Seattle Schools Community Forum

As you may recall, I said there were peripheral issues that I found in the public disclosure e-mails.  Let's go thru them.

Following up on the op-ed by Robert Crunkshank and me, here the the Families& Education Levy minutes/Mid-Year report from May 15, 2015. There are several statements made that tie with what Robert and I are seeing. It's a little funny because there are more staff there than actual committee members.  Superintendent Nyland is on the committee as is Marty McLaren ( I didn't know McLaren was on the committee.)  SPS staff include Pegi McEvoy and Charles Wright along with Jonathan Knapp of SEA.

Legislative action on public education still going (anything not voted out of committee by April 1 is dead and this list in not inclusive of all ed bills): - expanding states early learning system of ratings - HB 1240 use of restraints/restraining for students with disabilities (passed out of Ed Ctm unanimously)  - SB5748 tying student scores to test scores died but, as I previously reported, an amendment to bill 1345 includes tying student scores to test scores.  That bill is still alive. - SB5419 SUPER act - Establishes the Student User Privacy in Education Rights Act; which increases the strength of safeguards protecting student information. This one got by me. Given it's from a Republican, Senator Litzow, I don't have great hope. - SB5433 Requires the creation and incorporation of curricula about the history; culture; and government of the nearest federally recognized Native American tribe or tribes. - HB1031 Dual Credit Expands eligibility for Colleg...

 From Student Privacy Matters (I note there is nothing for Washington State):   Below are links to the laws enacted regarding student social media privacy.   Some states cover K-12 and post secondary and others only post secondary.  In general, these laws make it difficult for Pearson and schools to monitor online the students the laws cover.  You may want to provide this information to the list serve in case they want to review their state's law and/or advocate for coverage for K-12 students.  

The Technology Department is having a "Teaching and Learning Technology Vision Summit."  From the SPS webpage: This summit will bring together representatives from SPS leadership, faculty, community partners, students, City of Seattle, business, members of the SPS Technology Vision Taskforce and others to help create a vision for Teaching & Learning at SPS, and how technology will enable that vision. A technology understanding is important...but representatives should also have a passion for creating an educational environment for SPS students to flourish in, be able to share the views and visions of the organization they represent, and provide a vision on how technology will enable that environment. All discussions and activities will focus on a vision for our students...not on specific technology products or services.  That comes later! The summit w...

From SPS Communications, some VERY good news: District directs career-planning firm to destroy all student data Seattle Public Schools previously partnered with a company to assist students, parents and school counselors in career planning and to create authentic High School and Beyond plans, a state graduation requirement. The company, ConnectEdu, was in business from 2002 until April of 2014, when they filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The district immediately contacted them to request that all student data be destroyed per the contract; however, since they were protected under bankruptcy laws, the data was not destroyed at that time but was fully secured. Graduation Alliance then purchased ConnectEdu, and Seattle Public Schools contacted Graduation Alliance immediately to verify again that the data was secure. In late September, Graduation Alliance contacted families about this data, which raised concerns. The district notified the compa...

From Marketplace: Meet the most measured, monitored and data-mined students in the history of education.  Your children . How about this district in California , tracking every kid who uses social media.  From Tech Dirt : The Glendale School District in California is facing some backlash from the recent news that it has retained the services of Geo Listening to track its students' social media activity . After collecting information from students' posts on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter, Geo Listening will provide Glendale school officials with a daily report that categorizes posts by their frequency and how they relate to cyber-bullying, harm, hate, despair, substance abuse, vandalism and truancy. As the article states, the district was starting to use this service at the end of the year but waited until the start of THIS year to tell parents. Nice. The company's About Us page is, as the article says, pretty o...

Ramping up to the start of school, I hope to (finally) get several threads on student data privacy going.  I also hope to draft a template letter that I'm going to offer to parents to ask their school about any kind of signing up for online groups that a school asks students to do.   I don't know why the district would not think this important enough to even inform (no less ask permission from) parents about online services that their child signed up for and what information their child was asked to give away. Don't let anyone tell you that you do not have the right to ask - you do.   Education writer, Anthony Cody, has left Education Week and is writing his own blog, Living in Dialogue .  Anthony is a gifted thinker and his work is worthy reading.   He has guest bloggers on occasion and this piece by high school teacher, Mary Porter, is very good and very troubling.  Her thesis? Teachers must protect student agency and identity from the “templ...

