I know, there are a lot of petitions and sign-ons these days. Do they do any good?

This one seems especially comprehensive and is already signed by a good mix of people and organizations. It demonstrates that the message of true education progressives is becoming clearer and more unified.

The full Declaration to Rebuild America is too long to reproduce here, but its main aspects are very similar, for example, to Parents Across America’s statement of beliefs.

The Declaration includes seven principles including opposition to school privatization and high-stakes testing, as well as the need for equitable funding and a more engaging curriculum. The Declaration makes recommendations in seven areas including better assessments, effective discipline, and meaningful engagement of parents and others in setting school policy.

The statement concludes: “As a nation, we’re failing to provide the basics our children need for an opportunity to learn. Instead, we have substituted a punitive high-stakes testing regime that seeks to force progress on the cheap. But there is no shortcut to success. We must change course before we further undermine schools and drive away the teachers our children need.”

Take a look and consider signing and sharing.

I’m usually up in the air about which of my two alma maters to be more proud of or embarrassed about.

As a resident of Hyde Park, I’m usually most offended by the U of Chicago’s muscling around and over the neighbors it considers less desirable and replacing local businesses with more generic establishments. And let’s not even talk about the U of C charter schools and their Tim Knowles, a member of Rahm Emanuel’s education transition team who most recently assured the Tribune that “the city is going to be responsive. They’re not going to be deaf” to the schools on the closure list. Mmm hmm.

But then there was this excruciatingly tone-deaf letter to the Tribune last week by a Northwestern education prof named Diane Whitmore Schatzenbach who tossed the ball of shame right back into NU’s court. She wrote:

….the best research suggests that these closings are unlikely to cause long-term harm to students. I am not hardhearted — I am a parent myself — and there is little doubt that even in the best-case scenario, the transition will be difficult. But after the dust settles, Chicago Public Schools will likely be stronger.

Well, I was working up to blasting Diane when a U of C professor did a much better job in this beautiful letter in today’s paper:

Damaging kids

This is in response to “Moving forward in the wake of school closings” (Perspective, May 29), by Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, an associate professor in the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a public voices fellow with the OpEd Project.

She argues that the closing of local schools is “unlikely to cause long-term harm to the students,” and, “Eventually, the student’s achievement level rebounds to meet the original trajectory, suggesting that children are not permanently damaged by the moves.”

This is an awfully low bar for a professional educator to set; I’m frankly appalled.

The goal should be more than not doing permanent damage to kids.

Every kid deserves the kind of education that one gets in the best of the city, suburban, parochial or private schools.

The closing of local schools makes for larger schools, more kids per class and less involvement by parents, and undercuts the existing community involvement — all in the wrong direction compared to well-documented best practice. We should instead be focused on developing local schools with smaller classes, admired teachers and deep involvement by the staff, parents and community.

— Henry Frisch, the University of Chicago, the Enrico Fermi Institute

Combine that with the U of C students’ opting out of Students for Education Reform and the meeting about school closings and student mental health sponsored by a University of Chicago student group called (with classic U of C brevity) the Education and Mental Lives of Children study group of the Society for Psychoanalytic Inquiry, and U of C is up right now.

By the way, check out this older letter to the Tribune that Dr. Frisch wrote in 2000, which is just as relevant today. He was objecting to a Tribune editorial, “Keeping College Customers Satisfied,” an idea Dr. Frisch described as “shallow rancid hogwash.” He ends with this thought: ” ‘The Student is your Customer’ is a slogan for the mail-order degree factory, not for any school with teachers in it. We should stamp it out, and those who mindlessly promulgate it should move to professions other than education.”

Or journalism.

My new hero.

Today I’m sharing an action alert from Stop Common Core Illinois as a follow-up to yesterday’s blog:

ACTION ALERT: Let’s dump inBloom student data collection in Illinois!

Ok Illinois we’re not being loud enough! We are one of only THREE states not dumping InBloom!

Today call The ISBE at (217) 557-6763!

Listen friends we can talk about CC and data tracking, but unless we fight we won’t rid our state of this! You, yes YOU have to pick up the phone and call! Don’t expect everyone else to do it. 

If you don’t want your child tracked with InBloom then call!! TODAY!

