santelises said Mckesson, who spent about two and a half years overseeing key reforms as a strategist and special assistant in the human capital office, would lead the office at least through the fall.
"He has the depth of knowledge of the system, and he has proved that he can lift the work in a short amount of time," Santelises said in an interview. "And he has proven his dedication to the children of Baltimore."
Mckesson called Santelises a "gifted leader" and said he was proud to join her team.
"At its core, this role is about finding great people, matching them to the right role, and helping them to develop and experience careers in the service of our kids," Mckesson said. "I am excited to return to city schools … and to continue doing the work to ensure that every child in Baltimore City receives a world-class education."
DeRay Mckesson finishes 6th in Democratic primary for Baltimore mayor The 30-year-old Baltimore native and Black Lives Matter activist is fresh from an unexpected run for mayor of Baltimore. He finished sixth in the Democratic primary.
Mckesson catapulted onto the national media stage nearly two years ago when he took a leave of absence from his job as senior director of human capital in the Minneapolis Public Schools system to protest the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.
Mckesson founded and leads We the Protesters, a group that advocates policy changes against police violence.
Mckesson, who will earn a salary of $165,000, will be the district's third chief of human capital in two years, and manage of a budget of $4 million and 56 employees.
A famous activist, mayoral candidate DeRay Mckesson tries to win over Baltimore In a release, school officials said they would conduct a nationwide search for a new chief of human capital. The current interim head of the department, Deborah Sullivan, will return to her former position as executive director of organizational development.
He is the second cabinet appointment for Santelises. In May, she announced that Alison Perkins-Cohen, currently an executive director of new initiatives, will serve as her chief of staff and earn a salary of $178,500.
McKesson returns to the district as Santelises' new administration prepares to open schools in August, a task that Santelises said was both challenging and crucial.
"We have no time to waste. Every day in class is precious for our students, and every school must be ready to go when the opening bell rings," she said in a statement. "Mr. Mckesson has the hand-on experience, leadership skills, and energy to help us make that happen."
The office of human capital has a history of failing to fully staff schools, process paperwork and produce reliable data. Schools opened last year without enough teachers and principals. Hundreds of teachers and school staff also did not receive their first few paychecks on time.
As special assistant to the director of human capital, Mckesson advised the district's top officials and helped manage the department's budget and day-to-day operations. As a strategist, he was instrumental in implementing the a pay-for-performance contract, building systems that linked evaluation data to compensation.
In Minneapolis, Mckesson helped restructure the district office, change the human capital office's recruitment and teacher selection process, and build professional development and orientation programs for new teachers. He served in that role for 15 months.
Mckesson was a surprise entrant this year in the Democratic primary for mayor — he filed his candidacy on the day of the Feb. 3 deadline — and struggled to catch up to opponents who had been running for months.
With nearly 420,000 Twitter followers and appearances on nationally televised late-night talk shows, Mckesson quickly gained thousands of small contributions from around the country — dwarfing the number of contributions from any other campaign. He received checks from people in every state and the District of Columbia, and from famous names such as actress Susan Sarandon, who endorsed him on Twitter.
He won praise from President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who dubbed Mckesson a "social media emperor."
But Mckesson found it difficult to win over Baltimore primary voters, some of whom said they viewed him as an outsider. He finished sixth in a crowded field won by state Sen. Catherine E. Pugh. He garnered more than 3,400 votes, or about 2.6 percent of the total.
Mckesson's tenure as a sixth-grade teacher through Teach for America drew skeptics during his campaign, requiring him to address charges that he was a champion of privatizing education.
He dedicated a portion of his campaign website to debunk claims that he's a puppet of the "Illuminati, George Soros, or Teach for America."
He called for expanding full-day pre-K to enroll all low-income 3- and 4-year-olds, the public release of all internal audits of the city school system, and reforming state funding formulas to prevent tax deals for developers from hurting school funding.
He also said he wanted to "radically transform" Baltimore's community college, create a fund for occupational skills training and fully incorporate arts education into all schools.
Baltimore writer D. Watkins, who observed Mckesson's mayoral run, said he was proud to see a fellow high-profile activist stay in the community. He said he understands some of the backlash Mckesson received from other activists who criticized him as an outsider.
"It's difficult," he said. "If you leave Baltimore, you're a sell-out, you're a phony. And if you stay, nobody's really willing to invest in you."
He called Mckesson "sharp and intelligent," and that the city needed people like him working in institutions like the school system just as much as it needs protesters to hold such institutions accountable.
"Anybody who's young and black and doing something positive, I support them 100 percent," Watkins said. "Hopefully, the whole activist community and the people who do positive work, we can all unite."
__________________________________________
This is where PEARSON/PARCC global education policies need to take us K-12 and it needs complete deregulation ----elimination of all equal protection and citizen rights----to become hyper-competitive for-profit driven designed to take parents for every bit of money they can bring home from their $20-30 a day job.
What PARCC will do in Baltimore is move all those low-income students out of city center schools to make way for middle-upper middle students. So, students will move from private schools around Baltimore to Margaret Brent or Barclay for example while the immigrant and low-income students not able to perform well on PARCC are pushed out to national charter chain schools. We know already many of these national chains are full of fraud ----so it will become the same as for-profit higher education colleges where students get no education quality and all those public school funds are misappropriated to profit.
I want to shout out to middle-class families waiting to take those city center schools-----this is the coming stage for global corporate neo-liberal education----and your disposable income is where Wall Street's eyes are now. Many of what are non-profit after-school programs will become FOR-PROFIT and the competition to get into a best school as more and more schools close will have parents paying to send their children to all kinds of after-school----for-profit tutoring----constant test-prep-----
ALL FOR NO REASON OTHER THAN US CITIZENS ARE ALLOWING THE BEST IN THE WORLD PUBLIC EDUCATION SYSTEM BE DISMANTLED BY WALL STREET PLAYERS.
