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Not only is the Common Core State Standards initiative about “dumbing down” children under the guise of bringing them up, it is also about power, control and especially money!
While many Americans worry about government drones spying on their private lives and the NSA wiretapping phones, Washington is already in schools gathering intimate data on children and families.
The minutes of the 1954 hearing before the Special Committee to investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations, US House of Representatives Eighty-Third Congress reads:
Because of the limitations of time and finances, we have decided at this stage to confine ourselves to only some sections of the general subject of foundations.
The term encompasses many types of institutions, such as universities, hospitals, churches, and so forth, except where peculiar circumstances dictate we shall limit our study to foundations as the term connotes ordinarily in the public mind. A definition is difficult, but to name examples of such institutions, such as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Carnegie Foundation will illustrate what we shall ordinarily mean when we use the term “foundations” in these proceedings.
There have been indications however, that foundations have not at all times acted in the best interests of the people.
A growing number of parents are disturbed about the “data mining” under Common Core pushed by foundations, not just because of the cost, but the privacy implications. Let me explain why your children’s and your information is no longer private through FERPA although you may have been told otherwise.
Do not let anyone from the Bush Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation or any Florida legislator tell you that student and parent information is still protected. The Florida statutes have been changed in 2012 to match the changes in FERPA.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan and those at the US Department of Education knew Congress would never vote to codify the changes they sought in the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), so they’re using regulations in order to bypass Congress. They want to allow private and invasive information to be gathered on students and families in order to supply the future workforce. The intent is to make that information available without parental consent, which was previously required.
Government needs this information on our 1st, 2nd and 3rd graders in order to create a psychological profile on each child to be stored at the Federal Department of Labor.
How will your first grader will respond to questions like: Does your Mommy or Daddy own a gun? Do they fight? Do they drink? Do they go to church?
Say goodbye to your and your child’s privacy. Say hello to an unprecedented nationwide student-tracking system, whose data will apparently be sold by government officials to the highest bidders. It’s yet another encroachment of centralized education bureaucrats on local control and parental rights under the banner of Common Core.
The American Principles Project, a conservative education think tank, reported, Common Core’s technological project is “merely one part of a much broader plan by the federal government to track individuals from birth through their participation in the workforce.” The 2009 RTTT included a “State Fiscal Stabilization Fund” to bribe states into constructing “longitudinal data systems (LDS) to collect data on public-school students.”
These systems will aggregate massive amounts of personal data — health-care histories, income information, religious affiliations, voting status, and even blood types and homework-completion rates. The data will be available to a wide variety of public agencies. Despite federal student-privacy protections previously guaranteed by FERPA, the Obama administration has managed, through regulations, to pave the way for private entities to buy their way into the data. More alarming, the U.S. Department of Education is encouraging a radical push from aggregate-level data-gathering to invasive individual-student-level data collection.
The last South by Southwest education conference in Austin, Texas, had education-technology gurus salivating at the prospects of information plunder. “This is going to be a huge win for us,” Jeffrey Olen, a product manager at education software company CompassLearning, told Reuters.
The company is already aggressively marketing curricular material “aligned” to fuzzy, dumbed-down Common Core math and reading guidelines (which more and more states are now revolting against). Along with two dozen other tech firms, Compass Learning sees even greater financial opportunities to mine Common Core student-tracking systems. The centralized database is a strange-bedfellows alliance between the progressive Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (which largely underwrote and promoted the Common Core standards scheme) and a division of conservative Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. (which built the database infrastructure).
Another nonprofit startup, inBloom, Inc., has evolved out of that partnership to operate the database. The Gates Foundation and other partners provided $100 million in seed money. Reuters reports that inBloom, Inc. will “likely start to charge fees in 2015” to states and school districts participating in the system.
According to inBloom’s web site – “Inspired by the vision of the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), inBloom was created in response to a request from school districts to create a secure data storage resource that better enables their collection, retention, and use of student information.
Currently, New York, Massachusetts, Colorado, North Carolina, and Illinois are working with inBloom to understand how our technology resources work and how they may help them meet the needs of teachers, students, and families. Each of these states is working through selected pilot districts to evaluate inBloom’s offerings, and each is at a different stage in discussions and implementation timelines.
When learning about these companies I always urge you to do your own research and always go to the board of directors, leaders or whatever title they are using – it is always very telling.
The National Education Data Model (NEDM), available online, lists hundreds of data points considered indispensable to the nationalized student tracking racket. These include:
- “Bus Stop Arrival Time” and “Bus Stop Description”
- “Dwelling arrangement”
- “Diseases, Illnesses and Other Health Conditions”
- “Religious Affiliation”
- “Telephone Number Type” and “Telephone Status”
Homeschoolers and religious families that reject traditional government education will be tracked. Original NEDM data points included hair color, eye color, weight, blood types, and even dental status.
How exactly does amassing and selling personal data improve educational outcomes? It doesn’t.
This, at its core, is the central fraud of Washington’s top-down nationalized standards scheme. The Bill Gates/Jeb Bush-endorsed Common Core “standards” are a phony pretext for big-government expansion. The dazzling allure of “21st-century technology” masks the privacy-undermining agenda of nosy bureaucratic drones allergic to transparency, accountability, and parental autonomy. Individual student privacy is sacrificed at the collective “For the Children” altar.
In 1989 at the Governor’s Conference in Kansas, Senator Lamar Alexander (you know him – he is the one who had his hands on HR 5 wording it so you thought it was great and has always been for nationalized education) stated, The brand new American school would be year-round, open from 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. for children 3 months to 18 years”.
And the parents get to visit with their children when? They aren’t supposed to because the goal is to have our children under the control of the government. You don’t believe me?
In 1934 NEA former Executive Secretary Willard Givens stated, “The major function of the school is the social orientation of the individual. It must seek to give him the understanding of the transition to the new social order.”
Teachers, the NEW has never been your friend if you are a true teacher and have a love of children.
Remember the words of former General Counsel Bob Chanin of the National Education Association’s 2007 convention:
“In my opinion, NEA and its affiliates are such effective advocates. Despite what some among us might like to believe, it is NOT because of our creative ideas; it is NOT because of the merit of our positions; it is NOT because we care about children; and it is NOT because of a vision of a great public school for every child. The NEA and its affiliates are effective advocates because we have POWER and we have POWER because there are more than 3.2 million people who are willing to pay us hundreds of millions of dollars in dues each year because they believe that we are the unions that can most effectively represent them. The unions that can best protect the rights and advance their interests as education employees.”
The Chairman of the House Education Committee Representative John Kline in letter dated February 2010 to Arne Duncan stated his concerns and dismay that grant awards were to be based “in part on the willingness of the states to expand their statewide longitudinal data systems that would include a broad swath of student information”. Kline quotes Duncan as stating data collection was part of the “cradle to career agenda”.
This is not only the mindset of the Unions, but of progressives and the Federal government as well. Federal education, under Common Core, is less about excellence or academic achievement. It’s more about control, control and more control.
A question for Senator Kline: Why did you not make every effort to stop Common Core State Standards, when you knew in 2010, it was without being implemented without legislative process?
HR 5 the Student Success Act could have undone everything previously put in place by CCSS. We will watch what happens to HR 5.
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