Facebook Privacy = Student Privacy. It's the Same Issue. Where's the Outrage over the Longitudinal Data System? The Argument is the Same. Your Privacy is YOURS. Your Data is Not Your Employer's and not the Government's.

Facebook put out a statement about privacy as employers have started demanding Facebook passwords from prospective employees.  Why are Americans so concerned about this issue while a breathtaking invasive data gathering is occurring in the public schools...for children from birth to death?

We've changed a few words here and there to illustrate the importance of understanding how the Department of Education is eliminating student privacy rights in public programs via the Longitudinal Data System...and providing prospective employers and various governmental agencies information such as your voting status, eye color, religious affiliation and over 300 other data sets.  You can delete a Facebook account.  You can't delete the data sets required by the Federal government to attend public school or to receive public services.

If it's not okay for employers to ask about Facebook information, why is it permissible for the Federal Government to gather data on students JUST BECAUSE they are in public school?

Following is an altered statement from Facebook (changes relating to education vs Facebook concerns noted in all caps) to illustrate the protection needed for public education students against the Federal government...and how the argument is really the same. Private or governmental agencies should not have a right to personal data information for employment and/or educational/governmental services.

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Protecting Your Privacy (OR NOT)

In recent months, we’ve seen a distressing increase in reports of employers or others seeking to gain inappropriate access to people’s EDUCATIONAL profiles or private information.  This practice undermines the privacy expectations and the security of both the user and the user’s TEACHERS, ADMINISTRATORS, AND EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS.  It also potentially exposes the EDUCATIONAL FACILITY WHICH seeks this access to unanticipated legal liability.

The most alarming of these practices is the reported incidences of EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS asking STUDENTS AND FAMILIES to reveal their PERSONAL DATA.  If you are a PUBLIC EDUCATION STUDENT, PREVIOUSLY you never HAD to share HIGHLY PERSONAL DATA, let anyone access your PERSONAL DATA (THAT'S WHY IT'S CALLED "PERSONAL"), or do anything that might jeopardize the security of your DATA or violate the privacy of your FAMILY.  We have NOT worked really hard at THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION to give STUDENTS/FAMILIES the tools to control who sees PERSONAL DATA information.

As a user, you PREVIOUSLY  HAD NOT BEEN forced to share EXTENSIVE private information and communications just to get a job OR RECEIVE AN EDUCATION.  And as PUBLIC EDUCATION STUDENT, you PREVIOUSLY DID NOT have to worry that your private information or communications WOULD be revealed to someone you don’t know and didn’t intend to share with just because that YOU WERE looking for a job OR ATTENDING PUBLIC SCHOOL.  That’s why THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION SHOULD make it a violation of LAW AND INSTITUTE A Statement of Rights and Responsibilities  THAT IT IS ILLEGAL to share or solicit PERSONAL STUDENT DATA ON BEHALF OF FEDERAL AGENCIES OR PRIVATE RESEARCH COMPANIES.

We DO think employers should be asking prospective employees to provide their PERSONAL DATA because we DO think it’s the right thing to do, AND IN FACT, THAT IS WHY WE INSTITUTED THE P20 PIPELINE TO TRACK YOUR DATA.  But it also may cause problems for the employers that they are not anticipating.  For example, if an employer sees on A DATA SET that someone is a member of a protected group (e.g. over a certain age, etc., RACIAL GROUP, DISABILITY GROUP, POLITICAL GROUP, RELIGIOUS GROUP) that employer may open themselves up to claims of discrimination if they don’t hire that person.

Employers also may not have the proper policies and training for reviewers to handle private information.  If they don’t—and actually, even if they do--the employer may assume liability for the protection of the information they have seen or for knowing what responsibilities may arise based on different types of information (e.g. if the information suggests the commission of a crime).

THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION AND THIS SCHOOL SHOULD take your privacy seriously.  WE SHOULD take action to protect the privacy and security of our users, whether by engaging policymakers or, where appropriate, by initiating legal action, including by shutting down applications that abuse their privileges.

While we SHOULD (BUT PRESENTLY ARE NOT DOING) TO continue to do our part, it is important that everyone IN A PUBLICLY FUNDED SCHOOL understands they SHOULD have a right to keep their PERSONAL DATA to themselves (AS A RIGHT TO PRIVACY), and we PRESENTLY ARE NOT DOING our best to protect that right, IN FACT, WE ARE INTENT ON TRACKING YOU FROM BIRTH TO DEATH AND PROVIDING THIS DATA TO EVERY FEDERAL GOVERNMENTAL AGENCY.

-- DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION, Chief Privacy Officer, Policy, AND ARNE DUNCAN, SECRETARY OF THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

Do Facebook Posts Illustrate the State of American Education?

It's been an interesting few days in education in St. Louis.  We listened to a School Choice Week panel discussion about closing traditional public schools in favor of opening alternative public schools (charters) with just a passing mention of the federal takeover of education by Arne Duncan.  We listened to a legislative panel presentation about a court decision or legislative "fix" that will allow students from unaccredited districts to attend schools in accredited districts at a projected tremendous financial cost to both the sending and receiving districts.

What's rarely asked in these discussions is why the schools are bad.  It seems to be an unspoken assumption that:

• it's the teacher's fault
• it's the administration's fault
• there's not enough money
• it's the union's fault

What I didn't hear from these panels on educational failures are these premises:

• some children can't/won't learn
• some parents can't/won't support their children
• federal mandates take time away from actual teaching in the classroom
• federal mandates smother innovation and creates teaching to the test 
• parents that DO support children often are dismissed by teachers and administrators if parental vision differs from the school vision

What seems to be missing is a true sense of community.  Education reform has morphed into a war between parents, taxpayers, schools, administrators, teachers, unions, corporate interests, Federal agencies, politicians and students.  When education becomes so centralized and top down driven, the stakeholders become estranged from each other.  When students are moved around like pawns on a huge chess board so the interests of adults are reached (unions, charter school venture capitalists, data set completion, etc), it's the students caught in the crossfire of agendas. 


To close out this wild week in Missouri education, we are offering a bit of dark humor from various Facebook postings.  Do these postings represent the current crop of students from American educational institutions?  Is this what NCLB has wrought?  If it is, why are we subscribing to Race to the Top mandates (NCLB on steroids) which demand even more centralized control, standardized testing and less critical thinking skills?


From "Unforgivable Facebook Posts": (warning some strong language)

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You can read the other "unforgivable Facebook posts" here.  These aren't all from young people.  There is a post from a dad apparently flummoxed by the internet and his son rescuing him from the avalanche of technology available.     

Do You Know Which Teachers have "Friended" Your Child? Soon The School District Will

In case you missed it (this being summer and all), Gov. Jay Nixon signed legislation last week, sponsored by Sen. Jane Cunningham, R-Chesterfield, aimed at providing important safeguards that will help to protect students from sexual misconduct by school employees. For instance, part of the legislation prevents school districts from unknowingly hiring someone with a history of substantiated sex abuse allegations by requiring school districts to disclose that information about a former employee if contacted for a reference. The legislation also requires annual background checks for teachers, bars registered sex offenders from serving on school boards and creates a new task force of lawmakers and state child welfare officials to focus on sexual abuse of children that and complete a study by 2013.

Another piece of the legislation requires school districts to develop policies by 2012 for communication between teachers and students that includes text messages, social networking websites and other electronic devices. Those polices are to restrict teachers from interacting with students on websites or in ways that are not also accessible to others, including school administrators and parents.

Being a parent today has challenges that did not exist even 15 years ago. Responsible parents now must, in addition to checking out their children's friends and their friends' parents, make time to monitor their children's on-line contacts. While this legislation appears to put the onus for the latter on the school district, it does give parents a legitimate reason to complain if they find questionable communication between their child and a school official in those mediums.

I personally resist much of the social networking being pushed today. Matthew Schaffer wrote the best rationale for this resistance in his recent National Review article Ages Apart in which he first referred to C. S. Lewis’s vision of Hell in The Great Divorce.

In Lewis's Hell, the damned suffer not a fire, or any physical torment or confinement, but absolute dominion and inalienable rights: the liberty to roam an infinite and borderless land, and to freely and instantaneously build castles wherever they like. Lewis’s damned enjoy this freedom by abandoning locations and acquaintances the moment they become inconvenient. So after a few years’ stay in Hell, each of the damned is thousands of miles away from any other, pacing solitarily in his castle.

Of course the end result is eternal isolation and loneliness which the individual has created.

The political moral is that unchosen obligations, restraints, and dependencies are the things that push people together, despite our irritableness and our inconvenience to each other. Our limitations and inadequacies counter our selfish bent, and become a foundation for community.

Given this point of view, Facebook can easily be seen as the road to Hell, paved with good intentions.

Facebook is the acme of modernized society, allowing us unrestrained control over our relationships — we literally choose the face that others see, and can start or end a friendship by tapping a finger. These friendships never become inconvenient, because no obligation can impose itself through the digital medium. The irony of Facebook, and of modernity’s expansion of social autonomy generally, is that total, unlimited cosmopolitanism in the end produces more parochialism, homogenization, and even chauvinism than geographical confinement does: I can now commune with people all over the world of all nationalities and tongues and races who are just like me.