Simply rebuilding public schools in each community----assuring all Federal, state, and local funding gets to each school----allowing students to achieve to the best of their ability ----brings the US back to being the best in the world in education achievement.
South Korea's schools: Long days, high results
By Reeta Chakrabarti Education correspondent, BBC News
- 2 December 2013
- From the section Education & Family
Media caption
Hye-Min Park explains why she studies from 8am to 11pm each day
The results of the international school tests - known as Pisa tests - are to be published by the OECD on Tuesday. In previous years, South Korea has been one of the highest achievers. But it means long hours of study.
Hye-Min Park is 16 and lives in the affluent Seoul district of Gangnam, made famous by the pop star Psy. Her day is typical of that of the majority of South Korean teenagers.
She rises at 6.30am, is at school by 8am, finishes at 4pm, (or 5pm if she has a club), then pops back home to eat.
She then takes a bus to her second school shift of the day, at a private crammer or hagwon, where she has lessons from 6pm until 9pm.
She spends another two hours in what she calls self-study back at school, before arriving home after 11pm. She goes to bed at 2am, and rises in the morning at 6.30am to do it all over again.
How on earth does she cope with such a punishing schedule?
"I get tired usually but I can forget about my hardships when I see my results, because they're kind of good!"
She says she would like to get more sleep but it's her job to overcome it. To get the qualifications to follow her dream career as a teacher she has to work hard she says, and besides she likes studying, and learning new things.
Extra tuition
Hye-Min is not alone. For South Korean teenagers a double shift of school, every week day, is just a way of life.
Parents in Seoul pray for their children and grandchildren taking exams South Korean parents spend thousands of pounds a year on after-school tuition, not a private tutor coming to the home once or twice a week, but private schooling on an industrial scale.
There are just under 100,000 hagwons in South Korea and around three-quarters of children attend them.
Hye-Min's mother Yoon-Gyeong Hwang says she worries about her daughter, but they have no choice when it comes to having to compete.
"Korea has few natural resources, we don't even have much land, the only resource we have is people. So anyone who wants to be successful really has to stand out. As a mother I don't feel comfortable about this kind of situation, but it's the only thing she can do to achieve her dream."
This relentless focus on education has resulted in formidable exam performers.
Snap test
How would they compare with pupils who take the GCSE in England, Wales and Northern Ireland?
The anxious moments before a college entrance exam in Seoul As a quick test, a group of six teenagers - 15 and 16 year olds - from Ga-rak High School, Hye-Min's school, tried several questions from one of this year's GCSE maths papers.
All of them finished the questions in half the expected time, four scored 100%, the other two dropped just one mark. They then went on to do some more questions just for fun.
It's the sort of performance that makes education ministers in the UK and beyond look on with envy, and has them actively remodelling the curriculum and exams to try to emulate them.
The huge investment in education has also resulted in an economy that's grown at an astonishing rate since the end of the war with North Korea 60 years ago.
South Korea has in two generations gone from mass illiteracy to being an economic powerhouse. Brands like Samsung and Hyundai, Daewoo and LG are internationally known. The country has built itself up through the sheer hard graft of its people.
But it's come at a big cost. The relentless pressure means Korea holds another much less enviable record, that of having the highest suicide rate of industrialised OECD countries.
We still have a long way to go but we are doing some soul-searching in our society, and our goals now are about how to make our people happier
Nam Soo Suh, South Korean education minister
The most common form of death for the under-40s is suicide. The government understands the pressure, and in 2008 a curfew of 10pm was imposed on hagwons in Seoul. The Education Minister Nam Soo Suh said the government was trying to redress the balance:
"Korea has achieved miraculous growth within a short period of time. I think no other country has achieved such rapid growth within a half century as Korea. And naturally, due to that, we focused on and emphasised achievement within schools and in society, so that students and adults were under a lot of stress, and that led to high suicide rates.
"We still have a long way to go but we are doing some soul-searching in our society, and our goals now are about how to make our people happier."
Prof JuHo Lee, himself a former education minister, and now an academic at the KDI think-tank in Seoul, says intensive education may have been right while Korea was growing its economy, but now it's time for a new strategy.
"Test scores may be important in the age of industrialisation, but not anymore. So we look into the ways to reform our education system, not based on test scores, but based on creativity and social and emotional capacities," says Prof Lee.
South Korea's success is built on an extraordinary work ethic that has delivered rich economic rewards, but that's exacted a heavy price from its people and particularly its children.
It's a price the country is now gradually starting to weigh up.
_________________________________________
No matter how many times Wall Street global corporate pols tell us our education data is being protected----that it is only being shared in mega-data supposedly with no personal identifiers ----THOSE ARE THE SAME LYING, CHEATING, AND STEALING talking points from the Wall Street global corporate pols.
OF COURSE THEY ARE GOING TO PROFIT FROM ALL THAT DATA COLLECTION!
This is what GREAT SCHOOLS and PEARSON are in business to do ----market and profit from education. Add a dash of data-skewing to make bad education policy look like it's working----and VOILA---the modus operandus for global corporate education corporations totally unnecessary in providing quality public education.
'FYI: The DOE has no authority to levy fines on companies that violate FERPA. It can withhold federal funding from the district, but that’s considered such a drastic step, it’s never once been taken'.
'THE U.S. Department of Education ANSWERS questions about student privacy.
Are student files private? The answer is no because of the Loopholes! The "educational record" isn't the same as "metadata". Meta data is whatever the kid is doing online.
Schools can disclose “directory information” without parental consent, including a child’s name, address, phone number, birth date, awards received and student ID number. Schools must notify parents once a year of the general categories of information that might be released and give them a chance to opt out. And finally, the third big exception: Schools can also release student records, without written consent, to other “school officials with a legitimate educational interest.”
In 2008, the Education Department expanded the definition of “school officials” to include for-profit companies. Student information that has been properly de-identified or that is shared under the “directory information” exception, is not protected by FERPA, and thus is not subject to FERPA’s use and re-disclosure limitations'.
