Florida School Board Confirms They Have Ok'd Iris Scan Without Parental Permission

What would you do if you found out your school scanned your child's iris for the all critical purpose of enabling your child not to have to "carry an identification card?"  Parents in Florida are answering that question today.

A mother in Florida posted last week on Facebook that she thought her third grader had been scanned at school, but she could get no confirmation of that, that is until today when she received this letter from the school board.

In case you couldn't read it, it reads in part,

"The program is called Eye Swipe-nano. It is a safe non-invasive iris reader. It simply takes a picture of the iris, which is unique to every individual. The Eye Swipe-nano is an ideal replacement for the card based system since your child will not have to be responsible for carrying an identification card. With this program, we will be able to identify when and where a student gets on the bus, when they arrive at their school location, when and what bus the student boards and disembarks in the afternoon. This is an effort to further enhance the safety of our students."

Oh, well as long as its non-invasive on the collection part I guess I won't worry that you now have a way to track my child's every location without chipping them. All you need is one of those fancy iris readers that apparently can be installed anywhere. And of course, you have now given my child's uniquely identifiable feature to a private company without my permission. Those companies are never subject to federal requests to turn over data, like say Google or AT&T were.

And who decided this high tech privacy invading solution was needed?  That's right, the transportation department.  Given yesterday's story of a 6 year old boy who was suspended for having a plastic gun the size of a quarter on the bus, I wonder how long parents will continue to allow their children to ride the bus.

Schools regularly operate on the principle of "It is easier to ask forgiveness later than to ask permission beforehand." (Parkway wrist monitors) This culture must be stopped and it's up to parents to stop it. Do not take any government agent's assurance that they will never abuse the privilege of having access to this data. Say it with me, "No data collection on my child without my permission."

Reforms No Silver Bullet For Education

Reuters reporter Stephanie Simon reviewed Jeb Bush's education reform efforts in Florida and found no silver bullet among them. These reforms; charter schools, literacy requirements for 3rd graders, intense focus on reading, cyber classes, and vouchers, were instituted during his tenure as governor, and did initially show improvements in student scores and graduation rates. But, as they say, time will tell, and time has told the public that these gains were generally short lived.

"After the dramatic jump of the Bush years, Florida test scores edged up in 2009 and then dropped, with low-income students falling further behind. State data shows huge numbers of high school graduates still needing remedial help in math and reading."

It must not be forgotten that all of the things they tried in Florida came with a price tag. While property values were high and the state's economy was doing well, it was easy to push things like reading coaches and teacher bonuses for Advanced Placement scores through the legislature. For other states looking to adopt those measures now, the extreme cost is prohibitive.

"States adopting the policies now, in a time of austerity, tend to leave out the costly support systems. That has stirred protests from school superintendents, school board members, teachers unions and parents who see the policies as punitive, humiliating and too narrowly focused on a single test as a measure of success."

The long term value of their efforts is also falling into question as students who were held back in 3rd grade because they could not pass the reading proficiency requirement, who received a lot of extra attention to help them do so the following year, showed no advantage over other students by the time they got to high school. In addition, according to an annual report required by the state, those students who received vouchers and used them to go to private schools did no better at reading or math than their peers in public schools.

Even with all this intense focus on improving student performance in Florida, Missouri students still receive higher ACT scores than Florida students which is significant since our states fairly closely match in the percentage of students who take the test.

Bush's foundation For Excellence in Education is in high gear drafting legislation, editing bills line by line and sending in experts to testify in various states like Maine, New Mexico and Florida. Reuters points out that "Bush foundation donors include family philanthropies, such as those established by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Corporate donors include Connections Education, a division of global publishing giant Pearson; Amplify, the education division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp; and K12, a publicly traded company that runs online schools."

His critics say these corporate associations diminish any bragging rights he might have to tout Florida's improvements. Bush says that any individual failings in programs by these companies should be noted and those programs dropped. Goody. But we have decades of teaching experience in this country to tell us what works and what doesn't. We shouldn't have to wait for the free market to catch up on this learning curve, meanwhile wasting money and minds.

