 |
| Me with the board members of Parents Across America |
On Monday night in Washington DC, I received the Parent Voice award from Parents Across America for my work defeating inBloom, at a dinner co-hosted by the NEA. I was very moved and overwhelmed to receive this award, especially from fellow parents for whom I have so much respect and have worked closely with on many occasions. Here is what I said:
I'm tremendously
honored to receive this award from Parents across America - a wonderful
organization that provides great tools for parents to resist damaging policies and to
strengthen our public schools - and to speak up for parents in the national
stage. I am also incredibly honored to
be given this award by Helen Gym, who is one of the foremost parent activists in
the entire country and deserves her own award every day of the week. I also want to thank the generosity of the NEA for co-hosting this dinner; parents and teachers working together can stop the runaway train of corporate education reform.
The inBloom saga
was a hard fought battle but there is no way we could have defeated it without
the parents from all the nine inBloom states
who stood up in horror and refused to take the bland assurances of their state
and local officials and the Gates Foundation that this was all for their kids'
benefit and their own.
As soon as
parents found out that the plan was to gather all their kids most sensitive and
confidential info including their names, addresses, phones, disabilities,
grades, test scores, health conditions and disciplinary records, store it on an
insecure data cloud, and offer it up to vendors without their knowledge or
consent, they were rightly furious and just wouldn't allow this to happen.
Parents of all
political stripes fought back and many who had no political affiliation at all
and simply wanted to protect their children's privacy and safety and didn't
think the potential benefits of data collection, sharing and mining were worth
the risks.
I want to
acknowledge some of those here tonight who helped us win this battle, including
Khem Irby of Guilford NC, who stood up before her school board to protest the
handing over of her children data to Bill Gates, Joel Klein and Rupert Murdoch.
Robin Hiller of Voices for Education in Arizona, also Executive Director of Network for Public Education, who had me in her radio show several times to talk about the threats to privacy from inBloom and other schemes still in our future like the PARCC testing consortium.
Rachael Stickland of Jefferson Co Colorado who really did an amazing job
organizing parents in her community against this violation of privacy.
Julie Woestehoff who scheduled briefings for me and others to speak to the editors of the
Chicago Tribune and Sun Times, and co-hosted a forum for parents that persuaded Illinois and Chicago to essentially
cancel their involvement in inBloom in less than 24 hours from my arrival.
There are countless more parents and teachers who
helped us fight this behemoth but couldn't be here today- activists in
Louisiana, the first state to pull out, Georgia, and others. In NY, we had most
of the district superintendents and school boards on our side as well, making it
a lot harder for the inBloom apologists and flacks to argue that we were just
naive and dumb parents who didn't understand how great this plan was and all the
opportunities it would provide.
This is a template for the future that we will now use to try to strengthen the federal privacy law known as FERPA . Last week Rachael and I launched a new Parent Coalition for Student Privacy and we are visiting key congressional offices this week to get our point across that FERPA, which had been rewritten twice to essentially take out most of its privacy protections, must go back to what it was previously - a strong law that requires parental notification and consent before sharing the most intimate details of a child's life with any third party.
We will need all your help going forward, so please
join us at www.studentprivacymatters.org
But more than anything else the
story of inBloom provides proof that pissed off parents can achieve miracles -
we can take down an $100 million project of the Gates Foundation when we
work together, organize and have right on our side.
No comments:
Post a Comment