History itself must be holding its breath to see what happens next. H.R. 4174,Foundations of Evidence-Based Policy, a bad bill for liberty and privacy, awaits President Trump’s signature –or his veto.
I’m not a lawyer, and I’m not a data expert. I’m pretty good with reading, though.
In reading, I noticed:
The bill creates an inventory of citizens, their land, and their money. It includes indentifiable info (pii).
It is actively hostile toward, and seeks to alter, policies and laws that uphold privacy rights.
The bill allows the federal government to collect, archive and share personally identifiable information.
The bill authorizes government to break confidentiality pledges and punish citizens based on the perceived accuracy of data citizens submit.
The bill actively seeks to “convert” databases that don’t match its machine-interoperability standards.
An agent who shared/sold sensitive information from these databases might receive zero punishment.
The bill forces agencies and instrumentalities to share data with other agencies.
The bill empowers the Deep State, not allowing elections for data heads. Bureaucratic appointees only.
The bill authorizes federal agents to use private organizations and individuals to mine data.
The bill replaces informed consent with (pointless) informed public comment.
Below this video is a detailed, language-focused, page-specific, quote-laden excavation of the bill. It is more detailed than the video.
FACT #1: The bill creates an inventory of citizens, their land, and their money.
The new, federal “comprehensive data inventory” will feed into a “federal data catalog” and it’s “statistical” data includes “the whole, or relevant groups, or components within, the economy, society, or the natural environment” (page 17). What else IS there on earth, that isn’t covered under people, money, and nature itself?
An interesting spot to detect this in action is on page 19, where an exception is granted to the Energy Information Administration: “Data or information acquired by the Energy Information Administration under a pledge of confidentiality…shall not be disclosed in identifiable form” –meaning, obviously, that data acquired by agencies other than EIA –even under a pledge of confidentiality– CAN be disclosed in identifiable form!
FACT #2: It is actively hostile to laws that uphold individual or local privacy rights.
The bill does not clearly forbid ANY type of data sharing, nor does it forbid anyone from at least requesting sensitive data access– and the bill treats privacy statues or policies as obstacles.
See page 2: “evidence-building plan… shall contain… a list of any challenges to developing evidence… including any statutory or other restrictions“. See page 22: “…Statutory constraints limit the ability of these agencies to share data...” So state privacy laws are limiting the federal ability to share data? This reminds me of The Princess Bride movie. It’s Prince Humperdink (this bill) trying to steal Princess Buttercup (students’ data) from Vizzini (state SLDS databases) “You’re trying to kidnap what I’ve rightfully stolen.”
In the bill, neither the term nor the concept of “privacy rights” is ever mentioned. Agencies are advised that the motivation for letting the public think agencies honor “pledges of confidentiality” is that not doing so will affect data quality: “Declining trust of the public in the protection of information provided under a pledge of confidentiality… adversely affects both the accuracy and completeness of statistical analyses.”
FACT #3: The bill allows the federal government to collect and archive and share personally identifiable information.
The bill redefines many terms so that the words don’t really work the way you might think that word would work. This reminds me of The Princess Bride, too.
The bill doesn’t overtly lie, so much as it assumes you don’t know what it’s talking about, or that you won’t notice its fancy footwork.
The bill defines a “nonstatistical purpose” as “affecting the rights, privileges or benefits ofa particular identifiable respondent“. In contrast, the bill defines “statistical purpose” as “analysis…without identifying the individuals”. However it’s not actually a contrast: in addition to “statistical purpose” it also defines “statistical ACTIVITIES” –as “components within the economy, society or the natural environment”. Notice that since statistical activities can be a “component within” society, it can be information about one person. which sure sounds like individuals are included. So both nonstatistical purposes and statistical activities in this bill do include personal information.
Also, the bill defines “evidence” as:“information produced as a result of statistical activities conducted for a statistical purpose.” Note that the word “information” is adjective-free. It didn’t say that evidence is only aggregated data, statistical-purposed data. It’s anything-goes, collected information, collected while aiming to find statistical-purpose data. So if, in the process of developing methods or resources (or anything, anything– they also mention sampling frames and models and other activities) the researcher or bureaucrat happen sto stumble upon some unrelated information, well, that’s evidence. Evidence is any information gotten as a result of activities about “components” within society, or the economy, or nature.
FACT #4:The bill authorizes the government to punish citizens based on the accuracy level of the data they submit.
The bill reveals that its agents plan to break confidentiality when citizens or organizations are accused of submitting false information (whatever that really means). Such citizens will be punished in two ways: first, government pledges of confidentiality will be broken and the person or organization’s identifiable information will be used; second, the person or organization will be prosecuted by law enforcement. Page 20 says, “information collected…under a pledge of confidentiality may be provided…to a law enforcement agency for the prosecution of submissions… of false statistical information under statutes that authorize criminal penalties or civil penalties”.
Who gets to define “false”? Who will determine whether the information was really false? Who ensures that information was really submitted by the very person being punished? How does the government return confidentiality to the person if the accusation proves to be mistaken?
FACT #5: The bill actively seeks to “convert” databases that don’t match its machine-interoperability standards.
Under “Guidance tomake data open by default” (page 7) Agencies are advised to convert data that are not machine-readable: “ensure that any public data asset of the agency is machine-readable“. Everything is to flow interoperably toward the three main designated agencies: The Bureau of the Census, The Bureau of Labor, and The Bureau of Economic Analysis. Those three form the new federal database. (P.S. The Labor and Education Departments are poised to merge.)
It’s interesting to note that in the case of public education, states gullibly accepted the millions of “free” federal grant dollars for their databases when common data standards and common core came knocking. Interoperability mandates of fed-paid, state databases set us up for this bad moment, when easily, the feds can now take what states should never have collected/shared beyond the walls of the school itself. That money came conditionally: the grant language said that state databases had to be nationally interoperable. Agencies other than state school systems that don’t already have matching data standards will see this bill’s implementers try to convert them. (Don’t do it.)
FACT #6: An agent who shared or sold sensitive information from these databases might receive zero punishment.
There is a little loophole under “Fines and Penalties”. A person who deliberately shares or sells information could either get a punishment, or NO punishment. On page 21, it says that an agent or employee who “willfully discloses the information in any manner to a person or agency not entitled to receive it, shall be guilty of a class E felony and imprisoned for NOT MORE THAN 5 years, or fined NOT MORE THAN $250,000, or both.”
Not more than five years could mean one day, or no days. Not more than $250,000 could mean a penny, or nothing at all.
FACT #7: The bill forces agencies and instrumentalities to share data with other agencies.
Page 26 says, “Presumption of accessibility for statistical agencies and units: …the head ofan agency shall… make any data asset maintained by the agency available upon request to any statistical agency or unit“. (P.S. “unit” is one, as in one department or one person.)
And when privacy is spoken of, it’s in suggestion-mode: that agencies “take into account” the “risks and restrictions related to the disclosure of personally identifiable information” and “take into account” any “security considerations“. There’s a stark contrast from the bill’s forceful “shall” language concerning data mining. “Shall” is used 116 times in the 29 page bill, but never regarding the protection of privacy rights. Instead of what should have been written– something like “agencies shall notdisclose personally identifiable information” the bill’s creators just asks agents to “take into account risks and restrictions“. That’s a toothless and blind defense. Over and over the bill gives “shall” mandates about data inventory like the one on page 10, which says that every agency head “shall to the maximum extent practicable, develop and maintain a comprehensive data inventory”.
FACT #8 The bill empowers the Deep State. It weakens representation– our Constitutional right to representative governance.
The bill mandates that the top dogs in every one of the innumerable agencies must be be appointed (page 3) from among agencies’ “existing employees” (page 29) –meaning Deep State loyal bureaucrats, untouchable by any vote. Additional authorized agents are defined as anyone with a pulse: consultants, contractors, employees of contractors, even self-employed researchers (page 16).
Because the bill redefines the word “agency” to mean “executive agency” –which means it includes not only the long list of household-knowledge executive agencies (like Department of Transportation, Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, etc.) but also all the departments and all instrumentalities of each federal agency– the bill uses and empowers the deep, unelected bureaucracy known as the “Deep State”.
FACT #9: The bill authorizes the federal agents to use private organizations and individuals to help mine data.
On page 5, agencies are told to work on “interagency and private sector coordination”. On page 9, the bill asks agents to “engage the public“ and calls for “hosting challenges, competitions, events or other initiatives designed to create additional value from public data assets”.
FACT #10: The bill replaces informed consent with (pointless) informed public comment.
