Hardly a day goes by when new concerns aren’t raised about government-related organizations gaining access to your private information.
The National Security Agency has recently admitted to tracking literally billions of cell phones. They may not know who you are but they know who you called and who called you.
Now the North Shore school district superintendents are calling for a halt to the state Department of Education’s practice of providing information about students to the InBloom data collection service which is part of the controversial Common Core curriculum.
“We have to be convinced that this would maintain students’ confidentiality or we have to disengage from the system and find another way to keep data,” said East Williston Superintendent of Schools Elaine Kanas.
She is joined in her objection to the information sharing by Great Neck Superintendent of Schools Tom Dolan Herricks Superintendent of Schools John Bierwirth and Herricks school board President Jim Gounaris. These are educators for whom we have great respect, but we wonder if their concern about InBloom is well founded.
The state education department regularly collects student data from school districts, including report cards and transcripts, course scheduling, school lunch and transportation information as well as data from local assessment services.
The state knows what your kids are eating for lunch and the feds knows who they are calling on their cell phones. Together they may know more about your kids than you.
But the question is: what safeguards are in place to protect the confidentiality of this information? The superintendents are right in demanding that InBloom and Common Core guarantee that this data won’t handed off to other private organizations such as News Corp, which has already showed an interest?
That said, although we have had raised concerns in this space about Common Core and its reliance on standardized testing, we believe that it has potential and may help close the education gap separating the United States from other countries.
According to The Survey of Adult Skills by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the U.S. ranked 16th out of 23 countries in literacy proficiency and 14th in problem solving in technology-rich environments.
That’s why America needs Common Core.
We find this far more troubling than the confidentiality concerns raised by the superintendents.
