What’s So Bad About Educational Technology? Beware The Poverty Pimps!

Ed Tech.  It is everywhere.  Like the Vikings of yesteryear, it is invading every classroom in America.  It is pillaging the public education village.  For the Vikings, this was their way.  It was all they knew.  But for the Poverty Pimps, the companies who profit from students with the justification of fixing education for poor kids, it is disturbing on many levels.  If this technology is used in moderation and for the sole benefit of increasing the ability for students to learn, that would be one thing.  But companies are making billions of dollars off of our kids.  Even worse, the privacy of our children’s information is suspect at best.  One mom from Pennsylvania, Alison McDowell, has looked into all of this and she has found out a lot about what is going on with this aspect of the Ed Tech Boom.

A Skeptical Parent’s Thoughts on Evaluating Digital Learning Programs

With the school year beginning, questions about digital learning programs and computerized behavior management programs have started to pop up in my feed. Is X program ok? How about Y? Concerned parents are scanning privacy policies and trying to figure it all out. What does this mean for MY child?

As someone who took a symbolic stand and opted her child out of Google Apps for Education last year (and she didn’t seem to come out any the worse for wear for it BTW), I’d like to share my current thinking on this topic. I am not a Luddite, but I am concerned that rather than being taught to use and control technology, many children (especially children in turn-around or transformation schools) are increasingly being put into the position of being used BY technology to further the interests of for-profit cyber instruction and workforce development. I’m sharing my thoughts in the hope of opening up a discussion and to see where other folks are in this brave new world.

For me the bottom line is this: Does the technology under consideration empower students to be the creators of the content? Is the power with THEM?

If the answer is “yes,” then it shouldn’t depend on tracking personalized data to function properly. Sure kids should be able to work on a project, save it, and go back to it, but online monitors shouldn’t be tracking all their data. Students own the work they do. It is their intellectual property. It should remain accessible and editable by them for the purposes of what the child and the teacher are doing in the CLASSROOM-that’s it. Storing student learning with PII (personally identifiable information) in the cloud for some unspecified future purpose concerns me.

Fortunately for our family, the above scenario is the norm at my daughter’s school. Mostly they use GAFE for open-ended word processing and there is a geometry program that allows students to render shapes. But THEY are doing the creating. The work is being done in THEIR brains. They are not consuming pre-determined content and having their micro-data tracked and aggregated.

If the sole purpose of the technology under consideration is to distribute content from an online learning management system based on prior data that a program has gleaned from a student interacting with the program, that is NOT an empowering educational experience.

Others may feel differently, but right now that is my framework for looking at this issue. That, and the fact that technology should not supplant funds for human teachers and there should be age-appropriate screen time limits during the school day.

What we need is more educational sovereignty and less educational surveillance.

In Delaware, personalized learning is pushed heavily by the Rodel Foundation with support from the Delaware business community.  Rodel, a non-profit company, has been pimping personalized learning and competency-based education for years.  I have extreme issues with the CEO of a non-profit being the highest paid education person in the state, with a reported earning of $343,000 as of 2014.  That is a lot more money than the highest paid state employee in education, Brandywine Superintendent Dr. Mark Holodick, who earned $217,000 as of last year.  Every state has similar “foundations” doing the same thing.

Delaware teachers are at a crossroads.  Do they embrace this technology knowing it could eventually lead to the end of their career as they know it, or do they resist it and fade into obscurity as districts and charter schools feel they aren’t supporting education?  The problem is the power  structure.  The teachers who are embracing this technology are regarded as education heroes in the press.  They are considered the “trailblazers” who will lead our children to “college and career readiness”.  They get the rewards and the accolades while teachers in high-poverty schools, who work just as hard without proper funding and resources in bloated classrooms, get labeled and shamed over the state assessment scores.

