Video and account of hearings on the dangers of inBloom and private data-sharing in Albany

Video  of Wednesday’s excellent NY Assembly hearings in Albany on inBloom and student privacy are online and below, including riveting critiques from many of the Assemblymembers from both parties, who grilled Commissioner King and Associate Commissioner Ken Wagner of the NYS Education Department.  In turn, King and Wagner continued to obfuscate and tried as much as possible to avoid answering their direct questions or responding to their concerns.  

Chair of the NYS Assembly Education Committee Cathy Nolan was also particularly upset because inBloom refused to show up for the hearings after being asked to testify.  InBloom claimed a "prior engagement" --  the exact same response the NYC Council received from the company when the Education Committee held their hearings last month.

I was disturbed to learn that the state had already uploaded a large amount of personal student data to the inBloom cloud, only without names attached, apparently to help inBloom "test" and develop their infrastructure  -- though both Wagner and King avoided answering questions about what exact data elements were shared.

There was much compelling testimony offered by NYC parents Karen Sprowal, Valerie Williams, Vice President of CEC District 75, and Ossining parent Lisa Rudley of NYSAPE, all parents of special needs children who face the most risk from public disclosures of their disabilities.   Mary Fox Alter, Superintendent of Pleasantville schools, Karen Zevin, Croton Harmon School board member, and Tim Farley, principal of Ichabod Crane Middle School in Kinderhook NY were also eloquent in their opposition to the violation of student privacy rights this project represents.   Cathy Nolan was so impressed with Mary Fox Alter that she suggested she apply to be NYC Chancellor.

My testimony as well as that of Karen Sprowal and Valerie Williams starts at about 2 hrs 11 minute in; my written testimony is here.

Attorney Jane Lauer Barker who is representing NYC parents on a lawsuit to enjoin the state from sharing this data testified, at about 3 hours in, and was illuminating about how the state's disclosure of this information appears to violate the Personal Privacy Protection law, because it is not either necessary nor authorized by law.  She  also pointed out how the "service agreement" between NYSED and inBloom is totally one-sided: "it's not a service agreement that would ever have been drafted by an attorney for this particular client [NYSED] because it puts the onus and the burden on the State Education Department to protect the data, not on inBloom."

She cited several provisions that gives all the liability to NYSED and none to inBloom, including that inBloom makes no guarantee of compliance with any data privacy or security laws, will not warrant that its system is not susceptible to intrusions or hacking, and has no responsibility to notify anyone but NYSED if there are breaches. The agreement also contains no provisions for penalties to inBloom if a breach does occur. Her written testimony is here.

Also rather disturbing was the testimony (at about 4 hrs in) from David Little, director of Governmental Relations for the NY State School Boards Association. Despite the fervent protests of many school boards across the state against NYSED's data-sharing plans, Little minimized the risk of breaches and expressed opposition to any of the current bills introduced in the Legislature to require parental consent or opt out before personal data is shared with any third party vendor.  He said that disclosing this data could provide numerous benefits, including making it possible for colleges to gain access to students' behavioral/disciplinary records when considering their applications.  He remarked that such data could be calculated in the form of a numerical “inBloom score” that would be useful to colleges to consider alongside a student’s test scores and grades. On his way out of the hearing room,  I thanked Little for giving parents yet another example of why this plan is so repugnant to them. UPDATE: NYSSBA has put out a statement that Little was providing a "cautionary example".  A transcript of Little's full testimony is here.

 Just some of the MANY newsclips in recent days about the hearings and New York's data sharing plans:NY Only State Still on Board With School Data Plan (AP/ABC), Assembly grills education chief on data plan (Rochester Democrat & Chronicle); Common Core: Assembly grills education chief King on student-data privacy (LoHud Journal News); Data Dashboard fears addressed at education hearing (Times Herald-Record); Plan: Gather data on pupils (Albany Times Union); Student privacy a major concern (NY Public Radio); Assembly education chair threatens subpoena against data company (Capital New York).

What Finland and Asia tell us about real education reform

There has been much publicity in recent years about how for more than a decade, Finnish students have excelled in the international comparisons called the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), exams given each three years in reading, math, and science to samples of 15-year-olds globally. In the current issue of the New Republic, Samuel E. Abrams, a visiting scholar at Teachers College, explains what Finland did to turn around its education system, starting in the 1970's:

Finland’s schools weren’t always so successful. In the 1960s, they were middling at best. In 1971, a government commission concluded that, poor as the nation was in natural resources, it had to modernize its economy and could only do so by first improving its schools. To that end, the government agreed to reduce class size, boost teacher pay, and require that, by 1979, all teachers complete a rigorous master’s program.