On page 24, it says: “Whenever a written agreement concerns data that respondents were required by law to report and the respondents were not informed that the data could be shared... the terms of such agreement shall be described in a public notice… a minimum of 60 days for public comment.” Notice that there is no consequence or change that can happen due to the public comment; no mention of the data after comment time NOT being shared.
Now, let’s just reason together about this bill, and its facts.
The title is its own clue: Foundations of Evidence-Based Policymaking. The bill is a punch in the gut to privacy and representative governance. Evidence holders (bureaucrat councils) become the new policymakers. Where does evidence-based policymaking put power? In the hands of whoever holds the evidence– not with We, the People. Think about it: policymaking will be done by those who hold the evidence, not by those from whom evidence has been collected. Citizens are demoted to being data, and decisions will be made by those unelected policymakers who frame and interpret that data. And this is a foundational bill; more of the same is coming.
Do the “algebra” inside the bill. (You have to solve for X, excavating definitions and then inserting them where the word surfaces). Doing so shows the word-gaming going on to hide the power grab of this bill, with power going away from individuals and into the hands of a huge new system, not managed by the elected representatives.
If you’ve skimmed the bill, you might be thinking: “The bill does include one privacy officer in the 23 officer federal board that will run the nationwide system, and it does mention privacy and confidentiality.”
Friends, it’s a game of words.
Only a fool would believe lip service about privacy that tinsels a bill, while it mandates so much authority and access to data for agents and agencies. Please remember three things:
There is information that MUST stay secret, for reasons of national security and for individual Constitutional privacy rights.
If this bill were legitimate, such information would not only be clearlyforbidden from being shared, but also nobody would be given power to share that information, ever.
This bill does not clearly forbid sharing of identifiable information, and, for certain agencies and agents, power exists to share it.
A person cannot serve opposing masters (Matthew 6:24) and a bill’s purposes cannot be traveling in two opposite directions at the same time. This bill wants you to believe that a bird can simultaneously fly north and south. While the “pledge of confidentiality” words pull one way, the data-sucking mandates of the bill pull the other way. The data-sharing “shall” mandates in this bill prevail, especially since the privacy-mentioning lines are weak and loop-hole-y.
They are obsessed with gathering data –at any cost.
The obsession may stem from sincere intentions about how data collecting might help society, but look at the cost. It’s federal creation of a system (using pre-existing local databases) to create one river of citizens’ data– all mined by mandate, without informed consent of the individuals being data-mined. We, the People under this bill’s full implementation will soon become prisoners of intimidation, cowering under lockstep policymaking, instead of directing our own government.
Data is not the enemy. Data can be used for good or ill. But individual rights will always matter more than efficiency.
As Jane Robbins pointed out to Congress: “The problem arises when the subjects of the research and analysis are human beings [with rights!] … The analyses contemplated by the commission go further than merely sharing discrete data points… 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.”
Last year, I called Trey Gowdy’s office and talked with a staffer there, trying to understand why this patriot would promote the FEPA bill. The staffer said that because veterans are suffering, due to corruption in their hospital systems and other systems, Trey Gowdy wanted to support them with more accountability by federal agencies to Congress. The problem with this angle is that Congress is just one more entity that has to request access to all this federal data. Creating this huge data mining system is not going to solve all the problems of corruption and mismanagement, and in the process of trying, it will harm liberty and privacy, or set up a system that can do so!
Even though Americans cannot call the White House today (the answering machine says it’s due to the shutdown) we can tweet @POTUS @WhiteHouse @RealDonaldTrump —or send an email. (Scroll to the bottom of this article for easy contact links).
Please alert (plead with) President Trump to veto this already passed bill, HR 4174, that Congress passed WITHOUT a hearing, so stealthily, during the Christmas break when supposedly none of us are paying attention.
—Except that some are! Like the barking dogs who sent the alarm down the valley to alert others that Cruella DeVil was doing her evil, please join us and be a barking dog today.
If President Trump gets this message, he can veto.
Word of mouth, person to person, tends to be stronger than marketing initiatives.
Even if Trump doesn’t veto in time, Americans need to become aware quickly about what this bill will do. So bark!
HR 4174 doesn’t promote informed consent by individuals for agencies taking personally identifiable information for “sharing.” It promotes data sharing across federal agencies and between state and federal entities. HR 4174 will not make America great again! It will make America more like communist China, less like the America of liberty and justice for all, because its whole point is to collect EVIDENCE on you and me, and to create evidence-based policies, based on one-size-fits-all, federal moral values.
Do you want to give your own and your child’s and your neighbor’s privacy away —to public-private research partnerships, whom you never elected and cannot fire? Do you want all agencies to alter their databases to make them all interoperable and therefore much more in danger of huge scale hacking?!
This bill comes from the CEP (Commission for Evidence Based Policy) which formed thanks to Patty Murray, Paul Ryan and Obama a few years ago with a mission to consolidate ALL data of ALL Americans from ALL sources into one “central clearinghouse”.
Now, the fact sheet on the bill denies that it’s creating a new, central, federal data repository. This is on the surface of the words, true. But linking thousands of federal and state agencies’ data interoperably IS creating a new system that actually operates as a new federal repository— of data not given by individual informed consent. That’s flat out theft— especially in the context of the CEP’s history and stated goals (such as getting rid of protective student unit record bans).
The title of the commission, and of this bill, sounds innocuous. Evidence based policy making. But even back when the CEP was first organized, even though it came in part from Republican Paul Ryan, I was in full panic mode, and wrote about CEP’s goals and meetings, a lot. Search this blog.
Now the CEP’s privacy dismissing plot is to become US law (unless we see a veto from President Trump).
People won’t be able to ignore its effects.
When ALL data from ALL sources gets combined (for research purposes only, they promise us) into the de facto central clearinghouse, freedom can quickly go away.
The CEP wants access for officials and researchers to ALL DATA. This is not anonymous data, but Pii (Personally Identifiable Information) on children and adults from everywhere—every US school, every test and tech based report or assignment, data from every document held by public private partnerships including preschools, hospitals, foster families, the social security department, criminal justice departments, both state and federal; the IRS, the CIA, the FBI, the EPA, the TSA, student loans, colleges, universities, including private corporations in public private partnerships, and much much more. When personal data is accessible to a “researcher” or bureaucrat, whether a legitimate policy maker or a nefarious hack, without YOUR informed consent, that’s very, very, exceptionally bad news.
Without revisiting too many historical CEP conference details —you can read those by searching CEP on this blog— just let me share one telling fact that has always stuck out in my mind…
(And yes, this is an appropriate time to be freaking out and taking action)—
This I can not forget:
One of the top dogs at the CEP said— during one of the endless, hours-long conferences that CEP held— that the CEP mustn’t act too FAST in its research-based enthusiasm to take over Americans’ data. That, he said, would be “RIPPING OFF the band-aid” (of privacy) from the American people. (Too obvious! Someone might notice.)
Well, some of us do notice. President Trump, please notice!
Please tweet @POTUS @WhiteHouse @RealDonaldTrump to ask Pres. Trump to veto this bill.
The switchboard is not taking calls, but you can call your local congressional representative in-state, and send an email to Trump at www.whitehouse.gov/contact.
Please also send an email to Rep. Hice thanking him for his wisdom and courage in voting no. https://hice.house.gov/contact/
Educational freedom needs defending. Children need defending. Parental rights need defending.
As its new legislative priority, the USBA lobby has set this bullying doozy: forcing all students to take the Common Core tests and getting rid of the parental legal power to opt a child out of taking the tests, for any reason.
The Lehi Free Press reported that USBA passed a motion: “…every student that receives the benefit of state-funded education should participate in state created end-of-year assessments…” While students are taught not to bully others, the state may set the example of bullying both students and parents with this new priority.
Meanwhile, the state is also trying to convince parents and teachers that the much-hated Common Core SAGE tests are gone, so we should have no reason to opt out; trust the new Common Core RISE tests, they say.
This USOE video promoting Utah’s new, Common Core RISE test, which will replace Utah’s Common Core SAGE test for most grades, can do nothing to appease unhappy parents and teachers, because RISE is so similar to SAGE. The film praises the things it shared in common with the SAGE test. And that is like praising the rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Watching the promo film, I felt sad as lovely teachers, with beautiful things to say, each avoided speaking directly about the dark issues of the Common Core tests. The issues with SAGE testing that caused about 10% of all Utah parents to opt their children out of the tests, are STILL THERE in the test called RISE.
