I remember how it was -- JR
California’s Proposition 24 Fails Students’ Privacy
At a time when reliance on digital school services is at an all time high, Proposition 24, the Personal Information Law and Agency Initiative of 2020, fails to advance digital safeguards to students. The voter initiative, which is complement to the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, has been promoted as a means to protect school children online, but this is a grave exaggeration.
Voicing her support for Prop. 24, Valerie Amezcua, Vice President of the Santa Ana Unified School District, commented on the enforcement agency Proposition 24 creates, saying, “We can protect the privacy of our students and make sure violations are enforced. We have no agency to administer our privacy laws and Prop. 24 would put that in place.”
On the surface, it seems to deliver some promise of that. One of the features of Prop. 24 that garnered attention from educators is the tripling of fines for violations which involve a minor’s sensitive information. But the benefits to students stop there.
The CCPA is notable for its creation of a “right to be forgotten,” meaning a consumer can submit a request to have their personal information deleted. The original CCPA rightfully considers educational assessments and other student data to be a sensitive class of information. Yet, Prop. 24 undermines this by carving out an exemption to these types of records.
Section 15 of Prop. 24’s text amends Section 1798.145 of the California Civil Code to allow for the deletion of data of some classifications of data to be refused. One class of information, outlined in subsection (q) (1), exempts businesses from complying with a “verifiable consumer request to delete a consumer’s personal information... to the extent the verifiable consumer request applies to a student’s grades, educational scores, or educational test results that the business holds on behalf of a local educational agency... to which the student is currently enrolled.”
This is an inappropriate exemption. There are numerous reasons why a student or the student’s parents would want this personal information to remain private. Least among them is the poor record of protecting student information by education agencies and third parties. In a 2019 review on “The State of K-12 Cybersecurity”, the group EdTech Strategies LLC found that “[Fifty-one percent] of student and educator data breach incidents during 2019 were due to the actions (or inaction) of school vendors or (in some few cases) partners, including regional service agencies, non-profits, associations, and state departments of education.”
This means that a majority of times where there was a data breach or improper disclosure involving student records, a party working with schools to hold this data was responsible.
These data breaches are no small matter. In 2019 a FBI investigation uncovered that a cyberattack of Pearson PLC, a British education software maker, affected upwards of 13,000 American students. Last year it was reported that in 2016 the ACT inappropriately released information pertaining to 8,000 students in Montana.
At a Defcon Hacker Conference a high school student found flaws in the Blackboard and Follett platforms used by his school, which exposed sensitive information of at least five million students. This included “records for students and teachers, including student grades, immunization records, cafeteria balance, schedules, cryptographically hashed passwords, and photos.” In the Bay Area, the chief financial officer of a school lunch company was charged with identity and unauthorized computer access, when he was accused of hacking into a competitor’s website so he could obtain student data, including on food allergies and grades. California should not limit efforts of students or parents to mitigate the possible release of potentially damaging information.
Proponents suggest that a new enforcement agency, like Prop. 24 would create, is needed to ensure compliance. Yet, herein lies another monumental flaw with the initiative: it does not allow for a private right of action.
Having the right to address those who mishandle data is a necessary component of helping guarantee there is remedy against bad actors. Such an amendment to the CCPA should have been an obvious inclusion. A similar online consumer privacy bill introduced at the federal level in the Senate by Maria Cantwell (D-WA) contains a private right of action and is worthy of consideration for future public policy.
As such, Prop. 24 does not adequately extend privacy protections to students. The initiative does not give Californians privacy, it gives Californians extra bureaucracy. It is worse than window dressing.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=13310&omhide=true
Discipline Suffers as San Diego Schools Adopt ‘Anti-Racism’ Grading SystemThe San Diego Unified School District has approved a change to its grading system that coincides with broader ideas of restorative justice and “anti-racism.”
It will do this by no longer letting late assignments and bad behavior in the classroom affect grades. Students also won’t be penalized for not showing up to class at all.
Only “mastery” of a subject, whatever that means, will count for grading purposes. Students will also receive a separate grade for “citizenship.”
This change was made, according to The San Diego Union-Tribune, because of data showing that there are disparities between the number of white and minority students who receive “D” and “F” grades. The San Diego Union-Tribune reported:
District data have shown that Black, Hispanic, Native American and Pacific Islander high school students are significantly more likely to be given D and F grades. Black students received D or F grades 20 percent of the time and Hispanic students received them 23 percent of the time, while White students received them 7 percent of the time and Asian students received them 6 percent of the time, according to data from the first semester of the last school year. The district-wide average for D and F grades was 16 percent.