When we last left this story, ConnectEDU, a company that had an interactive program to try to connect middle school students with info on college/career.  From the story in the Wall Street Journal yesterday: In July 2013, the well-known foundation awarded a nearly $500,000 grant to ConnectEDU to develop an interactive program to help students master literacy under the Common Core standards that many states use to guide how public school students are caught.   The money came with some conditions, including a promise to only use the funds for the development of the new technology as well as a timeline requiring benchmarks to be met along the way. The grant, paid out in two installments, was set to expire this December.  I pause here to note that I didn't remember that the Gates grant to ConnectEDU was around Common Core. ConnectEDU filed for Chapter 11 earlier this year.  Apparently since then, ConnectEDU has not answered the Gates Foundation's questio...

 Stories from KUOW and Politico (highly recommended) and information I learned about what's in a TFA contract today about student data.  One is the KUOW piece about ConnectEDU and SPS .  It fleshed out what I had reported and had a couple of interesting comments.   Again: For the past three years, the school district has uploaded middle and high school students’ names, grades, addresses and demographic data to the website ConnectEDU. Students were able to add additional information, such as where they’d like to go to college, and how much they want to spend on tuition. The ConnectEDU privacy policy said that if the company was ever sold, users would be notified and allowed to remove all personally identifiable data from the site. After learning that the company had filed for bankruptcy and was looking to sell, Rahm said the district tried to end its contract with ConnectEDU and have all student data on the site deleted. The company’s lawyers ...

It's been a busy weekend and day for education news (as always). First, SPS Communications put out a press release about the continued growth in Seattle Schools.  As I reported last week, the district projects to be about 60,000 students by 2020.  School by school projections here . Seattle Public Schools has released its annual spring enrollment projections for the 2014-15 school year. An estimated 52,400 students are expected to attend school in the district this fall – an increase of 1,300 students over the year ending in June. This continues the five-year trend of enrollment growth that began in 2009, after a decade of declining enrollment. During the last five years, enrollment grew by more than 5,000 students – from 46,000 in 2009 to 51,000 this year. Next year’s expected enrollment growth of 1,300 students means the district will be serving 6,400 more students next year than in 2009.   Remember ConnectEdu , the company that SPS used to try to help middle/hi...

 Update: the state of Kansas has suspended their state testing after its testing vendor was cyber-attacked and hard. From Ed Week: While the cyber strikes scuttled the testing schedules of hundreds of schools across the state and left state officials scrambling to upgrade their security infrastructure, the full fallout is not yet known. "We're still in 'fix-it mode' right now," said Marianne Perie, the director of the Center for Educational Testing and Evaluation , or CETE, which develops and administers the exams. "We're putting out the fire before we have a chance to assess the damage." This year's administration of this year's exams is considered a pilot, and the results will not be used for accountability purposes. The content of this year's CETE exams covers mathematics and English/language arts in grades 3-8 and 11 and is aligned to the Kansas College and Career Ready standards—the Sunflower State's rebranded version of the ...

Someone asked a question in the Friday Open Thread about a Special Ed program and that led to SpedPTA president, Mary Griffin, to say this (and she calls it a rant alert and warning but really, it's a huge district-wide issue): I am not a fan of data sharing, but I am a fan of useful data collection and accessibility within the district. The district right now is suffering greatly from the lack of usable, easily accessible data.   Not having good data means that the Director of Special Education needs to spend two weeks going through all the student records identifying which students receive Special Education services.   Not having good data means they can't get their ducks in a row to even fill out the forms to request $12 million dollars to fund Special Education.  Not having good data interferes with enrollment predictions for next year and hampers communication about the location of classrooms.  Not having good data means even though t...

Monday, March 10th Curriculum&Instruction Policy Meeting, 4:30-6:30 pm, Agenda Of interest: - an ask for a waiver for one school day for Lawton - update on Creative Approach schools - Math Adoption Progress report This week has two of the five Community Meetings for the Strategic Plan for each region.  I would take this opportunity to ask ANY question you want because the Strategic Plan covers it all.   Community Meeting; Southeast - 5-Year Strategic Plan South Shore K-8 from 6:30-8:30 pm Wednesday, March 12th Executive Committee Meeting , 8:30-10:00 am, Agenda Oversight Work Session: Human Resources , 4:00-5:30 pm, no presentation yet available Work Session: Data Access & Sharing , 5:30-7:00 pm, Presentation This is basically a lot of what was said at the committee meeting that they presented it at last year.  It is not good and I'm a little surprised at what got left out. First, they did NOT fully explain FERPA.  Like the HUGE change i...