If you watch the film to the end and are still wondering, “What specifically are these interviewees praising? And what’s improved with RISE over SAGE?!” — just go to the Utah State Office of Education’s “Frequently Asked Questions” link. It confirms that there’s no real difference, despite what the film implies.
Wendy Hart of Utah’s largest school district, Alpine District, has said of RISE, “It’s like saying that the city got a new library– because they replaced the catalog software. But the building, the books and the patrons are the same.”
State Board members, local board members, and Utah teachers who oppose RISE (as they opposed SAGE) were of course not invited to participate in the filming of this taxpayer funded, RISE-promo film.
The facts are that as with SAGE, with RISE: parents are still not in the loop, the tests are still secretive, the tests are still not local, are not coming from teachers of these students; the tests are still founded on controversial Common Core standards, not local charter standards or Utah-built standards, and the tests are still collecting academic and nonacademic data to share with corporate, federal and state entities (not just with the teachers, as the film implies). https://www.schools.utah.gov/file/04be9c35-71ea-41e2-8a78-2dc39195ad6f
The initiative to try to get Utahns to embrace RISE illustrates the new bullying hierarchy: the federal government is strong-arming the state government via ESSA, and so the state now has decided to strong-arm parents, asking them to strong-arm the students.
The RISE test promo-film is step one toward forcing the kids. But the story really began with federal ESSA. For backstory, read Utah State School Board member Michelle Boulter’s article at her campaign website, and Autumn Cook’s article published by The Federalist. The Federalist article by Autumn Cook details the federal mandating drive for tests, that may soon quash Utah’s rights to opt children out of tests for any reason. She raises many interesting questions, including this one: “Utah’s hightest opt-out rates occur among economically advantaged, non-minority student populations with highly involved parents… so will this agreement direct Title 1 money away from schools with higher financial needs and toward well-to-do schools with high opt out rates? And what form with federal remediation of non-compliant local schools take?”
At stake are the following freedoms: academic freedom within Utah schools; the freedom for a parent to opt a student out of testing– for any reason; freedom for a school to follow its own, foundational education charter (rather than veering toward new, test-centric curriculum– to avoid being labeled a failing school) the freedom for a school not to pressure students and parents to take Common Core tests, the freedom for schools to actually be different from one another; the freedom for parents or elected representatives, not the federal government, to determine which schools “need” remediation.
Please write or call your school boards, state board members (at Board@schools.utah.gov) and legislators: https://le.utah.gov
Tell them that you expect them to protect children from bullying at any level, and that you expect them to defend academic freedom, school freedom, parental rights, and student’s rights.
Update 3/8/16 – Friends in Ohio and Florida have confirmed that this exact bill (elimination of elected school boards) is being pushed there. Watch the “greedom-over-freedom” ed-tech lobbies, such as Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, Global Silicon Valley investment group, Bill Gates, Marc Tucker’s National Center on Education and Economy, and Pearson, whose investments benefit from the streamlined elimination of voter input.
The bill in Utah has passed the Senate and is being considered in the House with a (pointless) amendment that would add to the appointed dictator-superintendent, an appointed-not-elected board. Several House members are opposing the bill right now. One rare senator who voted against the bill said in an email, “I couldn’t believe this may pass with no input – I like that the voters will determine if this goes to the ballot, but it’s a lot to explain to voters.” Yes, it is!
I’ve added contact emails for senators and representatives below.
SJR16, Senator Jim Dabakis’ bill to abolish the voice of voters in Utah education by abolishing the elected State School Board, passed the Utah Senate this week.
Dabakis’ claim is a ridiculous lie. The very short bill (SJR16) has only two elements, as it slashes at the Utah Constitution: 1) toeliminate the elected board, and 2) tohave no election and no representation at all. A solitary, governor-appointed superintendent would supervise all of Utah’s education system by him/herself.
This bill puts voters dead last, of course– because no vote will ever select the governor-appointed, solo-flying, unremovable superintendent.
An email from a Utah legislator who supports SJR16 argued: “Think of the current state board as a school bus with fifteen different steering wheels all driving in different directions….if one person is in charge, it’s harder for them to pass the buck.”
If he applied that reasoning to his own seat in the legislature, then there should be no legislature, but a king instead. And if the Senate gets the House to agree, and if the voters agree, then there will be an Education King of Utah.
It is up to the members of the House of Representatives to kill this awful bill that the Senate has approved. If they don’t, voters get one chance to end it. But will they? Will we all take the time to look at the history surrounding this long-planned effort?
This bill may have been sponsored by the notorious Democrat Jim Dabakis, but he didn’t come up with the idea of eliminating elected school boards. Blatant enemies of local control came up with the idea years ago and their ploy is ticking along even better than they’d planned. See the GSV’s graphic below. The “battle plan” of this investment company started with Common Core, and about ten years later, it planned to eliminate school boards. Utah’s leadership is listening to and acting on these plans —because of investment. Because dollars speak more loudly than children do.
Look at two movers and shakers from outside Utah, who are shaping Utah policy in this direction. One is a socialist and the other is a corporate hog. Both are instrumental in changing Utah’s formerly representative system: Meet Marc Tucker and Deborah Quazzo.
MARC TUCKER, THE SOCIALIST
To know Marc Tucker, simply peruse his report on Governing American Education, which says: “And the United States will have to largely abandon the beloved emblem of American education: local control... much of the new authority will have to come at the expense of local control.”
You can also study his infamous 1992 letter to Hillary Clinton, which was made part of the U.S. Congressional Record. The letter outlined Tucker’s vision of a communist-styled pipeline of education and workforce that would control individuals from early childhood through life.
It is a vision indistinguishable from Communism. It is a vision that Dabakis’ SJR16 consummates.
Tucker was invited recently by Utah legislators to speak in Utah at a statewide joint legislative/school board/USOE conference held at Southern Utah University. He’s also spoken at countless national venues, some of which are radical left-wing institutions: the Annenberg Institute, the Public Education and Business Coalition, the Aspen Institute, and state education conferences in various states.
Less that a year ago, Salt Lake City sponsored an education-tech conference co-hosted by GSV Advisors (an investment group) with Arizona State University. Bill Gates paid for it, of course. Former USDOE Secretary Arne Duncan was a featured speaker. Ms. Deborah Quazzo, founder and CEO of GSV Advisors, headed the conference, and was listed as “a prolific angel investor” who “leverages technology in the global $4.9 trillion education and talent technology sectors”.
She charged people $2,795 per person to attend this conference– just to walk in the door.
Above, you saw the graphic of Quazzo’s “Strategic Battle Plan” for GSV (and Utah politics). Keep in mind that Quazzo is an investor, not an educator. Her battle plan has nothing to do with what you or I as teachers and parents know is best for our children. It is her openly, repeatedly stated desire to eliminate local control by eliminating elected school boards.
[As an aside, here is some context: Forbes christened Salt Lake City the “tech mecca” of America, so now, ambitious, hungry eyes are on Utah’s ed-tech industry and school system and taxpayers’ votes. Those hungry eyes care deeply about whether Dabakis’ bill passes. From their point of view, voters and teachers and parents and children are a necessary annoyance, but they feel that our elected school boards are not: so, if Utah eliminates “messy” debate and gets rid of the old time-consuming elected representation business; if Utah streamlines decision-making for the entire state, we will have created an ed-tech dictatorship. It’s so very profitable to those (inside and outside Utah) who invest in the Common Core-aligned education system that Tucker and Quazzo promote. If it’s hard to wrap your brain around socialism now bedding with corporate America, or of socialism taking over the Utah legislature, just revisit how this “elimination of boards” policy –espoused by the GSV investment group that is repeatedly in our state preaching to legislators– perfectly matches the communist “human capital pipeline” agenda of Marc Tucker. Utah’s not utterly clueless, either; remember that Tucker and Quazzo were invited to this state to advise the once conservative legislators and businesses of Utah.]
How many mecca attendees last spring had read Quazzo’s creepy GSV document, entitled American Revolution 2.0, which echoes Tucker’s call for the removal of local control and local school boards? How many agree with it now– other than virtually the entire Utah Senate? The GSV calls for the promotion of Common Core and the elimination of elected school boards. What a strange coincidence that the Tucker-featured SUU conference also called for the same things.
In the GSV document’s “Strategic Battle Plan” Quazzo and company say: “We eliminate locally elected school boards, recognizing that the process by which they are elected doesn’t correspond with either strategic planning or longer term results.”