The San Diego Unified School District’s policy change is consistent with the Obama administration’s push to crack down on racial disparities in school discipline through legal threat.
The Trump administration and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos rescinded that policy, but school districts can still choose to follow the policies if they wish to.
The San Diego Unified School District concluded that the disparity in its schools must be a product of racism, or at least insufficient “anti-racism.”
“This is part of our honest reckoning as a school district,” San Diego Unified School District Vice President Richard Barrera said to a local San Diego NBC affiliate. “If we’re actually going to be an anti-racist school district, we have to confront practices like this that have gone on for years and years.”
It must be noted that the ideology of anti-racism, popularized by intellectuals like Ibram X. Kendi, is based strongly on critical race theories and other ideas once consigned to the radical fringe of college campuses.
And anti-racism, ironically enough, often looks like plain old racism, as its adherents—like Kendi—openly promote racial discrimination as a means to creating more equity.
Broad trends in behavior leading to unequal outcomes, according to the anti-racists, must inherently be a product of racism. No other explanation is acceptable.
Behavioral problems are not seen as the impediment to success. Instead, it’s the punishments for behavioral problems that are the problem.
While there may be some justification for treating late assignments and misbehavior in classrooms differently than subject grades, one wonders how better outcomes for minority students are ultimately being promoted by this change?
As Virginia Walden Ford, a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation, explained on a Heritage panel in 2018, breakdowns in classroom discipline create a terrible classroom environment for children who want to learn.
Walden Ford, who was one of the black students chosen to help integrate Arkansas schools in the 1960s and is the subject of the movie “Miss Virginia,” explained how a school program she ran in Arkansas was made worse by the changes to disciple policies.
Students who wanted to learn were made to feel unsafe “because the kids that were creating a lot of the discipline problems” got “a slap on the hand” instead of real punishments.
The result is that misbehaving students kept misbehaving, and other students had a tougher time because classrooms were out of control.
This seems to be a bad way to go about helping students who are struggling in the classroom.
Teaching children that there are no consequences or minimal consequences for not showing up on time or misbehavior will probably have more negative consequences for a person later in life than a bad test score.
Police Education Is Not Police Training: Virtue Signaling Is Not the Road to Improvement
In the wake of George Floyd’s death, a number of colleges have cut back their interactions with local police departments and are redesigning their law enforcement programs.
The University of Minnesota (UM) was one of the first to accede to faculty and student demands to cut ties with local police. The university scaled back its contract with the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) to provide officers at events and limited its reliance on MPD’s specialized services. The university’s Department of Public Safety was ordered to limit university police officers’ interactions with the city department.
UM is one of more than 90 percent of public colleges that employ their own police departments. Thus, it is unclear what such actions accomplish beyond complicating investigations of off-campus crimes against students or faculty and adding to the paychecks of campus officers who will be assigned to events without assistance from local police.
Focusing on education, colleges, particularly community colleges, are reacting to demands they change their law enforcement degree and certificate programs to include courses that focus on police history, race, social justice, and diversity. The goal is to change police culture by changing police training, but it’s predicated on the colleges’ misunderstanding of their role in police training.
Law enforcement/criminal justice degrees are among the most awarded in the country. This includes about 35,000 associate, 63,000 bachelor’s, and 7,500 master’s degrees conferred annually. Their popularity is based on a misconception.
Colleges rely on hyped-up marketing to convince students that the degrees are gateways to jobs as police or corrections officers, firefighters, emergency managers, or other public service positions. Sending the message that a cop badge starts at community college is not uncommon. Neither is posting typical hourly wages for law enforcement personnel.
But a law enforcement degree or certificate is not a direct line to a police job. To become a police officer, a candidate must meet a department’s requirements, including age and education (fewer than 1 percent require a four-year degree); physical, psychological, and drug testing. Only after those criteria are met is a candidate eligible to attend a police academy.
Why, then, are college administrators promising to reform something they don’t control? Are they showing their “wokeness” by responding to demands to defund—or at least reform—the police? Are they virtue signaling their concerns about police tactics?
Speaking in June, Elroy Ortiz Oakley, chancellor of California’s community colleges, promised a “review of police instruction” to create a curriculum that better reflects “the lived experience of people of color.” Emotions were high; Edward Bush, president of Cosumnes River College, said he had “yet to fully process how I internalize the repetitive trauma of seeing black bodies dead in the street.” Frank Chong, president of Santa Rosa Community College, added that “no one is free until we are all free.”
Oakley wants every community college to become more inclusive and to develop “an anti-racist curriculum.” He quoted from a report about black students’ and their families’ concerns that they were unaware of financial aid programs, felt isolated because there are few black students or professors, and received misleading academic information they felt was motivated by racial biases.
