NYC Public School Parents: Parents, do you know where your child's data is? My interesting but not reassuring afternoon with the Gates Foundation's Shared Learning Collaborative

NYC Public School Parents: Parents, do you know where your child's data is? My interesting but not reassuring afternoon with the Gates Foundation's Shared Learning Collaborative:

Parents, do you know where your child's data is? My interesting but not reassuring afternoon with the Gates Foundation's Shared Learning Collaborative

by Leonie Haimson

Yesterday, I spent several hours at the Shared Learning Collaborative “camp” held in midtown, where the Gates Foundation people invited teachers and  developers to brainstorm new “learning apps” to take advantage of all the confidential student data that they will be “holding” in their “data bank”.  (See our press conference, media coverage, and videos, during which we released a letter to the State Attorney General and the Regents, protesting the unprecedented agreement of NYC and NY State to provide confidential teacher and student data to this data bank without parental consent.  Four other districts and states, including Illinois, Massachusetts, and Colorado are also participating in this project, and Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky and Louisiana have agreed to follow soon.) 
  
The Gates Foundation identifies their role as “facilitating” the transfer of this data to commercial developers so they can invent learning products aligned with the Common Core; to aid in encouraging “efficiency” in “addressing the individual learning needs of students.”

I walked in late to the morning session, and after asking a question about the risks to student privacy, they seemed to identify me as a person of interest.  I’m not sure if the