PRIVACY INFORMATION
Student Privacy Bill:
No Parental Consent Needed for Data Mining
The big biz of spying on little kids
SELLING STUDENT INFORMATION and THEY DO NOT protect their rights to privacy !!2015 State Legislative Session:
Education Data Privacy Laws and Bills
Will FCC, FTC, care that GOOGLE continues to break its student privacy pledge per EFF
Internet Companies: Confusing Consumers for Profit Google’s Apps for Education contracts with schools suffer from gaping student privacy protection loopholes. School Administrators signed a contract that does NOT protect their students from data collection for the ultimate purposes of monetization as Google represents. Student Privacy Pledge requires Google to not collect and use student information for profit. However, most people don’t know that Google’s Apps for Education’s contracts only agree to not advertise to students on Google’s “core” education products like Gmail, Docs, Drive, etc., but the contracts exclude many Google student-popular products like YouTube, Maps, Android, Play, Google+, Chrome, etc. that students clearly could need or demand in their Google Apps for Education experience. This is a classic case of deceptive exceptions becoming the real rule.
2014 The big biz of spying on little kids
Intimate information about school children is in the hands of private companies — where it is highly vulnerable to being shared, sold or mined for profit.
The amount of data being collected is staggering. Ed tech companies of all sizes, from basement startups to global conglomerates, have jumped into the game. The most adept are scooping up as many as 10 million unique data points on each child, each day. That’s orders of magnitude more data than Netflix or Facebook or even Google collect on their users. Both Republicans and Democrats have embraced the practice. And the Obama administration has encouraged it, even relaxing federal privacy law to allow school districts to share student data more widely. A report by McKinsey & Co. last year found that expanding the use of data in K-12 schools and colleges could drive at least $300 billion a year in added economic growth in the U.S. by improving instruction and making education more efficient.
“When students become patients, privacy suffers” FERPA University students have less privacy for their campus health records than they would have if they sought care off campus. Schools say they are trying to seek the right balance between privacy and safety.
NATIONAL EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY PLAN
Student Data Privacy Bill won't protect children.
Privacy advocates, have expressed concerns that the pledge contains too many loopholes to be useful. Among their objections: The pledge doesn’t require companies to get parental consent – or even to give parents advance notice – before collecting intimate information on their children’s academic progress and learning styles. It also explicitly allows companies to build personal profiles of children to help them develop or improve ed-tech products. They can’t sell those profiles, but some parents are uncomfortable with any use of student data for commercial gain. A refresher on the pledge: http://politico.pro/192EYsW”
Teachers and School Districts MUST follow the law and protect children's privacy!!!privacy
rating system
Teachers often click “yes” that they agree with the privacy policy, but download apps for students without reading what the app developer actually does with student data. Common Sense Media APP is a rating system for educational apps has the potential to fill in a student data privacy gap between what school districts can control and what teachers can download. The Graphite platform includes ratings for more than 2,000 apps, games and websites. Then educators can check the rating before they download an app for students. This rubric allows app developers to evaluate how their apps measure up in five categories, including privacy, security, safety and social media, advertising and consumerism, and legal compliance with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. For example, the privacy category covers topics including whether they collect personally identifiable information or share it with third parties.
K12 Education SPYS
High-Stakes Testing Requires High Levels of Surveillance. Pearson & (SBAC) High Stakes Testing Makes Surveillance Necessary
Anthony Cody:Testing corporations are expecting teachers and administrators to help them spy on students’ social media. Apparently Pearson (and not Pearson alone) has a means of monitoring millions of students’ postings on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere, using key words as alerts. Pearson was also featured as a “case study” by one of the services they use, a company called TRACX.
2/26/15 PTAC Protecting Student Privacy While Using Online Educational Services: Model Terms of Service - 855-249-3072 PrivacyTA@ed.gov
Personal profiles of children can be sold as a product to the highest bidder on the open market. 5/14/14 The Education Department has been a major proponent of big data. It has used policy and financial incentives, including more than $500 million in direct grants, to prod states to build longitudinal databases that will track students’ progress from pre-K through high school and in some cases, into college and the workforce. States will mine the data to spot patterns; they might, for instance, be able to identify behaviors in 6-year-olds that indicate the child has an elevated risk of dropping out of high school a decade later. The department has also relaxed privacy rules to make it easier for school districts to share student records with state and federal officials, as well as with private companies, without parental consent. Privacy advocates sued to block some of those changes, but lost in court.
FYI: The DOE has no authority to levy fines on companies that violate FERPA. It can withhold federal funding from the district, but that’s considered such a drastic step, it’s never once been taken.
Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment, or PPRA, schools must obtain parental consent before requiring students to fill out surveys that ask about sensitive issues such as political affiliation, income or sexual behavior.
“Our objective is to produce succinct yet informative summaries that can be included in browser plug-ins or interactively conveyed to users by privacy assistants that inform users about salient privacy practices,” said Norman Sadeh, the lead principal investigator of the study. The results currently presented on this site were obtained using annotations crowdsourced from law students.
Why Privacy Matters Glenn Greenwald was one of the first reporters to see — and write about — the Edward Snowden files, with their revelations about the United States' extensive surveillance of private citizens. In this searing talk, Greenwald makes the case for why you need to care about privacy, even if you’re “not doing anything you need to hide."
THE U.S. Department of Education ANSWERS questions about student privacy.
Are student files private? The answer is no because of the Loopholes! The "educational record" isn't the same as "metadata". Meta data is whatever the kid is doing online.
Schools can disclose “directory information” without parental consent, including a child’s name, address, phone number, birth date, awards received and student ID number. Schools must notify parents once a year of the general categories of information that might be released and give them a chance to opt out. And finally, the third big exception: Schools can also release student records, without written consent, to other “school officials with a legitimate educational interest.”