For parents, their rights to protect their child’s personal information have slowly been dismantled through federal regulations involving FERPA.  Outside contractors with state and local education agencies have certain allowances which allow them to see personal information.  The laws surrounding this are very vague and unclear.  On the surface, they look great.  But the loopholes embedded in these laws are the true tale.  For parents, opt out is no longer about the state assessment.  It is also about education technology.  But how does a parent opt their child out of entire curriculums that use computers and hand-held devices?  It’s not like schools can say “that’s fine, we will give your child a textbook.”

As the world slowly begins to embrace Blockchain technology, modeled after Bitcoin, serious questions are being asked about how this could transform the education landscape.  And what it means for our children.  Make no mistake, the initiatives and “ideas” are already in play and have been for years.  Blockchain is the end of the agendas.  It is the Rubicon of the plans that began in the early 1990s.  While these “futurists” didn’t foresee the exact mechanism of what is now Blockchain, they knew education would become a master and apprentice society, with earn to learn programs replacing the traditional classroom.  Common Core and the high-stakes testing were a means to this end.  We are hearing more and more talk about career pathways and early education.  The role of corporations in these areas is too large to ignore.  We are knee-deep in Education Incorporated, but we are about to be swallowed whole.

Last March, I created a Parent Bill of Rights for Education.  It began as a response to the Center for American Progress’ Testing Bill of Rights.  I found their platform to be insulting to the students, parents, and teachers of America.  Since then, things have changed.  I landed in Facebook jail when I posted this to the same groups I show my articles to.  With no explanation whatsoever from Facebook.  The idea took on a life of its own.  But I need your help.  Please look at it.  Come up with ideas on how to improve it.  Let’s make this a real thing and present it to Congress next year.  We must be able to exert parental control over what is best for our children before that control is stripped from us forever.  To this end, I have created a Parent Bill of Rights for Public Education group.  It will be a private group.  It will be by invitation only, which some may see as hypocritical on my end given my  rants about transparency.  But we don’t want the corporations getting their hooks into this.  This will be created by parents, for their children.  Not for profit or power and gain.  This is for our kids.  Because we love them better than any company ever will.

 

Call For NEA To Cut Ties With TeachStrong Coalition

Another new business item at the NEA Rep. Assembly in D.C. this week would call for NEA to quit the TeachStrong Coalition sponsored by the Center for American Progress.  Delaware Governor Markell is one of the biggest advocates for this farce of a coalition and helped to launch the initiative.  The Center for American Progress was also the same group that led the “Testing Bill of Rights for Education” which landed with a resounding thud.  This led to my creation of the “Parent Bill of Rights for Education” which pretty much led to a two-week banishment on Facebook for myself in April.  How dare parents voice their opinion!

The NEA has to realize they are cutting their own throats by aligning with these companies.  They need to fight this crap, not join it.  To read more on this NBI, please go here.  How much do you want to bet the TeachStrong ambassadors were carefully selected by these partnership organizations to further their own agendas, including the ultimate privatization of public schools?  Lily Eskelsen-Garcia, you are not leading your membership to glory.  You are leading them to the slaughter…  will the NEA members wake up and take back any shred of decency before it is gone forever?

New Legislation Uses “Cyber Attack Threat” To Shield Delaware’s Student Data Mining Tactics

Delaware Governor Jack Markell sure is going out with a bang.  New legislation introduced a week ago in the Delaware Senate all but ensures any citizen requesting information on student data mining in Delaware will be met with a resounding no.  While the legislation mentions nothing about student data, it talks about the Delaware information technology system.  This bill would prevent a citizen from filing a FOIA request for the following:

Information technology (IT) infrastructure details, including but not limited to file layouts, data dictionaries, source code, logical and physical design of IT systems and interfaces, detailed hardware and software inventories, network architecture and schematics, vulnerability reports, and any other information that, if disclosed, could jeopardize the security or integrity of an information and technology system owned, operated or maintained by the State or any public body subject to the requirements of this Chapter.

