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Education Programming Technology

Code.org and Scratch Access Yanked By Chicago Schools Due To Student Privacy Law 76

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
theodp writes: Chicago Public School (CPS) teachers were 'blindsided' after access to popular classroom software was yanked due to CPS's interpretation of Illinois' Student Online Personal Protection Act (SOPPA), the Chicago Sun-Times reports. Sneha Dey writes, "Among the software products that violate the law, CPS now says, are programs like Code.org, which is widely used in computer science classes, and Adobe applications used for artistic design and newspaper page layouts. That left has many high school newspapers unable to produce their print editions. Also off limits is Scratch, software to create interactive stores, animations and games. CPS had partnered with the Scratch Foundation to hold family coding nights, among other events."

The Blueprint's Karen Buecking has more on how the new student data protection law has upended the computer science curriculum at CPS, noting that CPS teachers received an email from tech-backed Code.org explaining the situation: "We've already signed student data protection agreements with over 150 districts across the state to comply with the new law," said the Code.org representative. "The bad news is CPS's agreement and application process contains onerous requirements unrelated to student privacy that make it prohibitive for organizations like Code.org to agree to CPS's requirements as written."
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Code.org and Scratch Access Yanked By Chicago Schools Due To Student Privacy Law More

Code.org and Scratch Access Yanked By Chicago Schools Due To Student Privacy Law

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  • will Adobe applications have an offline for schools mode / non online account needed installs to fix this?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      Right now adobe software is local. Students must sign in using whatever method the school has used to purchase a license. As most schools purchase licenses for specific classes and students, there is no way to avoid this. Just have a generic machine for student use. A long time ago, you just had school licenses, but the companies were not making enough, I guess

      I donâ(TM)t see how this violates privacy, as the school can just provide a list of logins that are anonymous. The laws I have seen exclude

  • in other news, a union voted on something blindly without reading it, carry on.
    This time it was teachers, it'll be another one next week.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jbengt ( 874751 )
      What are you on about? The state legislature voted on something for privacy. The school board is either implementing it too strictly or incompetently or both. The union had no say.
      • When I had family involved with the union, they would routinely vote on implementation, which was passed to the school boards before approvals.
        They absolutely had a say, especially the teacher from the article who had hours of curriculum become useless overnight, should have spoken up.

        from the first article linked
        “I may very well be in jeopardy of not being able to use it and my entire curriculum is based on this,” Solin said. “I’ve spent hundreds of hours developing my curric

  • "teachers to receive 25% less money if fewer than 40% of their CS students are girls"

    The disgusting sexist sows.

    https://developers.slashdot.or... [slashdot.org]

  • Where is the dispute? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by kunwon1 ( 795332 ) <dave.j.moore@gmail.com> on Tuesday November 02, 2021 @03:16PM (#61951931) Homepage
    One of the linked articles says

    The bad news is CPS’s agreement and application process contains onerous requirements unrelated to student privacy that make it prohibitive for organizations like Code.org to agree to CPS’s requirements as written

    Seems like it would be easy to determine who's being weasely here, what are the specific requirements they're referring to?

    • Re:Where is the dispute? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by aardvarkjoe ( 156801 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2021 @03:44PM (#61952027)

      My thoughts exactly.

      Sure, public school bureaucrats are responsible for all sorts of bad policies. However, if you click through to the "donors" page, the top four donating organizations are Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, and Infosys Foundation. Besides the last (I don't know what they are), that's pretty much a who's who of organizations that want to exploit people's personal information for profit. We can't seriously take what they say at face value without doing further digging.

    • No idea what the beef is. You can click thru and read CPS interpretive docx(!) a google doc... About five pages of pseudo legalese. Not that hard but not fun either. This sticks out: The operator shall not engage in any advertising, including targeted advertising toward students. MB

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by donpezet ( 93069 )

      Sadly, this is not a new thing. I saw something similar last year. My company received a privacy agreement from a school board. The majority of the document was completely reasonable and did a great job ensuring student data was protected up until the last clause in the agreement. It required that we, as a private company, could not boycott Israel. I had to do a double take. Here was a student records privacy agreement and they had bolted on a completely unrelated policy statement to it. It was amazing.

  • Alternative (Score:3)

    by sjames ( 1099 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2021 @03:19PM (#61951939) Homepage Journal

    Just about any Linux distro comes with a full suite of free developer tools that once learned will remain useful to students once they graduate and move into industry. Those tools don't require an online account or phone home every chance they get.