In 2008, the Education Department expanded the definition of “school officials” to include for-profit companies. Student information that has been properly de-identified or that is shared under the “directory information” exception, is not protected by FERPA, and thus is not subject to FERPA’s use and re-disclosure limitations.
Privacy and Encryption companies gather and sell K12 student information.Check to see whether your school district has a policy about disclosing student information.School Districts and Companies are Data mining your children
Doug Levin, Executive Director
of the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA), the principal membership association representing U.S. state and territorial educational technology leaders.
202-715-6636 x700No one is protecting student privacy.
5/15/14 POLITICO examination of hundreds of pages of privacy policies, terms of service and district contracts — as well as interviews with dozens of industry and legal experts — finds gaping holes in the protection of children’s privacy. Students are tracked as they play games, watch videos, read books and take quizzes. The data revolution has also put heaps of intimate information about school children in the hands of private companies where it is highly vulnerable to being shared, sold or mined for profit. The most adept are scooping up as many as 10 million unique data points on each child, each day. That’s orders of magnitude more data than Netflix or Facebook or even Google collect on their users.
Ed tech insiders will not name bad actors in their industry. But they will say this: It’s quite possible to exploit student data.Web sites receive huge amounts of student information directly from schools or districts. They hand over children's data because they wrongfully assume it would be aggregated and anonymized even though the contracts makes no mention of that or they don't realize just how much date is actually turned over.
The data management site
- Matthew Rubinstein, the founder and CEO of LiveSchool, markets software that helps schools track student behavior. Children’s personal information is splintering across the Internet “Anonymity is going to be more valuable than gold in the near future.”
- LearnBoost, a startup backed by prominent venture capital firms a for-profit startup is holding student records and making it easy for teachers to send them zipping around the Internet without supervision from the district.
- LearnSprout, stores information such as attendance records, which can be granular to the point of noting head lice, a cold, a doctor’s appointment or bereavement to name just a few of the categories.
- Interactive Health Technologies stores multi-year fitness records on students, based on data from heart monitors they wear in P.E., and integrates them with “unlimited data points” from the classroom, including behavioral and nutrition records.
- eScholar, data storage and analytics firm sells software to help districts manage records on 20 million students and stores some of that data on its servers does not have a posted privacy policy.
- Panorama Education, a data analytics platform used by thousands of schools is backed by investors including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and actor Ashton Kutcher does not have a blanket policy to share with the public.
- code.org - donors /sponsors Facebook’s Zuckerberg and Microsoft’s Bill Gates.
Cameron Wilson Chief Operating Officer requires that its partner schools turn over up to a dozen years of academic records, including test scores, on every participating student, according to a model contract The policy goes on to say it may provide personal information to “schools, teachers and affiliated organizations.” It explicitly states that Code.org does not control how that information “is later used by them or shared with others.” The policy doesn’t define “affiliated organizations” or explain how access is determined. Nor does it explain what Code.org does with its voluminous student files or how it protects them. - Khan Academy CON Academy privacy policy, gives it the right to draw on students’ personal information to send them customized advertising.
Users do pay a price: In effect, they trade their data for the tutoring. “Data is the real asset,” founder Sal Khan told an academic conference last fall. The site tracks the academic progress of students 13 and older as they work through online lessons in math, science and other subjects. It also logs their location when they sign in and monitors their Web browsing habits. And it reserves the right to seek out personal details about users from other sources, as well, potentially building rich profiles of their interests and connections. It allows third parties, such as YouTube and Google, to place the tiny text files known as “cookies” on students’ computers to collect and store information about their Web usage. It can share personal information with app developers and other external partners, with students’ consent.
A report by McKinsey & Co. last year found that expanding the use of data in K-12 schools and colleges could drive at least $300 billion a year in added economic growth in the U.S. by improving instruction and making education more efficient.
The NSA has nothing on the ed tech startup known as Knewton. The data analytics firm has peered into the brains of more than 4 million students across the country. By monitoring every mouse click, every keystroke, every split-second hesitation as children work through digital textbooks, Knewton is able to find out not just what individual kids know, but how they think. Private-sector data mining has galloped forward — perhaps nowhere faster than in education. Both Republicans and Democrats have embraced the practice. And the Obama administration has encouraged it, even relaxing federal privacy law to allow school districts to share student data more widely.
Parents AND School administrators are often in the dark, too. They don’t know which digital tools individual teachers are using in the classroom. And when they try to ask pointed questions of the ed tech companies they work with directly, they don’t always get clear answers. LOOPHOLE
LOOPHOLES IN AN OLD LAW
The U.S. Department of Education has called safeguarding children’s privacy a priority. “That has to be first, that has to be foremost, that’s absolutely paramount,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a recent video chat posted by the department. Yet the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, written when the floppy disk was just coming into vogue, offers only limited protections. The 1974 law, known as FERPA, explicitly gives school districts the right to share students’ personal information with private companies to further educational goals. Companies are supposed to keep standardized test scores, disciplinary history and other official student records confidential — and not use it for their own purposes. But the law did not anticipate the explosion in online learning. Students shed streams of data about their academic progress, work habits, learning styles and personal interests as they navigate educational websites. All that data has potential commercial value: It could be used to target ads to the kids and their families, or to build profiles on them that might be of interest to employers, military recruiters or college admissions officers. The law is silent on who owns that data. But Kathleen Styles, the Education Department’s chief privacy officer, acknowledged in an interview that much of it is likely not protected by FERPA — and thus can be commercialized by the companies that hold it.
10/1/14 ComputerCop dangerous internet safety software given away by hundreds of police agencies, does NOT protect your child online. ComputerCOP is actually just spyware, generally bought in bulk from a New York company that appears to do nothing but market this software to local government agencies. The way ComputerCOP works is neither safe nor secure. It isn’t particularly effective either, except for generating positive PR for the law enforcement agencies distributing it. As security software goes, we observed a product with a keystroke-capturing function, also called a “keylogger,” that could place a family’s personal information at extreme risk by transmitting what a user types over the Internet to third-party servers without encryption. That means many versions of ComputerCOP leave children (and their parents, guests, friends, and anyone using the affected computer) exposed to the same predators, identity thieves, and bullies that police claim the software protects against. Furthermore, by providing a free keylogging program—especially one that operates without even the most basic security safeguards—law enforcement agencies are passing around what amounts to a spying tool that could easily be abused by people who want to snoop on spouses, roommates, or co-workers.