Strategic planning for whom? Longer term results for whom? WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN? And what about the taxpaying voters who are to foot the bill without a voice in it? What about the reasons we fought the American Revolution 1.0? We wanted representation. We wanted a voice in our own lives, not dicatorship by Mother England. Do we want a dictatorship led by Mother Quazzo or Mother Dickson or Father Gates?
This bill of Dabakis, the consummation of Quazzo’s and Tucker’s long-term scheming, must be stopped.
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:
National I.D. cards in Rwanda, like the one above, (see PreventGenocide.org) cost hundreds of thousands of innocent people to lose their lives in 1994, since certain tribal affiliation was cause for slaughter by the Rwandan government, and the government had access to all that ID information.
This week, in Jamaica, the big news is rollout of a mandatory, national ID card. This ID system, hastily and without vetting, became law, despite concerns, protests and a 60,000 signature petition.
Today in the United States Congress, there are bills poised to create a system of national identification of individuals, being promoted by Republicans and Democrats. I have listed them in bullet point form at the bottom of this article.
See what is happening in Jamaica, where national I.D. cards are suddenly now mandatory for all. Below, watch this current-event (video). A Jamaican student, Daniel Thomas, gets shouted at by his prime minister, after politely asking Prime Minister Holness to consider the 60,000 signatories of the petition against the ID, and to consider waiting for three months, to allow for discussion of both the pros and cons of having a national I.D. card, rather than to force the decision so quickly and without “ventilation”.
At minute 6:55, the Prime Minister says, “You know what I reject? Do you know what I reject? I reject the view that somehow you have a higher moral authority on this matter than I do. I am not here to create— and I make that point very clear– I am not here to create the system that is going to deprive Jamaicans of their freedom. And ..”
Student Daniel Thomas breaks in: “But the bill does.”
He gets ignored and the prime minister goes on, “I am not hiding from consultation. I am here facing the questions and answering them… And I will go to every church in Jamaica, I will go to every room, every house, and I will answer them. Because I am not trying to take away anybody’s rights. And I find that this discussion is disingenuous, unfair, and untruthful. And I will tell you, Jamaica, that I am not going to hide from this.”
Daniel Thomas of Jamaica
Holness denies trying to take away citizens’ freedoms. But the bill has already passed. Citizens did not get to discuss and debate it beforehand. Holness seems to have persuaded himself despite facts.
And how will the prime minister be able to control what happens with citizens’ data after he is no longer the prime minister?
I guess the prime minister is shouting at the student because of the $68M grant from the Inter American Development Bank that Holness would lose if he failed to get the national ID card movement rolling in Jamaica.
Money, to the promoters, seems to follow the loss of liberty, everywhere you look. The Inter American Development Bank gave Jamaica $68 million to create this database of personal information on every Jamaican Citizen. Similarly, in 2009, to promote common education standards and common data standards, the US federal government granted states a few millions each, to establish federally-interoperable student databases (SLDS systems). And there are also smaller “grants” given to individual citizens, aka handouts/ benefits to Jamaican citizens who give up their data to the government. This is happening in some places in the U.S. too.
How cheaply and carelessly some people sell other people’s lives/data, calling it not theft or and resale but progress, partnering, or “sharing”.
Right now in the U.S., though, people are probably more aware of and annoyed by corporate snooping than they are about the increase of government snooping. But do they know that public-private partnerships combine corporate and government snooping!? Facebook and the U.S. Department of Education have teamed up to make digital student badges. Congress and corporate researchers teamed up to promote the FEPA bill (federal-state-corporate pii access) that sits in the Senate today. (S.2046).
Some folks see well-intentioned “research” as outlined by the Commission of Evidence Based Policy, or they agree with some “re-educating” of citizens about the “violence of patriarchal order” via the U.S. Department of Peacebuilding. Understandable, I suppose.
But do they agree with the flat-out death to citizens who were pegged (via national I.D.) as dangerous in Rwanda? –Or do they stomach the death of citizens in Germany and elsewhere who were pegged (via both identification documents and by the yellow star) as enemies of their government? Should government have that much power to potentially weed us out– even if they “never would”? Should they have the power to make that kind of choice?!
How would a survivor of the Rwandan genocide or the Jewish German genocide advise a Jamaican citizen, or a U.S. citizen, today?
Here are a few of the data-grabbing and freedom-harming bills that must not pass into U.S. law.
Utah’s Senator Orrin Hatch is pushing his College Transparency Act, S1121. It would remove the prohibition against sharing student pii (personally identifiable information) with the federal government.
Paul Ryan and Trey Gowdy pushed HR4174/S2046, The Foundations of Evidence-based Policymaking Act, which passed the House but still hasn’t passed the Senate. It would mandate the sharing of personally identifiable information on citizens (without their knowledge) between agencies, both federal and state, as well as to private groups who define themselves as researchers. This is a non-centralized, easily accessible, hackable, federal database of pii (personally identifiable information) collected without consent.
The Keeping Girls in School Act, S1171, from New Hampshire’s Senator Sheehan, would tax the U.S. an extra $35M per year to promote common education standards and data mining of foreign girls in foreign schools without their informed consent. (Privacy of data is a joke in that bill: it promises, but contains no enforcement mechanism, to disaggregate students’ data “to the extent practicable and appropriate“. -i.e., not at all.)
The HR1111 The Department of Peacebuilding Act of 2017 makes a U.S. Department of Peacebuilding, requiring an office of “peacebuilding information and research” that will “compile studies on the physical and mental condition of children” and “compile information” and “make information available” because it requires the “free flow of information”.
Who gets to define children’s peace? The Department of Peacebuilding. The bill creates that department, as well as a “peacebuilding curriculum” to be taught in pre-k, elementary, secondary, and beyond.
Among other things, students are to be taught that violence is: “the patriarchal structure of society and the inherent violence of such structure in the shaping of relationships and institutions“.
I think: traditional family can be called a patriarchal structure. Christians build lives on the words of 12 male apostles and Jesus Christ, and pray to a patriarchal Heavenly Father. Are these institutions and relationships “inherently violent”?
Will the Department of Peacebuilding “compile information” and “make available” the “mental condition” of family life, a patriarchal order, as “inherently violent”? Will my children be “rescued” from this “physical and mental condition”?
The concerns I am outlining above would be nothing more than empty fears IF decision makers locally chose not to use technologies that mine children’s social and emotional learning (SEL) and their “mental conditions”–but SEL and CES mining and labeling children’s social, emotional, sexual and religious “conditions” is growing.
I hope thousands will pick up their phones to call (202-224-3121) to halt the student/citizen privacy-torching bills that are now up for a vote.
Here’s why.
Bills that destroy privacy in the name of research are right now, quite incomprehensibly, being sponsored by Republicans Orrin Hatch, Paul Ryan, and Trey Goudy, as well as Democrat Patty Murray.
Even though public comment was overwhelmingly AGAINST the formation of a federal database on individual citizens, the bills are moving, without debate.
“There was tremendous public opposition to the CEP Commission’s proposal to create a national student record, as stated on page 30 of the CEP report:
‘Nearly two-thirds of the comments received in response to the Commission’s Request for Comments raised concerns about student records, with the majority of those comments in opposition to overturning the student unit record ban or otherwise enabling the Federal government to compile records about individual students.’ ”
Bless the dear soul of the CEP clerk who was honest enough to publish that important tidbit in the CEP’s report of public comment. But still, the CEP ignored the public’s wishes, and now, Paul Ryan and friends plan to continue to ignore the American people and to skip the debate process that Congress is supposed to follow.
College Transparency Act (CTA) (H.R. 2434) (S 1121) – would overturn the Higher Education Act’s ban on a federal student unit-record system and establish a system of lifelong tracking of individuals by the federal government.
But a stalker could call his studies evidence-gathering, too. Without informed consent, there is no justification for evidence-gathering on individuals. I honestly keep scratching my head as to why these representatives and senators don’t get it. Is someone paying them to give away Americans’ rights? Do they honestly, in their heart of hearts, not see that this is theft?
Many trustworthy sources are in a panic about this, as am I. Read what Missouri Ed Watchdog, Education Liberty Watch, and McGroarty/Robbins have written about this: here and here and here
Months ago, I wrote about Ryan’s precursor, the Commission on Evidence-Based Policy (CEP) and its designs– here.
