Seattle Schools Community Forum

  Update : so there is definitely something amiss here. One, the FTC had made ConnectEdu promise NOT to sell off student data assets and yet that appears to be what happened.  Only the new company, Graduation Alliance, may have gotten away with it because they seem to have bought the entire ConnectEdu and so got bit just the data but the entire company.  Two, I asked SPS a number of questions but only got this reply: Thanks (sic) you for bringing this to our attention. We are working with the new company to resolve this quickly and ask them to comply by not selling the information. Well, I don't think the company is selling the information but they surely bought it up and did NOT return it to the district as was promised.    From a thread in June 2014 from KUOW: 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...

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...

The Senate HELP (Health Education Labor and Pensions committee) is negotiating over the re-authorization of the Education Sciences Reform Act.  We were told that there are Democrats on the committee who are pushing for relaxing limits on access to personal student data, and are saying that researchers should be able to obtain open-ended access to complete student data sets– and that they shouldn’t have to even specify which specific student level data they want for what purposes. Please call Senator Patty Murray, who is a senior member of the HELP committee, and let her know strong controls and oversight of student data are important to you. It is especially important that parents/advocates who live in the states represented by Dems below call on Monday. Senator Murray's D.C. office:   (toll-free) 866-481-9186

New parent or veteran of many grades, welcome back to Seattle Schools.  It can be dizzying and worrying but take it in stride.  You - and your child - will probably be just fine.  Transportation kinks will be worked out and so can schedules. That said, if your high schooler has schedule issues, hang in there if you are trying to get your child a rigorous schedule and not TA classes.  Also, if it's an issue of wanting to be with friends, do not try that argument with counselors.  You will get a blank stare (and rightly so).  A couple of pieces of advice:

I am absolutely amazed that people believe (a) there's nothing that can be done about privacy and (b) it's all for the good so why worry. We're adults and that's okay.  But kids?  How do they defend their privacy?  Right.  That's our job. I want to say in advance, people can take any kind of photo they want on their phone.  (But you might want to warn teenagers of the devastating outcomes if they do this. And trusting a friend/boyfriend/girlfriend is playing with fire in the teen years.) But understand, there are smart people who want data - of any kind - to use for their own purposes.  You are not wrong for taking a photo; you are wrong to believe there is security in any kind of devise that you have apps or data that uploads to any data cloud.   Here's the story of multiple celebs and their nude photos - taken on iPhones - and hacked out of the Apple"cloud."   Experts are looking at whether a flaw in Apple’s iPhone operating system...

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...

I've been corraling stories about how to help parents make informed choices about schools and how to judgm how their child's school is doing. Need help figuring out schools?   A handy "cheat sheet" of what to ask from the Huffington Post. More questions you should ask your school/district especially around student data privacy .  This is a truly great and comprehensive list.  A great idea for parents that teachers/administrators use - "learning walks. "  From Edutopia: It is an invitation to parents to come to the school for a set period of time (an hour or two), to go on a guided tour of the school/classrooms during the school day. Not to look at the decor - but t o learn more about the learning happening or explore other topics revolving around education and the school .  Each tour/learning walk, would have a topic or theme to guide the discussion and help with selection of which classrooms to visit. The thought is more about giving paren...

 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...

You know how you really need to get something done but drag your feet because of time, overwhelming amounts of data/research and just plain organization?  That's been me with an overview of Common Core.  It took a nudge from a member of one of the City's Commissions to kickstart me and get it done. It's much longer than I had hoped but this is not a simple subject.  I also do not offer an alternative vision of what I believe should happen but, at the least, I think: there should be a moratorium on assessments for at least three years,  K-2 needs to be reviewed for developmental appropriateness and  the high school math standards need revision (they are not "college ready" in their current form). I have done my research and I believe I have the facts correct.  I did throw in a bit of editorializing in trying to give focus to rising issues around Common Core but overall, I tried to stick to the facts. Common Core Overview  Here are what I con...

Update:   it seems that despite the fact the ConnectEdu has declared bankruptcy last week, they may trying to forge on.  I will ask about the contract that SPS has with this organization and the SPS student data they have. End of update. The district recognized some Nutrition Services staff as part of School Lunch Super Hero Day.  This week is School Nutrition Week so thank a kitchen staff member for watching out for students at your school. It is also PTA Teacher Appreciation week so please do thank your child's teacher for their hard work.  May 6th is National Teacher Day.   It is also Choose Privacy Week as observed by the American Library Association .   It's a time for discussion about "privacy rights in the digital age."  Something for everyone to think about considering the district has is using ConnectEdu and havd kids sign up WITHOUT previously explaining to parents what it is and what student information is being put into th...

