Dear Commons Community,

The New York State Education Department acknowledged earlier this week that it will reverse plans to store student data on a controversial cloud-based service called inBloom.

“As required by statute, we will not store any student data with inBloom and we have directed inBloom to securely delete the non-identifiable data that has been stored,” department spokesman Tom Dunn said.

The statement is an acknowledgement of recently passed state legislation that prohibits the state from giving student data to inBloom or other vendors to store and manage.

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 is stored on a “cloud” managed by amazon.com.

Dunn said the department will continue to explore “alternative paths” to help schools access “secure and cost-effective educational technology tools that empower and support our teachers, students, and their families.”

The plan to use inBloom to manage extensive data on all students was widely criticized by parents and educators who were concerned about the security of the data and possible use of it by third-party vendors like inBloom. The Education Department maintained that the data was secure and that vendors were barred from selling or sharing it. 

Thank God that there are some sane officials in Albany that forced the NYS Education Department to take this action.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The entire faculty at P.S. 167 in New York City took a stand against standardized testing in an op-ed published by The Hechinger Report.  The piece decried standardized testing’s impact on their school. The teachers wrote that the tests have made students incredibly stressed and have detracted from students’ educational experiences.  Here is an excerpt:

“When they enter our school each fall, our sixth-graders write about their hopes and fears for middle school. This year, 35 percent said their greatest fear was failing the state tests. At one of the most socially difficult times of their lives, over a third of our children have more anxiety about standardized tests than any other issue.

…This year in our school, as in schools across the country, we have seen the number of standardized tests we are required to administer grow sharply, from 25 to more than 50 (in grades 6-10). In the next six weeks alone, each of our sixth-graders will be required to participate in 18 days of testing. The testing includes “3 days of state English tests, 3 days of state math tests, 4 days of new city English and math benchmark tests, and 8 days of new English, math, social studies and science city tests to evaluate teacher performance”

The faculty members wrote that they don’t oppose testing on principle.  However, they recommended that officials allocate resources toward developing other ways of assessing educational quality.   Furthermore,  they question an assessment system in which 70 percent of students are labeled “failing.”  “This is not a function of low performance, but a deliberate decision by the state to increase the number of students labeled “failing” in order to create more pressure on teachers and schools, and to gain public support for new—untested—reform initiatives. We question the collateral consequences of such a mechanism for educational change.”

Collateral damage indeed!

Tony