Anyone out there looking for or touting a silver bullet for the things that ail our public schools is going to be disappointed. The Bush Foundation has not found it, no matter what they say. The best that can be done is for control of education to be returned to the most local level possible so each school can work out its own formula for success.

The Fight Against High Stakes Testing Will Not Be Easy

The state of Florida remains at the forefront of education issues so it is useful to keep an eye on how things are going there. In a nutshell, they are not going well.

At a recent meeting of the Florida School Boards Association, Education Commissioner Gerard Robinson gave a lunchtime speech in which he essentially told the local school boards, comply or else when it comes to the state's main assessment the FCAT.  The Association of 67 school boards across the state is working on a resolution opposing high stakes testing as the main tool for student and teacher evaluation. Robinson said of the local school boards, "They can express their opinion, but let’s also remember the local school board’s obligation is to implement the laws approved by the Florida Legislature; to implement the regulations approved by the state board.”

Got that everyone? You have only as much local control as your state legislature gives you. In Florida the legislature and State Board of Education are together in their support of the FCAT.  It is top down control and that line of command was just emphasized by their Commissioner. If anyone is going to be successful in getting things changed, they are going to have to focus their efforts on the legislature and the BoE. Talking to your teacher, principal, school board member or even superintendent will do you no good. They have no authority to affect change.

The FL BoE is hanging tight to the FCAT because they believe it has produced results.

“If you take a look at where students have performed in math, reading, writing as well and other subjects, we’ve been moving in the right direction for over a decade,” Robinson said. “That didn’t happen overnight. That happened because we set accountability and assessments are in place.”

That is a complete disconnect from the experience of the teachers and parents at the point of implementation.  One school board member characterized it this way, "for our Florida Department of Education not to be willing to listen to the concerns from parents, and students and school board members all across the state of Florida? We have a problem. We have a communication problem, we have a messaging problem."

They have more than a messaging problem.  They have an ego and an economic problem. Jeb Bush has a lot of his personal political worth on the line with education reform in FL. BobsIdleMusings noted, "He cannot remain education reforms voice if he is being challenged by the state’s local school boards – many of them filled with republicans."

They have an economic problem because of all the ties in to Pearson who produces the FCAT and has the company's  future viability challenged if they do not have a lock on the standardized testing protocol in the state. Osceola County School Board member Jay Wheeler said the FCAT, started “with the best intentions,” has turned into a successful “business model for Pearson” — which earns millions from Florida — but not something meant “to help kids.” Where business and politics cross is dangerous territory.

In Missouri, the line of command goes from DESE, through the legislature to the local districts. Many times the legislature has deferred to the decisions of DESE, even when such decisions were not pre-approved by the legislature and end up costing the state money that was not budgeted for by the legislature. Still, it is top down authority. Since our legislators have taken a somewhat hands off approach when it comes to things like Common Core Standards, high stakes testing and longitudinal database creation which were all brought into the state single handedly by DESE, the only way to change things is through DESE whose leadership is appointed by the governor.  Starting to look at the governor's race any differently?

And for those districts crazy enough to apply directly for the new RTTT funding, the line of command will bypass the state all together and come directly from Washington. You think DESE doesn't listen to you or plays hardball? Wait til you try to get an answer, some help or relief from DC.

Can A Single District Take Down Standardized Testing?

Everyone knows the image of a series of falling dominos. It's a basic lesson in physics on inertia and gravity, combining linear impulse with angular momentum. I offer this video as a more advanced physics lesson using dominos to demonstrate how today's story may play out.



Notice how tiny the first domino is. He must hold it with a tweezers. And note how large the 13th domino is.  It weighs 100 lbs yet it is knocked down in the end.

