It was a long day today at Senator Flanagan's hearings on the Common Core, testing and privacy.
My written testimony is here. Other testimonies are linked to here, where hopefully the webcast will be posted soon. Meanwhile, below is the media release from our press conference this morning.
For
immediate release: October 29, 2013
NYC
PARENTS, ELECTED OFFICIALS, EDUCATION PROFESSIONALS AND ADVOCATES SPEAK OUT
AGAINST TESTING AND DATA-SHARING
BEFORE
NYS SENATE HEARINGS
 |
| Council Member Robert Jackson |
This
morning, at a press conference at 250 Broadway in Lower Manhattan, before
hearings of the NY Senate Education Committee, members of Class Size Matters,
Change the Stakes, and New York State Allies for Public Education, along with
elected officials and education professionals, spoke out against the way the New
York State Education Department is subjecting public school students to
unproven programs, excessive high-stakes testing, and privacy violations, undermining
the quality of their education and putting their future prospects at risk.
Leonie
Haimson, Executive Director of Class Size Matters, said: “New York is now the
worst state in the country when it comes to student privacy. Commissioner King
plans to share personally identifiable data from the entire state’s public
school student population with inBloom Inc. and other vendors, including highly
sensitive disability diagnoses, disciplinary records, and even teen pregnancy
and immigrant status. Parents in NYC and
elsewhere have protested this plan at every turn, and demanded the right keep their
children’s data out of the inBloom database, without success. There is now a
grassroots rebellion brewing among parents, school board members, and district
superintendents against inBloom. We
welcome the opportunity to speak to Senator Flanagan and other members of the Education
Committee, to let them know that personalized learning can only come through
smaller classes, not testing or data-mining our children, and to urge them to
pass legislation to stop this unconscionable plan.”
"In
recent years, some education officials have gotten awfully cavalier about
handing over private, personal data on our kids to outside vendors and third
parties seeking to use it in commercial product development," said Sen.
Liz Krueger (D-Manhattan). "None of this data should ever be shared with
outside vendors and third parties without the informed consent of parents, at a
bare minimum. 'Big data' analysis can
yield tremendous benefits, but data-sharing run amok can yield disastrous
consequences as well. Protecting our kids must always come first."
 |
| NYC parents Karen Sprowal, Lisa Shaw & Nancy Cauthen |
Nancy
Cauthen, parent of a 7th grader and a member of the group Change the Stakes
says, "Education officials have justified imposing costly, large-scale and
unproven reforms based on an overly-simplistic and unsubstantiated narrative
about American high school graduates not being 'college and career ready.'
Reasonable people can debate the pros and cons of having national standards,
but we never had that debate. Instead, the push for Common Core was driven by a
corporate vision of education that sees students only as future workers and
public funds as a source of private enrichment."
“Our children continue to be negatively
impacted by ill-conceived education policies that have nothing to do with
teaching and learning. We must rid the school environment of the pressure
of doing well on tests and bring back learning and teaching to a student’s
academic level. A student’s achievement should be measured on the
totality of their school work and progress not on the scores of high stakes
tests. Only then can we develop a curriculum that truly supports to their
success,” said Councilmember Robert Jackson, Chair of the New York City
Council’s Education Committee.
Lisa
Rudley, an Ossining parent and founding member of NYS Allies of Public
Education says, “As districts in Westchester and Long Island give
back their Race to the Top funds, to try to protect their children's private
records from being shared with dashboard vendors, I am outraged that the state
still plans to share our personally identifiable student data, including highly
sensitive discipline and disability information, with inBloom Inc. This is
morally reprehensible and incomprehensible not only to parents, but to
superintendents, who have made their opposition to this plan known. Six
states have pulled out of inBloom or put their data-sharing plans on hold; the
other two are allowing either districts or parents to opt out. It is time that
the NY State Education Department do the same.”
Santos
Crespo, the President of Local 372, the school aide union, says: “The Common
Core Curriculum Standands created by non-educators has taken the joy out of
learning for our children. The excessive testing and test prep is traumatizing
our children. The violation of student privacy through schemes like InBloom
designed to exploit and profit off our children must be stopped. The Regents'
Reform Agenda is clearly an attempt to corporatize and privatize education.
Local 372 vehemently opposes this agenda that seeks to undo Public Education
and stands united with parents to ensure every child receives a high-quality,
well rounded public education.”
According
to Lisa Shaw, “As a parent of four children I can't sleep at night. I am so desperate to protect my children's
personal information from inBloom that I am considering sending them to a private
school, moving out of state, or even out of the county. My pleas to the DOE and
NYSED to opt out have been ignored. I now
refuse to sign any school forms, including Medicaid or school lunch forms, and
encourage other parents to do the same. If Commissioner King had his own
children in a public school he might understand how I feel.”
“How do you build a baseline
from last year’s poorly constructed tests--a weak foundation standing
on shaky field test data?” asks Fred Smith, a testing expert and former
employee of the NYC Board of Education.
Karen Sprowal, a NYC parent of a special needs child and a member
of Class Size Matters, explains: “Once
again the NY State Education Department has dismissed the rights of public
school parents by trampling all over our children's privacy. These
‘personalized learning’ tools that inBloom intends to facilitate are experiments
on public education children. No private schools are signing up for them,
so I must question why my child is being subjected without my consent. Parents
will not share financial information if they know that it will be
shared with for-profit vendors. As a result, New York City and New York state may
lose millions in Medicaid reimbursements, Title one funds and, if there are
breaches, from lawsuits. We cannot
allow our children to become experimental subjects in a manner that puts their
future at risk.”
Ruth Powers Silverberg,
Associate Professor in the School of Education at the College of Staten Island,
CUNY, asks: “Am I meeting my responsibility to my students, future principals,
if I don’t focus on practices designed to increase test scores? I came to the
College of Staten Island to prepare school leaders with research-based
approaches to school improvement: nurturing a collaborative culture with the
focus on learning, and developing the supportive relationships that are the
foundation of all learning and growth. I implore the Senate Education Committee
to reverse the current test-driven course so that my graduates can do this
work.”
###
No comments:
Post a Comment