Mayoral control hearings and video: It's time for a change

I just came from the NY Senate hearings on mayoral control, where Senator Shelley Mayer, chair of the Education Committee, Senator John Liu, chair of the NYC Education Committee, and Senators Robert Jackson, Velmanette Montgomery and others asked piercing questions of parents, advocates, community members, as well of Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Carranza.

To cut to the chase: the Mayor said that he and the Chancellor are "working on being more responsive to parents" and  plan to be more systematic about this in the "next couple of weeks."  This is after he has been in office for five years.

Meanwhile he insisted on a three-year extension of mayoral control to the end of his term; no change in the composition of the Panel on Educational Policy, no change in his ability to fire PEP members at will, and no change in the selection process of the Chancellor to make it more transparent or provide more public input.

Several times the Mayor claimed he had never fired a PEP member for disagreeing with him, which is untrue.  Elzora Cleveland was fired last year as reported here and in City Limits below, for voting against school closures.

Both the Mayor and the Chancellor said they had made terrific progress in "empowering" parents and "listening to them," though no specific examples were given in terms of new policies adopted or decisions made.

Jumaane Williams, our new Public Advocate-elect, spoke concisely and well about the need for municipal control - meaning that the City Council should be empowered to provide checks and balances when it comes to our schools, as they do with all other city agencies but DOE.

Brooke Parker of NYC Kids PAC and I spoke after Jumaane; my testimony is below.  We agreed that municipal control would be an improvement,  as well as giving more authority to CECs to approve school closings and co-locations and changing the composition of the PEP.

After me, Community Education Council District 3 President Kim Watkins and Shino Tanikawa, the co-chair of the Education Council Consortium, the collective of all the CECs, explained how the current system is essentially undemocratic and that parents continue to be shut out of important decision-making when it comes to their children's schools.

Shino, a parent activist for at least 15 years, said that she vehemently opposed mayoral control without checks and balances.  She pointed out that there is no accountability, as the supporters of mayoral control maintained, because there is no real transparency and voters do not vote on education alone.  Moreover, as de Blasio is now in his second term, what choice do voters even have at this point?  We cannot vote him out. She added that all the things that others praised de Blasio for doing, including expanding preK,  could have done with or without mayoral control.

Senator Liu and Senator Jackson asked whether they would support a Commission that could deliberate over the course of one or two years to devise how an improved system of school governance might be structured.

Shino said perhaps, but only if the Commission including CEC members and other parents.  "We need a real conversation that includes parents students and teachers and that results in a system that is truly democratic...We need a system that doesn’t depend on the individual temperament of the mayor."

The most infuriating testimony came from Bob Lowry of the NY State Council of Superintendents and Julie Marlette of the NY State School Boards Association.  Both said that they supported an unrestricted three-year extension of mayoral control with no changes;  not for their own districts of course, but for NYC.  The districts they represent have elected school boards that offer parents and community members real input as opposed to our essentially dictatorial one-man rule.

In my testimony, I tried to counter many of the myths surrounding mayoral control, including great improvements in student outcomes, less corruption and waste, etc. etc..  Our Kids PAC video is at the top of the page.  Our mayoral control fact sheet is here.

Take a look and let your legislators know how you feel.  At this point, it appears that the best chance we have for making a real change is for the State Legislature to create a Commission to examine both the benefits and drawbacks of mayoral control and propose a better system for the future.

Please vote now to send Parent Coalition for Student Privacy and other grassroots privacy activists to SXSWEdu!

Cross-posted at Student Privacy Matters 

Each spring, thousands of edtech entrepreneurs, and advocates funded by the edtech industry, descend upon Austin’s SXSWEdu conference to promote their products and publicize their point of view.

For example, it’s where Bill Gates launched inBloom Inc. in 2013, to push the expansion of data-mining student personal information and online learning. Rarely do you bump into any classroom teachers, parent leaders or grassroots education activists attending, much less find one on stage. We hope to change that in 2018.

Please help us by voting for our panel proposal “Shielding data privacy and resisting online learning.” Our panelists include attorney and privacy activist Bradley Shear, creator of the  annual National Student Data Deletion Day, research associate Faith Boninger, who has just co-authored a terrific new report on student privacy for the National Education Policy Center, Marla Kilfoyle, the Executive Director of Badass Teachers Association (BATS)  and me.


The BATs NEA Caucus supported, and pushed for several pro-privacy and anti-online learning resolutions that were adopted at the recent NEA Representative Assembly.

To submit your vote:
1.     Simply fill out this form.
2.     Sign in and select “PANELPICKER.”
3.     Search for our panel name “Shielding data privacy and resisting online learning.”
4.     Click on “Vote Up.”