While those may be legitimate issues, none involve course content, and none are based on recent actions by police officers.
As Oakley said, while working to be more inclusive and mindful of racial differences in student access and outcomes, the death of George Floyd prompted many of us to ask, what can we do? His answer: improving instruction for what future and current police officers learn “is certainly one place where we can do something.”
Despite all this soul-searching, most of the searchers, including Oakley, can do very little. Any of the textbooks that faculty members assign would tell them that their programs do not replace state-mandated, skills-based academies.
In Virginia, community college chancellor Glenn DuBois promised a six-year plan to increase “equity” at the colleges, to increase diversity in hiring, and to invite community members and law enforcement officials into a review of law enforcement training. He said that in 2019 more than 2,000 students were enrolled in law enforcement programs, but that he could not estimate what percentage of Virginia’s law enforcement personnel the programs “train.”
DuBois at least is aware of his limits to drive change. In a June 28 Hechinger Report article critical of the para-military model of police training, he admitted that little is known at the state level about what is taught in police training, and that although he didn’t have the authority to shut down a program, he could “ask some pretty uncomfortable questions.”
Yes, he can ask, but who is responsible for answering and acting on the answers?
In his state, it is the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services that manages training for police officers and deputy sheriffs. It sets hours, modules, and performance-based tests that recruits (they are not called students) must pass, including a 1.5-mile run to test aerobic capacity, maximum sit-ups and push-ups to test muscular endurance, and an estimate of body fat percentage to measure body composition.
The community colleges in Virginia don’t determine police training. This is just more virtue signaling. If the goal was to accomplish change, why does it require a six-year plan? Are the community colleges currently so inequitable that it will take six years to achieve today’s holy trinity of diversity, equity, and inclusion? And if the task force’s goal is to improve American policing, why are the colleges reviewing their own hiring practices?
Administrators of the Minnesota state university system also mistakenly think their law enforcement, criminal justice, and corrections programs “train 80 percent of police officers in the state.” They want to change the programs to include law enforcement history, stress management, and cultural competencies, and to provide internships in diverse communities, according to Henry Morris, vice president of diversity and inclusion at the Mankato campus.
Morris suggested that rather than a normal program review, his task force on change might go beyond academic experts to include community members and police officers. One program director, Champlain College’s Tony Perriello, has already determined the direction of the change, noting that content about race should be “embedded into every course.”
But why assume that college students in Minnesota (or elsewhere) harbor racist attitudes? And why only race? Should content on sex/gender, sexual orientation, or homelessness be embedded in every course? Moreover, obsessing about race requires that some existing assignments and discussions in these basic courses be modified or dropped. That won’t improve student learning.
The same is true in North Carolina. Its Board of Community Colleges recently approved $100,000 to train police officers in de-escalation, relationship-based policing, and community interaction to ensure that officers “have the tools and training necessary to engage effectively within their communities.”
But, according to the attorney general’s Law Enforcement Training and Standards website, the North Carolina Sheriffs’ Education and Training Standards Commission and the Criminal Justice Education & Training Standards Commission regulate the training and certification of sheriffs’ deputies, law enforcement, corrections, and juvenile justice officers, not the community colleges.
Some of this confusion may stem from college campuses physically hosting almost half of the almost 700 certified police academies that operated between 2011-2013 (the most recent years available). But physically hosting a training academy is not the same as running it.
Colleges are attractive for police training; they have classrooms, facilities for indoor and outdoor physical training, and are available all year. Between 2011-2013, of the nearly 135,000 (45,000 per year) police recruits, about 1 in 7 were women and nearly 1 in 3 were racial or ethnic minorities.
I was once one of those 1 in 7. My police academy training was held at a Westchester County (NY) college. We had no contact with college administrators, faculty, or students. Our instructors were police personnel who followed a curriculum approved by New York state’s Municipal Police Training Council (MPTC).
And yes, as the Hechinger Report states, we followed the para-military model. We wore uniforms, answered “yes, sir,” or “no, sir;” boxed, and did a lot of running and sit-ups and push-ups!
Regardless of where the training occurs, a police academy must comply with its state’s police standards and training requirements.
In response to demands by students, faculty, and outside groups, college administrators have been drawn into promising to make police training more “diverse and inclusive.” But with little or no responsibility for police academy instruction, their efforts are likely to produce minimal change, if that. Rather than obsessing over police training, colleges should look beyond race to refresh and enrich the instruction they are providing to the students enrolled in their law enforcement courses.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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