Posted on 03/08/2013 7:29:24 AM PST by DoctorBulldog
While many Americans worry about government drones in the sky spying on our private lives, Washington meddlers are already on the ground and in our schools gathering intimate data on children and families.
Say goodbye to your children'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."
As the American Principles Project, a conservative education think tank, reported last year, 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 porkulus package 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. The data will be available to a wide variety of public agencies. And despite federal student-privacy protections guaranteed by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the Obama administration is paving the way for private entities to buy their way into the data boondoggle. Even 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.
At the South by Southwest education conference in Austin, Texas, this week, education technology gurus were 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. Cha-ching-ching-ching.
The company is already aggressively marketing curricular material "aligned" to fuzzy, dumbed-down Common Core math and reading guidelines (which more than a dozen states are now revolting against).
Along with two dozen other tech firms, CompassLearning sees even greater financial opportunities to mine Common Core student tracking systems. The centralized database is a strange-bedfellows alliance between the liberal Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (which largely underwrote and promoted the Common Core curricular 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. "So far, seven states — Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina and Massachusetts — have committed to enter data from select school districts. Louisiana and New York will be entering nearly all student records statewide."
The National Education Data Model, 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."
Home-schoolers and religious families that reject traditional government education would be tracked. Original NEDM data points included hair color, eye color, weight, blood types and even dental status.
How exactly does amassing and selling such personal data improve educational outcomes? It doesn't. This, at its core, is the central fraud of Washington's top-down nationalized curricular scheme.
The Bill Gates-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.
Fed Ed is not about excellence or academic achievement. It's about control, control and more control.
FYI
Cheers!
I’d like to know more about how they track homeschooled kids, as well as how to keep the government out of my business.
Probably a back door gun registry too: Johnny, does your family have firearms in the home?
If so, are they locked away or can you get them.
If yes, kindly list your home address and location where the SWAT can come by and when the dog will be there too.
Every day it’a a new revelation of a government out of control, more freedom lost. It just never stops.
Many states have very little information about homeschoolers. Oklahoma had none.
North Carolina knows (at most) the address of the non-public school and the sex and age of children of compulsory-education age.
I’m guessing they are doing it through the States.
When you homeschool your child, you have several forms that you need to fill out and submit to the State. My thoughts are that the States are sharing that information with the Feds.
Here in Missouri, we have laws that are suppose to prohibit that type of data sharing, but many times those laws go ignored by the bean counters and pencil pushers in our State and local government.
As to how to keep the government out of your business, I’d like know how you can do that, too! LOL
Cheers!
When I was in 8th grade my school suddenly began wanting our SSN’s.
I can’t remember why, in particular, but this really irked my brother and I so we made up the numbers we gave.
We continued to use those numbers through high school.
LOL!
Yeah, I don’t remember very many 8th graders having SSN’s when I was a kid. So, no one EVER asked us for ours.
Now, with the way the IRS has structured the deduction requirements for a dependent, just about all kids have them within days of birth.
The Overton Window in action.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
Cheers!
We deliberately have not had our kids assigned Social Security numbers - skipping the tax deduction - and we carefully avoid their having any electronic footprints just so we can be sure that they’ll be left alone by the chekists of the education gulags.
More people should do the same.
Well, then, this is of interest to ALL.....
So ping to both lists.
We just finished signing our son up for the SAT test. Not sure about all the ages of freepers but I signed a form and my Mom enclosed a check. That was it. Now you have to sign up online and they ask race/religion/family income/GPA/classes taken/sports/ssn/dob/and you have to put a picture online. They even ask parents educational background. Serious... it took us over an hour to fill the darn thing out. Disgusting IMHO.
Where will they gather info about homeschooled kids? I’m thinking IRS, Obamacare, census info.
Yikes!
Well... We’ve got a few more years to go before we’re at the SAT level (our daughter is only 5). However, I’m fairly sure it’s going to be even worse than what you’ve encountered by the time she’s ready to take her SAT. Grrr!
BTW - We’ve been documenting our daughter’s education and have decided to create a transcript to get her into college (Christian, of course)when she gets older. I don’t want to saddle her with a GED and have folks think she dropped out of high school, or something.
Cheers!
Your local government...
There is some of the form you can put the . on for (choose not to answer). I did that with as much as I could. However, the picture somewhat disturbed me (and you need a completed print out with picture, and another form of picture ID for the test). Most colleges demand either the SAT or ACT.. so we’re stuck. I am serious when I said it took me over an hour to complete. I couldn’t believe how much has changed!
There are NO forms you need to fill out in Missouri. If your child was in public school, you only need to write a withdrawal letter. Educators will tell you that you must register with your district, but you DO NOT have to, and all the homeschool orgs discourage it.
Yes, you are right. In Missouri, we can opt out of a Declaration of Enrollment (section 167.042, I think). However, many states are not so laissez-faire about it and require forms.
Cheers!
The picture is due to the decline in morals coinciding with the decline in education - too many people paying someone else to take the test for them. (It’s too bad it’s wrong and all that, or I could have a great career. I could color my hair, and my face doesn’t look much older than that of a stressed-out teenager hyped on Monsters.)
ping for later!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.