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SIFA Data Privacy Charter

Data Privacy Team Charter

Version	Date	Reason	Author(s)
0.1	3/12/2014	Initial Draft	R Kleinman
0.2	4/08/2014	Adjusted to reflect initial reviewer feedback	R. Kleinman
0.3	4/15/2014	Adjusted to reflect initial SIG meeting feedback	R. Kleinman
0.4	4/23/2014	Adjusted to reflect international (AU) feedback	R. Kleinman
1.0	5/08/2014	Approved by ITB and Co-leads identified	R. Kleinman

Team Name:	Data Privacy Work Group
Date Submitted to TB leads:	TBD
Type of Charter:	Work Group ___X___
Work Group Sponsor Needed:	Core group of participants identified
Staff Liaison:	Name of Staff Liaison (or “unassigned”) ________Ron Kleinman____________
PT Leads: (Must be from different SIF member organizations)	Leslie Zimmerscheid, Wyoming SEA Graham Reed, SchoolsICT, UK
PT Members	Over 20

Need/Rationale for Formation:

Threats to student data privacy have received considerable attention recently, and it is generally recognized that while data security and data privacy issues overlap to some degree, there are enough differences that data privacy concerns can effectively be treated separately. Educational solutions at the school and district levels are increasingly deployed in the cloud, and that introduces a set of new concerns about who might be granted (or otherwise obtain) access to student health records, discipline actions or identification (ex: name, address and phone) information. At the 2014 SIF Annual Meeting at a session called “Who owns the data?” the consensus of attendees was to form a SIF Work Group focused exclusively on privacy issues surrounding access to and use of sensitive student related data.

Mission Statement:

This Work Group will concentrate on end user (District and State) issues relating to ensuring data privacy primarily for student data, but encompassing staff and possibly parental data privacy as well.  It will create: Checklist of Data Privacy “Recommendations”:  These suggest important SEA / LEA constraints be placed upon the privacy policies of Cloud Service providers, enabling EAs to meet or exceed FERPA and local data privacy mandates. Where such guidelines are not agreed to before sensitive student data is turned over to a Cloud Service vendor, data privacy can be fatally compromised with no recourse from the District or State.  Problematic examples have been posted on the Group SharePoint page and will be maintained and updated. Data Privacy Use Cases:  Identifies the major solution components (ex: District SIS, State Data Warehouse) and what sort of (student) data they each should be allowed access to in a particular process (and whether for all students or a subset): Ex A: Work Study Application (UK use case –only students in the work study program and only their identification and grades) Ex B: State level Data Warehouse (Student Data without identification elements like name, addresses, phone numbers) Object Data Privacy “Profiles”:  Each profile will correspond to one or more use cases, and will identify a unique collection of data elements which are to be excluded in objects conforming to that profile.  For example the Anonymous Student profile might contain an encoded unique index (UUID) but no identifying student data elements (name, addresses, phone numbers, etc.).  Other standardized profiles might exclude discipline or health related student elements or any combination of all 3. SIF administrative Data Privacy “Best Practices”:  These will specify exactly how SIF-compliant solutions can be administrated to enforce selected Object Data Privacy Profiles in a real world solution.  For example, once the Anonymous Student profile is selected, the multi-zone SIF Data Confederacy architecture allows local administrators to directly apply that profile to all student data exchanges in a separate Anonymous Student SIF Zone.  The set of applications assigned to that Zone (whether cloud based or not) never see the restricted information ... not because it is stripped out by routing middleware or just before message delivery, but because it is never made available to them.

Activity Overview
Projected Data Privacy Meetings For Version 3.0:	Virtual meetings:  24 (bi-monthly) Group meetings: 2 (SIF Annual Meeting and SIF Developer Camp) Minutes to be provided for each meeting:   ____X__
PST Time Frame for Version 3.0	Proposed Start Date:  3/25/2014 Estimated End Date:  12/16/2014
Tech Board Approval of Charter	Date Tech Board Approved  5/1/2014