Online privacy regulations for kids take effect 7/1/13
The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) of 1998 restricts websites from knowingly collecting personal information from children younger than 13 years of age. The FTC voted last year to expand the regulations to cover games, apps and ad networks. The new rules also expand the definition of personal information to cover photos, videos, audio recordings and location data. The rules apply to sites and apps directed at children, such as a Disney princess website, as well as sites where children disclose their age, such as Facebook.
Digital Literacy and Citizenship Classroom Curriculum by commonsensemedia.org
The U.S. DOESN'T have a Privacy Commissioner and the U.S. Department of Education remains disturbingly placid about all the breaches in the education sector.
- Privacy Online
- Surveillance
To amend title 18, United States Code, to specify the circumstances in which a person may acquire geolocation information and for other purposes. 3/13 -- H. R. 1312 - Big Data
If you thought that the NSA wanted too much personal information, just wait a few months. The EFF is reporting that the FBI's new facial recognition database, containing data for almost a third of the US population, will be ready to launch this summer. Codenamed NGI, the system combines the bureau's 100 million-strong fingerprint database with palm prints, iris scans and mugshots. Naturally, this has alarmed privacy advocates, since it's not just felons whose images are added, but anyone who has supplied a photo ID for a government job or background check. According to the EFF's documents, the system will be capable of adding 55,000 images per day, and could have the facial data for anything up to 52 million people by next year. Let's just hope that no-one tells the Feds about Facebook, or we're all in serious trouble.
2013 Supreme Court says Police can collect your DNA, from anyone arrested and without a search warrant. the FBI's Combined DNA Index System or CODIS - a coordinated system of federal, state and local databases of DNA profiles - already contains more than 10 million criminal profiles and 1.1 million profiles of those arrested. U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the court's opinion: "When officers make an arrest supported by probable cause to hold for a serious offense and bring the suspect to the station to be detained in custody, taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee’s DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment."
U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, along with associate justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Stephen Breyer went along with the ruling; while associate justices Antonin Scalia, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and and Elena Kagen dissented. Make no mistake anyone arrested for any reason will lose their privacy. The gov't is building the national database with your DNA.
DoDDS - EU breach
A previously reported breach that affected students at the Ramstein Intermediate School also affected students and sponsors at three other schools under the U.S. Department of Defense Education Activity– Europe (DoDDS-Europe). Until now, I didn’t know which other schools were involved, until a small item on Military.com provided their names.
Stars and Stripes: Jennifer H. Svan reports: The theft of five thumb drives from an unlocked vehicle may have compromised the personal information of hundreds of pupils, their parents and staff members at a Defense Department school in Germany, school officials said Wednesday. Parents of more than 900 students at Ramstein Intermediate School were notified of the possible data breach Tuesday night, more than three weeks after the information disappeared. The thumb drives were stolen overnight Oct. 26 from the unlocked vehicle of an American living in Landstuhl, according to German police. The data sticks belonged to an intermediate school employee, said Department of Defense Dependents Schools-Europe spokesman Bob Purtiman. [...]
Purtiman said officials were trying to determine whether the data on the thumb drives was protected by encryption, and whether the devices were personal or government-owned.
One may contact us with questions and concerns by sending an e-mail to Privacy.Office@eu.dodea.edu or addressing a letter to our APO address:
DoDDS-Europe
ATTN: Privacy Officer
Unit 29649, Box 7000
APO, AE 09002
The U.S. Department of Education established the Privacy Technical Assistance Center (PTAC) as a “one-stop” resource for education stakeholders to learn about data privacy, confidentiality, and security practices related to student-level longitudinal data systems.
The mission of the Family Policy Compliance Office (FPCO) is to meet the needs of the Department's primary customers--learners of all ages--by effectively implementing two laws that seek to ensure student and parental rights in education: the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA).
Parents and eligible students who need assistance or who wish to file a complaint under FERPA or PPRA should do so in writing to the Family Policy Compliance Office, sending pertinent information through the mail, concerning any allegations to the following address:
Family Policy Compliance Office
U.S. Department of Education
400 Maryland Avenue, SW
Washington, D.C. 20202-5920
Phone: 1-800-USA-LEARN (1-800-872-5327)
Final FERPA regulatory changes Published in Federal Register on December 2, 2011 Effective January 3, 2012
States collect far more information than parents expect, and it can be shared with more than just a student’s teacher or principal. Parents and students have very little access to that data. Data Quality Campaign, their idiot Directors and for profit business partners who support deforming education into a data-driven enterprise and advocate for expanded data use. All 50 states and Washington, D.C. collect long term, individualized data on students performance, but just eight states allow parents to access their child’s permanent record. Forty allow principals to access the data and 28 provide student-level info to teachers. "When you have a system that’s secret [from parents] and you can put whatever you want into it, you can have things going in that’ll be very damaging," says Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "When you put something into digital form, you can’t control where that’ll end up." Some states store student’s social security numbers, family financial information, and student pregnancy data. Nearly half of states track students’ mental health issues, illnesses, and jail sentences. Without access to their child’s data, parents have no way of knowing what teachers and others are learning about them. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act gives parents "certain rights with regard to their children’s education records, such as the right to inspect and review [their] child’s education records." But it also allows student information to be shared without parental consent. "Your child’s information may be disclosed to another school in which your child is enrolling, or to local emergency responders in connection with a health or safety emergency," it says.
usnews.com/news/articles/2012/01/19/who-should-have-access-to-student-records
School used the webcam to spy on children in their home without permission.
