On Wednesday’s Bill Buckmaster Show

by David Safier

Bill Buckmaster and I had an interesting discussion on the second half of his Wednesday radio show. (You can listen to it here.)

Bill was as concerned as I am about the inBloom project, which was our first topic. The Bill Gates Foundation has plowed $100 million into a data bank which they hope school districts will use to upload all student data, including the most sensitive information schools collect in their files. To add to the problem, over $40 million of that money is going to an education company owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, which is creating the technology that will put the data on Amazon servers. There are serious questions about the News Corp's integrity here in the U.S., but in England, it has acted in a scandalous, illegal manner, hacking into people's emails and phones for years, including interfering in the murder case of a 13 year old girl. These folks are not to be trusted with sensitive data. I also brought up something I haven't posted about yet — another data storage program from News Corp, mClass, which is being used by TUSD.

We also discussed the recent vote to create new grade retention policies at TUSD as well as the current state of the legislature, which has ground to a halt until the Medicaid expansion issue is resolved.

After the show, I thanked Bill for giving me the opportunity to talk about issues near and dear to me as a monthly guest, which I meant sincerely. It's great to be able to move beyond the blog into other media outlets and reach more people.