Stopping MA DESE from Turning Over Student and Teacher Records to Corporations

Letter from ACLU to MA BESE:

February 5, 2013

Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education
75 Pleasant Street
Malden, MA 02148

Dear Board Members,

It has come to our attention that the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education intends to share confidential student and teacher data with the Gates Foundation, as part of its Shared Learning Collaborative, consisting of personally identifiable information including student names, test scores, grades, disciplinary and attendance records, and most likely, special education needs, economic status, and racial identity as well. 

The Gates Foundation is building a national “data store” of such information, and intends to hand all this information to a new, separate corporation, which in turn plans to make it available to commercial vendors to help them develop and market their “learning products.”[1][1] The operating system of this “data store” is being built by Wireless Generation, a subsidiary of the News Corporation, which has been investigated for violating the privacy of individuals both here in the United States and in Great Britain.[2][2]

The Foundation has stated that this new corporation, inBloom, will be financially sustainable and independent of philanthropic support by 2016, meaning that states, districts, and/or vendors will likely have to pay for the maintenance and upkeep of the “data store,” which is to be placed on a cloud run by Amazon.com.[3][3] Of particular concern, inBloom has stated that it “cannot guarantee the security of the information stored in inBloom or that the information will not be intercepted when it is being transmitted” to third party vendors.”[4][4]

We have grave concerns about this unprecedented plan to disclose highly sensitive information with private entities, and we urge you to take the following steps to ensure that student privacy rights are fully protected:

1. 1.   Provide and post publicly the contract between the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Gates Foundation concerning this matter;

2.  2.  Hold hearings and explain to the public what specific confidential information will be shared and for what purposes;

3.  3.  Require parental consent before a child’s data is shared with the Gates Foundation or any other private corporation that intends to store it and/or make it available to others, as FERPA requires[5][5];

4. 4.  Promise that this data will never be used for commercial purposes;

5.  5. Ensure maximum protections against data breaches and explain who will be held liable if a child’s personal information leaks out or is used in an unauthorized fashion;

6.  6. Explain what resources are being used to facilitate this project, and what further costs will accrue to state taxpayers for the long-term maintenance of this “data store,” once the new corporation becomes independent of philanthropic support;

7.  7.  Create an advisory group to oversee this project, including public school parents, advocates, independent experts in data security and privacy, and other stakeholder groups.

The Federal Trade Commission has recently strengthened restrictions on the capture and use of a child’s personally identifiable information, in recognition of the huge risks to safety and privacy that occur when commercial entities obtain access to it.[6][6] The Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education should be leading the effort to protect this data, rather than involved in facilitating its disclosure. The Board should have as its top priority securing the privacy rights of the state’s schoolchildren and their families, rather than serving the interests of private corporations. Until and unless the above steps are taken, we trust that you will not allow any disclosures to occur.

We await your reply,

ACLU of Massachusetts

Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood

Citizens for Public Schools

Little Research and Less Science to Support Race To The Top Agenda

The Race to the Top (RTTT) appears more and more to be a Race over the Edge (ROTE). No one, conservative or progressive, outside the Broad and Gates green zones (where the money is) believes even an ounce of the propaganda tonnage that has been launched by the Oligarchs to justify the corporate takeover of American education. Clips from a piece in Ed Week by Debra Viadero:

. . . .With recently published draft guidelines for federal economic-stimulus money and Title I aid, critics are beginning to ask whether much has changed under the Obama administration.

“What is extraordinary about these regulations is that they have no credible basis in research. They just happen to be the programs and approaches favored by the people in power,” writes Diane Ravitch, a research professor of education at New York University, in her blog, Bridging Differences, which is hosted by edweek.org. She served as the Education Department’s assistant secretary for educational research and improvement under President George H.W. Bush.

For their part, department officials are not yet answering the criticism. They did not respond to repeated requests from Education Week to address such complaints.
. . . .

The lack of research reflected in some of the department’s school-improvement initiatives is a disappointment, though, to researchers and advocates who were encouraged by President Barack Obama’s Inauguration Day pledge to “give science its rightful place” in government decisionmaking.

An ‘Opposite Approach’
Both the Bush administration and President Obama “have supported using data to determine ‘what works,’ ” economists Sean P. Corcoran and Joydeep Roy of the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute write in a letter filed in response to the proposed guidelines for the $4 billion Race to the Top fund, part of the economic-stimulus legislation. Yet, in some areas, they say, the proposed rules “take the exact opposite approach.”

In particular, Ms. Ravitch, Mr. Corcoran, Mr. Roy, and scholars such as Duke University’s Helen F. Ladd oppose two priorities at the heart of the program that they say lack research evidence: evaluating teachers based on students’ standardized test scores and promoting the growth of charter schools.

“One theory of action seems to be that holding teachers more accountable for the gain in their students’ test scores will induce them to become better teachers,” writes Ms. Ladd, a professor of public-policy studies and economics. “At this point, I am not aware of any credible evidence in support of that proposition.”
. . . .

Skepticism of efforts to evaluate educators based on their students’ test scores was not universal among academics, though. “We strongly support the focus of the Race to the Top program on teacher effectiveness and achieving equity in distribution of effective teachers,” wrote eight academics in a comment letter submitted by Thomas J. Kane, a professor of education and economics at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., and the deputy director of research and data for the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s education program. . . .

If you cannot believe economists about the economy, we must wonder how much credibility should be given economists about something they know even less about--especially when they work for the same corporatists who are behind the current takeover bid of American education.

Thin and Thinner
The evidence behind Race to the Top’s call for giving priority to states that don’t impose caps on the growth of charter schools, likewise, is far from definitive, various commenters said.

Recent studies in Boston and New York City have found that charter school students outperform regular public school peers who applied to charter schools but failed to win a seat. But a study of charters in 15 states and the District of Columbia by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University found that students in more than 80 percent of the charter schools performed the same as, or worse than, students in regular public schools on mathematics tests. Achievement from school to school was highly variable, the study found. ("N.Y.C. Study Finds Gains for Charters," Sept. 30, 2009.)

The American Educational Research Association, a Washington-based group that represents 25,000 education researchers, notes in its Race to the Top comments that “there has been much less research about the turnaround strategies identified in the proposed regulations than about charter schools, and, consequently, even less is known about conditions required for their success.”

Yet the Education Department, in both the proposed Race to the Top rules and in draft regulations governing the spending of $3.5 billion in new school-improvement aid for the nation’s 5,000 worst-performing schools, spells out specific interventions states should use to qualify for the funding. They range from implementing a mandatory basket of “transformation” strategies to closing the school and sending students to higher-achieving schools to “restarting” the school by turning it over to a charter- or education-management organization. . . .

All entirely without data to support the new educational empire where all decisions are data-driven. Are you lost in the funhouse, too? I am.