On the surface, it looks like a great bill.  But the key words in this legislation are in the data dictionaries.  This defines how a system operates and what is included in it.  You can see one from the Delaware DOE below, from 2012:

The below are recommendations made to the Delaware DOE from Education Insight.  Some of the key words in this document pertain to exactly what is happening now, in current talk and pending legislation.  But the parties who come up with these ideas are trying to make it seem like this is brand new.  The jig is up.  This was planned a long time ago.

The four-year plan for DOE data systems as outlined in Race to the Top will result in a significant expansion in the amount of data available for use within the Department and for sharing with outside organizations. This expansion has implications for how data quality and data access will be managed in the future, and how DOE needs to be organized to meet this demand:

And the below document gives it all away:

Expansion of the warehouse to subject areas such as early childhood, higher education, workforce and social services will increase the need for more formal management of the data interchange process and increasing the demand for sharing of this data with owner organizations.

I have talked to quite a few tech people and none of them understand why “data dictionaries” would be included in this.  Especially when it comes to student data.  But this bill would exempt them from FOIA requests.  So what’s the big deal?  Who cares if your child’s data is tracked and catalogued?  If they aren’t doing anything wrong it should be no big deal, right?  Wrong.

Over a year ago, the documentary “Defies Measurement” showed parents the flaws of standardized testing. Back in February of this year, members of the Pennsylvania Parents Across America in Lower Merion Township began showing the documentary to other parents.  As a result, opt-outs in Pennsylvania grew bigger by the day. The Philadelphia Inquirer covered what was going on one weekend in February.  One teacher from New Jersey spoke about the threats and intimidation going on:

“They’re trying to use the fear and lack of information to coerce parents,” she said.

The documentary, clocking in at over an hour, is very informative. I encourage all Delaware parents, along with any parent in America who cares about education, to watch the entire thing.

In Delaware, parents opted their children out of the Smarter Balanced Assessment which began it’s second year of testing a week on March 9th.  Because Delaware agreed to replace Smarter Balanced with the SAT for high school juniors, it is expected opt-out numbers may be less than last year, but it is unknown how many parents opted their children out of the SAT this year.  There is one documented opt out from, of all schools, the Charter School of Wilmington according to a draft of their April 26th board meeting.  Meanwhile, many Delaware legislators played a high-stakes game of chicken in the Delaware House of Representatives.  They had an opportunity to override Governor Markell’s veto of Delaware’s opt-out legislation, House Bill 50, back in January.  Instead, they hung onto stagnant and outdated excuses by refusing to suspend rules to allow for a full House vote on the override. Even though the legislation does sit on the Ready List for a full house vote, Delaware Speaker of the House Peter Schwartzkopf has given no indication he will put it on the agenda for a full House vote.

Last June, Oregon Governor Kate Brown signed House Bill 2655 which allowed parents to opt their child out of the state assessment.  The feds pitched a fit, but Brown heard what the people of Oregon were saying.

Meanwhile, in Georgia, their Senate passed their own opt-out legislation with a 39-9 vote.  Georgia Senate Bill 355 is also called the “Student/Teacher Protection Act”.  This is very similar to how the votes went down in Delaware last spring in our own Senate and House of Representatives.  Did Georgia Governor Nathan Deal sign the bill?  Not a chance.  He vetoed the bill on May 3rd.  Like Markell, he defied the will of the people and his own legislature to cater to corporate interests.  But of course he covers it up under the guise of, get this, making sure there is “local control”:

Veto Number 15

Senate Bill 355 allows federal, state and locally-mandated assessments to be optional for certain students. At present, local school districts have the flexibility to determine opt-out procedures for its students who cannot take the assessments in addition to those who choose not to take such assessments. As there is no need for state-level intervention in addition to the regulations already set in place on a local level, I VETO SB 355.

As organizations like the National PTA, the United Negro College Fund, and other Gates Foundation supported organizations come out with “position statements” against opt-out, parents are figuring things out on their own.  They are putting the pieces together and realizing how bad these tests really are.  What many don’t realize is the data mining that is happening right under our very noses. With these computer-adaptive tests, as well as all the personalized or blended learning modules students log into, there are embedded data mining algorithms involved.  These algorithms are sent to a joint system owned by the United States Department of Education and the Department of Defense.