The legislation specifically recognizes teachers' use of social networking sites, like Facebook, as a means of communication with students. In searching for a rationale why any teacher would need to communicate with a student through a site like FB or MS, I am forced to admit that there are some students who are addicted to these sites and seem to only be reachable through that medium (parents, if this describes your child, please read all of Matthew Shaffer's article). A teacher down in Joplin MO defended the use of social networking sites noting, "teachers used social networking websites to confirm their students were OK after a deadly tornado struck the southwestern Missouri city in May. He said the restrictions in the legislation would have made that same process far more difficult."

That is one extreme example, but I am hard pressed to come up with another more common reason why teachers need to contact students other than through official school channels. If anything, it should be students trying to contact teachers for missing assignments and the like, in which case it might do their overall organizational strategy some good to lose that crutch. Teacher websites and e-mail allow today's students' concentration to wander because they can always get the information later. School districts will have to come up with policies regarding text messages, social networking websites and other electronic devices. Should be a simple policy, "Don't use them."

New York City School Administrators Should be Turned in for Bullying Parents and Students

The anti-bullying campaign has taken hold in public schools with Facebook and Britney Spears lending assistance in advertising the administration's message.

The President has taken a lead in this campaign for children to learn how to be nice to each other:



Perhaps school administrators should practice what they preach as they are apparently trying to make students' and parents' lives difficult when and if the administrators are challenged.

Is it okay to send a child home because he wears an American flag (because it might hurt someone's feelings) but permissible for administrators have a child wear a T-Shirt with the saying "Not Yet", suggesting he wasn't "ready" to be integrated back into his class? Maybe this was a literary example of explaining the 'Scarlet Letter' and visual methods of scorn to the other students.

But good news! States are attempting to make certain bullying doesn't occur in public schools. The Nevada Legislature is set to vote on anti-bullying curriculum fashioned from an anti-bullying New Jersey law already enacted.

Apparently adults need to know how to practice and teach the "Golden Rule" because of legislation. Do you remember that ethical code that made you learn how to regulate your behavior? This moral code did not need to clutter up precious curriculum time:

The Golden Rule or ethic of reciprocity is a maxim, ethical code, or morality that essentially states either of the following:

1. One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself (positive form)
2. One should not treat others in ways that one would not like to be treated (negative/prohibitive form, also called the Silver Rule)

Personal morality isn't expected these days, now it is legislated. Will the threat of legislation and enforced curriculum teach these adults they will be under the threat of expulsion if they continue with their bullying tactics against students and parents? The New York school administrators should not expect behavior from their students they can't/don't practice themselves.

DATA is a Four Letter Word if You Value Your Privacy.

You may have been reading about the ability of Apple and Google to track their users' location and information:

Apple Inc.'s iPhones and Google Inc.'s Android smartphones regularly transmit their locations back to Apple and Google, respectively, according to data and documents analyzed by The Wall Street Journal—intensifying concerns over privacy and the widening trade in personal data.

Here is an idea of some of the information that can be tracked:

For almost two years, Alex Pentland at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has tracked 60 families living in campus quarters via sensors and software on their smartphones—recording their movements, relationships, moods, health, calling habits and spending. In this wealth of intimate detail, he is finding patterns of human behavior that could reveal how millions of people interact at home, work and play.

It doesn't stop at Google and Apple, however, your use of Facebook also compromises your privacy. This 2010 article on the founder is quite enlightening on the vanishing idea of individual privacy:

Zuckerberg imagines Facebook as, eventually, a layer underneath almost every electronic device. You’ll turn on your TV, and you’ll see that fourteen of your Facebook friends are watching “Entourage,” and that your parents taped “60 Minutes” for you. You’ll buy a brand-new phone, and you’ll just enter your credentials. All your friends—and perhaps directions to all the places you and they have visited recently—will be right there.

For this plan to work optimally, people have to be willing to give up more and more personal information to Facebook and its partners. Perhaps to accelerate the process, in December, 2009, Facebook made changes to its privacy policies. Unless you wrestled with a set of complicated settings, vastly more of your information—possibly including your name, your gender, your photograph, your list of friends—would be made public by default. The following month, Zuckerberg declared that privacy was an evolving “social norm.”

The backlash came swiftly. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Privacy Information Center cried foul. Users revolted, claiming that Facebook had violated the social compact upon which the company is based. What followed was a tug-of-war about what it means to be a private person with a public identity. In the spring, Zuckerberg announced a simplified version of the privacy settings.(emphasis added)

Here is one of the latest articles about Facebook's use of data mining information:

...privacy watchdogs say Facebook's unique ability to mine data and sell advertising based on what its members voluntarily share amounts to electronic eavesdropping on personal updates, posts and messages that many users intended to share only with friends.

