Please come to our April 29 Town Hall meeting on student privacy & inBloom Inc.
Parents, do you know your child’s confidential, personal school records are going to be shared with a corporation called inBloom Inc?
This highly sensitive information will be stored on a data cloud and disclosed to for-profit corporations to help them develop and market their “learning products.”
The data will include your child’s names, address, photo, email, test scores, grades, special education, economic and racial status, and most likely detailed disciplinary, and health records as well.
Please come and hear more about this plan from advocates and state and city education officials.
What: Town Hall meeting about student privacy
When: Monday, April 29th at 6 p.m.
Where: Brooklyn Borough Hall, 209 Joralemon Street
(Take the #4 or 5 Trains to Boro Hall, #2, 3, or R to Court Street, or the A, C or F Trains to Jay Street/Boro Hall)
Invited guests include representatives from the NYS Education Department, the NYC Department of Education, the Gates Foundation, inBloom Inc., and the Board of Regents.
Co-sponsored by the Brooklyn Parent Academy; Assemblymembers Danny O’Donnell, James Brennan, William Colton; NYS Senators Liz Krueger and Martin Golden, NYC Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, NYC Council Education Chair Robert Jackson, Council Members Gale Brewer and Leticia James; Class Size Matters, the Learning Disabilities Association of NY, Community Education Councils of Districts 1, 3, 13, 14, 15, 20, 21, 22 and the Citywide Council for Special Education.
Vertical linking & looking for feedback on this year's ELA exams
If you have children or students in grades 3-8 they are now in the midst of three days of state ELA standardized testing. Last year, the ELA exams werefull of errors and confusing and ambiguous questions, including the infamous Pineapple passage, which we first reported on our blog. This year, we have heard from teachers and principals that the reading passages were difficult and the questions extremely tricky. Some said they could not figure out the answers themselves.
In addition, several passages and questions were repeated at several different grade levels. Reportedly, one of the four forms of the test had the same passage in grades 3,4, and 5. So many principals and teachers thought this was a mistake that the stateposted a memo, calling this "vertical linking" and claiming that repeating the same items in adjacent grades is one of the"typical testing processes." Yet a principal told me