I reported previously on the discussion of the issue of NW Center and Cascade as discussed at the Board meeting on Wednesday, March 5th.  That, along with later start time advocates, was the bulk of public testimony.  I note that it seems that a call seems to have gone out that at every Board meeting, there needs to be two non-profit groups working with Seattle schools that come and tell the Board how much they need student data and how careful they are with it.  They also come with an "example."  There were two people at the Board meeting that night. I think I mentioned previously how one of these providers came to a meeting and practically outed a middle school student (with a lot of personal description about the student).   Coincidentally, the district is having a Work Session on how they take care of student data just this coming Wednesday but I'll write separately on that.  I'll just say this the district does NOT have everything in place...

Arne Duncan spoke at a public education summit yesterday put on by Common Sense Media. From Ed Week : The event came in the midst of a recent flurry of student data privacy-related activity. In addition to the non-binding federal guidelines , expected to be made public Tuesday afternoon, a leading technology trade group released recommendations on the issue ; major state legislation on the issue was proposed in California; and U.S. Senator Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts who also spoke at Monday's school privacy summit, announced that he will soon introduce new federal legislation. All of this is good news. The big takeaway: One key principle around which there is an emerging cross-sector consensus is that educational data about students should be used solely for educational purposes—and not for targeted advertising. Industry representatives and some education officials in attendance at Monday's event supported the general notion, but said much co...

It's heating up. There was a great debate on Here and Now on NPR between Mary Fox-Alter, superintendent of schools in Pleasantville, N.Y., and Aimee Rogstad Guidera, executive director of the Data Quality Campaign (and note, DQC is a Gates group). A hugely important article appeared in the NY Times about a California legislator who is introducing a student data privacy bill.  Who can truly argue with this statement regarding students and their student data?  “We just think the public policy of California should be that the information you gather from students should be used for their educational benefit and for nothing else.” I believe Arne Duncan will be speaking on this issue today so I will have an update when details come in.

 From Stay Safe Online : Data Privacy Day is an international effort to empower and educate people to protect their privacy and control their digital footprint. Data Privacy Day began in the United States and Canada in January 2008 as an extension of the Data Protection Day celebration in Europe. Data Protection Day commemorates the January 28, 1981, signing of Convention 108, the first legally binding international treaty dealing with privacy and data protection. Data Privacy Day is now a celebration for everyone, observed annually on January 28.  Data flows freely in today's online world. Everyone - from home computer users to multinational corporations - needs to be aware of the personal data others have entrusted to them and remain vigilant and proactive about protecting it. Being a good online citizen means practicing conscientious data stewardship. Data Privacy Day is an effort to empower and educate people to protect their privacy, control t...

I know that many of you do not read these Ed News Roundups.  I get it; there's a lot to do and read in a day. But understand this is to let you know what the REST of the country is experiencing so that (1) we don't have these things happening to our state and our district and (2) we can learn what works and doesn't work. My biggest fear is really two-fold.  One, that too many entities for not-so-good reasons will want access to more data.  The district has confirmed to me that MORE entities ARE asking for MORE data so this is not a "what if."   Every single provider and group does not need vast amounts of data in order to verify their work.  It is very troubling that this is already happening. My other concern is a data mistake or breech.  The story out of Chula Vista, California is one I hadn't even thought might happen and yet it did. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was to visit a middle school in that district.  The district wanted ...

Sorry to be blunt but NOW is the time to pay attention to what is coming. There's a front-page story in the NY Times today on this issue.  I, along with several other activists, have several irons in the fire on this issue. I tell you - as parents - this should be the SINGLE issue to most concern you.    Why? There is NO ONE but you to protect your child's data.   Truly. Your child cannot just be another data point (or a brick in the wall) for any number of "researchers" or data collectors.  Where is the proof that more data makes better academic outcomes?  If you have been a parent for longer than a minute, you know that children and learning is a complex issue.  You, as a parent, know your child better than anyone and yet can you say, with complete accuracy, what is the best way for your child to learn?  In 3rd grade?  7th grade?  10 grade? Well, having 100 data points and throwing it at the wall and seeing what sticks is...