How 10 digits will end privacy as we know itTeachers: Does your district have a policy regarding students privacy?Parents: Check to see whether your school district has a policy about disclosing student information.Summary
The Secretary amends our regulations implementing the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which is section 444 of the General Education Provisions Act. These amendments are needed to implement a provision of the USA Patriot Act and the Campus Sex Crimes Prevention Act, which added new exceptions permitting the disclosure of personally identifiable information from education records without consent. The amendments also implement two U.S. Supreme Court decisions interpreting FERPA, and make necessary changes identified as a result of the Department's experience administering FERPA and the current regulations.
These changes clarify permissible disclosures to parents of eligible students and conditions that apply to disclosures in health and safety emergencies; clarify permissible disclosures of student identifiers as directory information; allow disclosures to contractors and other outside parties in connection with the outsourcing of institutional services and functions; revise the definitions of attendance, disclosure, education records, personally identifiable information, and other key terms; clarify permissible redisclosures by State and Federal officials; and update investigation and enforcement provisions.
When it comes to your student's personal information, who's in charge?
K12 Administrators: The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, enforced by the Federal Trade Commission, requires commercial website operators to get parental consent before collecting any personal information from kids under 13. COPPA allows teachers to act on behalf of a parent during school activities online, but does not require them to do so. That is, the law does not require teachers to make decisions about the collection of their students' personal information.
The No Child Left Behind Act includes a provision that requires high schools to turn over personal information on students to military recruiters. In addition, the Pentagon now maintains a database of some 30 million 16- to 25-year-olds, including their names, ethnicities, addresses, cell phone numbers, family information, extracurricular activities, and areas of study.
Citizens have lost Control over their children's information.
Privacy Concerns arise over Student Data.
Thanks to the 1974 federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act schools are allowed to sell (designate as public record) as much student data as they want to directories, yearbooks. Outside groups get it through public record. Debate prods some schools to alter policies of selling contact information. K-12 School Districts and Colleges are allowed to share and sell student contact information with outside sources. They sell names, ages, phone numbers and home addresses of students.
TAKE BACK CONTROL: WHAT PARENTS CAN DO
- Parents should demand tha the school board decide to stop giving out students' phone numbers, home and email addresses.
- Parents should form group to oppose a school policy to share its student list. Parents can request their information be taken off the list.
- Sue the School District to make them stop.
- College students may restrict what information is made available.
DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOUR STATE IS COLLECTING ABOUT YOUR CHILD?Shawn Bay, the founder and chief executive of eScholar, a software company has helped build successful student data warehouses in 20 states. State Education Technology Directors Association also build the database. Examples:
- California spent $60 million since 1997 to develop an "electronic statewide school information system."
- Maine spent five years building the Maine Education Data Management System, $5 million, and are still working kinks out of it.
- North Dakota spent $2.4 million on a system.
- Idaho's 114 school districts in a system spent 21 million and will cost 180 million to complete.
- North Carolin spent 110 million and needs 140 million to complete.
- NY 31 million.
DEPT. OF EDUCATION PROPOSES EXPANDING IPEDS Inside Higher Ed, 1 December 2006
The U.S. Education Department has proposed significantly expanding the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), creating what it calls Huge IPEDS. In March 2005, the department proposed creating a unit-record database that would track students much more closely than current reporting does, allowing more accurate statistics for graduation and transfer rates among U.S. college students. Many in the higher education community resisted the unit-record database, saying it represents an invasion of student privacy, not to mention increasing the administrative workload. Some of the most vocal opponents of the unit-record database now see Huge IPEDS as a government tactic to move forward with the database by proposing another that is even more unpalatable. One official from a higher education association who asked not to be identified said, "It seems like a lever for the department to make an even stronger case why unit records make more sense." Mark Schneider, commissioner for education statistics at the Department of Education, declined to answer whether the new proposal is a decoy but did say that "people want and need more data, and were going to get it one way or the other."
Statewide data systems that could be linked.
2010 An infrastructure will make it possible for dozens of states to share data about the students in their K-12 and postsecondary education systems, creating the equivalent of a national system of data on students' educational progress. Once the "model common data standards" are developed, the State Higher Education Executive Officers and the Council of Chief State School Officers will -- using grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation -- build understanding of and support for the standards among their respective members, SHEEO announced last week.
Many policymakers say the ability to gather and analyze such information is essential to reaching the goal of getting more Americans into and out of higher education. After Congressional Republicans quashed the Bush administration's proposal for a truly federal "unit record" database as part of its existing Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, a coalition of foundations, research groups, and now, the Obama administration are looking to develop statewide data systems that could be linked. "There are a very small number of data elements that are really central to educational progress and achievement, and sometimes separate standards [and definitions] for K-12 and higher education," explained Paul Lingenfelter, president of the State Higher Education Executive Officers. "Where there needs to be communication between the two, like in terms of students' academic preparation and academic success, this would create consistent standards so that communication could take place." Some fear, however, that a massive receptacle of data on students would inevitably impinge on individual privacy. The Lumina report, by Peter Ewell and Marianne Boeke of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, follows a similar 2003 review of the status of state systems that track data at the student level, which found that 39 states had such databases for all or parts of their public higher education systems and that it would be feasible to link those databases into a comprehensive network.
SurveillanceSchool Districts' Staff installing spyware / adware on district-owned workstations. School District's staff seems to download and install all types of garbageware: Example: Hotbar, Webshots, Bonzi Buddy, Shopping Buddy, Comet Cursor, etc. with little regard or thought as to what these "programs" do in the background (advertising banners, stealing information from forms).
Should the district care if staff wants to personalize their workstation? Most of these kinds of programs have become very, very intrusive and invasive. Ad components don't uninstall, browser security settings are abruptly changed, ads added to personal email, etc. What is the district policy if secretaries & custodians who have installed "Hotbar" (which puts pieces into IE and Outlook) and who now cannot fill out district browser-based database forms, and other staff members who now have lost their default browser homepage settings to Webshots or related garbage (and, oddly enough, Win2000 Group Policies isn't preventing it or fixing it). Some staff members get popup windows with advertising as soon as they start their browsers to view the district private internal webserver. Garbageware is starting to prevent people from completing their job duties.