Back in 2011, the US DOE and US DOD partnered together to create the Federal Learning Registry.  This joint system purported to be a massive sharing mechanism so anyone involved in education could contribute and access.  In an article from Local Journal in November, 2011, it describes the Federal Learning Registry  as being designed specifically “so that both commercial and public sector partners could freely take part.”

Even Education Week got in on the upcoming data mining explosion that was about to take place in education:

Predictive analytics include an array of statistical methods, such as data mining and modeling, used to identify the factors that predict the likelihood of a specific result.

It is hard for any federal agency to work with another.  So why this unprecedented partnership between US DOE and US DOD?  Technology has certainly advanced to this point where collaboration can save taxpayers a lot of money.  But in looking at the University of Southern California’s report on potential funding opportunities with the Department of Defense, there are some very distrubing ideas presented.  One of these is something called the Minerva Initiative:

Human Social, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling (HSCB)
http://minerva.dtic.mil/
In addition to Service core HSCB programs, the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) funds S&T programs to address understanding and modeling of human behavior in social and cultural contexts. The basic research component is entitled the Minerva Initiative (see MAPS DOD Chart 128); it is presently administered by ONR.

Another one of these budget items shows where algorithms are changing technology at a rate faster than any of us can imagine or even keep up with:

What is a data-mining algorithm in this case? Microsoft defines it as:

A data mining algorithm is a set of heuristics and calculations that creates a data mining model from data. To create a model, the algorithm first analyzes the data you provide, looking for specific types of patterns or trends. The algorithm uses the results of this analysis to define the optimal parameters for creating the mining model. These parameters are then applied across the entire data set to extract actionable patterns and detailed statistics.

Microsoft, along with Google and Amazon, lobbied heavily against legislation introduced in many states last year.  In most of the states, the legislation was amended which allows for these data mining algorithms to go out to different sources.  Your child’s data, despite what legislation passed, is not safe. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) does not recognize the algorithms generated by these types of tests and personalized learning modules.  It does forbid any personal identifying information to go out.  This is otherwise known as PII. This type of information includes name, social security number, address, birth date, and other easily recognized information. This is the information that schools aren’t allowed to get released to everyone.  But the information does go out, in a “de-identified” format.  So how would a state DOE keep track of what information is going out?  They assign each student a student identification number.  So while the PII information doesn’t go out, it is attached to a number.

The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) covered student data privacy and legislation in several states meant to protect student data in their online April magazine.  But like the legislation it glorifies, the article didn’t even touch what happens when outside companies get the de-identified data, make assumptions on it to form policy or assessments, and then send it back to the state.  The Every Student Succeeds Act is meant to limit federal control in education.  The states and local districts will have more control.  But because of the horrible federal mandates of the past eight years, the states are now just satellites of the same corporate education reform madness that infected the US DOE.  Instead of one central agency, we now have fifty calling the shots.

When you look closer at NCSL’s “concerns” about student data privacy, it is very alarming to see a study done by the Aspen Institute about the need for outside education companies to obtain student data.  This is an organization stacked with more corporate education reform leaders under one membership roof than any other organization I’ve seen.  There are many organizations like Aspen, and they all spit out the same bad methodology and education double-talk: high-stakes testing, Common Core, personalized learning, student data “privacy”, school choice, charter schools, turning schools into community centers, and so much more.  The problem is more and more of the education organizations that are supposed to be the last wall of defense against these corporate intrusions are joining them.  We saw this with the National Educators Association, the American Federation of Teachers, and the National PTA with the rushed passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act.  Parents have never been more alone in their education battles.  In Delaware, our state PTA can’t even talk about opt out due to the immense bullying of the National PTA.