Now let's look at Broward School District in Florida, small in comparison to the whole state, but the 6th largest school district in the country. Broward just passed a resolution asking the Governor Rick Scott, the Florida Department of Education and state and federal lawmakers to revamp state and federal accountability systems so that they include a variety of measures to determine how students perform. The resolution claims standardized testing is "an inadequate and often unreliable measure of both student learning and educator effectiveness."

How can a single school district bring down the state's standardized test, the FCAT? As the video shows, its not a direct path from the smallest to the largest, but rather a combined force of each domino working together to push over the largest one. Broward's domino may actually be somewhere in the middle of this chain.

In Florida, other districts like Palm Beach County, Martin County and St. Lucy County, have made similar requests. They join districts across the country who recognize that such tests are often not accurate measures of what students learn, and more importantly, that such tests are receiving greater and greater power to completely change school districts. (Picture the largest domino falling the other way back onto the smaller dominos.)

In Texas, 360 school boards passed resolutions against standardized testing. They join districts in New York, California and Illinois in opposing the seemingly endless stream of assessments kids are being funneled into with the new "incentives" coming out of Washington.

A national effort to stop the heavy push of standardized testing was launched back in April with a resolution that local districts could adopt. (full text here) The resolution, modeled on the Texas resolution was developed by: Advancement Project; Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund; FairTest; Forum for Education and Democracy; MecklenburgACTS; Deborah Meier; NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.; National Education Association; New York Performance Standards Consortium; Tracy Novick; Parents Across America; Parents United for Responsible Education - Chicago; Diane Ravitch; Race to Nowhere; Time Out From Testing; and United Church of Christ Justice and Witness Ministries.

What gives it a fighting chance is that it uses a concept that liberals love, choice. The signers are simply asking that schools be given the choice of a number of assessment tools to determine whether they are meeting standards. After all, if the newest RTTT says that schools must provide individual learning plans for children to meet their individual learning needs, shouldn't schools be given individual assessment options to meet their teaching needs?

If your school district doesn't think it would do any good to pass this resolution, maybe you should show them the domino video.

Home Economics Class Recipe: Florida Christmas Cookies

I'm in Florida for Christmas which is an awesome place to be in December. As a native Floridian, I believe the natives take for granted the beautiful weather here (usually) around Christmas. It was pushing 60 degrees here today with a light breeze and that is very cool in North Florida. We have a small fire in the stove right now which takes the December chill out of the house. Dinner was at a favorite neighborhood restaurant where the special was a dozen of oysters for $4.00. It was a fabulous day with family, perfect weather, and tasty food. (And to the delight of my UF alumn husband, he has his choice of all kind of Gator clothing and paraphernalia that is understandably impossible to find in Missouri).

It's been a pleasure putting Bill Gates, Arne Duncan and common core standards on the back shelf for a few days. To celebrate Christmas and the special cooking we do once a year, here's a recipe that captures the flavor of Florida.

Hope your Christmas plans are coming together!

Rick Scott is Making a Splash in Florida Education Waters

Whether you agree with it or not, this is a radical move for the governor elect in Florida:

Newly elected Florida Gov. Rick Scott is making waves with his proposal that all children should receive education vouchers they can use to attend private, public or charter schools.

Many school choice advocates are pushing for school choice, but only as it pertains to charter schools which still must operate under federal mandates. Private schools are not under such mandates which make this proposal that much more intriguing. I would think this would also apply to homeschooling parents as Scott stated:

"The parent should figure out where the dollars for that student are spent," the Republican governor-elect told the St. Petersburg Times. "So if the parents want to spend it on virtual school, then spend it on virtual school. If they want to spend it on, you know, whatever education system they believe in, whether it's this public school or that public school or this private school or that private school, that's what ought to happen."

Read the article and let us know what you think.

Did you think the health care debate was heated? The original article regarding Scott's remarks was posted at 5:24 ET. By 8:44 PM ET, there were 232 reader comments. This tells me education is of high interest to many Americans and they are weary of failing systems. Readers have differing opinions, but everyone agrees something radical must occur in delivering education to our students.