NYC Public School Parents: Please help us fight for small classes & student privacy in 2014!

NYC Public School Parents: Please help us fight for small classes & student privacy in 2014!:

Please help us fight for small classes & student privacy in 2014!

Class Size Matters is an organization with a large reach but a small budget.  We count on donations from individuals as our main source of funding.  To continue our efforts on behalf of children’s right to small classes, we need supporters like you to give a tax-deductible contribution by clicking here or sending a check to the address below.

In addition to the critical issue of class size, this year we have focused on protecting student privacy from the corporation called inBloom Inc.  I am proud to have been called “the nation’s foremost parent expert on inBloom and the current threat to student data privacy.”

We were the first advocacy group in the nation to sound the alarm about inBloom’s plan to create a multi-state database with as much personal student information as possible, to be stored on a vulnerable data cloud run by Amazon.com and an operating system built by Rupert Murdoch’s Amplify.  The explicit goal of inBloom was to package this information in an easily digestible form and offer it up to data-mining vendors without parental consent.

In February, inBloom formally launched as a separate corporation, and nine states were listed as “partners.”  We worked hard to get the word out through blogging, personal outreach to parent activists and the mainstream media.  After protests erupted in states throughout the country, one by one of inBloom’s “partners” pulled out.  Now, eight out of these states have severed all ties with inBloom or put their data sharing plans on indefinite hold.

Sadly, New York education officials are still intent on sharing with inBloom a complete statewide set of personal data for all public school students– including their names, addresses, phone numbers, test scores and grades, disabilities, health conditions, disciplinary records and more.  To stop this, we helped to organize a lawsuit on