I recorded the core of what the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking (CEP) was doing, after I’d painfully viewed hours of Ryan’s CEP Commission’s public meetings that promoted the benefits (to researchers and to the government) of creating a federal database of personally identifiable, individual information. –By the way, no mention was ever made of gaining informed consent from citizens, prior to creating that database. Lip service was given to the idea of “ensuring” that no unauthorized citizen could hack the federal database (an impossible thing to ensure). At the time of the Commission’s posting of that video and my writing about it, I complained that their video was not embeddable. Today, their video’s not even there. Still, I do have an exchange, which I had typed up on that day:
The question was asked of the Commission:
“Let me try and ask what I think is a very difficult question … you are working to bring data from other agencies or you have… you’ve broadened their mission and you are bringing together data from many agencies and allowing researchers in and outside of government to access the data that you’ve brought together. What are the ways that you could expand those efforts? Um, and I’m not suggesting that we talk about a single statistical agency across government, but how could there be more of a coordination or maybe a virtual one statistical agency where census is playing a coordinating role, or what kinds of movements in that direction should we think about?… What are the barriers tomoving toward more coordination between the statistical agencies?”
The response at 1:29 from the CEP:
“… different rules that are attached to data that are sourced from different agencies or different levels of, you know, whether it’s federal or state… that if there was broad agreement in, that, you know, if there was one law that prosc– had the confidentiality protections for broad classes of data, as opposed to, you know, here’s data with pii on it that’s collected from SSA, here’s data with pii on it that’s collected from the IRS; here’s data with pii on it that’s collected from a state; versus from a statistical agency– if data with pii on it was treated the same, you know I think that would permit, you know, organizations that werecollecting pii-laden data for different purposes to make those data available more easily. Now, that’s probably a pretty heavy lift… do this in sort of baby steps as opposed to ripping the band aid. I think ripping the band-aid would probably not fly.”
So, months ago, Ryan’s CEP admitted that what it was doing would be considered unacceptable, so unacceptable that it “would probably not fly” so they ought to carefully trick the American people by moving toward such a centralized database in “baby steps”.
Congress is about to vote to rip off American privacy rights.
Pro-citizen-tracking Republicans and data-desperate researchers are making a bet that the American people are so asleep or confused or unconcerned, that we will say nothing while they make the theft of individual privacy justified, under new laws.
The CEP and Paul Ryan are undoubtedly good folks with research-driven intentions, butno good intention can supercede the vital importance of this basic American right: to keep personal privacy– to not be tracked, as an innocent citizen, without reason or warrant, by the government.
If you don’t know what to say, use this simple truth: that without individuals’ informed consent, it is theft to collect and store an innocent citizen’s personally identifiable information. If an individual does this to another individual, it’s punishably wrong; if a government does it to individuals, even after voting itself into justification of the act, it’s still wrong.
Is anyone honestly opposed to having students govern and own their own private data? Are reputable organizations openly, actively working around systems to get hold of individual students’ data?
Yes. There are so many that it’s overwhelming to learn. The biggest organizations that you can think of, both political and corporate, are either looking away from scary privacy issues, or are actively engaged in promoting the end of student data privacy for reasons either research-based or greed-based (or both).
Trendy, probably well-meaning power brokers profit hugely from data sharing –done without the informed consent of students and parents. Most of them probably aren’t thinking through what they are doing, nor of its effects on individual freedom. Many of the richest and most powerful of them (even Betsy DeVos herself) were here in Salt Lake City last week at the Global Silicon Valley convention; attendance there cost $2,795 per person, which is a clue to how exclusionary the conspiracy of greed really is and how it fears pushback from teachers and parents and lovers of liberty. That is a conspiracy of greed against local control.
I am not fighting greed. I believe in capitalism even with its greedy warts, because capitalism represents freedom.
It’s piracy that I balk at. And the student data-mining madness is absolute piracy. Parents, students and teachers were never asked for consent prior to having their data mined by the schools or the schools’ agents. In some cases, that data is already being held against them.
How can this be happening? Is it really happening? Can we comprehend it?
To make it simple, look at this notification of inspection. It seems snoopy, yet reasonable. I found it in my suitcase when I came home recently from San Francisco.
Think about it.
Did you as a student, a parent, or a teacher, ever receive a “NOTICE OF INSPECTION”?
No! Of course not. You are being given less respect than a suitcase. Children are being scrutinized for academic, social and psychological data, their data saved in State Longitudinal Database Systems and in third party corporate data systems, without informed consent and without notice. That is snoopy –and unreasonable.
“Partnershipping” education-data piracy is happening rampantly. It includes all the states who took the federal bribe and then created a student stalking system known as the State Longitudinal Database System (SLDS). The data piracy includes the U.S. Department of Education (see its EdFacts Data Exchange and its Datapalooza conferences and its official student-data partnership with private groups such as the Council of Chief State School Officers and National Governors Association.) The data piracy party includes the U.S. Chamber of Commerce –and the United Nations. (See the U.N. Data Revolution) The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is in. (Just see how much money Gates gives to, and earns from, this movement.) The federal Commission on Evidence Based Policy, the Data Quality Campaign, American Institutes for Research, the United Nations’ Data Revolution Initiative, Pearson, Microsoft, and Jeb Bush’s Foundation are in. Betsy DeVos does nothing, nothing to stop it. Nothing.
Lest we believe that it’s all bad guys, far away, realize that the Goliaths of data piracy also includes locals: the Utah Data Alliance, Utah’s Prosperity 2020, The Utah Chamber of Commerce, the University of Utah’s K-12 research database (SLDS) and many Utah corporations.
These groups are financially thriving financially from the common use of Common Educational Data Standards (CEDS) and Common Core academic standards, which go hand in hand. They also thrive on the lack of proper protections over student data privacy, although many of them give loud and proud lip service to caring about student data privacy.
Hearing these groups claim commitment to student privacy (after having listened to the CEP‘s meetings, or after having seen what the USDOE did to shred protective FERPA law) is like hearing a boat captain boast about the safety of his vessel to passengers who have been handed sandwiches instead of life vests. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, look into the federal Commission on Evidence Based Policy (CEP) for starters.
It’s pretty fascinating, but inspiring at the same time, to see that some people are thinking through all of this: a group of smart, conservative Republicans and smart, progressive Democrats are joining forces because they see student data privacy being of extreme, non-negotiable importance. The non-bought, pro-privacy coalition, called The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, has just released its Parent Toolkit for Student Privacy, which it calls “a practical guide for protecting your child’s sensitive school data from snoops, hackers, and marketers”.
I’m not anti-data or anti-progress. Invention and science are wonders! I balk at, and hope others will consider, the idea that personal privacy of children is being taken without their consent and without their parents’ consent, for cash.
The conspiracy of greed does not want to talk about that.
It just wants to keep collecting the golden eggs.
It’s up to individual parents to care and to act, to protect student data privacy. State school systems are not going to do it; they are taking huge grants from the feds, on an ongoing basis, to beef up the “robust data systems” instead.
According to its vision document entitled “American Revolution 2.0”, the pro-Common Core investment group GSV Advisors is plotting a lucrative U.S. “revolution” (GSV’s own words) that will include pushing the school choice movement and abolishing locally elected school boards. GSV is co-hosting its huge ed-tech summit in Utah in May with Arizona State University.
The very fact that a financial institution has a 27-point business plan that involves removing local control in education –and that it’s promoting that vision to a national elite-only audience ($2,795 ticket) right here in Utah, in a few weeks –is very unnerving. How many voters who want to preserve local control can afford a $2,795 ticket?
Look at page 302 of the GSV vision document if you think I am inventing this madness about eliminating local control.
GSV lists a “Strategic Battle Plan” for fifteen years, with 27 steps to that plan. First of the twenty-seven steps is “Common Core”. Fifth is “No Child Left Behind 2.0” (which was ESSA). Twenty-first is “Eliminate Locally Elected School Boards”. Read. Share it with your ed-tech friends.
This vision feels as creepy as it feels greedy. Remember, this is coming from a financial investment company, but the document’s title is “American Revolution 2.0” –and in its conclusion, it poses in the language of the founding fathers, pretending to care about, or to even comprehend, liberty:
“A System whose characteristics are thus marked by every example which may be defined a failure, is unfit to be the platform of the knowledge citizens of the future….We, therefore, the Representatives of Education Innovators of the United States of America, solemnly publish and declare, that our students ought to have the chance to succeed, that they have access to the best learning technologies, and that as free and independent learners, have the full power to choose their path to success in life. And for the support of this Declaration, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
Using the language of our noble founding fathers to promote this greedy, $elfish, anti-liberty agenda –brazenly pretending to do it for the cause of liberty –is sickening to me.
