With another snow day on the books, students returned to school Tuesday. The Ramapo Central School Board will also return to its budget and board meeting roadshow, as it holds meetings at different schools throughout the district. The BOE is due to meet Tuesday, February 4, at Montebello Elementary School, starting at 7:30 p.m.

When the Board of Education last met it faced a packed auditorium at Sloatsburg Elementary School that waited for answers related to rumored program and personnel cuts for the 2014-15 budget.

District Superintendent Dr. Douglas Adams addressed the audience early, announcing that, no, there will be no recommended program or personnel cuts for the 2014-15 school year, a marked contrast to last year’s budget process that saw spirited public debate on the topic. In the end, the district voted for a 2013-14  budget that included cuts to summer school, dance, and additional programs, along with personnel reductions.

January’s meeting featured a presentation by Assistant Superintendent of Instruction Lisa Weber on the progress of the implementation of Common Core throughout the the district — currently Common Core Standards are being implemented in the English Language Arts and Math programs. The Common Core Standards Initiative is a private sector standardized curriculum response to President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top educational reform effort. Race to the Top awards federal funding through a points system to states that meet the program’s matrix of criteria.

Ramapo Central parents and residents gathered to meet the Board of Education in January at Sloatsburg Elementary School.

While the BOE continues to workshop next year’s budget, there are curriculum skirmishes taking place throughout the state over NY’s Common Core implementation, with particular focus on the inBloom program. Parents and teachers have criticized the speed of the rollout, the program’s intense focus on standardization and testing that ties directly into teacher performance, mandates that come with the program, the inBloom data sharing portion of the effort, and the general top-down approach to the initiative.

In late January 2013, the New York Teachers Association Board voted to withdraw support for the Common Core Standards, related to a sharp statewide drop in Common Core standardized test scores. “These proficiency scores do not reflect a drop in performance, but rather a raising of standards to reflect college and career readiness in the 21st century,” NY Education Commissioner King said in US News.  “I understand these scores are sobering for parents, teachers, and principals. It’s frustrating to see our children struggle. But we can’t allow ourselves to be paralyzed by the frustration; we must be energized by this opportunity.”

Additionally, according to James Odato, who covers the capitol in Albany for the TimesUnion.com and writes about NY state government, the state Common Core implementation is being pushed through the NY education system by “policy entrepreneurs” or “a team of two dozen well-paid analysts embedded in the State Education Department” who act as fellows for the Regents Research Fund.

“The fellows have been involved in mapping teacher and principal evaluations, redoing student exams and working through the state’s implementation of the Common Core standards — reforms that have moved with a speed that many parents and teachers across the state have protested as hasty and harsh,” wrote Odato in November 2013.

inBloom, likely the most publicly controversial element of the program, has created unease. The program involves uploading student data to a nonprofit company’s Web-based cloud system to store the data. According to Diane Ravitch, “the actual work will be done by Wireless Generation, which is part of Joel Klein’s Amplify, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.”

Advocates of inBloom promote the ease by which schools and parents, and eventually state agencies and even colleges, will be able to access the inBloom dashboard to review and, presto-chango, get student information. The fellows at the Regents Research Fund and inBloom have both been funded by the Gates Foundation.

According to ClassSizeMatters.org, nine states originally signed on to the inBloom program, agreeing “to share confidential and personally identifiable student and teacher data,” with New York the only remaining state still onboard. Other states are rolling out the program in more limited, pilot programs, while others have dropped out completely.

In early January, “due to delays in piecing together its new portal system,” the state Education Department postponed the “release of identifiable student data to inBloom until April at the earliest,” wrote LoHud’s education reporter Gary Stern.

Sen. David Carlucci, D-New City has co-sponsored a bill now winding its way through the legislature that would require parental consent for the release of student data from district schools to the inBloom program.

“Passing meaningful legislation and defining the parameters on how to deal with student data should be done before any uploading occurs,” Carlucci said in Stern’s article.

Critics of the inBloom program have labeled inBloom as a sort of data for dollars private enterprise effort.

When contacted about the inBloom rollout in the Ramapo Central School District, Assistant Superintendent for Human Resources Stephen Walker said, via email, that “the School District is, of course, aware of the concerns that some parents have regarding the security of student data.

As a public school district, Ramapo Central is required to comply with all federal and state law, as well as the rules of the Board of Regents and the Regulations of the Commissioner of Education. As such, we will be guided by the principle of complying with applicable statutes and regulations, while at the same time doing whatever we are legally required to do to protect student data. 

As we have learned over the past months, “opting out” of Race to the Top does not relieve a school district of its legal responsibility to transmit student data to the State Education Department.”

Stern wrote in LoHud that some 28 Lower Hudson Valley school districts have chosen to drop completely out of “the state’s participation in the federal Race to the Top program, forfeiting small federal grants, so they will not have to choose dashboards connected to the new system. They still are expected to submit the same data to the state, though.

Several other states and school systems have backed off plans to submit data to inBloom due to public opposition, leaving New York as the only state fully committed.”

The Ramapo Central School Board of Education meets at Montebello Elementary School on Tuesday, February 4. There will be a Budget Workshop at 6:30 p.m. that is open to the public but not public comments. The regular BOE meeting take place immediately afterwards and is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. 

Note: the article was updated. New York state is currently the only state out of nine that have moved forward with releasing all student data statewide to inBloom, though the rollout was postponed until April.