Proposed Deliverables	Description	Est. Due Date	Dependencies & Assumptions	Status
Assemble Initial Team	·         Complete first draft of  Data Privacy Work Group Charter ·         Recruit additional members, ·         Hold first meeting, ·         Elect team leaders.	April-May 2014	Complete initial recruitment of members who are concerned with data privacy issues.	Completed
Scoping Document / Finalized Work Group Charter	Gain consensus on the scope of team activities and the set of initial “artifacts” team will attempt to produce. Publish final draft of the Work Group charter.	April-May 2014		Completed
Data Privacy SIG transformed into Data Privacy Work Group	Get ITB and Association Executive Board Approval of charter. Elect co-leads and start meeting as a Work Group	May 2014	Charter approved as submitted.	Completed
Activities
Identify critical end user Data Privacy concerns / questions and generate an associated Data Privacy  “Glossary of Terms”	Questions like: ·         Who “owns” the data? ·         Who “has” the data? ·         Who can access the data? ·         Who determines who can access the data? ·         Who can change the data? ·         Who defines “rules of ownership”? ·         Who enforces these rules? ·         Who verifies these rules are enforced? ·         Are there any special requirements when data is stored in 3rd party cloud?	June 2014	Initial list taken from the “Who owns the data” session notes at the Annual Meeting	In Progress
Define a list of cloud service provider recommendations which if adhered to would provide an “adequate” level of student data privacy	Potential examples include: ·         Cloud Servers must be located in US ·         No access given to product marketers ·         All data is owned solely by the district. ·         The district is the only entity that can specifically approve others to access its data ... no matter where the data actually resides.		Existing privacy policies of educational Cloud vendors will be examined and potential “weaknesses” identified and addressed
Define RFP wording to be used when a district solicits Cloud Service Provider proposals	Example: The student data belongs solely to the district and may never be considered an asset of the cloud service provider.  If a cloud service vendor is acquired or its assets sold, any new host organization must be explicitly approved by district or all student data must be downloaded to a district approved location and scrubbed from the cloud servers.		Providing this level of detail proves useful to Districts and States, and does not duplicate information available elsewhere.
Create Student Data Privacy “Profiles”	These apply data privacy concerns to the SIF Data Model, and define “subsets” of Student data that may be made accessible to a class of applications (ex: State level applications to District data)		Example might be AnonymousStudent profile with no identifying elements
Map data privacy requirements to a set of SIF solution best practices which can be implemented and enforced	Example: If multiple applications from an external source are to be given access to only part of a Student record (ex: no health, or no discipline or no identifying information) as defined in a Data Privacy Profile, consider creating a separate Zone for them in which the Student object events and responses simply do not contain the restricted information.		Providers supporting defined Data Privacy Profiles may be required to post multiple Events for a given change.

LA and PARCC

Louisiana Commissioner of Administration Kristy Nichols today said she would suspend the state’s approval of a contract that the education department intended to use to purchase the PARCC Common Core exams and launch an investigation into whether it should have been put out for competitive bid.
The move adds another twist to — and intensifies the political infighting over — Gov. Bobby Jindal’s move today to pull the state out of PARCC and repeal the Common Core.
State Superintendent John White has said that the governor has no legal authority to pull out of PARCC or seek new bids on for standardized testing. He said he planned to proceed with full implementation of Common Core and the PARCC exams.
But tonight Nichols said that White appeared to have no authority to purchase and administer the PARCC tests using an old consulting contract dating to 2003. The contract, with the testing company Data Recognition Services, has been amended multiple times, most recently in 2013, to allow the firm to continue to administer each new annual iteration of the state’s tests. White planned to amend that contract again to administer the PARCC Common Core tests, Nichols said.
But she said that introducing the new type of exam, potentially with different subcontractors, was beyond the scope of the original contract. White’s plan, she said, appeared to “circumvent procurement laws.”
“If that’s the intention,” Nichols said, “… yeah, we’re going to have a problem with it.”
Nichols served as Jindal’s deputy chief of staff before taking on her current role.

Nichols said she would send the state education department a letter this evening demanding that they provide justification for using the existing contract for the new exams. Once she hears back, she said, her office will review the contract and the department’s reasoning and determine whether to allow the contract to proceed or require an entirely new process. In the meantime, she has suspended payment to the company named in the contract.