- Do any districts have policies in place regarding staff installing software from the Internet (as compared to purchased CD-based software)?
- Staff installing software from the InternetIs this allowed freely?In your policies, do you address issues of whether these garbageware titles are violating federal laws regarding privacy of student records?
Some transmit the contents of whatever form you're filling out back to the ad company. 10/02 Example: imagine if every piece of information you filled out in a PowerSchool form was sent back to CometCursor or Bonzi Buddy for evaluation (they're doing) Do you use firewall-based or content-filtering tools to block such invisible network communications between ad client and ad company? - Is removing this garbage going to be a big focus for your school district?
Educational CyberPlayGround's Catching Digital Cheaters, how to COMBAT PLAGIARISM
SCHOOL PUBLIC ACCESS SYSTEMS -
prevent students from installing or deleting software on our public access systems.
Schools have tried to punish their students' online activities and failed. Learn Why.
ARMED FORCES COLLECT CHILDREN'S INFORMATIONMining for kids: Children can't opt out of Pentagon recruitment database
By Kathryn Casa | Vermont Guardian
Parents cannot remove their children's names from a Pentagon database that includes highly personal information used to attract military recruits, the Vermont Guardian has learned.
The Pentagon has spent more than $70.5 million on market research, national advertising, website development, and management of the Joint Advertising Market Research and Studies (JAMRS) database a storehouse of questionable legality that includes the names and personal details of more than 30 million U.S. children and young people between the ages of 16 and 23.
The database is separate from information collected from schools that receive federal education money. The No Child Left Behind Act requires schools to report the names, addresses, and phone numbers of secondary school students to recruiters, but the law also specifies
that parents or guardians may write a letter to the school asking that their children's names not be released.
However, many parents have reported being surprised that their children are contacted anyway, according to a San Francisco-based coalition called Leave My Child Alone (LMCA).
"We hear from a lot of parents who have often felt quite isolated about it all and haven't been aware that this is happening all over the country," said the group's spokeswoman, Felicity Crush.
Parents must contact the Pentagon directly to ask that their children's information not be released to recruiters, but the data is not removed from the JAMRS database, according to Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke, a Pentagon spokeswoman.
Instead, the information is moved to a suppression file, where it is continuously updated with new data from private and government sources and still made available to recruiters, Krenke said. It's necessary to keep the information in the suppression file so the Pentagon can make sure it's not being released, she said.
Krenke said the database is compiled using information from state motor vehicles departments, the Selective Service, and data-mining firms that collect and organize information from private companies.
In addition to names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and phone numbers, the database may include cell phone numbers, e-mail addresses, grade-point averages, ethnicity, and subjects of interest.
S.F. SCHOOL BOARD SET TO PULL TRIGGER ON JROTC
A majority of the San Francisco Board of Education is poised to end the district's 90-year relationship with the U.S. military and its widely popular Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps, with a vote expected next week. Four board members oppose the program on two grounds: the military's stance on gays and the desire to keep the armed forces out of public schools. "I don't think the military should be involved in civilian life," said board member Dan Kelly, a self-described pacifist who served two years in prison for resisting the Vietnam draft. "I know that children, the students, like the program," Kelly said. "I know they enjoy it. That doesn't necessarily mean it's doing a good thing for them." The program costs nearly $1.6 million per year, reports Jill Tucker. The military pays $586,000, or half the salaries of 15 instructors -- all of whom are retired military personnel rather than certified teachers. The district pays the other half of salaries and $394,000 in benefits. Most critics acknowledge that the JROTC helps reduce dropouts. Students learn leadership and problem-solving skills, first aid, money management, geography, civics and how to be a team player, among other topics -- some of which they learn in other required classes. Opponents say all that can be done without the military.
How to Protect Kids' Privacy from the Government
k16 to 25? Pentagon Has Your Number, and More By DAMIEN CAVE June 24, 2005
The Defense Department and a private contractor have been building an extensive database of 30 million 16-to-25-year-olds, combining names with Social Security numbers, grade-point averages, e-mail addresses and phone numbers.
The department began building the database three years ago, but military officials filed a notice announcing plans for it only last month. That is apparently a violation of the federal Privacy Act, which requires that government agencies accept public comment before new records systems are created.
David S. C. Chu, the under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, acknowledged yesterday that the database had been in the works since 2002. Pentagon officials said they discovered in May 2004 that no Privacy Act notice had been filed. The filing last month was an effort to correct that, officials said.
Mr. Chu said the database was just a tool to send out general material from the Pentagon to those most likely to enlist.
"Congress wants to ensure the success of the volunteer force," he said at a reporters' roundtable in Washington. "Congress does not want conscription, the country does not want conscription. If we don't want conscription, you have to give the Department of Defense, the military services, an avenue to contact young people to tell them what is being offered. It would be na12ve to believe that in any enterprise, that you are going to do well just by waiting for people to call you."
On Wednesday, The Washington Post reported that the notification in The Federal Register had drawn criticism from a coalition of eight privacy groups that filed a brief opposing the database's creation. Yesterday, many of those privacy advocates, learning that the database had been under development for three years, called its existence an egregious violation of the Privacy Act's rules and intent.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/24/politics/24recruit.html?ex=1277265600&en=10803fe5d6f59fe1&ei=5090
ARMED FORCES RECRUITER ACCESS TO SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS
Did you know that NCLB Title IX, Section 9528 requires school districts that receive NCLB assistance to share student information such as names and addresses of students to military recruiters? Another provision in Section 9528 allows parents and students to protect this information by requesting that it not be released. Schools must notify parents of their right to request that personal student information not be released, but many do not do so. NCLB requires school districts to provide military recruiters the "same access to secondary school students as is provided generally to postsecondary education institutions or prospective employers." Many states and school districts also have policies that regulate the privacy of student information, in addition to the NCLB requirements. With their parents written consent to the school district, a student may request that their name, address and telephone not be released to military recruiters, institutions of higher education or both. At the link below are sample forms that can be submitted to school districts to request privacy protection of student information.
