Join us next month in Indy to discuss privacy & online learning!

Next month in Indianapolis, the Network for Public Education will be holding our annual conference on Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 20-21. More info and how to register here.

I will be participating in two amazing panels focused on how protect students and teachers from the growing threat to data privacy and resist the the expansion of online learning which is undermining the quality of public education.

The first workshop, to be held on Saturday Oct. 20 morning at 10:50 AM is entitled Outsourcing the classroom to ed tech and machine-learning: why parents & teachers should resist . Presenting with me are two brilliant bloggers and thinkers whose work I never fail to learn from, Audrey Watters and Peter Greene.

Audrey has single-handedly and fiercely taken on the ed tech industry for many years and critiques their claims on her essential blog, Hack Education. If you haven't subscribed to her newsletter, you absolutely should do so. She is currently writing a book to be published by MIT Press called Teaching Machines.

Peter is a Pennsylvania teacher who retired last year, but even while teaching was among the most prolific and incisive education bloggers at Curmudjucation. He also now writes a regular column for Forbes. In his writings, he deconstructs and eviscerates the agenda of the corporate reformers and faux philanthropists, whether it be the promotion of online education, Common Core, high-stakes testing or any of the other snake oil disseminated by private interests bent on disrupting public education. He shows how they are based neither on research, common sense, or the experience of teachers or parents.

During the second workshop, held later the same day, our panel will present A Teacher Data Privacy Toolkit: How to protect your students’ privacy and your own. Marla Kilfoyle and Melissa Tomlinson of the Badass Teachers Association, Rachael Stickland co-chair of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy and I will offer some of the highlights and practical tips of our yet-to-be released Toolkit, the product of a year-long collaboration between the PCSP and the BATs, with support from the Rose Foundation, the NEA and the AFT.

From responses to an online survey and focus groups of teachers, administrators and other school staff, we heard loud and strong how educators were deeply frustrated by the lack of training and knowledge they had about how to minimize and safeguard the increasing amount of personal data being collected by schools and vendors, and how they can work to ensure it isn't breached or improperly used. This toolkit, like the Parent Toolkit for Student Privacy we along with Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood released in 2017, represents an attempt to provide the support and information that teachers need to act as responsible guardians of their students' privacy -- and their own.

Please join us in Indianapolis - more amazing speakers and panels are described here. -- Leonie Haimson

NPE conference Oct. 14-15; please come if you can!

There are only about thirty seats left for our annual Network for Public Education conference, this year in Oakland CA from Oct. 14-15.  If you've never been before to an NPE conference, you are missing something terrific. We have some fabulous keynote speakers, pictured to the right. In addition, you can check out the schedule of workshops.

I'll be moderating two panels: One on the myths and reality of online learning, along with Mark Miller, the former President of the PA School Board Association and Marla Kilfoyle, the Executive Director of the Badass Teachers Association.

I'll also be doing a workshop on the fight for children's privacy, with Rachael Stickland of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy and Josh Golin of the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood.

Please come and share with friends and colleagues, especially those who live in the Bay Area.

Please join NPE in Raleigh to be inspired and learn so much!

In a few weeks, the Network for Public Education will hold our annual conference in Raleigh NC on
April 16-17. Among the keynote speakers will be Diane Ravitch, Rev. William Barber and author Bob Herbert, Jesse Hagopian, Karran Harper Royal and Dr. Phil Lanoue of Clarke County GA and National Superintendent of the Year.

I will be leading a workshop with the co-chair of our Parent Coalition for Student Privacy Rachael Stickland on the fight for student privacy post-inBloom, and another on "Personalized Learning", contrasting the research and reality of class size reduction vs. online instruction.  Joining me will be teacher/blogger extraordinaire Peter Greene and attorney and columnist Wendy Lecker.

Here is the full schedule of events; click the right hand arrow for Sat. and Sunday and this page to register and get info on how to reserve your hotel room etc. 

I am on the board of NPE, and I'm proud to say it has become the leading national organization of parents, teachers and advocates fighting the forces that undermine our public schools, including high-stakes testing, budget cuts and privatization. Each year the opportunity to meet with like-minded allies and share strategies and information is tremendously helpful and even inspirational.  This year promises to be our best yet.  Please join us if you can!