As long as we have high-stakes testing, we will have opt out.  But now, happening everywhere across the country, there are many other reasons to opt your child out.  Out of anything that could allow your child’s data to be released to any outside organization.  Until legislation is passed in every single state stopping this charade, assume your child’s digital footprint is making some company a lot of money.  Because the states pay these companies to do the research on YOUR child.  And if Delaware has their way, you won’t even be able to track it.

It was for all of these reasons and more that I wrote a Parents Bill of Rights for Education and the accompanying petition.  Please sign the petition today and let our political leaders know our children are not data, to be bought and sold.  They are human beings.  They need to be children, not a part of this absolute destruction of their spirit in the name of corporate wealth.  And if you are a parent of a special needs child, a minority student, an English Language learner, or a low-income or poverty student, the time is now to stop listening to civil rights and advocacy groups that spread this disease in public education and start asking yourself- what is this really about?

 

Have You Signed The “Parent Bill of Rights for Education” Change.org Petition Yet? This Is Not The “Testing Bill Of Rights” From Center for American Progress

Two weeks ago, I posted the “Parent Bill of Rights for Education”.  As a result of posting this on Facebook to various education groups that promote opt out, Facebook banned me for two weeks from posting to groups or joining groups.  So I created a petition on Change.org.  Please sign it today if you haven’t already.  When you finish, please share the Change.org link or this one on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, or anywhere else you can think of.  Share it with your family and neighbors.

This was a reaction to the “Testing Bill of Rights” promoted by the Center for American Progress, an education reform company that heavily supports high-stakes testing and Common Core.  They are against opt out and hope to make more money from their education reforms.  Their petition, which they claim has 11,000 signatures in the past two weeks, does nothing to protect a parent’s right to opt their child out of the state assessment.  Their claim that reducing testing, while getting rid of the tests that do matter, is bogus.  Don’t believe me?  Take a look at some of their recent tweets:

ICYMI: Less than 2 weeks after launch, Testing Bill of Rights petition gains momentum w/ over 11,000 supporters https://t.co/t4UjIA2xW4

— CAP K-12 Education (@EdProgress) April 7, 2016

Opting your kid out means opting out of being a more informed parent. Learn more via @HuffPostEdu https://t.co/SEiBYgsuQT

— CAP K-12 Education (@EdProgress) April 8, 2016

Better tests will allow us to reduce the need for local exams: https://t.co/KjfKHgRBk6 #testbetter pic.twitter.com/Q5Yhupnv9K

— CAP K-12 Education (@EdProgress) April 7, 2016

RT @EdTrust: WATCH: New #CommonCore Video Series Shows How Kids Today Learn #Math a Better Way https://t.co/FiBBr0sYdZ via @The74

— CAP K-12 Education (@EdProgress) April 8, 2016

So what is the “Parents Bill of Rights for Education”?

THE PARENTAL BILL OF RIGHTS FOR OUR CHILDREN IN EARLY EDUCATION, PRE-SCHOOL, ELEMENTARY AND SECONDARY EDUCATION

CONCERNING HIGH-STAKES STANDARDIZED ASSESSMENTS, OUR RIGHT TO OPT OUT OR REFUSE OUR CHILD OUT OF THOSE ASSESSMENTS, THE COLLECTION OF STUDENT DATA, AND OUR RIGHT TO GATHER

BE IT ENACTED BY THE PARENTS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Definition of parent: any biological parent, or a parent through legal adoption, or foster parent, or guardian, or court-appointed guardian, for children through the ages of birth to 18 or 21 with guardianship through the end of an IEP, whichever is later.

Whereas parents have been given the responsibility to raise a child and to help guide them to adulthood, as their primary caregiver, and

Whereas parents, through United States Supreme Court decisions and other laws, have the right to decide what is best for our children in education matters until they come to a legal age when they are able to make those decisions on their own, and

Whereas, we believe public education should be reserved for the public at large and not the corporations, be they profit or non-profit, and that decisions based on education are best made at the local level, and

Whereas, we believe any assessments given to our children should provide immediate feedback for the student, teacher, school, and parent as defined for the sole purpose of giving reasonable and interpretive analysis of academic progress for our child’s allotted grade.

