Testimony of UFT Vice President for Education Catalina Fortino before the New York State Assembly Committee on Education
Good morning, Chairwoman Nolan and members of the committee. My name is Catalina Fortino, and I am the vice president for education at the United Federation of Teachers and the director of the UFT Teacher Center. On behalf of our 200,000 members, I appreciate this opportunity to address you about the New York State Education Department’s plans to transfer all of the student information collected by the New York City Department of Education and school systems across the state to InBloom, Inc. and express the serious concerns we share with parents and advocates about jeopardizing private student information.
We fear our students’ privacy will be breached by the data-integration and cloud-storage plans spearheaded by the New York State Education Department and implemented by its contractor InBloom. In the interest of protecting our students, we ask that you bring pressure to bear to halt these plans. Our union opposes releasing sensitive student data unless parents themselves want that information released.
The Value of Information for Educators, Parents and Students
The UFT is not opposed to gathering data on public school students; in fact, it’s a valuable tool. Our members routinely use student data to help assess progress and deficiencies, to guide instruction and to develop targeted strategies to improve individual student-level learning and fine-tune teaching practices. What’s more, the aggregation of student data on a broad scale, where individual student identities are concealed, can inform policy and support evidence-based education programs. Its collection can benefit our students, their educators and their parents by providing concrete evidence of which education and enrichment programs are most effective, as well as where to apply or reallocate resources to better address students’ needs.
Privacy Concerns are Real and Legitimate
But the proposed initiative we are talking about today is something completely different. Instead of giving a student’s teacher some information to help shape instruction for that particular student, this proposal is about releasing sensitive, student-identifying data points in 400 categories to InBloom and, ultimately, to share some or all of that information with private companies developing education software. The list of those data categories is staggering; it includes disciplinary and incarceration records, learning disabilities, religious affiliation, health and attendance records and whether a student walks to and from school. How, in this day and age, when a few erroneous clicks of a mouse can inadvertently release thousands of pages of confidential documents to the public, to say nothing about someone with a more nefarious motivation, can we possibly countenance that? Student-identifying data, regardless of the safeguards in place, will always be less safe when more organizations have greater access to it. Public institutions need to be guardians for our children; in fact, it’s one of their most important roles. This risky proposition does the opposite.
Parent groups and community advocates including Class Size Matters, the Alliance for Quality Education, the New York Disability Alliance and the Coalition for Educational Justice have brought to light questionable details about the broad and deep level of student data involved. In so doing, they have once again demonstrated how critical parent and community voice is to the process. We commend these advocates for prompting greater scrutiny of the mass storage of sensitive student information and for shining a spotlight on how private interests could exploit this data for profit.
Third-Parties Contractors — The Ultimate Beneficiaries of Current Education Reforms
The UFT is on record with this committee and with the New York City Council with respect to our concerns with the increasing role of private interests in public education and the money being made on public school students by hedge funds and corporate entities. Our concerns with big money in our school system are three-fold: 1) for-profit companies are reaping financial windfalls in the name of education reform and elevating standards; 2) high-net-worth foundations and corporate entities are acting as self-appointed crusaders without respect for parent, educator or community voice and are often patently anti-teacher union; and 3) this kind of data collection “feeds the beast” of high-stakes testing since for these private interests, the be-all and end-all of data is its relationship to tests, tests, and more tests.
The InBloom-managed cloud repository is another example of the encroachment of private interests in public education. We fear third-party vendors will have the opportunity capitalize off student data by directly marketing products and services.
According to Gannett’s Journal News, more than 20 districts in the Lower Hudson Valley alone have rejected Race to the Top funding in a last-ditch effort to protect student privacy. Yet New York State is not allowing its school districts to opt out of the InBloom data collection. It should give us pause that seven out of nine states, including Massachusetts and North Carolina, that initially considered partnerships with InBloom have pulled out or put their data-sharing plans on hold, following an outcry from parents and privacy experts. In fact, New York State and Illinois are the only remaining active participants, and Illinois allows individual school districts to opt out.
We ask that you tell New York State Education Commissioner John King and the New York State Board of Regents not to implement the InBloom contract. Listen to the parents and community advocates. Listen to the school superintendents. Look at the districts that have chosen to forgo Race to the Top funds in order to take a principled stand for student privacy.
We owe it to our students and their families in New York State to bring all the stakeholders into the process and figure out a better way to share data that helps boost student achievement without placing our children in harm’s way.