Use their contact form: http://webprod1.isbe.net/contactisbe/

Page three of this document has your local regional office:http://isbe.net/regionaloffices/pdf/roedirectory.pdf

Go to their FB page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Illinois-State-Board-of-Education/136022251779

Go to the boards next meeting:
http://www.isbe.net/board/pdf/2013_board_meetings.pdf
(it’s in Naperville!)

Tweet them:
https://twitter.com/ISBEnews

Again don’t just sit on this! Call, write, tweet, and MAKE SOME NOISE! Tell them we want out of InBloom!!!

Christopher Koch got our state in Common Core and the data tracking with RTTT…let him know what you think! (Call one of these numbers and ask for him…it’s the main office number: 866/262-6663 • 217/782-4321)

Here’s a list of the board members: http://www.isbe.state.il.us/board/

Yesterday the Tribune printed a Reuters story about the InBloom  (formerly Wireless Generation) program funded by Bill Gates that is currently collecting student confidential records it plans to share with private software companies. InBloom says it cannot guarantee the safety of this data.

The story reported that several states or districts which InBloom claimed were part of “Phase 1″ of their project have either disavowed any involvement or pulled out.

The only remaining inBloom clients at this point are Illinois, Colorado and New York. Currently only Bloomington and Normal school districts are involved in our state, but Illinois plans to add Chicago and 34 other districts in 2014.

I’ve written about this before, and tip my hat to the tireless work of my PAA colleague Leonie Haimson to expose this enormous threat to family privacy. I’ll share more on this tomorrow for Public Schools Action Tuesday, but meanwhile, here’s the letter I just sent to the Tribune:

Thank you for publishing the excellent Stephanie Simon piece about states choosing not to share confidential student and teacher data with the Gates-funded corporation called inBloom Inc. Most parents are unaware of this threatened encroachment on family privacy which is already underway in the Bloomington and Normal school district and is slated to start in the Chicago Public Schools and 34 other districts in January 2014.

The confidential data being collected by InBloom includes children’s personally identifiable information such as name, address, grades, test scores, detailed disciplinary and health records, race, ethnicity, economic status, disabilities and other highly sensitive information. It is being collected into an electronic “data store” with an operating system built by Wireless Generation, a subsidiary of News Corporation, a company owned by Rupert Murdoch which has been found to have illegally violated privacy in Great Britain and in the US. The “data store” will be placed on a vulnerable data cloud managed by Amazon.com. InBloom Inc. has already stated that it “cannot guarantee the security of the information stored…or that the information will not be intercepted when it is being transmitted.” InBloom Inc. intends to make all this highly confidential data available to commercial vendors to help them develop and market their “learning products.”

All of this is happening without parental knowledge or consent, and is encouraged by federal privacy rule changes made last year by Education Secretary Arne Duncan. As Simon's report points out, several states have reconsidered their earlier agreements to join this questionable program.

Illinois should do the same.

Julie Woestehoff

Executive Director

Parents United for Responsible Education

Chicago, IL

From NYC’s Leonie Haimson:

Dear Karen Lewis and other Chicago friends and allies (among the SOS folks):

Thank you for fighting so valiantly to preserve public education in Chicago.  We are all with you in spirit.

I wanted to alert you to yet another real threat to your schools.

Yesterday, Stephanie Simon of Reuters revealed that at least four states have pulled out of the data mining Gates-funded operation called inBloom Inc., because of privacy concerns and protests from parents, and several others are reconsidering.  Only three states remain currently involved, NY, CO and IL.

Yet she also revealed that Illinois plans to expand inBloom data sharing and data mining to 35 districts serving half a million students starting in 2015.  http://shar.es/wbnTF

Here is the list of these “RTT” districts, which includes the Chicago public schools (D 299).

http://www.isbe.state.il.us/racetothetop/PDF/RttT-LEA-map-and-list.pdf

inBloom violates teacher privacy as well as student privacy; see Anthony Cody about how:

Will the Data Warehouse Become Every Student and Teacher’s “Permanent Record”? http://shar.es/wb0Sc

Anthony doesn’t mention one of the biggest threats – the ultimate goal is to replace teachers with software programs and increase class size to huge levels as you can see in the inBloom promotional video. https://vimeo.com/60661666

inBloom is collecting more than 400 data points – and some of the most sensitive information one can possibly imagine.  We got a list straight off the inBloom website. An excerpt with some of the most troubling data can be downloaded here, as a pdf. And the longer version can be downloaded here: full data elements.