Whereas, as the caretakers of our children, we demand that decisions regarding data and the collection of data are parental decisions and that we furthermore have the absolute, unconditional right and ability to consent or not consent to any sharing of said data

(1) As parents, we have the fundamental, moral, and constitutional right to make decisions on behalf of our children in regards to their education.

(a) This includes the type of school we decide they go to, whether it be in a traditional school district, public charter school, vocational school, private school, home school, or home school co-op.

(b) This includes our ability to refuse or opt our children out of standardized assessments despite accountability measures placed upon a school.

(1) Once we have submitted our letter indicating our choice to refuse or opt out our child, we shall receive no verbal or written words meant to threaten, bully, or intimidate, in an effort, whether intentional or coincidental, to coerce us into changing our minds.

(2) We expect our children to receive instruction while their peers take the state assessment that is of equal or greater value to the type of instruction they would receive prior to or after the administration of the state assessment.

(3) If our child is forced to take a test after we have already given our consent to refuse or opt out, we reserve the right to call the local police and press charges against the local education administration.

(4) If we witness parents who are bullied or intimidated, we will advocate on their behalf with their consent, if they feel they are unable to do so.

(2) We reserve the right, as dictated by United States of America Federal Law, Title 34, Subtitle A, Chapter 1, Part 99.32 (b), to request all personal identifiable information sent as data or official records to all parties indicated in the entirety of Title 34, Subtitle A, and to receive the entire list of all those who have disseminated, received, or researched said data, and to receive such record keeping as required by federal law, within the 30 day timeframe.

(a) Parents also reserve the right to have any aggregated data on our child, which could conceivably set up a pattern of identification based on our unique and individual child’s health records, social-emotional behavior, discipline, socio-economic, or any such identifiable trait or history of said traits, be banned from any education research organization, personalized learning computer system, or blending learning computer systems, standardized assessment(s), or any other form of educational environment practice or computer-based digital learning environment, whether it is through algorithms already built into a system or any other form of data collection that does not include the legal definition of personal identifiable information, at our request.

(1) This would also include any State Longitudinal Data System, or any Federal system, up to and including the Federal Learning Registry, a joint system shared by the United States Department of Education and the United States Department of Defense.

(2) Parents have the right to reject any “competency-based education” decisions for our children that we feel are not based on reasonable, valued, well-researched, or statistically-normed guidelines or analysis.

(3) Parents may freely reject any form of data collection, data-mining, or data sharing that would lead to our child having a pre-determined pathway to a career based on any such data unless we give consent for said behavior, before the actual data collection, data-mining, or data sharing by any education agency or institution, and as such, we reject and forbid any trajectory-based decisions for our child unless we have given complicit consent.

(3) For any education decisions regarding our children that we, as parents, feel is not safe, or is inadequate, or is unhealthy for our children, we hereby reserve the right to be able to give public comment to any governing body, without incident or refusal, based on compliance with existing, applicable, and reasonable rules of public meeting conduct, based on our First Amendment Rights.

(4) As parents, we reserve the right to gather, discuss, and give advice to other parents or concerned citizens, in any public meeting or gathering place or social gathering place, whether it is physical or on the internet, without censorship, removal, or banishment, based on existing, applicable, and reasonable rules of conduct set forth by the host of the public meeting place or social gathering place.

(5) Parents have the right to lobby elected officials or local school board officials or state board of education officials, regarding pending, suggested, or passed legislation or regulation, that parents deem harmful to their child or children in general, without cause or incident, based on existing, applicable, and reasonable law.

(a) We expect our elected officials, based on their availability, to make every concerted effort to personally respond to our request(s) and to not send a generic form letter, but rather to constructively engage with parents to the same effort they would with any official registered lobbyist who is paid to do so.