Student Marketing Group Inc.
Deceived students into providing personal information. The company encouraged teachers to collect the data from students, which was then sold to marketers to pitch the students for items such as magazines, clothes, and credit cards. Suit
American Student List, LLC
New York: (888) 462-5600 • Florida: (888) 550-8548
E-mail: sales@studentlist.com
Privacy Policy
American Student List then sells student names and other information to companies that solicit students for a wide array of goods and services. ASL provides the largest, most authentic lists of students available. They target children for promotions by zip, county, sectional center and state, gender, age and class year. Many lists also include telephone numbers. All lists are available on magnetic tape, tape cartridge, diskette, pressure-sensitive or cheshire labels, or through electronic delivery: modem to modem.
School students are entitled fo First Ammendment Protection.American Student List pays for the information by helping to fund the National Research survey. Companies that buy student names from American Student List include shaving giant Gillette Co.; credit-card purveyors American Express Co. and Capital One Financial Corp.; Kaplan Inc., the Washington Post Co. unit that is the largest admissions test-coaching chain; Primedia Inc.'s Seventeen Magazine; and Columbia House Record Club, which is owned by AOL Time Warner Inc. and Sony Corp.
- 3 million students Segmented by juniors and seniors on this list
A gold mine of marketing potential and valued property of ASL since 1972. - Over 2 million email addresses from teens, from 16 to 25.
- 12 million names of children ranging in age from 2 to 13 years, representing Pre-K through 8th grade. All names are selectable by age, birthdate, and head of household.
- 25 million names of children ages birth through 17, by age, birth date, head of household, income and geography.
- 9 million names segmented from grades 9 through 12 contain the student's full name and home address
- 4 million names of individuals, aged 14 to 19, from Sports Activities, Scholastic Activities, Career Interests, Computer Users, categories.
- 5 million names, home and school addresses and phone numbers of students attending 1,100 colleges and universities.
- full names of people between the ages of 18 and 36
- 3 million questionnaire respondents from a particular ethnic group.
- 8 million questionnaire respondents belong to a religious group.
College-Survey Firm Quietly Peddles Student Information to Big Marketer[source]
Each year, more than one million U.S. high-school students take time out of their school day to fill out a survey asking their names, addresses, grade-point averages, races, religions and social views. The organization that sponsors the survey, the National Research Center for College and University Admissions, tells the schools it will broaden students' higher-education options by distributing their names and profiles to hundreds of colleges and universities across the country.
But colleges aren't the only recipients of the survey results. Generally unknown to high schools, colleges, students and their parents, National Research for at least a decade has also sold the personal information it gathers to the country's leading supplier of young people's names to commercial marketers, American Student List LLC.
UNIVERSITY2007 The ruling says the student had "legitimate, objectively reasonable privacy expectations" concerning the data on his computer even though he had connected it to the university network. University policies, no matter what they say, "do not eliminate [the student's] expectation of privacy in his computer," the decision said. Read the text of the decision, , written by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/opinions/
How They Manage
Student Data
The University of Texas at Austin manages student data confidentiality and disclosure in accordance with FERPA, the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (aka the Buckley Amendment) and the Texas Public Information Act. Under FERPA, universities designate certain formation as "directory information" that may be disclosed without the student's explicit permission (although students may elect to make directory information confidential, most students do not). Under the Public Information ("Open Records") Act, "it is the policy of this state that each person is entitled, unless otherwise expressly provided by law, at all times to complete information about the affairs of government ...." including student directory information. Texas Public Info Act: UT Austin's FERPA policies
2000 Privacy Law Forcing Changes to Children's Sites
WASHINGTON -- The first federal law governing privacy in cyberspace takes effect on Friday, when Web sites that gather personal data will be required to start getting parental permission before requesting personal information from children under 13.
Lawmakers, regulators, privacy advocates, Web companies and Internet users alike will be closely watching the introduction of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act to see if it is effective, how it changes the online experience of young Web surfers and whether similar rules should be expanded to cover teenagers or even adults.
The Federal Trade Commission, which wrote the rules for the new law and which will be responsible for enforcing it, has launched a media blitz both on- and off-line to educate parents, children and Web site operators about the new law.
The law that takes effect Friday was passed two years ago after an FTC survey found that the state of online privacy protections was generally dismal. It requires all Web sites that gather personal information from children under 13 to have clearly posted privacy policies stating how that data is used. And they must gain "verifiable" parental consent before gathering any information.
Web Sites Related to This Article:
Center for Democracy and Technology
Federal Trade Commission: Privacy Initiatives, with links to information about the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act
Immunity provisions of the federal Communications Decency Act (CDA).
Legal Liability for Internet Service Providers Under the Communications Decency Act By Edmund B. (Peter) Burke
http://www.gigalaw.com/articles/2001/burke-2001-05-p2.html
A Win for a Public Library
In this article we will examine some recent cases that throw light on the interpretation of the immunity provisions of the federal Communications Decency Act (CDA). The decisions generally involve the interpretation of Section 230(c)(1) of the CDA, which states: "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."
The leading case on this rule of federal immunity is, no doubt, Zeran v. America Online Inc., a 1997 case from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. In Zeran, the court found that Congress made a deliberate policy choice to immunize those persons providing Internet access from tort liability. According to the Fourth Circuit's decision:
Congress recognized the threat that tort-based lawsuits pose to freedom of speech in the new and burgeoning Internet medium.... Section 230 was enacted, in part, to maintain the robust nature of Internet communication and, accordingly, keep government interference in the medium to a minimum.
RSS Feed