Even if one believes in the efficacy of online learning, data clouds are notoriously vulnerable, and inBloom has stated that it will not be responsible if the data breaches in storage or transmission.  Please be aware of this huge threat to your children’s privacy and safety as well as that of teachers.

If you’d like more information on inBloom and their goal to commercialize student data and provide it to as many for-profit vendors as possible, you can check out my inBloom page here, with links to (now many) news articles, documents etc.

http://www.classsizematters.org/inbloom_student_data_privacy/

I know I’m a day late for Memorial Day but I have been reading several excellent pieces over the weekend and the question is still on my mind – what did these soldiers die for?

Was it to guarantee that the Walton family’s income grows larger every year? Was it to assure a bright future for test publishing companies? Or to make the world safer for Rupert Murdoch to steal and use our children’s school information so that they can market more stuff no one needs?

Did they die for our democracy only to have it replaced by consumerism?

First, I read the excellent, extremely well-researched and quite depressing Curtis Black article in NewsTips, “AUSL turnarounds called ineffective, expensive.” Here’s just some of what Curtis laid out.

• AUSL schools are too expensive. AUSL schools receive over $1 million per year above their per-pupil allotment. This year CPS will pay $11 million for improvements to schools about to be taken over by AUSL. CPS gives AUSL schools an extra assistant principal and a full-time social worker, rare in CPS schools. Curtis wrote, “A couple years ago, annual spending on turnarounds was $20 million. It’s growing steadily.” Thought we had a budget crisis?
• AUSL schools have poor academic track records. State test results for all but one AUSL school are well below district averages. North Lawndale’s brilliant activist Valerie Leonard pointed out to Curtis that AUSL will control all of the feeder schools to Collins HS after this year’s closings, yet AUSL schools underperform neighborhood schools by 51.7% average ISAT reading for AUSL to 65.6% for neighborhood schools. That’s a turndown, not a turnaround.
• AUSL schools push out students they don’t want. Curtis shared stories from several people about students being told by AUSL to “find another school.” The percentage of students with disabilities has also dropped at AUSL schools, including a one-third drop at Morton, AUSL’s top scoring school. That’s called turning away, right?
• AUSL teachers have a “huge” turnover rate, and the percentage of African-American teachers drops significantly in many AUSL schools. Keep in mind that AUSL touts itself as a top-flight teacher training institution.

Okay, I try to share the truth about these schools day in and day out. This is just one more example of the facts that prove that the corporate reform agenda is not about educating children but about power mongers grabbing more power. Don’t forget that Mayor Emanuel’s appointed school board president, David Vitale, was the Chairman of AUSL, a fact conveniently left out of his Board biography.

So, does it help? Does it matter? CPS closed 50 schools despite everything. Why bother?

Because they died for democracy, not for this $#!+. And our public education system was built to foster democracy, not “choice and competition.”

On the positive side, Curtis’s article highlights Strategic Learning Initiatives, a local program that does work and actually builds on democratic participation. I have written about SLI a few times.

That reference resonated with the other piece I read this weekend – the wonderful report by my heroes at the National Education Policy Center, “Democracy Left Behind: How Recent Reforms Undermine Local School Governance and Democratic Action.”

I read the executive summary when it came out last fall, and that’s well worth looking at if you can’t read the full report.

But the full report shows the importance of embedding democracy into education, and how democracy is destroyed when people become “passive bystanders” in education through privatization, top-down control, and narrowing of the curriculum using punishments linked to test-based accountability.

The report warns that we must not fail to provide all of our children with an education in democratic participation that will equip them to be active and involved citizens. This is the gift we must pass down and not throw away.

That’s why the fight against the corporate reform agenda is so important – it’s about saving democracy.

Congratulations to the Kelly HS and the Drummond Montessori Local School Councils for signing on to the National Resolution on High-Stakes Testing. You can see their sign-on at the bottom below. The Kelly faculty also signed on.

The More Than a Score group has been working to include LSCs in the important work of educating parents and others around the problems with high-stakes standardized testing.

We created this LSC Testing Toolkit which provides useful fact and tip sheets as well as sample local resolutions to go along with the national resolution. We hope to get more LSCs to sign on and to bring this valuable information to their schools.