    As a bonus, you also get a wide variety of free industry standard server apps including Apache, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, etc and a free complete office suite. None of which require online accounts or phone home.

    • But, they do require an issued computer or spare computer to install. They might get Chrome booksâ¦not much more.

    • How are those students going to move into industry if no one will hire them due to lack of skills in using adobe products?

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by sjames ( 1099 )

        I have been in the industry for nearly 40 years and have never needed Adobe products.

        I am not an outlier there. If anything, Adobe will be less relevant now that flash imploded.

        Meanwhile, if schools go that direction, Adobe will have to get friendlier if they want to be at all relevant to anything by the time the kids graduate.

    • Just about any Linux distro comes with a full suite of free developer tools that once learned will remain useful to students once they graduate and move into industry. Those tools don't require an online account or phone home every chance they get.

      This is about the curriculum which, if you're talking about code.org, can indeed already be done on a Linux distro - in fact they support Windows, Mac, Linux and Chromebook. You're suggesting to give students a Linux system and then ... what?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sjames ( 1099 )

        Teach. That is still something teachers do, isn't it?

        I can understand that they're in a bit of a bind ATM since they *HAD* a plan and it didn't work out. Of course, they probably shouldn't have gone with that plan in the first place. At the end of the day, if they develop a curriculum based on free widely available professional grade tools, they won't go wrong.

        • Teach. That is still something teachers do, isn't it?

          Yes they teach a curriculum, they don't just individually decide what they want to teach.

          At the end of the day, if they develop a curriculum based on free widely available professional grade tools, they won't go wrong.

          That already exists with code.org and - aside from CPS - it seems most institutions don't seem to have any issues with it.

          I'm still not sure what your point about Linux is, it's well supported by code.org and lots of educational institutions already use it. I don't know about CPS, do they not use it? Even if they don't, switching to it doesn't solve their problem.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by sjames ( 1099 )

            seems most institutions don't seem to have any issues with it.

            Perhaps they should. Do we really want a whole generation that is used to getting an anal probe by every random company that wanders by?

            • What do you mean? Exactly what data is being provided?

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by sjames ( 1099 )

                CPS has published a helpful policy document that outlines requirements (and so the sort of thing that don't meet requirements) here [cps.edu].

                • Yeah sure but what does code.org do that runs afoul of that?

                  • Re: (Score:2)

                    by sjames ( 1099 )

                    You'll have to ask Code.org, they're the ones who said they cannot meet the requirements.

                    • Well no, what they actually said is:

                      "We've already signed student data protection agreements with over 150 districts across the state to comply with the new law," said the Code.org representative. "The bad news is CPS's agreement and application process contains onerous requirements unrelated to student privacy that make it prohibitive for organizations like Code.org to agree to CPS's requirements as written."

                      So actually it seems they already comply with the law, it's some additional requirement in the

                    • Re: (Score:2)

                      by sjames ( 1099 )

                      They *SAY* it is unrelated to student privacy, but I don't see anything in that policy paper that meets that description.

                      It's fair to say we don't have the whole story.

      • Seems like a pretty good curriculum. It may not have gray-beard approval, but then most gray-beards aren't that good at teaching even if they make wonderful engineers. It's a different skill set than telling a machine what to do.

  • Let me guess... (Score:3)

    by karlandtanya ( 601084 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2021 @03:28PM (#61951969)

    FTA:
    "the district’s stringent interpretation of the law has resulted in a contracting process that is “onerous” for vendors."

    Somebody help me out here; maybe I am dumb and I missed it?

    What's the specific part of the process that's so onerous they can't comply with it?
    Are there too many forms to fill out?
    Do they need to get pen-to-paper signatures from every parent and guardian in the district?
    Do they have not not spy on the kids?

    If the "onerous contracting process" is silly, let's hear it, then we can all mock the CPS until they back down.
    If CPS just happens to be the only ones that are actually putting teeth into online privacy requirements, maybe it's code.org & scratch that need to change their behaviour.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by matthelm007 ( 1392603 )
      Being it's Chicago, they didn't pay the bribes to the correct person!

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by jbengt ( 874751 )
        Being it's Chicago, a lot more rules and regulations are in place to make it harder to bribe people than in most other jurisdictions. Not saying it doesn't happen, just that past briberies have led to more scrutiny and more red tape.

