Archive for February 2018

The Cost to Children of a Common Core of Greed   1 comment

Although the greedmeisters are never again going to call what they promote by the now-toxic name of Common Core, still, the march toward common-everything moves forward like a communist conveyor belt, under the radar of most people.

That common core of greed is everywhere, like a misbegotten Midas touch.   And those who are devoted to children are pitted, knowingly or not, against those who are mostly devoted to the tax dollars that children represent to them, even though the stupidity of the common core is now household knowledge–  even the latest Disney trailer for the new Incredibles 2   mocks the “new math for life”.

But with or without the “Common Core” label, CCSS (math and English),  NGSS (science), federal data sharing initiatives like the CEP’s Evidence Based Policy, and most disturbingly the CSE (sexuality) each thrive under the same control-and-funding umbrellas as the common core.    (The way you can discern whether something is of the fed-corp common core, is to check  1) who is paying for promotion of it   2) whether it’s been aligned with federal data standards to track people’s use of the common thing.

The fed-corp partnerships repeatedly do this.  They take over pieces of education, pieces of what is supposed to be supervised and owned by you and me.  Someday, if and when the power agendas fully align, what will freedom look like?  The child or teacher who wants to have a distinct, uncommon experience, won’t be able to have it; like a small flower trying to take root where an enormous machine has been built, without soil (freedom) nor sunshine (access to whole truth) that small flower will have to give up trying to be a flower.  The common everything machine is not built to recognize the presence of a flower.  It is Economy First:  Persons Last.

The stupidity and the danger of where we have allowed ourselves to sit is bad enough– but the worst part is that the struggle’s not over.  We are mid-struggle.

We should stop –STOP– right now– handing our power away.  Look at our losses, our choices:

We allowed the federal government to define common educational data standards (CEDS) in partnership with a private club called Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO).

That was a power giveup.

We took money (each state did) from the federal government, to build fed-designed “State Longitudinal Database Systems” that sucked up data about individuals in our states, and now, if the CEP gets its way, that data will, without our consent, be up for grabs to any federal researcher or federal agency or any corporate crony the feds want to “authorize” to see that data– which is data citizens don’t even have about themselves.

That was a power giveup.

We, the states, allowed the huckster David Coleman to “architect” a new education system for all math and English, despite his zero qualification for such an effort, despite its utter unconstitutionality, despite the low quality of the standards themselves.

Another power giveup. 

And, right now, we are in the process in Utah of allowing the sick-joke of a set of science standards called Next Generation Science to become the rule of science education in our state, a move that will strangle academic freedom and delete much of classic science curricula, stupidly, to make room for a preponderance of propaganda and unsettled science doctrines: global warming, Darwinian evolution, and human blame for all of earth’s flaws.  So, in the wings:  another power giveup.

All these have been crimes of greed and negligence for which we cannot fully blame our now-overlords.  We had, and still have, the freedom to walk away.

But the one crime that hasn’t fully ripened yet, the big one that churns my stomach and makes me ill, is the Common Sexuality Standards movement, truly a soul-stealing movement.  CSE hides behind the respectable title of “sex education”.  But it’s not education at all.  Rather than teaching biological and moral facts to children, CSE aims to sexualize children, and not only to sexualize them early, but to normalize every and any sexual perversion, early.  See  CSE’s common sexuality standards  for download here.)

If you haven’t seen the video, see it  –but don’t show it to your children.

 

 

 

CSE / LGTB  promoters know that many, maybe even most, Americans, are God-fearing, chastity-cherishing, family-focused  people –whose religion can be twisted against them.  So they call the practices or teachings of a devout Jew, Mormon, Baptist, or Hindu American “unkind” or “intolerant” or “old-fashioned”.  They say then that inclusion of the transgender or pedophaelia agenda would be kind and tolerant, and many times they beat that American with his or her own good nature.

But it does not work with every person.  Some people say to the name-callers, “I do not care what you call me;  You will not force your agenda on my child.”  They might even be able to say, “I have done my homework and I know who pays you to push this lie-laden agenda on me.”    And lies they are.  Gender is an eternal and essential characteristic of every human being.

It always seems to boil down to masses of money, and never seems to be about the well-being of children at all, whenever new education agendas are shoved down our throats.  Important new research from Jennifer Bilek at the Federalist.com  names  the lecturers and fat-cat investors in biomedical companies, who are teaching and funding transgender organizations and programs –for huge, huge amounts of money.  J.B. Pritzker.  Penny Pritzker.  Jennifer Pritzker.  George Soros. David T. Rubin.  Martine Rothblatt.  Drummond Pike.  Warren and Peter Buffet. Jon Stryker.  Mark Bonham. Tim Gill.

According to Bilek, it won’t end with transgender operations and transgender counseling nor with the surgical and mental meddling with children against their families’ concerns.  It ends never, because proponents are grooming young people for a lifetime of expensive, never ending surgeries and expensive services.  It’s making money by cultivating human self-hate, particularly body-hate.  Gobs of money can be made from stirring up such hate.

