Monday, October 28, 2013

Press conference tomorrow & District Superintendents rebel against inBloom & state's data sharing!

Please join us tomorrow, Tuesday morning, Oct. 29 at 9:15 AM outside of 250 Broadway near City Hall (map here), where we will be holding a press conference about the Common Core, excessive testing and privacy violations by the NY State Education Department.  
 
Elected officials, parents, education professionals, and members of the group Change the Stakes will be there as well.  Immediately afterward, at 10:00 AM the NYS Senate Education Committee will hold hearings on these critical issues at 250 Broadway, 19th floor, chaired by State Senator John Flanagan.  Stay, if you can, to hear testimony about how the state is actively undermining our children’s education and privacy.  

Meanwhile, District Superintendents and elected school boards throughout  the state are pushing back against NYSED’s plan to share highly confidential student data with inBloom, Inc. and other vendors.  The last few days there have been several articles, here, here and here, about how districts are even  returning Race to the Top funds, in hope that this will persuade the State Education Department  from sharing this highly sensitive information with inBloom, Inc.
So far Commissioner King is hanging tough, insisting that even if districts return these funds and don’t sign up for dashboards, their personal student data will be uploaded to the inBloom cloud anyway.  Before, he claimed that parents were merely confused, and didn't understand how districts have long shared this personal information with vendors and need to do this to efficiently operate. This argument is much harder to make when he is trying to convince Superintendents that they just don’t understand how their own districts need inBloom, for reasons that they find impossible to grasp.
 
Watch the video below, in which Pleasantville Superintendent Mary Fox-Alter explains their opposition to this data-sharing plan:

4 comments:

RSquier said...

Common Core has nothing to do with testing, data collection, inBloom, etc. Please keep learning standards separate from excessive testing caused by APPR that Cuomo pushed not SED, data collection that has been going on for years. I would surmise the online games children play has more unprotected information on kids than the state does.

Anonymous said...

I applaud school boards and superintendents who are stepping up to protect our children. The hubris of Commissioner King and the SED is staggering. How long can they ignore the voices of the parents? My wife teaches in Hyde Park and I am proud that her district is standing up. I teach in Poughkeepsie--which has a different take. Look at the Poughkeepsie Schools website to see a letter trying to distance our school district from the press over the meeting with Dr. King. My hopes are that the tides will continue to turn and those the Regents, Commissioner of Education and NYSED will FINALLY be held accountable for their disreputable and flagrant misuse of power.

apple desktop repair said...

I applaud school boards and superintendents who are stepping up to protect our children. The hubris of Commissioner King and the SED is staggering. How long can they ignore the voices of the parents? My wife teaches in Hyde Park and I am proud that her district is standing up.

Anonymous said...

This is a great article that Juan Mendez should read and learn from. Juan Mendez is one of the dirtiest administrators in the city. He changed many state grades while in EBT High School in Brooklyn.
Furthermore, how does someone who is being investigated for having relations with another man all of a sudden get promoted to Superintendent? This man has no ethics and extremely arrogant. Hopefully, with the new chancellor things will change. This man deserves no position in the DOE.