Seattle Schools Community Forum

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...

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 ...

 Updated for Thursday the 22nd - see below for details of Charter Commission meeting and Audit and Finance Committee meeting. One update before I start.  When I check the agendas for various District meetings, I generally only check once for committee meetings.  I check more often for Board meetings because (1) things change quickly and (2) there is notification embedded in those Board agendas to alert me to changes. Sadly, this did not happen for the Operations Committee meeting last Thursday.  When I put up last week's list of meetings, the agenda for that meeting was available and I duly noted important items.  But then I find out that they added an item that several of us had been asking for and yet didn't show the agenda to be amended. It's sad to continually ask the district to be transparent.  Unless, of course, you don't want people to know what you are discussing and when.  This particular agenda item was about student data privacy....

The fight is still on in many states over Common Core.  New wrinkles have emerged like all kinds of products "aligned" to Common Core and being pushed to states. First (and thanks to Dan Dempsy) is a YouTube video from Ben Swann on the issues around Common Core.   This is the best, most distilled down information on CC I have ever heard.  Recommended. Think CC isn't linked to DOE money?  I'll let Diane Ravitch tell you what happened to Georgia: A few days ago, Georgia announced that it was dropping out of PARCC, the Common Core testing consortium funded by the U.S. Department of Education. State officials said the state could not afford the technology or the cost. The U.S. Department of Education was swift to respond. It wrote Georgia to warn that it is withholding $10 million from the state’s Race to the Top funding . Maybe the timing was a coincidence. Maybe not.  The state says it needs more time to fix its educator evaluation system befo...

One important note from the Board meeting - parent Mary Griffin spoke out about the issues around student data information, the inBloom student data "cloud" and FERPA and HIPPA (for students with disabilities).  She let the Board know that neither of those would protect student data if the district signed an agreement with a third-party allowing access to student information.  Director Sherry Carr, during her director comments, said she wanted clarity on this issue and asked for feedback from the district's legal counsel.  (I wrote to her and asked about when she wanted this and she said she wasn't sure she had a confirming vote from another director for this information.  She said she would check with legal counsel, Ron English.) I have been working with a couple of parents on this issue and I urge you to encourage the Board to seek this information.  Please write to them - schoolboard@seattleschools.org - and add your voice to this concern and ask for...

Here's what inBloom - the "cloud" student data system that the Gates Foundation is setting up says about students: Every student is an individual, with unique knowledge, abilities and learning needs. But the technology used in most K-12 schools today can make providing personalized instruction time-consuming and cumbersome for teachers. Meanwhile, states, districts and educators implementing the Common Core State Standards have set new goals for student learning, and they need effective tools and resources to ensure students meet those goals. Better, more integrated technology and data analytics can help by painting a more complete picture of student learning and making it easier to find learning materials that match each student’s learning needs. Unfortunately, creating the technology infrastructure to do this is often too expensive for most states and school districts. That’s where inBloom comes in. I feel like many parents are out there shrugging....

  Update:  From a Colorado blog about children, School Belongs to the Children, a screenshot of inBloom's promotional video.  The accompanying article has some good information that I plan to draw from on what WE in Washington State need to do to stop this. This article   from Reuters really does a good job of explaining the issues around student data and privacy.  (I had seen this but a reader also alerted me to it; thanks). I keep getting asked, "What to do?"  I'll have a list of things you CAN and SHOULD do.  Our district can say no to a lot of this.   In a nutshell: A $100 million database set up to store extensive records on millions of public school students has stumbled badly since its launch this spring, with officials in several states backing away from the project amid protests from irate parents. The database, funded mostly by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation , is intended to track students from kindergarten t...