inBloom redux? NYSUT, NYSAPE and Parent Coalition for Student Privacy protest

Update: After we sent our letter to Anita Murphy below, the BOCES announced that "All seven of the Statewide Data Conversations set for this spring have been postponed to better coordinate with all stakeholder groups. At this time, new meeting dates have not been scheduled."  If and when they are re-scheduled we will let you know.

I thought this announcement was from 2013 until I saw the date: a new NY state effort to “envision” a new state data system with funding from the Gates Foundation.

Apparently the grant was obtained by the Capitol region BOCES but Commissioner Elia must have approved it. Do these guys never learn? 

Envisioning a New Statewide Data System

A variety of data is collected about children and students—from birth through their school years and into young adulthood. Used purposefully, this data can be a powerful tool to inform, engage and create opportunities for our students. It can paint a “bigger picture” of who students are and what they most need to grow, achieve and meet their educational goals, and help educators and others make connections that can lead to school and curricular improvements.

See the letter of protest sent today from NYSUT, NYSAPE and our Parent Coalition for Student Privacy below. Meanwhile, a series of sessions are being held throughout the state “to gather feedback” in late May and early June.  Please sign up if you can.

So what happened? And how we need to be ready for the fight to save our public schools

I've been hesitant about writing about the Presidential election for many reasons.  I am as shocked and appalled as many others, and have no special insights or expertise to explain what happened.  But one of the smartest guys I know, Tad Devine, a top adviser to Bernie Sanders, was on NPR and explained Trump's election this way: "most voters in the states that decided the election wanted change. He represented that change. She did not. And I think that was enough for him to win the election."

Clearly, many people, especially the Rust Belt voters who decided the election, wanted change desperately.  There was no way to argue that Hillary represents change.  The more that Obama tried to point to what a great job she did in his administration and her years of experience probably just underscored how she had been part of the system for 20 years or more. 

I remember that Bill Clinton’s convention speech was focused on the claim that Hillary represents change.  He was  smart to focus on that issue as he had correctly diagnosed the temperature of the electorate, but in the end his argument was unconvincing.

Does that mean Bernie Sanders would have won?  Who knows.  No matter how anti-establishment Sanders is, Trump could have argued that he’s been in Congress for 27 years.  On the other hand, Bernie beat Hillary in some of the primaries in the same states that went for Trump. Whether Trump will deliver the sort of change these voters yearn for or bring their factory jobs back seems unlikely, and how much damage he will do to marginalized groups of immigrants, Latinos, blacks and others in the process we will have to see.

The other reality is this: Because Hillary has been part of the system for so long, a lot of negative feelings and even hatred has accumulated towards her personally over the years.  This attitude is largely irrational and unfair, but it was not easy to dispel – especially when the email scandal erupted twice via FBI director Comey’s letters during the last two weeks of the campaign.   To witness just how intense the hatred is for Hillary among many women and men, you should watch this excellent CNN series with Van Jones interviewing Trump supporters in Gettysburg PA.  

The real tragedy is that Obama could have probably brought more real change into these communities if the GOP in Congress hadn’t blocked nearly everything he tried to do, whether it was increasing the minimum wage, infrastructure spending, tax reform etc.  The GOP in the House and the Senate had a highly partisan strategy to stand in the way of Obama accomplishing nearly anything since they took control -- including reforms that could have helped a lot of those people in the Rust belt  and throughout the country -- and their strategy won.

I also think we need to remember the stunning data that came out last year showing that for the first time in this nation’s history white death rates are increasing sharply – which seems to be the result of increased rates of addiction, alcoholism and suicide. Meanwhile, black and Latino mortality rates are falling significantly. I hope that some economists/political scientists analyze whether the addiction/mortality data correlate in specific communities with the Trump vote.

What’s also tragic is that if Obamacare is repealed or cut back this may cause mortality rates to grow – in most all communities and among all races.

I do want to point out some bright spots in the election results.   In Georgia and Massachusetts, multi-racial coalitions of unions, parents and school board members overwhelmingly defeated privatization efforts, proving that big money doesn’t always win.  Here is a must read by Jennifer Berkshire (Edushyster) about how this was accomplished in Massachusetts.