They also banned all standardized testing, as they figured out this takes too much time and too much money out of learning; and now they only give standardized exams to statistical samples of students to diagnose and assess school progress.

According to Abrams, the "only point at which all Finnish students take standardized exams is as high school seniors if they wish to go to university." The Finns "trust teachers" and allow them to "design their own courses, using a national curriculum as a guide."

Abrams is writing a book on school reform for Harvard University Press and has researched the Finnish educational system extensively. I contacted him by email to thank him for his article, and this is what he told me about class size:

• Average class size in 1st and 2nd grades is 19; in grades 3 through 9, it is 21.

• These reductions in class size were won by Finland's teachers' union (Opestusalan Ammattijarjesto, or OAJ) as a concession from the government when education authorities nullified tracking. In 1972, authorities postponed tracking from fifth grade to seventh. In 1985, authorities postponed tracking from seventh grade to tenth. The response from the OAJ was acceptance of the termination of tracking as wise but only if class sizes were reduced, as it would be too difficult for teachers to teach heterogeneous groups if classes remained large.
  

• In addition to science classes, all classes that involve any machinery or lab equipment are capped at 16. This includes cooking (which all seventh-graders are required to take), textiles (or sewing), carpentry, and metal shop.

Abrams' article concludes:

The Finns have made clear that, in any country, no matter its size or composition, there is much wisdom to minimizing testing and instead investing in broader curricula, smaller classes, and better training, pay, and treatment of teachers. The United States should take heed.

Also, see this recent interview with Pasi Sahlberg, another expert on the Finnish educational system. Sahlberg was asked about the current push towards test-based teacher evaluation systems in our country:

If you tried to do this in my country, Finnish teachers would probably go on strike and wouldn’t return until this crazy idea went away. Finns don’t believe you can reliably measure the essence of learning. You know, one big difference in thinking about education and the whole discourse is that in the U.S. it’s based on a belief in competition. In my country, we are in education because we believe in cooperation and sharing. Cooperation is a core starting point for growth.

Recently, McKinsey consultants estimated that if the achievement levels of American students matched those in Finland, our economy would be 9 to 16 percent larger - with the nation's GDP enlarged by $1.3 trillion to $2.3 trillion.

And yet what lesson have the Obama administration and its allies in the DC think thanks and corporate and foundation world taken from the PISA results? That there needs to be even more high-stakes testing, based on uniform core standards, that teachers should be evaluated and laid off primarily on the basis of their student test scores, and that it's fine if class sizes are increased.

In a speech, Duncan recently said that "Many high-performing education systems, especially in Asia," Duncan says, "have substantially larger classes than the United States."

What he did not mention is that Finland based its success largely upon smaller class sizes; nor the way in which many experts in Asian education recognize the heavy costs of their test-based accountability systems, and the way in which their schools undermine the ability ofstudents to develop as creative and innovate thinkers -- which their future economic growth will depend upon.

As Jiang Xueqin, the director of the International Division of Peking University High School, wrote in the Wall St. Journal:

According to research on education, using tests to structure schooling is a mistake. Students lose their innate inquisitiveness and imagination, and become insecure and amoral in the pursuit of high scores. Even Shanghai educators admit they're merely producing competent mediocrity. ...This is seen as a deep crisis... A consensus is growing that instead of vaulting the country past the West, China's schools are holding it back.

Nor do Duncan and his allies discuss the fact that many Asian education experts are calling for the need to reduce class size in their own countries. For example, a study from the Korea Institute of Curriculum and Evaluation revealed that South Korean students are highly disengaged from their classes compared to those in other nations. Their students also scored the lowest in respect or tolerance for others. The answer, according to the authors of the study? "To ...raise their interest in class, much improvement needs to be made including reducing the number of students per class.”


Many of the ideas of the Obama administration are based on a competitive business model, first developed by the right wing of the Republican party, leading conservative commentator George Will to call Arne Duncan and his policies "the Obama administration's redeeming feature."

The fear that many of us have is that these corporate-style concepts will be even more firmly imposed on schools, by means of a bipartisan consensus of the administration and the GOP majority in the House of Representatives.

In the current issue of Education Week, Amy Stuart Wells, a professor at Teachers College, bemoans the destructive group think reflected in this prevailing notion of education reform. She points out how it is "often difficult to distinguish Republicans from Democrats on key education issues, " and that:

"the most agreed-upon solutions—testing, privatization, deregulation, stringent accountability systems, and placement of blame on unions for all that is wrong—are doing more harm than good. Achievement overall has not improved, and the gap between the privileged and the disadvantaged has widened..."