(6) As parents, we reject the ability of corporations to “invest” or “hedge” in education with financial predictors of success, including social impact bonds, or any other type of investments where financial institutions or corporations would gain financial benefit or loss based on student outcomes, as we believe a child’s education should be based on the unique and individual talents and abilities of each child, not as a collective group or whole.

(7) As parents, we believe our child’s teacher(s) are the front line for their education, and therefore, have the most immediate ability and responsibility to guide our children towards academic success, and therefore, should have the most say in their instruction.

(a) Therefore, we believe no state assessment can give a clear picture of a teacher’s ability to instruct a student or group thereof, and therefore, we reject any evaluation methods for teachers based on high-stakes standardized testing.

(b) Therefore, we believe a teacher’s best efforts should remain at the local level, in the classroom, and not to conform to a state assessment or to guide instruction towards proficiency on a state assessment, but rather on the material and instruction present before the students based on the material and instruction they have learned before.

(8) We reject any basis of accountability or framework system meant to falsely label or demean any teacher, administrator, school staff, or school, based on students outcomes as it pertains to state or national standardized assessments.

(9) As parents, we are the primary stakeholders for our child’s education, and therefore demand representation on any group, committee, task force, commission, or any such gathering of stakeholders to determine educational decisions for children, be it at a local, state, or national level.

(a) We demand equal or greater representation on any such group as that allotted to outside corporations.

 

The Irony Of Mark Zuckerberg & Facebook Jail For A Parent Bill Of Rights For Education

As I look back on the last 20 hours or so, I am still in shock over my Facebook banning.  Frankly, with the thousands of articles I’ve written on here and posted all over education groups on Facebook, I’m shocked it didn’t happen sooner.  It makes me wonder, what was it about this post, a “Parent Bill of Rights” for education, written in reaction to the education reform tainted “Testing Bill of Rights”, that caused this banning on Facebook?  Did I fly too close to the sun with my “Parent Bill of Rights in Education”?  I could hypothesize all day long who may have complained to Facebook, but the plain simple fact is this: I’ve ticked off many in nearly two years of blogging.

But what if it was more than someone just complaining?  Others have been banned from posting in groups before.  But have they had the groups they administer decimated?  The Delaware Opt Out district groups (all 20 of them), the Refuse The Test Delaware page, and Delaware Against Common Core?  While I can see the posts I put on those groups, others can’t.  Why are they restricting others from seeing what I’ve written?  This is censorship at it’s absolute worst.  I would love to know the justification for my two week ban.  What criteria do they use?   I saw their community page, but nothing in my article called out anyone, threatened anyone, bullied, or harassed anyone.  There was no sexual content or nudity.  Nothing remotely bad.  Especially compared to what I’ve written before!

I have to think, whatever is going on, I rattled someone.  So bad, they wanted to shut me up fast.  Which tells me they are worried.  Scared.  On edge.  I’ve always suspected opt out was very dangerous to the corporate education reformers.  But when you encourage parents to demand data on their children isn’t sent out at an aggregate level, that’s a whole other level of opt out.

What scared them is how fast it got out there.  Within minutes of my posting the article to different Facebook groups, it was being shared by like-minded readers.  But the action on Facebook’s part had a rebound effect.  A very big thank you to the always awesome Emily Talmage for announcing my Facebook jail status.  Nobody likes to be censored, and nobody likes to see someone being censored (unless you’re a corporate education reformer).  This caused the “Parent Bill of Rights” to become bigger than I ever thought it would.  Which is more ironic, the fact that censorship led to greater views or that Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook banned a post that actually talked about parents being censored?

If you agree with the “Parent Bill of Rights for Education”, please sign the petition on Change.org today.  Many have signed already.  And if you should want to share this post or the change.org petition on Facebook, please do so.  Until April 8th, I can only write and post on my own Facebook status.  What I learned yesterday was how many parents agree and are in solidarity about the rights of parents and children.  That’s a very good thing.