Bilek writes:  “Bodily diversity appears to be the core issue, not gender dysphoria; that and unmooring people from their biology via language distortions…  Institutionalizing transgender ideology does just this.  This ideology is being promoted as a civil rights issue by wealthy, white men with enormous influence who stand to personally benefit…

“…Rothblatt suggests we are all transhuman, that changing our bodies by removing healthy tissue and organs and ingesting cross-sex hormones over the course of a lifetime can be likened to wearing makeup, dying our hair, or getting a tattoo…

“It behooves us all,” Bilek concludes, “to look at what the real investment is in prioritizing a lifetime of anti-body medical treatments for a miniscule part of the population, building an infrastructure for them, and institutionalizing the way we perceive ourselves as human beings”.

Stopping CSE standards and the accompanying philosophies from infiltrating our curricula may help stop a disorder from growing into the enormously lucrative business that its investors hope it will become.

#StopCSE 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Video: Jane Robbins’ Testimony to Congress: On Consent and Student Data Privacy   4 comments

On January 30, 2018, Jane Robbins, a lawyer with the American Principles Project, testified to Congress’s House Education and Workforce Committee.  She strongly opposed the recommendations of the Commission on Evidence-based Policy (CEP) that there should be an expansion of federal agencies’ access to data collected on U.S. citizens, or that there should be permission given to researchers to access that data without citizens’ consent.

Robbins pointed out the immorality of the CEP’s recommendations and patiently explained the difference between researching objects and researching human beings.   Some highlights of her testimony have been transcribed below.

 

Robbins said (see minute 39:30):

“…The problem arises when the subjects of the research and analysis are human beings. Each American citizen is endowed with personal dignity and autonomy and therefore deserves respect and deference concerning his or her own personal data.

Allowing the government to vacuum mountains of such data and employ it for whatever purposes it deems useful, without the citizens’ consent or in some cases even his knowledge, conflicts deeply with this truth about the dignity of persons. Bear in mind that the analyses contemplated by the commission go further than merely sharing discrete data point among agencies, they involve creating new information about individuals via matching data, drawing conclusions, and making predictions about those individuals; so in essence the government would have information about a citizen even he or she doesn’t have.

Our founding principle, which enshrine consent of the governed, dictate that a citizen’s data belong to him rather than to the government. If the government or its allied researchers want to use it for purposes other than those for which it was submitted, they should get consent; and in the case or pre-k through 12, students’ parental consent. That’s how things should work in a free society.

Let’s consider a few specific problems. The commission’s recommendations to improve evidence building, while well intentions and couched in reasonable language, sometimes fails to realize that data turned over by citizens for one purpose can be misused for others.

It is always assumed that the data will be used in benevolent ways for the good of the individual who provides it. But especially with respect to the enormous scope of pre-k through college education data, that simply isn’t true. Literally everything can be linked to education. Data analysis might study the connection between one’s education and his employment, or his health, or his housing choices or the number of children he has, or his political activity, or whether his suspension from school in sixth grade foreshadows a life of crime.

Education technology innovators brag that predictive algorithms can be created and those algorithms could be used to steer students along some paths or close off others. And much of this education data is extraordinarily sensitive. For example, data about children’s attitudes, mindsets, and dispositions are currently being compiled, unfortunately, as part of so-called social-emotional learning (SEL). Do we really want this kind of sensitive data to be made more easily accessible for evidence building to which we as parents have not consented? The commission recommends that all this data be disclosed only with approval to authorized persons, but we should ask approval of whom, authorized by whom. There are myriad examples of government employees violating statute or policy by misusing or wrongfully disclosing data, and even if the custodians only have good intentions, what they consider appropriate use or disclosure may conflict diametrically with what the affected citizen considers appropriate.  Again, this illustrates the necessity for consent.

 We should take care to recognize the difference between two concepts that are somewhat conflated in the Commission’s report. Data security means whether the government can keep data systems from being breached, which the federal government in too many cases has been unable to do. Data privacy refers to whether the government has any right to collect and maintain such data in the first place.

The federal privacy act set out the fair information principle of data minimization, which is designed to increase security by increasing privacy: a hacker can’t steal what isn’t there.

Another problem with the evidence-building mindset is that it assumes an omniscient government will make better decisions than individuals can themselves. But what these analysis are likely to turn up are correlations between some facts and others; and correlations do not equal causations. So, for example, we might end up designing official government policies based on flawed assumptions to nudge students into pursuing studies or careers that they wouldn’t choose for themselves.

Human beings are not interchangeable. Our country has thrived for centuries without this kind of social engineering and it is deeply dangerous to change that now.

In closing, I reiterate my respect for the value of unbiased research as the foundation for policymaking, but speaking for the millions of parents with whom we work in various states whose concerns about education policy and data have been minimized by various levels of government for years, I urge you to maintain the protections against treating their children as subjects for research without their consent. This might happen in someplace such as China, but it should not happen here...”

 

 

 

If you don’t want to search through the entire hearing, you can just see Jane Robbins’ portion here:

 

 

 God bless Jane.