I would never, ever, ever invest in any of these networks of companies that profit from the destruction of local control of education. Boycott Pearson, Knewton, Aspen, Lumina, and the countless, countless ed-tech groups that are in this collusion against local liberty. Don’t use CEDS common data standards for education. Don’t profit from the thieves of liberty. Walk away.
I am certain that the average person working for Pearson or Gates or Aspen or Microsoft or Lumina may have no idea that he/she is daily empowering a devastating collusion against local liberty in U.S. education, yet the fact remains that this is exactly what’s happening.
And Utah friends, it’s happening under your noses.
In a few weeks, in May 2017, international big names in the ed-tech world will convene in Salt Lake City at GSV’s Ed-Tech Summit with ASU.
The average person can’t go. It costs $2,795 per person, just to walk in the front door of the two day conference.
The very long list of summit speakers includes former Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan and GSV founder Deborah Quazzo, who is listed as “a prolific angel investor” who leverages “technology in the global $4.9 trillion education and talent technology sectors.”
A prolific angel investor? I’m not sure what that means. I do know that Quazzo is the co-author of the GSV document “American Revolution 2.0” that aims to eliminate locally elected school boards.
Here she is, onstage with Bill Gates at last year’s summit.
Deborah Quattro and GSV! Our ed-tech industry is looking to these for guidance?! It makes me quake to think that hundreds of ed-tech leaders will listen to her, to Arne and to the others. Will they see the GSV vision document as some sort of blueprint, recklessly forgetting the God-given Constitutional rights and duties of local control of education? Such rights go away when unelected businesswomen, philanthropists and governments “partner” behind the backs of voters and take over what used to be real learning, the kind that happened between one teacher and her students. The new ed-tech allows extremists’ philosophies, dumped from socialist think tanks through massive online curricula, to fill student devices and minds, thinly disguised as pedagogy.
The list of sponsoring companies at Salt Lake City’s upcoming GSV summit? I bet you can already guess. These are the not-so-secret combinations: Gates. Lumina. The Center for Education Reform. National Geographic. USAFunds. Amazon. Microsoft. Et cetera.
It isn’t every day that one of the original #StopCommonCore moms runs for U.S. Congress.
America, please support this mom; if every one who read this donated even five or ten dollars, that would buy many thousands of signs or mailings for Sheri Few’s important, but financially limited campaign.
The article below is a guest post by Sheri Few.
I want to thank Christel for the opportunity to explain why I am running for Congress and why my election is so important for those of us concerned about education in America today.
All my children attended public schools and I could see firsthand the problems in education, from proposed standards for sexuality education to anti-American and pro-Communist propaganda in geography and history books. I decided to get active and fight for change.
I formed South Carolina Parents Involved in Education (SCPIE) in 2000 and began a newsletter informing parents and taxpayers about public education instruction problems, from teaching children they evolved from apes to teaching young children to put condoms on bananas, to anti-Christian/anti-American rhetoric.
Like many of you, I’ve been attending Donna Hearne’s Educational Policy Conference in St. Louis for many years, where I’ve learned so much more about the intentional agenda in public schools to transform our country’s government through the minds of our children – hearing all along about Common Core forerunners: Goals 2000, Outcome-based Education, School-to-Work, and No Child Left Behind.
Around the same time, I became politically active; joined my local Republican Party and was soon the Chairman and member of the State GOP Executive Committee. This provided a platform for the changes I saw necessary in public education. The work of SCPIE writing newsletters turned to educating lawmakers and advocating for and against education policy. I also became active in the Tea Party movement.
Although I knew what was being taught, I mistakenly left my children in public schools, thinking I would no longer have a voice if I withdrew them to homeschool. Now, to my chagrin, my oldest son has rejected his Christian faith because of what he learned in public schools. He also believes the climate change hoax and has adopted many other liberal philosophies. I now never recommend that anyone put their children in public schools.
Six years ago, Jane Robbins from the American Principles Project approached me to help expose the Common Core Standards in South Carolina.
I created a PowerPoint and began traveling my state, making presentations to audiences in nearly every county about the problems with Common Core and the data-mining tests.
Three years of work resulted in the bi-partisan, unanimous passage of a legislation rescinding our agreement with the Smarter Balanced Testing Consortium and a requirement for the State Department of Education to rewrite the English and Math standards.
In 2014, I ran in the Republican Primary for State Superintendent of Education in a field of nine candidates. narrowly missing the runoff by less than 2 points (in South Carolina, if one candidate does not receive 50 percent plus one, the top two vote-getters enter a runoff election).
The new Superintendent was charged with rewriting the English and Math standards, but to no one’s surprise, my state ended up with Common Core rebranded as South Carolina College and Career Ready Standards.
Even our state’s Education Oversight Committee did a comparison and found the standards to be 91 percent aligned to Common Core and they would have been more like 98 percent aligned if there hadn’t been a separate law passed the year prior mandating the return to memorization of Math facts and cursive writing.
SCPIE expanded in 2015 into a national organization adding a Leadership Team of colleagues from around the country who led the fight against Common Core in their state.
We had conference calls twice a month, and as we shared our very similar experiences with Common Core, we agreed that the problems originated with and are perpetuated by the federal government, so we set our goal to end the U.S. Department of Education and all federal education mandates.
Our movement grew quickly and thirty state chapters have been created, coupled with an exemplary Advisory Board of national leaders.
President Trump’s decision to name my Congressman, Mick Mulvaney, to lead the Office of Management and Budget, created a vacancy for his seat. I prayed about running, talked about it with my husband, made several calls to people in the District who supported my run for State Superintendent of Education, and talked to national Common Core leaders about a possible run.
Everyone I spoke with agreed that there is no one in the U.S. Congress that fully understands the problems in public education. I also analyzed the returns from my 2014 Superintendent’s race and found that I had finished FIRST in the Fifth District, winning by more than 3,000 votes over my eight competitors.
I announced my candidacy in the Republican Primary for South Carolina’s 5th Congressional District in mid-January, and as of this writing, there are seven other Republicans who have filed with the Federal Election Commission.
This is where I stand out from my opponents in this very conservative district that President Trump won by nearly twenty points. Most are “establishment” Republicans who have raised taxes, supported Common Core or sat silent on issues of political correctness.
And none of the others in this race have a clue about education policy and the ongoing problems with Common Core and the data-mining tests that are used to enforce the standards.
I am writing my story to urge you to help me win this election and be our voice in Congress.
I am determined to win and am working 24/7 to do all I can to make that happen, but I need to raise a lot of cash to get my message out to this sprawling district. Several of my opponents are wealthy and can self-fund their campaign, but I am just a mom activist who has volunteered and spent personal resources most of my adult life to fight for the children of this country and to maintain our free Constitutional Republic.
I took a trip to D.C. recently to meet with political action committees, hoping to gain endorsements and financial support. Many of them said they will see how much money I can raise on my own first, and they will be looking at the financial disclosures due the end of this month to gauge who they might support.
I talked to them about the importance of our issue and explained that what is being taught in public schools is fundamental to many of the problems our country faces politically. I explained the intentional agenda to change our form of government through the liberal indoctrination of our country’s children and pointed to the evidence of the fact that most young Americans wanted the self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders for their President. We must stop allowing our tax dollars to fund this agenda.
Please help this mom activist go to Washington D.C. to be our voice. Seize the moment with me while we have a Republican-led Congress, and a bold president who does what he said he would do. Time is of the essence if we are to preserve our Constitutional Republic. I need your help.
Please donate any amount to my campaign, but please give a lot of thought to contributing $250 or more right away, so I can list your name on my FEC report as one of my strongest supporters. Alternatively, would you consider a weekly pledge of $10, $20, $50 or $100 for the remaining nine weeks of the campaign?
Many of you have never contributed to a candidate before. I hope you will consider making your first contribution to help me win this seat.
This election is too important to lose, because with President Trump’s election and Republican majorities in the House and Senate, it’s time to seize the moment and work as aggressively as possible to move our conservative agenda as fast and as far as we can.
I’m planning to run an aggressive campaign, and I have no fear of calling out my opponents for enabling those who are taking away our freedoms. Too many conservatives lose elections because they are afraid to stand up when the left attacks. I welcome it.
I am working twelve to sixteen hours a day, making calls to raise money, speaking at events and issuing press statements, because I know I can win this race. I need your help and support from others across America who are concerned about our nation’s future. Please do what you can today.
Thank you for taking the time to read this, for considering my candidacy, and for all the work you do to take back our schools.