She points out how states now spend five to six times the funds on testing than before NCLB -- with more than 90% of this going to private testing companies.

Yet she also holds out hope, based upon the fact that parents are increasingly pushing back against these misguided, market-driven notions, and mentions the leadership of Chicago's PURE, headed by Julie Woestehoff, one of the founding members of Parents Across America.

It's time that parents provided that third force, to put forward ea positive and progressive vision of education reform, based on small classes, experienced teachers, a well-rounded curriculum, and evaluation systems that go beyond test scores. Check out what Parents Across America believe will improve our schools here and join us.

What's going on with Mayoral control around the country?

On Friday, there will be a public discussion/forum on Mayoral control elsewhere in the nation; sponsored by the Parent Commission on School Governance. If you’ve come to one of our previous forums on governance, (see videos here and here), you know how good they’ve been. If you haven’t, it’s time you found out.

When: This Friday, Nov. 21 at 6:30 PM

Where: Judson Church Assembly Hall, 239 Thompson St. in Greenwich Village.

(Take A, B, C, D, E, F, or V trains to West 4th Street, or #6 train to Astor Place, or #1 to Sheridan Square)

What: A dynamite panel of experts including:

Mary Levy of Washington, DC: Parent advocate and Project Director of the Public Education Reform Project,Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights & Urban Affairs

Julie Woestehoff of Chicago: Executive Director, Parents United for Responsible Education (PURE);named one of the 100 Most Powerful Women in Chicago by the ChicagoSun-Times in 2004

Stefanie Chambers of Trinity College: Associate Professor and author of Mayors and Schools: Minority Voices and Democratic Tensions in Urban Education

If you think that all that is wrong with Mayoral control is Michael Bloomberg or Joel Klein – guess what! You might hear otherwise.

For more information, email parentcommission@gmail.com or call 917-435-9329.

Common-sense education reforms for the candidates

Today the NY Sun broke the story about our letter to the Presidential candidates, sponsored by Class Size Matters and Parents United for Responsible Education, out of Chicago:

Senators Obama and McCain have a panel of education advisers each, and there is no shortage of school administrators, union bosses, business leaders, and policy wonks who would very much like to be in those ranks.

A new group is urging the presidential candidates to pay attention to another constituency as they craft their education platforms: parents.

Led by two parent organizers — one in New York City and one in Chicago — this group says it's parents, not the unions, not the CEOs, and not even many of the academics, who have the right idea of how to improve public schools.

"There's a complete disconnect between what we're being told by the politicians and the businesspeople about what we should want schools to do, and what parents want schools to do," the executive director of the Chicago-based Parents United for Responsible Education, Julie Woestehoff, said. "But frankly what parents want schools to do is better for their children. They know best."

Our letter to McCain and Obama -- posted in full here -- describes some common-sense education reforms that parents and other stakeholders believe the federal government should be supporting, including safe and uncrowded schools with more counselors, smaller classes, a rich curriculum including arts, and more parental involvement. This isn't rocket science, guys!

High-needs kids need these sort of conditions in their schools as much as the children of those who are backing the so-called Education Equality Project, who are pushing a very different agenda for urban schools that, in the letter, we call "NCLB on steroids."

We also have a slightly different emphasis than those who put together "A Broader, Bolder Approach" in that the education reforms we propose are both more specific and more wide-ranging, and we strongly believe that making these sorts of fundamental changes can make a significant and sustainable difference.

As our letter says, "Until these goals have been achieved, we cannot and should not give up on the potential of schools to transform lives."

We are also more explicit in our critique of the current regime of high-stakes testing and the argument that simply adding more charter schools will lead to improvements systemwide though competition and market forces-- which we see no evidence of in NYC or Chicago.

Instead, here in NYC, charter schools are allowed to cap enrollment and class size and are being forced into overcrowded buildings, where they are diminishing the ability of the children who attend the existing school in the building from enjoying the same advantages. Meanwhile, the Bloomberg/Klein administration remains vehemently opposed to reducing class sizes in our regular public schools systemwide.

As we say in the letter, the last thing our nation needs is a "trickle down" educational system.

The full letter is posted here, on our new website, Common-sense reforms for our schools ; if you'd like to sign on, just send us an email with your name, affiliation and town or city to commonsensereforms@gmail.com and we'll pass on your names to the candidates as well.