Second update:  a reply to inBloom's withdrawal from NY city parents who have been very in the thick of this fight. Yet the statement issued by inBloom’s CEO reeks of arrogance and condescension, and makes it clear that those in charge still have not learned any lessons from this debacle.   The fervent opposition to inBloom among parents throughout the country did not result from “misunderstandings”,   but inBloom‘s utter inability to provide a convincing rationale that would supercede the huge risks to student security and privacy involved. Contrary to the claims of Iwan Streichenberger and others,   InBloom was   not designed to protect student privacy but the opposite: to facilitate the sharing of children’s personal and very sensitive information with data-mining vendors,   with no attention paid to the need for parental notification or consent, and this is something that parents will not stand for.   In New York, the last state to pull ...

Meeting on Wilson-Pacific on May 13th From the district: To address growing enrollment and capacity needs, Seattle voters passed the 2013 Seattle Public Schools Building Excellence IV (BEX IV) Capital Levy. As a result, a new middle school and new elementary school are scheduled to open in time for the 2017-18 school year. A newly renovated play field will be located between the two new buildings on the site at 1330 North 90th Street.   The project is now in the design and permitting phase and thereafter, the existing structure will be demolished. A School Design and Advisory Team (SDAT) composed of community members, professionals, Mahlum Architects and Seattle Public Schools Capital Projects staff have worked to create the design of the two school buildings and the entire 16.8-acre school site. The comprehensive neighborhood middle school will be constructed to house 1,000 students, including students from the Pinehurst K-8/Indian Heritage program (They w...

My big focus for the foreseeable future is student data privacy .   Data collection is the future of our nation and nowhere else is that more clear than public education. My goal is a student data privacy bill passed in the Washington State Legislature.  In a future thread, I will outline what SPS is doing versus what it should be doing but really, I don't have time to wait for the Board to wake up (and district leadership is a lost cause).  We need a robust law to protect our public school children. Data is a good thing - like standards and assessments.  But it's all in the collection and implementation and uses and that's the devil in the details that needs attention. You cannot stop an idea.  And the idea today is that vast amounts of data are going to better our lives and, allegedly, the lives of our children and grandchildren.  But we can use the force of law and especially our Constitution, to protect that data from going everywhere to ne...

 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 ...

Please go to this White House site and give the President your opinion on data privacy.  There is a message from John Podesta, who is aide and counselor to the President, in a short video where he states that he is the Chair of the "Big Data and Privacy Working Group" at the White House. Here are the two big questions that are being asked by the White House: 1) Which technologies or use of data is most transforming in your day-to-day life? 2) Which technologies or use of data gives you pause? (Oddly, Mr. Podesta asks both questions but the survey doesn't.  Let them know what gives you pause.)  I'll simply say - again - that I believe over the next 10 years, the new coin of the realm in our country, for both government and business, will be personal data.   (My other coin of the realm over the next 20+years? Water, not oil.) We , the people, should be directing where this line is, not Bill Gates or Arne Duncan (for public school children) and not ...

 I will be writing a thread about what I learned at the Work Session on data privacy yesterday.  Some is good, some not-so-good (with Director Carr asking the best questions).  But I can say that SPS has NOT done enough.  From Education Week : As part of a potentially explosive lawsuit making its way through federal court, giant online-services provider Google has acknowledged scanning the contents of millions of email messages sent and received by student users of the company’s Apps for Education tool suite for schools.  In the suit, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company also faces accusations from plaintiffs that it went further, crossing a “creepy line” by using information gleaned from the scans to build “surreptitious” profiles of Apps for Education users that could be used for such purposes as targeted advertising.  Gmail is a key feature of Google Apps for Education, which has 30 million users worldwide and is provided by the c...

My predictions for the new coin of the realm for the next 25 years for both business and government?  Data and lots of it .  And now, we have "digital data backpacks" so that your child's data can be "carried" around AND made use of anywhere your child goes.  From The Atlantic (with the what-should-be-troubling-to-you title, Your High School Transcript Could Haunt You Forever , the story of how what seems to be help - remedial classes in college - could follow you around.  What if the data collected by the software never disappeared and the fact that one had needed to take remedial classes became part of a student’s permanent record, accessible decades later?  What if the data collected by the software never disappeared and the fact that one had needed to take remedial classes became part of a student’s permanent record, accessible decades later?   Some educational reformers advocate for “digital backpacks” that would have students car...

A reader let me know that his/her home got a call from Universal Survey (according to their phone message they do "marketing and political opinion" surveys.  The caller said they were doing a survey for SPS.  The reader did not continue the call.  Anyone else?  As well, the APP blog had a comment that one person had not received their scores and e-mailed AL.  They received a prompt reply that a letter had been mailed Feb. 15(!) but it never reached the family.  What was worse is that they received a PDF with the scores for their child but ALSO names, IDs, addresses and test scores for 60 other students.   Did anyone else get this in their letter? I also note that I believe something of a similar nature happened to some Sped students (to an even larger degree).   I find this all quite interesting given that tomorrow's Work Session is on ....data privacy and how SPS has great polices and procedures in place.  I will inquire to the di...