"Facebook has perfected a stealth digital surveillance apparatus that tracks, analyzes and then acts on your information, including what you tell your friends," said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. "Facebook users should be cautious about whether the social networking giant ultimately has their best interests at heart."

You can deduce from these various scenarios with Apple, Google and Facebook, the idea of privacy is becoming quite antiquated. It seems as if the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) push by this administration is for naught: money is not made by creating and producing products; CEOs will become millionaires by selling other people's information. And let's package it by declaring privacy is an "evolving social norm". It's the ultimate nudge to give away our individuality for some company's or government's usage.

We'll be writing this week about this push for your data and your student's data while in public school and quite possibly, private and home school settings as well. Data mining is rampant in private businesses, so I suppose the government decided it might as well get what it could to drive the workforce and manipulate education services based on data.

It's been done in Europe for quite some time and we'll be writing about England's experience with tracking its citizens and what they do with this data. Since we're now copying their health system, the Federal Government probably thought it might as well utilize their data experiences too. It's all connected: health data leads into education data leads into workforce data. Stay tuned.

DOE tells principals they are required to monitor speech on and off school property

Rahm Emanuel said, "Never let a good crisis go to waste." Well, the White House created a crisis for them, a crisis of bullying, and the Department of Education jumped at the chance to use it to force school administrators to crack down on free speech. The Daily Caller broke this story today

Back in October, when everyone was in the heat of the campaigns, the Department of Education’s Russlynn Ali sent a Dear Colleague note to school officials across the country alerting them to the new broader definition of civil rights rules they have developed

Key points in this note:

"… federal officials have reinterpreted the civil-rights laws that require school principals to curb physical bullying, as well as racist and sexist speech, that take place within school boundaries. Under the new interpretation, principals and their schools are legally liable if they fail to curb “harassment” of students, even if it takes place outside the school, on Facebook or in private conversation among a few youths."

And Facebook is happily abetting this effort by implementing a feature allowing people to easily report “harassing language” on its network to school officials. In fact, they were said to be “thrilled” to work with the White House. Note, however, that the existence of this feature removes school administrator’s ability to claim they didn’t know about the offensive post. Since the Obama administration’s Department of Justice is not out investigating Black Panther voting rights violations, presumably they will have time to investigate Amanda’s repeated attempts to warn Becky on her Facebook page to stay away from Jason, or else.

But perhaps the biggest kicker in all of this is the Department of Ed’s new found powers to enforce punitive actions. "Following the discovery of “harassment,” officials may have to require mandatory training of students and their families, according to the Ali letter."

Is it any surprise that the force behind the expanded rules is Kevin Jennings, founder of the Gay Lesbian Straight Network and now head of the Dept of Ed’s Safe and Drug Free Schools division? The main focus of the agency's harassment campaign is the protection of homosexual students. Once a broad policy is in place, however, it allows any individual or group to complain about harassment and further REQUIRES the school to take action. No chance for abuse there. No siree.

Lots of people have other suggestions on how to deal with bullies, solutions that are more direct and, more importantly, free. There is now a video from Australia that has gone viral which plays out one of these solutions. It shows a kid who decided not to be the victim of bullying any more.

This video strikes a particular chord with those who have themselves been the victims of bullying or who have kids who have been picked on. The current direction school policy is heading regarding bullying seems to be completely wrong, and only serves to prolong or escalate the problem. Kids have been told to “walk away,” “use their words,” or “find an adult” who can help. Casey can been seen trying to ignore the other kid’s taunts while his friend aptly comments, “Man, this is going to be pathetic.” Kids who fight back or defend themselves are frequently punished because many administrators believe they would be condoning violence if they did not punish everyone who threw a punch. My own son was punched in class and told the attacker to “Knock it h--- off!” For using swear words, he was given a two day detention. Casey was given a 4 day suspension. But at least in Casey’s case, I don’t believe that particular twerp will ever bother him again. The comment sections where this video is posted are loaded with people who said their own torment only stopped once they stood up to the bullies who then backed off and left them in peace.

The privacy rights issues associated with the DOE’s letter are enormous and making very few people happy. The pressure on school administrations is huge now because they are “legally liable” if they don’t actively work to find and stop the harassment. Just what we need in times of fiscal crisis - a new administrator to monitor social networks. What say we all give them a hand and stand up to the bullies at the DOE in the administrator’s (and our own) defense and tell them we will not tolerate this level of intrusion.