My speech when I received the Parent Voice award in DC on Monday night

Me with the board members of Parents Across America

On Monday night in Washington DC, I received the Parent Voice award from Parents Across America for my work defeating inBloom, at a dinner co-hosted by the NEA.  I was very moved and overwhelmed to receive this award, especially from fellow parents for whom I have so much respect and have worked closely with on many occasions.  Here is what I said:

I'm tremendously honored to receive this award from Parents across America - a wonderful organization that provides great tools for parents to resist damaging policies and to strengthen our public schools - and to speak up for parents in the national stage.  I am also incredibly honored to be given this award by Helen Gym, who is one of the foremost parent activists in the entire country and deserves her own award every day of the week.  I also want to thank the generosity of the NEA for co-hosting this dinner; parents and teachers working together can stop the runaway train of corporate education reform.

The inBloom saga was a hard fought battle but there is no way we could have defeated it without the  parents from all the nine inBloom states who stood up in horror and refused to take the bland assurances of their state and local officials and the Gates Foundation that this was all for their kids' benefit and their own.   

As soon as parents found out that the plan was to gather all their kids most sensitive and confidential info including their names, addresses, phones, disabilities, grades, test scores, health conditions and disciplinary records, store it on an insecure data cloud, and offer it up to vendors without their knowledge or consent, they were rightly furious and just wouldn't allow this to happen. 

Parents of all political stripes fought back and many who had no political affiliation at all and simply wanted to protect their children's privacy and safety and didn't think the potential benefits of data collection, sharing and mining were worth the risks.

I want to acknowledge some of those here tonight who helped us win this battle, including Khem Irby of Guilford NC, who stood up before her school board to protest the handing over of her children data to Bill Gates, Joel Klein and Rupert Murdoch.

Robin Hiller of Voices for Education in Arizona, also Executive Director of Network for Public Education, who had me in her radio show several times to talk about the threats to privacy from inBloom and other schemes still in our future like the PARCC testing consortium.

 Rachael Stickland of Jefferson  Co Colorado who really did an amazing job organizing parents in her community against this violation of privacy.

Julie Woestehoff who scheduled briefings for me and others to speak to the editors of the Chicago Tribune and Sun Times, and co-hosted a forum for parents  that persuaded Illinois and Chicago to essentially cancel their involvement in inBloom in less than 24 hours from my arrival.

There are countless more parents and teachers who helped us fight this behemoth but couldn't be here today- activists in Louisiana, the first state to pull out, Georgia, and others. In NY, we had most of the district superintendents and school boards on our side as well, making it a lot harder for the inBloom apologists and flacks to argue that we were just naive and dumb parents who didn't understand how great this plan was and all the opportunities it would provide.

This is a template for the future that we will now use to try to strengthen the federal privacy law known as FERPA . Last week Rachael and I launched a new Parent Coalition for Student Privacy and we are visiting key congressional offices this week to get our point across that FERPA, which had been rewritten twice to essentially take out most of its privacy protections, must go back to what it was previously - a strong law that requires parental notification and consent before sharing the most intimate details of a child's life with any third party.

We will need all your help going forward, so please join us at www.studentprivacymatters.org

But more than anything else the story of inBloom provides proof that pissed off parents can achieve miracles - we can take down an $100 million project of the Gates Foundation when we work together, organize and have right on our side. 

Video of our student privacy panel at the NPE conference in Austin last month

Check out the video below Network for Public Education panel presentation on student privacy, held in Austin on February 29, with a short slice of my powerpoint (the rest of it is here), along with some amazing parent advocates who beat back inBloom in their respective states and districts: Jason France of Louisiana (better known as Crazy Crawfish), Rachael Stickland of Colorado, and Julie Woestehoff of Parents United for Responsible Education in Chicago.

We wrap up with Barmak Nassirian of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, who explains why student privacy is so critical -- and so endangered -- with the weakening of FERPA by the federal government and because so many states, private organizations and vendors are eager to collect, share and data-mine your children's  information.

All of these activists still remain working on this issue, pro bono, including advocating for state legislation to protect privacy,  well aware of how defeating inBloom is only the beginning of a longer battle.
For more information about the 2014 NPE Conference, visit our website and Diane Ravitch's blog, with links to many accounts of the different panels; see also videos of  the terrific keynote speakers, including John Kuhn, Karen Lewis and Diane herself.

Many of the activists I met for the first time said it was the best conference they ever attended, as did and many with whom I was able to re-connect; and I agree.  Please become a member of NPE to support public education, be kept up to date on our activities and be invited to next year's conference.

Thanks to Schoolhouse Live and Vincent Precht for the video.