Student privacy advocate and activist Leonie Haimson writes (emphasis added by me):
There’s a good article in today’s Buffalo News, about at least two more NY school districts upstate, Williamsville and West Seneca, that have decided to turndown Race to the Top funds to try to protect their students’ privacy, joining the growing list of suburban districts that have already announced this.
Here are just some of the districts that have announced their withdrawal so far: Spackenkill (See here); Hyde Park ( here); Pleasantville ( here); Comsewogue (here); Rye Neck, Pelham, Pocantico Hills, Hastings-on-Hudson, and Mount Pleasant(here) Districts considering doing the same include Dobbs Ferry, and South Orangetown (here). (Thanks to No DATA NY blog).
According to an article in Capital NY, 90% of the state’s 700 districts were originally participating in the RTTT program, and of these, one fourth of them, or about 160, failed to sign up for dashboards by the official deadline of October 30.
This is despite the fact that Ken Wagner of NYSED has made it clear, including again in the Buffalo News, that this does NOT mean the state will spare their personal student data from being shared with inBloom and via inBloom with the dashboard companies.
Read more on NYC Public School Parents.