The Federal Register is collecting comments on and International Early Learning Study (IELS) that’s scheduled to be conducted next year. The deadline for these comments is midnight tonight, February 13, 2017! Here’s the link:
The IELS is a proposed international study that seeks to collect data on kindergarteners about their academic competencies. This might sound harmless, but the most problematic aspect of this study is the effort to collect data on the children’s SEL: “social-emotional skills.” This opens the door to invasive analysis of the students’ home life and personal beliefs. It turns untrained and already overworked teachers into psychoanalysts.
Jonas Himmelstrand, Phyllis Schafly, Mireja Institute and many others have published studies about the lack of benefit and the terrible potential harms that early childhood education can do.
Student data collection also undermines parental authority and citizen privacy.
Please send a brief comment to oppose this study — today.
Below is a longer comment, submitted to the Federal Register’s call for comments by Joan Landes, a Utah clinical mental health counselor. She submitted these comments to the Federal Register’s comment site this week and gave permission to publish them here.
I am a Master’s Level Clinical Mental Health Counselor, fully licensed in my state to assess, diagnose and treat emotional and cognitive problems in individuals, couples and families. I have served as a Mental Health Counselor to treat stress, anxiety, suicidality and depression in students grade 1-12 in a charter school during school hours. I currently work in a residential treatment center for troubled teen girls. I also have a private practice which includes children and adolescents. I have served as the church leader for hundreds of youth over the last 30 years. I have taught homeschool, private school and charter schools. Finally, I have seven children of my own who are grown except one daughter in seventh grade. I think you could say I am an expert of children — what they need to be happy and how things can go terribly wrong. Along with academic training, I have spent my life in the trenches dedicated to the emotional and intellectual growth of children.
Governments should not abrogate the rights of parents to rear their children without significant interference from bureaucrats. Governments should not exploit schools as data-sweat shops, and abuse children as unpaid fodder for Big Data. If Governments and corporations adhered to minimally ethical practices, all children would be compensated a living wage ($25.00 per hour) for the data they are working to provide for the benefit of entities who will profit from the labors of these small children. Since this compensation has never been discussed, it will be no surprise that every other ethical protection for vulnerable children and their data will be violated in the rush to profit from the involuntary servitude of the young.
If entities are interested in gleaning data from children the following protections MUST be required:
1. The entire research project must pass review by a research ethics review board. 2. Parental notification and review is required of all assessments prior to the administration. 3. No surveys, questions or assessment in violation of United States Code, Title 20 1232h which prohibits (among other things), questions eliciting responses regarding parental beliefs, income, sexual mores etc. 4. All assessments to be previously researched and normed on the appropriate population and will meet superior criterion validity and reliability standards. 5. All assessments to be administered by licensed mental health professionals on an individual basis. 6. All assessments to take less than 1% of the child’s learning time per day so as to limit the child’s stressors. 7. All assessments to be interpreted by fully licensed mental health experts and research psychologists. 8. All data to be disaggregated at every point with no personally identifying information attached. 9. All children will be compensated a living wage ($25.00 per hour) for parts of every hour they are subjected to the assessments.
Without these protections in place, the object of the data accumulation becomes obvious to all who understand such things, and this purpose is absolutely unacceptable to those who hold even a shred of ethical integrity.
linked at Florida’s Stop Common Core Coalition here.
January 9, 2017
Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee
428 Senate Dirksen Office Building, Washington, DC 20510
Dear Chairman Alexander, Ranking Member Murray, and Members of the Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions Committee,
We, the undersigned leaders of a nationwide coalition of grassroots parent groups, wish to raise significant concerns about Secretary-designate Betsy DeVos, and request that you ask her these questions about education, standards, privacy and autonomy issues:
1) We understand that your website statement right after your appointment that you are “not a supporter – period” of Common Core was meant to reassure activists that you oppose the standards and will honor Mr. Trump’s promise to get rid of Common Core.
Please list your efforts during your extensive period of education activism and philanthropy to fight the implementation of the standards.
2) In your November 23 website statement you mention “high standards,” and in the Trump Transition Team readout of your November 19th meeting with the president-elect, you reportedly discussed “higher national standards.”
Please explain how this is different from Common Core. Also, please justify this stand in light of the lack of constitutional and statutory authority for the federal government to involve itself in standards, and in light of Mr. Trump’s promise to stop Common Core, make education local, and scale back or abolish the U.S. Department of Education.
3) Would you please reconcile your website statement that you are “not a supporter – period” of Common Core with your record of education advocacy in Michigan and elsewhere – specifically, when you have, either individually or through your organizations (especially the Great Lakes Education Project (GLEP) that you founded and chaired, and of which your family foundation is still the majority funder):
Been described as supporting Common Core by Tonya Allen of the Skillman Foundation in the Detroit News?
Actively worked to block a bill that would have repealed and replaced Michigan’s Common Core standards with the Massachusetts standards, arguably the best in the nation?
Actively lobbied for continued implementation of Common Core in Michigan?
Financially supported pro-Common Core candidates in Michigan?
Funded Alabama pro-Common Core state school board candidates?
Threatened the grassroots parent organization Stop Common Core in Michigan with legal action for showing the link between GLEP endorsement and Common Core support?
4) The Indiana voucher law that you and your organization, the American Federation for Children (AFC), strongly supported and funded requires voucher recipient schools to administer the public school Common Core-aligned tests and submit to the grading system based on those same Common Core-aligned tests. The tests determine what is taught, which means that this law is imposing Common Core on private schools. Indiana “is the secondworst in the country on infringing on private school autonomy” according to the Center for Education Reform because of that and other onerous requirements, and the state received an F grade on the Education Liberty Watch School Choice Freedom Grading Scale.
Do you support imposing public-school standards, curriculum and tests on private and or home schools?
5) Through Excel in Ed and the American Federation for Children, you have influenced legislation that has made Florida a “leader” in school choice, yet the majority of students, especially those in rural areas, in states like Florida, still chooses to attend traditional public schools. Public school advocates in Florida complain that expanded school choice has negatively affected their traditional public schools, even in previously high performing districts.
As Secretary of Education, how will you support the rights of parents and communities whose first choice is their community’s traditional public school?
6) You and AFC have been strong supporters of federal Title I portability. As Secretary of Education, would you require the same public school, Common Core tests and the rest of the federal regulations for private schools under a Title I portability program as Jeb Bush recommended for Mitt Romney in 2012 (p. 24)? If yes, please cite the constitutional authority for the federal government to be involved in regulating schools, including private schools, and explain how this policy squares with Mr. Trump’s promise to reduce the federal education footprint.
7) The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) requires secretarial approval of state education plans for standards, tests and accountability. Will you support state sovereignty by approving the state plans in line with Mr. Trump’s vision of decreasing the federal role in education, or will you exercise federal control by secretarial veto power over these plans?
8) The Philanthropy Roundtable group that you chaired published a report on charter schools, but did not mention the Hillsdale classical charter schools, even though they are in your home state of Michigan and Hillsdale is nationally renowned for its classical and constitutional teaching and for not taking federal funding. Have you or any of your organizations done anything substantive to support the Hillsdale model aside from a few brief mentions on your websites? If not, do you want all charter schools in Michigan and elsewhere to only teach Common Core-aligned standards, curriculum and tests?
9) During the primary campaign, President-elect Trump indicated that he strongly supported student privacy by closing the loopholes in the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), saying the following to a parent activist:
I would close all of it,” Trump replied. “You have to have privacy. You have to have privacy. So I’d close all of it. But, most of all, I’d get everything out of Washington, ‘cause that’s where it’s all emanating from.
Will you commit to reversing the Obama administration’s regulatory gutting of FERPA and to updating that statute to better protect student privacy in the digital age?
10) We are sure you are aware of serious parental concerns about corporate collection and mining of highly sensitive student data through digital platforms, without parental knowledge or consent. But the Philanthropy Roundtable, which you chaired, published a report called Blended Learning: A Wise Giver’s Guide to Supporting Tech-assisted Teaching that lauds the Dream Box software that “records 50,000 data points per student per hour” and does not contain a single use of the words “privacy,” “transparency” [as in who receives that data and how it is used to make life-changing decision for children], or “consent.”
Will you continue to promote the corporate data-mining efforts of enterprises such as Dream Box and Knewton, whose CEO bragged about collecting “5-10 million data points per user per day,” described in your organization’s report?
