Provocative education tweet of the day
I am afraid the White House is pushing high speed Internet to make testing platforms easier.
— Wilhelm II (@knightofgood) June 9, 2013
For those who missed it last week, President Obama announced a new initiative to bring broadband and wireless Internet access to nearly all of the nation's public schools and libraries within five years. Click here to read the full text of the speech Obama gave at a West Virginia middle school explaining the new EdConnect program, assuming it can be funded as he proposes.
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Privacy concerns grow over Gates-funded student database
(Shutterstock)
Privacy concerns are growing among parents, educators and some state officials about a Gates Foundation-funded project that is storing an unprecedented amount of personal information about millions of students in a $100 million database that cannot guarantee complete security.
As a result of the concerns, some states that had initially signed up to participate in a pilot program with the database — operated by a new nonprofit called inBloom, Inc., — are pulling back, including Louisiana. Others states originally listed on the inBloom Web site as project partners told Reuters they hadn’t fully committed, and one, Georgia, asked to be removed from the site. By Reuters’ reckoning, of the nine states originally listed as participating, only three are actively involved — New York, Illinois and Colorado. In New York, parents and educators are protesting the state’s involvement, and there has been legislation introduced in the to pull back.
The database, funded largely with money from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was launched in March at the SXSWedu conference in Texas.
Supporters say that states already collect the information and that collecting it one place makes it easier for teachers to “plumb” data about their students and target software to improve their academic performance. Parents, they say, could see what schools have