PARCC Contracting

The PARCC consortium originally planned to have every participating state use the same testing company to write items, administer and score the new Common Core exams — and expected states to adopt the pricing models set forth in a model contract developed by New Mexico. But that vision may have to be overhauled due to the brouhaha over the Common Core in Louisiana, a spokesman for the consortium said tonight.
PARCC let the state of New Mexico request bids from testing companies for several years of Common Core assessments. Pearson was the sole bidder and won that contract. Other states in the consortium were then expected to adopt the same contract — without seeking other bids — for their own Common Core assessments, spokesman David Connerty-Marin said.
But in Louisiana, state Superintendent John White was planning to use an existing contract with Data Recognition Corporation to deliver the Common Core tests, according to his spokesman, Barry Landry. White told POLITICO that the state does not have a contract with PARCC, but planned to use PARCC content nonetheless, apparently through the vehicle of the existing contract with Data Recognition. Earlier tonight, however, the state commissioner of administration put a big crimp in that plan, announcing that it appeared to circumvent state procurement laws. The commissioner, Kristy Nichols, suspended the contract with Data Recognition immediately, pending an investigation.
PARCC had been unaware of White’s plans and was taken by surprise by Nichols’ statement, Connerty-Marin said. But he said the consortium was “committed to working with John White… to figure out a solution that works for Louisiana.”
“The original vision of the PARCC consortium was, and is, based on item security and comparability,” Connerty-Marin said. “The best path forward for those two things is a single administrator for the tests and a single scoring approach” across all participating states, he said.
“However, that said, sometimes politics happens,” Connerty-Marin said. “So if there is another way that will make this work for Louisiana, I think our governing board will certainly look at that.”
PARCC’s original plan was already in jeopardy before the contretemps in Louisiana, because a rival testing company had protested New Mexico’s bidding process, complaining it was rigged in favor of Pearson. A judge has ordered the state purchasing agent to investigate that complaint; both sides are currently filing briefs. There is no timetable for the decision. In the meantime, the contract in New Mexico is on hold and no other state can adopt it.
One more wrinkle in the saga: Pearson’s bid in New Mexico was based on the understanding that all the other PARCC states would adopt the same contract. It priced the tests accordingly.  If states instead pick their own vendors to administer and score PARCC questions, that could upend the economics for Pearson. “It’s just too early to say,” Connerty-Marin said. “We just don’t know the details.”

A contract to administer Common Core tests in all PARCC states would be worth billions of dollars over the next several years.

America's Cult of Ignorance

America's Cult of Ignorance Is No Match for Asia's Cult of Intelligence

Posted: 06/17/2014 5:59 pm

I have been traveling to East Asia (and many other parts of the world) for more than 25 years and over that time one of the things that has always struck me is how intelligent the general public in countries like Japan appear to be. It's not that there aren't dummies in East Asia, but it always seems that the average level of education and ability to think about the world intelligently and critically is impressively widespread. I've often thought about why this is the case and also why the same seems more difficult to say about the U.S. The answer, I think, can be found in a comment science fiction writer Isaac Asimov made about the U.S. while being interviewed in the 1980s: "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

Asimov is right on the mark, and this cult of ignorance is the most serious national security issue facing the U.S. today. It is more important than the external threats from terrorists or the rise of a politically and economically powerful China. And a major part of the reason it is such an major issue for Americans to fix is that our immediate competitors, particularly those in Asia, have managed to create a culture in which rather than a cult of ignorance, a cult of intelligence plays a major role in shaping attitudes about the world and, thus, policies about dealing with other countries.

Many Americans are aware that the U.S. does not score well on measure such as international student assessment tests when compared to other industrial countries. For example, the 2011 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TMISS) the top five countries for math were Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan--the U.S. is not in the top ten. It is better by 8th grade, where the same counties are in the top five (although the order changes) and the U.S. makes number 9. Roughly the same pattern can bee seen for science results. This doesn't seem too bad, but in a different testing organization's measure, the Programme for International Student Assessment, the U.S. does not fare quite so well, scoring 36th for math, 28th for science, and 24th for reading. With the exception of science, where Finland is ranked 5th, all of the top five countries in this measure are from East Asia.

American policy has generally worked from the assumption that the problem lies in basic weaknesses in the structure of our educational system with its inherent inequalities and the way in which our school curricula are constructed. These certainly have contributed to comparatively weak scores. I have long been convinced that one of the reasons Japan's educational system is better than the U.S.--at least in the sense that a very broad swath of the general public receives a good and equal education through high school--is related to funding. The U.S. system generates inherent inequalities in school funding by depending upon property taxes. Even in states where there is some (usually grudging) redistribution of wealth to support public schools in poor areas (in Texas it is called the Robin Hood law), it is obvious that children in wealthy areas receive a better education with far greater academic and other resources than those in poorer areas. In Japan, because there is a national curriculum and a significant portion of the funding for public schools comes from the national government, in addition to funding from prefectural and municipal governments, there is considerably less inequality in distribution of and access to quality education than in the U.S.

Unfortunately, the troubles with the U.S. education system are much deeper than distribution of funding or curriculum weaknesses, although these are both a byproduct of the cultural issue that Asimov's observes. The troubles lie in the cult of ignorance and anti-intellectualism that has been a long-standing part of American society and which has become increasingly evident and powerful in recent years through the propagandizing and proselytizing of groups like the Tea Party and the religious right.

