Dear Commons Community,

Erik Bennett, a student in the Ph.D. Program in Urban Education, sent this piece to me that appeared on the Network for Public Education website. 

“David Gamberg, the enlightened and thoughtful superintendent of the Southold school district in Long Island, New York, wrote a letter to the president of inBloom and asked that the corporation remove any data pertaining to the students of his district.

For his willingness to say “no, not with our students,” David Gamberg is hereby added to the honor roll as a champion of American education. He has done the honorable thing. He has defended his students against commercial exploitation and defended their right to privacy and their right to be left alone by a government and a private sector that believes that privacy is dead. Not in Southold!

New York is one of the few states in the nation that has agreed to hand over all personal, confidential student information to inBloom.

inBloom is the corporation funded by the Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation ($100 million from Gates) to collect personal, identifiable student data. The software was created by Wireless Generation, part of Joel Klein’s Amplify, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. The data will be stored on a “cloud” managed by amazon.com.”

Every school superintendent in New York and elsewhere would be wise to consider taking the same action as Mr. Gamberg.  For more information on inBloom, I posted about it in early October. 

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Charmaine Givens-Thomas, a 60-year-old Walmart worker in Evergreen Park, Ill., has started an online petition asking President Obama to meet with employees of the company.

“We would like for you to hear first-hand why [workers] are appealing for respect and calling on Walmart to pay them more to feed and support their families,” she wrote to the President in the petition. As reported in The Huffington Post:

“Givens-Thomas announced the petition Thursday on a conference call organized by OUR Walmart, an advocacy organization with ties to the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. The petition will be distributed by MoveOn, Credo, Sum of Us, Firedog Lake and other organizations in the coming days, according to Lynsey Kryzwick, a spokeswoman for OUR Walmart.

Givens-Thomas, who has worked at Walmart for almost eight years and makes $11 an hour, said she still relies on a food pantry and struggles to pay her bills.

“I’ve had my gas turned off because I have to make hard choices,” she said on the conference call. “Either you’re going to keep something like your lights on, or you’re going to keep the gas on. You shouldn’t have to make choices like that in America in 2013.”

Born and raised in Chicago, Givens-Thomas said that, at 15 years old, she marched with Martin Luther King Jr. Five years ago, when President Obama was elected, she was overjoyed. “I felt like we were closer to realizing King’s dream of good jobs and freedom,” she wrote in the petition.

However, “Walmart, the country’s largest employer, is helping to hold America back from this dream,” she wrote. “Like too many Americans, I cannot promise my grandchildren that they will have a brighter future than I had.”

This is a good cause.  Please take a minute to sign this petition and support Ms. Givens-Thomas and her co-workers at Walmart.

Tony