Good News from Oakland! | Diane Ravitch's blog

Good News from Oakland! | Diane Ravitch's blog

Good News from Oakland!

Several years ago, the Walton Family Foundation and the Gates Foundation decided that it was not enough to open new charter schools. No, they had to devise mechanisms to make sure that school officials put charters on an equal footing with public schools and that the public didn’t care whether schools were run by their elected school board or a private board of directors.

The Gates Foundation created something called “the Gates Compact,” paying districts to treat public and charter schools the same.

The Waltons played a different angle. To advance their agenda of embedding charters and wiping out any differences between public schools and charter schools, they pushed for the adoption of a common enrollment form. The two sectors are intermingled, and neither students nor parents know which schools are public and which have private or corporate management.

In Oakland, where a slate of pro-public school parents won the last school board election, the board voted to eliminate the OneApp system.

Jane Nylund, a parent activist in Oakland, sent the CONTINUE READING: Good News from Oakland! | Diane Ravitch's blog

Compulsory Dyslexia Screening: A Trojan Horse To Advance Data Collection For Predatory Pay For Success Deals in Pre-K and Early Literacy – Wrench in the Gears

Compulsory Dyslexia Screening: A Trojan Horse To Advance Data Collection For Predatory Pay For Success Deals in Pre-K and Early Literacy – Wrench in the Gears

Compulsory Dyslexia Screening: A Trojan Horse To Advance Data Collection For Predatory Pay For Success Deals in Pre-K and Early Literacy

I put together a presentation to warn California educators, parents, and elected officials about Boston Consulting Group’s ties to compulsory dyslexia screening legislation. See the consulting firm’s July 2020 white paper, The Economic Impact of Dyslexia in California. This is the cost-offset analysis that will be used to justify future data extraction schemes. BCG was behind the closure of 23 schools in Philadelphia in 2013. That event launched my personal journey into researching human capital finance. This article I wrote in 2018, Silicon Valley: A Laboratory of Smart Surveillance and Privatization, provides useful background on impact investing in the Bay Area. Pay particular attention to the parties involved with the Strong Start and Big Lift pay for success deals (pre-k and early literacy). The latter effort is backed by the San Mateo County Office of Education one of the funders of the UCSF dyslexia risk screening tool AppRise, which has ties via Curious Learning to global ed-tech investors and defense / neuroscience interests. CONTINUE READING: Compulsory Dyslexia Screening: A Trojan Horse To Advance Data Collection For Predatory Pay For Success Deals in Pre-K and Early Literacy – Wrench in the Gears

New Data Highlight Disparities In Students Learning In Person | 89.3 KPCC

New Data Highlight Disparities In Students Learning In Person | 89.3 KPCC

New Data Highlight Disparities In Students Learning In Person

The U.S. Education Department has released the first in a series of school surveys intended to provide a national view of learning during the pandemic. It reveals that the percentage of students who are still attending school virtually may be higher than previously understood.

As of January and early February of this year, 44% of elementary students and 48% of middle school students in the survey remained fully remote. And the survey found large differences by race: 69% of Asian, 58% of Black and 57% of Hispanic fourth graders were learning entirely remotely, while just 27% of White students were.

Conversely, nearly half of white fourth-graders were learning full-time in person, compared with just 15% of Asian, 28% of Black and 33% of Hispanic fourth-graders. The remainder had hybrid schedules.

This disparity may be partly driven by where students live. City schools, the survey found, are less likely than rural schools to offer full-time, in-person classes. Full-time, in-person schooling dominated in the South and the Midwest, and was much less common in the West and Northeast.

The racial and ethnic gaps may also be driven in part by which families are choosing to stay remote, even where some in-person learning is offered. Three out of 4 districts around the country were offering some in-person learning as of January, the CONTINUE READING: New Data Highlight Disparities In Students Learning In Person | 89.3 KPCC

Parents: Two ways to ask about your students’ data. | Parent Coalition for Student Privacy

Parents: Two ways to ask about your students’ data. | Parent Coalition for Student Privacy

PARENTS: TWO WAYS TO ASK ABOUT YOUR STUDENTS’ DATA.

Parents, help fill in this FERPA Project Map for the folks at The Student Data Privacy Project.

https://www.studentdataprivacyproject.com/ferpa-project-map

1. This FERPA Map project

is sponsored by our friends at the The Student Data Privacy Project.  Their goal is to highlight the shortcomings of FERPA with regard to protecting student privacy. They state, “We would love to have parents in all 50 states send a letter to their District requesting their child’s data.”  You can click on their website here to request their  FERPA template  letter.  When you send your letter to your district, please copy us, info@studentprivacymatters.org  on your emails to your district. 

2. It’s time we KNOW what data these edtech apps are collecting and how they are being used. 

We at the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy launched our own App Survey in January, for Data Privacy Day 2021. We are researching which edtech apps schools are asking students to use and whether they are sufficiently protective of children’s privacy.  You can take our App Survey here.  

Please let us know what online apps and programs your district or school is using, and check to see if they have been transparent about their privacy policies.  Your name and district will be kept confidential. Thank you to the MANY parents and educators who have already completed this App Survey.  Please continue to share and we will let you know the results soon.  If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to email us at info@studentprivacymatters.org  

 Parents: Two ways to ask about your students’ data. | Parent Coalition for Student Privacy