    • If CPS just happens to be the only ones that are actually putting teeth into online privacy requirements

      I'm reminded a lot of the GDPR debate from a few years ago. What an utterly hilarious panic which amounted to very little. Being the only ones "actually putting teeth" into a law, doesn't make something a sane approach.
      https://knowyourmeme.com/photo... [knowyourmeme.com]

  • They are locking everything down everywhere. The ends do not justify the means here.

  • I have seen far too many idiotic managers in public service organisations sign up for online services both for themselves or for the constituents. I have also worked on the other side where corporate management and sales salivate over the thought of the insights that they'll gain analyzing the clients data. The is the very data that the clients often think that their contract protects.
    Even if they're not mining the information directly they analyze your information for service purposes use this indirectly a

  • I was a high school computer science teacher (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RitchCraft ( 6454710 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2021 @04:38PM (#61952191)
    ... for 18 years. Scratch and Code.org are not needed. Install Python locally for goodness sake and be done with it. The real problem here though is not that these low-grade tools are no longer available, it's that qualified computer science teachers are needed. Packages like Scratch make it easy to offer "programming" for the teacher that really hasn't done actual programming. It's difficult to create your own programming curriculum, let alone the programs you wish to create with the students in class. I geared my curriculum towards games, and tic-tac-toe or match-the-tiles just wouldn't have cut it.
    • In a way, your curriculum wouldn't have cut it. I'm not saying your curriculum is bad, but a lot of what you're teaching is the idea and logic in and behind computers and programming and problem solving. But a lot of programming jobs care less about understanding and more about how to use certain tools and put them together. i.e. How to build a CICD pipeline with a AWS runner, making an UI with react or bootstrap. Basically, your curriculum would have made better people and programmers. Things like code.org
    • I wouldn't say they are low grade tools, they are very competent and accessible resources. Expecting schools to have a qualified CS teacher though seems unrealistic, hence why Python alone would make a challenging educational choice. The point of public education should be to make it accessible and efficient - in the UK there is a lot of work based on the Raspberry Pi for different projects - whether there is actual code teaching or just copying from the page to the screen I'm not sure
      • A strategy focusing on hardware or software, without teacher professional development, is doomed. Here is a crazy notion: In Switzerland teacher education (pre-service) starting at the elementary school level, includes mandatory, multi semester computer science courses. If the teachers fail these courses then they will not become teachers.
    • The same logic applies to Python. You need to have didactical materials such as Scalable Game Design and train teachers to enable them to teach programming and computational thinking through game design. Using a different, even harder to use tool, certainly will not solve this problem.

  • ... did everyone bring their flash drives? Ok, great! Today we are going to learn how to defeat censorship by using Tails!

  • Editors, edit! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    There's far too much reliance on spell checkers. It should be obvious that although these sentences pass spellcheck they need to be edited:

    That left has many high school newspapers unable to produce their print editions.

    Also off limits is Scratch, software to create interactive stores, animations and games.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by jonadab ( 583620 )
      What, specifically, is wrong with the second sentence?

      (Apart from the fact that Scratch is software to teach basic computer programming concepts, and while this is often done by having the students create animations or simple games, it has absolutely nothing to do with interactive stores; Scratch doesn't even have internet connectivity of any kind, unless that's a new feature added quite recently. It has variables and loops and conditionals and sprites...)

  • That's sad. I loved Scratch. I used it to teach my kid, we built a pretty good game with it.

    • Same here. Great introduction to programming, had a lot of fun together with my kid.

      Be careful though - it's a gateway drug and before you know it they'll try heavier stuff. My kid secretly started writing Minecraft server plugins in Java.

  • Adobe being on this list does not surprise me. They tried to argue FERPA didnâ(TM)t to college students using the software because once they left University they werenâ(TM)t students. So all their identity and data was free game at that point. Itâ(TM)s really a shame there is no solid competition against them. Theyâ(TM)re the absolute worst and yet there is zero pressure for them to get better (or anyone to come along and steal their market share).

  • Who the hell's idea was it to saddle the kids with shitty Adobe software in the first place? It's expensive. It's a resource hog. And it hasn't been any good in over a decade. People who waste their money on that software are not professionals - they're amateurs who don't know better.

    • Lightroom is pretty good, I'd struggle to think of anything better

      • Capture One Pro is excellent for editing raw files and was the industry standard until they got lazy and let Lightroom's nose into their tent. In the last few years they've been pumping out updates to their software in an attempt to recapture the market.

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