The more votes we get, the better our chances of being selected – so please vote today and ask your friends to vote too! The voting window closes Friday, August 25th.

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Background

In spring of 2013, Bill Gates took the stage at SXSWEdu to unveil inBloom, his foundation’s $100 million student data collection project which was being piloted in nine states and school districts across the nation. inBloom surfaced in every corner of the conference that year with parties, meet-ups, and a code-a-thon where cash “bounties” were awarded to teams who developed the best apps using the inBloom data store.

At the same time, parents whose children’s data was going to be ensnared in the project were raising their voices in opposition – concerned about how inBloom threatened student privacy and could accelerate the use of online learning. After considerable parental backlash, inBloom shuttered its doors in 2014. Shortly after, parents involved in the fight formed the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy.

Since then, student data privacy has gained national attention and SXSWEdu has featured countless workshops and presentations on the subject – including on the reasons for inBloom’s demise, without inviting a single parent involved in the fight to explain their opposition. We want to change that next year by going directly to the belly of the beast, and inviting others who are active in the resistance movement on the ground to protect student privacy and prevent the expansion of online learning to join with us. You can help by casting your vote in support of our panel here!

Chief Privacy Officer Finally Appointed; Parents and Advocates Await Next Steps to Protect Student Data

See the Politico article this morning about NYSED's appointment (finally) of a CPO -- more than two years past the legal deadline and our press release below. UPDATE: See also articles in Schoolbook, Chalkbeat and Staten Island Advance.

For immediate release

August 24, 2016

For more information: Leonie Haimson, leonie@classsizematters.org, 917-435-9329

Chief Privacy Officer Finally Appointed; Parents and Advocates Await Next Steps to Protect Student Data

The long overdue appointment announced today by the NY State Education Department of a Chief Privacy Officer, Temitope Akinyemi, is an important step forward to begin to enforce the New York student privacy law that was originally passed on March 31, 2014 as part of the state budget, along with the banning of the plan to share personal student data with inBloom Inc. 

Parents are relieved that more than two years following the July 29, 2014 deadline set by this law, the NY State Education Department has finally appointed a permanent Chief Privacy Officer.  Yet by that date, the CPO was also supposed to have developed an expanded Parent Bill of Privacy Rights, with the input of parents and other stakeholders.  Instead, NYSED hurriedly posted a Bill of Rights two years ago that is incomplete as to existing federal and state privacy laws – as pointed out by a letter to then-Commissioner John King in August 2014.

Said Leonie Haimson, Executive Director of Class Size Matters and co-chair of the national organization, the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy: “Now that the CPO is appointed, Ms. Akinyemi should immediately begin to reach out to parents through public hearings to improve and expand upon the Parent Bill of Rights, to gain their input so that their children’s privacy and safety can be secured. Parents have already waited too long for this to occur.”

Parents and advocates also urge Ms. Akinyemi to appoint a Data Stakeholder Advisory Panel to oversee the state’s collection and disclosure of personal student data.  According to a federal grant provided to NYSED in 2009, this Panel was supposed to “provide active and ongoing review by local constituents,” but still does not yet exist – seven years later.

Added Ms. Haimson, “Only with robust citizen oversight can we be assured that children’s personal information will be safeguarded with appropriate restrictions and protections. We recently learned that the NYSED has decided to reverse their earlier decision to put the personal data of all public school students in the State Archives, potentially forever; but this decision should never have been made in the first place.  It reflects a deficient understanding of federal law and insufficient concern with the right to privacy that all children should enjoy.”

Allison White, parent and co-founder, Port Washington Advocates for Public Education, said: “I hope the CPO will put parental concerns about student privacy and security ahead of all else. It's time the profits of tech companies and the greed of those seeking to privatize public education took a back seat to the concerns of parents seeking to protect children.”  Ms. White’s request for her child’s data last year was improperly denied initially with a demand for payment by Tina Sciocchetti, the state’s previous temporary CPO.

“There needs to be stronger oversight and enforcement of the law,” said Fatima Geidi, NYC parent, whose child’s disciplinary file was illegally posted online by Eva Moskowitz, the CEO of his former charter school, in violation of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). “We need someone at the state level who is looking out for the interests of New York families, rather than ignoring our concerns.” 

"The appointment of a Chief Privacy Officer may bring some sense of student data protection, but until parents have the right to consent or opt out of the use of their child's individual personal data beyond the school level, data will continue to be at risk," said Lisa Rudley, Westchester County public school parent and founding member of NY State Allies for Public Education.

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