The fundamental reason that countries in places like East Asia present such a significant challenge to the U.S. politically and economically is not because they have a lot of people or big militaries, or seem to be willing to grow their economic and political might without concern for issues like damage to the environment (China). The problem is that these countries have core cultural values that are more akin to a cult of intelligence and education than a cult of ignorance and anti-intellectualism. In Japan, for example, teachers are held in high esteem and normally viewed as among the most important members of a community. I have never run across the type of suspicion and even disdain for the work of teachers that occurs in the U.S. Teachers in Japan typically are paid significantly more than their peers in the U.S. The profession of teaching is one that is seen as being of central value in Japanese society and those who choose that profession are well compensated in terms of salary, pension, and respect for their knowledge and their efforts on behalf of children.

In addition, we do not see in Japan significant numbers of the types of religious schools that are designed to shield children from knowledge about basic tenets of science and accepted understandings of history--such as evolutionary theory or the religious views of the Founding Fathers, who were largely deists--which are essential to having a fundamental understanding of the world. The reason for this is because in general Japanese value education, value the work of intellectuals, and see a well-educated public with a basic common knowledge in areas of scientific fact, math, history, literature, etc. as being an essential foundation to a successful democracy.

Americans need to recognize that if the cult of ignorance continues, it will become increasingly difficult to compete politically and economically with countries that highly value intelligence and learning. Nowhere is this more problematic in the U.S. than among a growing number of elected officials who are products of that cult of ignorance and who, thus, are not equipped to compete with their international peers. Why is this a problem of national security? Because a population and its leadership need to have the knowledge and intellectual skills necessary to analyze world affairs in an intelligent and sophisticated way and to elect intelligent, capable representatives. The problem is not really with our educational system; it is with our educational culture. Americans need to remember the words of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote to Charles Yancey on January 6, 1816: ""if a nation expects to be ignorant & free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was & never will be."

More lies from the far right

Emmett McGroarty, education director of American Principles Project, applauded Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s controversial move to cut ties with the Common Core and the PARCC testing consortium.

The governor’s actions give hope to “the moms, dads and other citizens across America who are pushing back against a $600 billion education industrial complex and the elites in both parties who have been advocating for the national Common Core standards,” McGroarty said. 

The American Principles Project has been active in organizing opposition to Common Core, including in Louisiana. McGroarty called the standards “defective and inferior” and said they were “foisted” on states by the federal government.


“Certainly, as the governor’s statement today recognizes, much still needs to be done to make things right,” he said. “But the governor's actions and words mark this as a historic day.”

Jindal plays politics with Common Core

“Shame on any politician who won't stand with the majority of everyday parents and educators to maintain higher standards for kids."

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has defied his state legislature and state Superintendent of Education  While by issuing executive orders today to withdraw from the Common Core state standards and a federally funded Common Core testing group testing group.


Jindal also instructed the state legislature to develop its own set of standards next legislative session to replace the Common Core. “We’re very alarmed about choice and local control of curriculum being taken away from our parents and educators,” he said at a press conference. “If other states want to allow the federal government to dictate to them, they have every right to make that choice.”


Jindal, a likely presidential contender in 2016, was once a staunch supporter of the standards. But he has changed his mind amidst mounting opposition and tea party pushback.

He said his office has notified the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association that the state intends to withdraw from the Common Core. His office also notified PARCC that the state intends to terminate its relationship with the consortia. He said the contract with PARCC is in violation of state law because it did not go through a competitive bidding process.

Jindal’s said his executive orders would set up such a process to replace the testing group’s exams with a high-quality test at the lowest cost possible.

On Tuesday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan defended the Common Core and addressed the growing partisan divide over the standards on "CBS This Morning." He noted that Jindal was once in favor of the standards.  "Gov. Jindal was a passionate supporter before he was against it," Duncan said. "In that situation it was about politics. It's not about education. That's part of the problem."


Jindal responded by saying he wouldn’t allow the federal government to bully him over the Common Core.
“The proponents of Common Core claim it is not a federal takeover, but Secretary Duncan's comments and actions prove otherwise,” he said.

Michael Cohen, president of Achieve, a nonprofit education association that helped develop the Common Core, said Jindal’s move amounted to playing politics.


"On the same day a new WSJ/NBC poll shows overwhelming public support for Common Core, with only a vocal minority of ideologues opposing it, some elected officials still insist on playing politics with children's futures,” he said. “Shame on any politician who won't stand with the majority of everyday parents and educators to maintain higher standards for kids."