Seattle Schools Community Forum

Going thru all those forms in your student's take-home packet?  Consider the following: - t he FERPA form - you have quite the dilemma.  If you do not approve allowing your student's data to go out, you risk your child not being in the yearbook.  (I find this all pretty silly but I believe this is done to get that data.)  A better directory opt-out form (and one I would have used.)  I think the district could challenge you on this but I think if it's what you submit, well, then you are on record. Here's what they do in one district in Colorado.   I like this one. Also on FERPA, it was amended (by our friend, Arne Duncan) to allow districts and other educational entities to allow any group/person with a "legitimate education interest " access to student data.  Here's something to consider;

Update: some common sense from one of my favorite education writers, Jersey Jazzman, and his "The PARCC Silly Season. end of update It's just hard to know where to start. First, the new thought from ed reformers is that parents just don't understand what they are doing when they opt their children out.  Thanks for patronizing them as if they are not thinking adults.  There are also new pro-testing groups springing up and many of them are funded by the Gates Foundation.  It's the same thing, over and over, with the Foundation. Create faux parent groups, data use groups and even media groups. 

Back to one of my major concerns - data collection on children and student data privacy. There was an important article published last week at The Answer Sheet at the Washington Post by Leonie Haimson and Cheri Kiesecker who are both public ed advocates and in leadership for the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy , a national alliance of parents and others, standing up for the rights of parents and their students to protect their data. Into the fray, via the Times, comes... Rob McKenna ?  You remember him, former Washington State Attorney General and failed candidate for governor?  Look where he landed? At the Gates-funded Data Quality Campaign.