At the same time, the campaign by Bill Gates and other billionaires in the state of Washington to pack courts with pro-charter judges lost. 

We will need to replicate these grassroots campaigns throughout the country to keep our public schools safe and secure from being defunded and privatized by the Trump administration, Wall St. financiers and ed-tech interests.  At the same time, we'll have to form the same sort of coalitions to ensure that our public schools are sufficiently and equitably funded and provide all children with a real opportunity to learn.

In New York state, sadly, this didn't happen.  The state teachers union, NYSUT, gave most of their money to long-shot upstate candidates who lost.  Only 3 percent of the $3.9 million NYSUT spent was in support of candidates who won. Democratic challengers in the extremely close State Senate races on Long Island were left largely without state union funding and support -- according to the parents and rank and file teachers who worked hard as volunteers on these campaigns.  At the same time, millions in pro-charter PAC money was spent to defeat these same Long Island Democratic candidates, and to keep the State Senate in Republican hands, which paid for stealth attack ads that never mentioned the words "charter school" -- dirty words for most Long Island voters.

We will have a battle on our hands for sure to withstand the destructive impulses of a pro-privatization President, State Senate and Governor.  Public school parents, teachers, school boards, community activists and yes, unions, will need to band together, organize, be smart and ready for the fight.  

Video of Saturday's One Voice United Rally for Public Education

Video below of the Saturday's huge rally, One Voice  United in Albany.  Highlights: Randi Weingarten at 56 minutes in; Michael Mulgrew at 1:08; student leader Nikhil Goyal at 1: 29.

At 1:35, Tom Chapin and Michael Mark perform their great song, "It's Not on the Test," and then, with Mary Mark, reading teacher in Nyack, a new song they wrote for the occasion, "One Voice."  (Tom Chapin went to PS 41 in Greenwich Village and Brooklyn Tech; Mark is on his 6th term of the Nyack school board.).

John Nichols of The Nation's gave the keynote address at 2:10; my speech is at 2:30.  Please add your favorites below.

Video of massive rally in Albany today and my speech

The rally in Albany was massive today; with estimates of 25,000.  You can get a sense of the size from the video below.  I was honored and
excited to be a part of it.  Let's hope it is just the beginning of a real movement to rescue public education, led by teachers, parents, administrators and students, to take back our schools.  Here is my speech:

We are here today to call upon the Governor and the Legislature to do what is right for the children of New York. 

Children need good schools. Children need small class sizes.  Children need experienced and caring teachers…But instead of giving New York's children what they need, the Governor, the Legislature and the Regents are intent on giving our kids more tests.

Parents are outraged as to how our public schools are being undermined by policymakers who do not seem to realize how their decisions are hurting New York State’s children. 

From the testing obsession, to budget cuts, class size increases, and rampant sharing of private data, the needs of our students and the priorities of parents are ignored, and our trust in government is eroding every day. 

Rather than give our children the smaller classes they need, the corporate reformers claim that personalized instruction will be provided through software and data analysis.

So the state is providing all our children’s most sensitive personal information to a corporation called inBloom Inc. funded by Bill Gates – which in turn plans to give this information to for-profit vendors w/o parental consent. 

Because of protests from parents, four states have announced they are pulling out of inBloom –– but the arrogant and reckless bureaucrats in the NYS Ed Department are still intent on going ahead no matter what. 

NYS is now the only inBloom client willing to risk the privacy and the future of more than 3 million public schoolchildren of the entire state by putting their names, test scores, disability status, health records & disciplinary records on a vulnerable cloud -- managed by Amazon.com with an operating system by Wireless, run by Joel Klein and owned by Rupert Murdoch.

And not only parents should be worried – inBloom is also collecting personal teacher information, including your social security number and the longitude & latitude of your home address, as though they wanted to send a drone missile to your home.  They are putting this data together with your students’ test scores, and the reason you were let go from your last job – so that there can be a national black list of teachers based upon unreliable value-added formulas.

Collecting data and providing it to for-profit companies run by people like Rupert Murdoch can never substitute for the personal interaction a child has with his or her teacher.  You cannot be replaced by a machine.  

Today we come together to say, enough of this arrogant dismissal of the voices of parents, children and teachers; enough of the damage being wreaked on our schools.  We will not stand for it any longer.  It must end today.