CA student data privacy bill passes

A California bill that would prohibit using students’ personal information for profit is now headed to Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk.

The California Senate passed the legislation unanimously Tuesday night. The bill, the Student Online Personal Information Protection Act, would end targeted advertising on K-12 websites, services and applications. Companies wouldn’t be able to create profiles on students unless the profile serves an explicit educational purpose. Companies would be banned from selling student data, as well.


U.S. Sens. Ed Markey and Orrin Hatch recently introduced a similar bill as an update to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974

90% of WA districts fail AYP

8/27/14 3:22 PM EDT

Nearly 90 percent of schools in Washington state aren't making adequate yearly progress under No Child Left Behind, the state announced today. 
Out of 1,916 schools, 1,401 are under some phase of required improvement under No Child Left Behind. Almost 30 percent of those schools have been identified for major restructuring. Their options include replacing almost all of the school's staff or having the state or an outside entity take over the school.
The numbers aren't dramatically different from last year, but state Superintendent Randy Dorn said Washington has to look at the results through a different lens. After the Education Department pulled Washington state's waiver from No Child Left Behind earlier this year, the state now must accommodate some of the more onerous provisions of the law in the coming school year, including paying for transfers to other public schools and tutoring.
In recent months, Dorn asked federal officials if the state could avoid sending notices home to parents that their child's school was failing. The Education Department rejected that request. 
But the Evergreen State got a small reprieve. The department gave the state a “limited one-year waiver” of a requirement forcing districts to provide parents of students attending Title I schools with notice of public school choice options at least two weeks before the start of the school year. 

Now LA Gov sues USED on CC

8/27/14 8:22 AM EDT

Republican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is suing the federal government over the Common Core, alleging that the Education Department has violated federal law and the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Jindal says that the Obama administration has used federal grants like Race to the Top “to compel states to enter binding agreements to adopt and fully implement a single set of federally-defined content standards and to utilize assessment products created by a federally-sponsored ‘consortia,’” according to a press release.
“Furthermore, the U.S. Department of Education has made changes to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act state test review and approval process that will coerce states to adopt the federal government’s preferred tests or risk billions in federal funding,” his office adds in a statement.

Jindal alleges that the Common Core testing groups PARCC and Smarter Balanced are part of an effort to nationalize curriculum — an argument that he’s making in his own state in a separate lawsuit. And waivers from No Child Left Behind have allowed states to “unlawfully” waive accountability requirements in exchange for adopted the Common Core.

Opposing the Common Core is like opposing fluoride in the water.

Opposing the Common Core is like opposing fluoride in the water.  Both are counter-factual paranoid reactions.

Southern R states band together against CC

LEARNING HOW TO LOSE THE COMMON CORE: Louisiana state lawmakers are headed to Oklahoma today to learn from Sooner State legislators about how to successfully ditch the Common Core. Republican Rep. Brett Geymann tells Morning Education that he and Reps. Lance Harris, Bob Hensgens, Cameron Henry and Rogers Pope will meet with staff and authors of the Oklahoma bill that repealed the Common Core. Earlier this year, Geymann and his colleagues unsuccessfully spearheaded a bill to repeal the standards. And a judge recently said the Common Core could continue [http://politico.pro/1pX40yN] in the state after denying a request filed by 17 lawmakers alleging that implementation of the standards violated state law.

— Speaking of the Common Core, the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference is hosting an event with former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee today to bolster support for rigorous academic standards. While NHCLC has come out in support of the Common Core (and Huckabee has called it a “toxic term” and declared the standards “dead”), the event is about much more than Common Core. Carlos Campo, chair of the Hispanic Education Alliance at NHCLC, tells Morning Education the group will push for educational equity and announce new initiatives to close the achievement gap. The event starts at 10:30 a.m. ET at the National Press Club.

Writing things down

The exemplary manager is often shown delivering a rousing speech that inspires her troops to achieve ever greater heights. But the truth is a lot less exciting than that.

To three highly effective and successful executives, a boring, often-overlooked ability is one of the most vital skills you can have as a manager — the ability to write.

“Written communication to engineering is superior [to verbal communication] because it is more consistent across an entire product team, it is more lasting, it raises accountability.”

— Ben Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz

Written communication creates lasting consistency across an entire team because a piece of writing is leveragable collateral from which everyone, from marketing to sales to QA to engineering, can work and consult.
Accountability spreads as a manager’s written work product — product requirement documents, FAQs, presentations, white papers — holds the manager responsible for what happens when the rest of the team executes on the clearly articulated, unambiguous vision described by the documents.
To Horowitz, the distinction between written and verbal communication is stark and in fact is what separates the wheat from the chaff. Good managers want to be held accountable and aren’t looking for ways to weasel out of responsibility. And so, good managers write, while “[b]ad product managers voice their opinion verbally and lament … the ‘powers that be’.”

“There is no way to write a six-page, narratively structured memo and not have clear thinking.”

—Jeff Bezos, Amazon
Jeff Bezos values writing over talking to such an extreme that in Amazon senior executive meetings, “before any conversation or discussion begins, everyone sits for 30 minutes in total silence, carefully reading six-page printed memos.”
Writing out full sentences enforces clear thinking, but more than that, it’s a compelling method to drive memo authors to write in a narrative structure that reinforces a distinctly Amazon way of thinking—its obsession with the customer. In every memo that could potentially address any issue in the company, the memo author must answer the question: “What’s in it for the customer, the company, and how does the answer to the question enable innovation on behalf of the customer?”

“Reports are more a medium of self-discipline than a way to communicate information.”

— Andy Grove, Intel

Like Bezos, Grove finds value in the process of writing. The surprising thing, then, is that reading what’s written isn’t important to Grove. The main point of this self-disciplinary process is to force yourself “to be more precise than [you] might be verbally”, creating “an archive of data” that can “help to validate ad hoc inputs” and to reflect with precision on your thought and approach.

Writing, according to Grove, is a “safety-net” for your thought process that you should always be doing to “catch … anything you may have missed.”

Accountability, coherence of thought and planning, and commitment to vision and mission are amazing benefits of what too many consider a ho-hum, even old-fashioned, tool.

Student Data Privacy Advocates

CLOSING A FERPA LOOPHOLE: As students head back to class, privacy advocate Sheila Kaplan is urging parents to demand that schools keep their children’s personal information private. Federal privacy law, known as FERPA, gives schools the right to share “directory information” with third parties, including for-profit companies. That information can include a child’s name, address, phone number, date and place of birth, awards, extracurricular activities and even height, weight and student ID number. Schools can also share student photos. But parents have the right to opt out — as long as they do it in writing. Kaplan has run an Opt Out campaign [http://bit.ly/1qqmu7t] for the last few years; she recently ramped it up with a new video. Take a look: http://bit.ly/1q0BH1F.

— Still have FERPA questions? The Future of Privacy Forum today unveils a website designed to be a comprehensive resource for parents, educators, entrepreneurs and policy makers. The site, sponsored by a host of ed-tech companies, explains privacy laws and explores data management issues. Check it out: http://bit.ly/YzXPH4.