11) Related to Questions 9 and 10 above, there is currently a federal commission, the Commission on Evidence-based Policymaking, which is discussing lifting the federal prohibition on the creation of a student unit-record system. If that prohibition is removed, the federal government would be allowed to maintain a database linking student data from preschool through the workforce. That idea is strongly opposed by parent groups and privacy organizations.
Will you commit to protecting student privacy by recommending to the Commission on EvidenceBased Policymaking that this prohibition be left in place?
12) As outlined in a letter from Liberty Counsel that was co-signed by dozens of parent groups across the nation, the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) plans to add subjective, invasive, illegal, and unconstitutional survey or test mindset questions to the 2017 administration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
What will you do to rein in NAGB and protect the psychological privacy and freedom of conscience of American students?
13) Through commissions, programs, federally funded groups, the newly passed Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the proposed Strengthening Education Through Research Act, and other entities, there has been an explosion of effort to expand invasive, subjective social emotional learning (SEL) standards, curricula and assessment.
What is your view of SEL and what will you do to protect student psychological privacy and freedom of conscience?
Thank you for your willingness to hear and address the concerns of hundreds of thousands of parents across this nation.
Should you need any further detail on any of these issues, I am acting as point of contact for this coalition.
Karen R. Effrem, MD President – Education Liberty Watch
In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck stole chickens. Huck’s father had taught him how to stomach chicken theft.
That reminds me of the way the federal CEP (Commission on Evidence Based Policy) stomachs human data theft. Huck said:
… Pap always said, take a chicken when you get a chance, because if you don’t want him yourself you can easy find somebody that does, and a good deed ain’t ever forgot. I never see pap when he didn’t want the chicken himself, but that is what he used to say, anyway.
Just as the Finn thieves lied to themselves, saying that they might do society a favor while they did themselves a favor, stealing chickens, so ed reformers and CEP data gatherers lie to themselves and to the public. After all, the CEP doesn’t do its own thieving; why should it judge or disclose the immoral origins of the data?
CEP simply says that it wants to centrally house data (that’s previously been taken, without permission from citizens, by school State Longitudinal Database Systems and by other entities.) CEP members wring their hands over the inconvenience they have endured, not fully being able to access all the pii. So also say the elite researchers and Gates-linked business people testifying at CEP’s public hearings.
Maybe you didn’t know that citizens’ data is being taken without our permission.
Think: when did you receive a permission slip from the school district, or from the state, asking you to sign away all student academic and nonacademic data for the rest of your child’s life? Never.
YetSLDS systems do track a child for life. That’s what “longitudinal” means: through time. They call it P-20W. That means preschool through grade 20 and Workforce. Life.
Well, now you know. And we can’t opt out of the data theft system. I tried. The biggest, most vibrant source of citizen data is our public school system, and the government is unwilling to stop stealing from us in this way.
I do not use the word “stealing” lightly, nor am I exaggerating. Personal data is literally being confiscated without informed consent or permission of any kind, via school databases linked with many state agencies. Every digital record created by students, teachers, counselors, school nurses or administrators can be stored (and shared) from there.
No one seems to notice these articles about stolen pii.
And on it goes. Data points are taken and taken and taken –about both academic and nonacademic lives. Schools feed aggregate data and pii into federally-created “State Longitudinal Database Systems” (SLDS). Because SLDS systems use common educational data standards (CEDS) that the federal-corporate partners created, that data is portable and re-shareable (or re-stealable).
Many people believe that federal FERPA privacy laws protect the data, but it doesn’t. It used to. The Department of Education shredded the protective parts of FERPA several years ago. What’s actually protecting student privacy right now is the territorial unwillingness of agencies to share all data.
But the CEP is out to change that.
CEP will lead you to believe that it’s all about benefiting society. But that’s a side show, because data is the new gold. Everyone wants the data!
Sadly, individuals aren’t guarding this irreplaceable gold; most people aren’t aware that this pii is so valuable, that it’s being taken –and that it’s THEIRS.
Meanwhile, the elite at the CEP speak about data as if it’s oxygen, free for all, belonging to all. It makes sense from their (bottom line) point of view; governments and ed vendors have financially benefited from SLDS’s taking students’ data since about 2009, when SLDS databases were installed in every state by federal grants, and when federal FERPA changes allowed almost anyone access, for supposed research purposes.
Luckily, there’s so much territorialism by the various holders of the taken data that it hasn’t yet been centrally housed all in one spot. The federal EdFacts Data Exchange has some data. Each state’s SLDS has tons of data. Universities, hospitals, corporations, criminal justice agencies, and other organizations have other caches of pii. But the elite (the federal government, globalists, corporate elite, and some scientists) are desperate to have one national “clearinghouse” so that they can see and use our data to their own designs. They speak a smooth line in each of their CEP hearings. But don’t forget: that data is your life. Yours. Not theirs.
There was a recent three hour conversation that you most likely missed last week. Held in Chicago, this “public” hearing of the federal Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking (CEP) discussed what should be done with the pii (personally identifiable information) that federal agencies, state agencies, counties, school systems, hospitals, criminal justice systems, colleges and other organizations have collected. They’ve been discussing this all year long.
I picture Pap with a crate of stolen chickens. I picture his pirating friends with their own crates nearby. I think there might even be a few crate-holders who ethically came by their chickens, but the federal Chicken Evidence Policy says that all chickens go in one central pen, on an ongoing basis, so all the elite can access the chickens conveniently– conveniently for everyone except the chickens and their owners.
When you listen to their hearings, you find that the federal CEP is leaning toward creating a federal clearinghouse where every individual’s data can be centrally managed. CEP is also hoping to overturn the federal ban on unit-record identifiers.
Welcome to the real live prequel to Orwell’s 1984.
Do I sound calm? I’m not. This makes me almost unspeakably angry.
While trusting parents, teachers, school administrators and students are being used as pawns in the great data-gathering heist, arrogant members of Congress, of science, of CEP, of big data, are assuming authority over MY life and yours in the form of our personally identifiable data. And who is stopping them?
Despite a huge number of public comments that told the CEP that Americans want the CEP to get its hands off our data, the CEP moves ahead at a steady pace. And why not? We can never un-elect this appointed group that Congress created less than a year ago. What motivation would CEP have to actually incorporate the public comments?
As the Missouri Education Watchdog pointed out in October, there was only one man in America who seemed to care about protecting citizen privacy at that month’s hearing. Mr. Emmett McGroarty testified to the CEP that what they were doing was wrong. Similarly, at last week’s January 5 CEP hearing, there was only one woman who spoke ethically about children’s data privacy rights. She did a magnificent job. Everyone else testified that data should be gathered in one place, or possibly in a few places; and none of the others mentioned permission or informed consent. I took pages and pages of notes, since the meeting was only public in the sense that I could listen in to it on my phone.
It wasn’t filmed. It wasn’t truly public. It’s aiming to fly under the radar because it’s theft.
Huck Finn’s father’s plan to later share the stolen chickens didn’t make the chickens less stolen. Other people’s information doesn’t suddenly become your “scientific research” or your “evidence” for “evidence-based policymaking” just because Congress created a commission and appointed you to chat about it.
Shame on the CEP. Shame on all who turn a blind eye to this evil, open assault on the basic freedom of personal privacy.
Back in the spring, there was a bill called the Countering Information Warfare Act of 2016. It didn’t pass then, but its intent, just this month, did, buried inside another bill called the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017 (NDAA). Here’s the NDAA full, overwhelming text: https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/4909/text
I don’t know how many want to read the 1,500+ page monster. So here are a few highlights.
The new center will “counter propaganda and disinformation” as defined by the center.
The new center will “track andevaluate counterfactual narratives”.
The new center will identify “emerging trends” in “disinformation,” including “information obtained from print, broadcast, online and social media.”
The new center will use “covert or clandestine special operators and agents to influence targeted populations”.
The new center has 10 million dollars to pay select members of academia and journalism to “proactively promote fact-based narratives and policies,” and “to expose and refute foreign misinformation and disinformation,” –as defined by the center.
The new center will pick winners and losers in academia and politics: “The Center is authorized to provide grants or contracts of financial support to civil society groups, journalists, nongovernmental organizations, federally-funded research and development centers, private companies, or academic institutions.”
The new center will compile and evaluate information that has been gathered by those whom the center funds.
How can they even pretend that this is okay? Who gets funded? Who gets heard?
Imagine: one journalist will write a narrative on Israel that recommends aid to the Jews and another will write another, recommending aid to the Muslims; whose version is going to be funded? One radio station says that the U.N. shouldn’t be collecting global education data without the consent of the people, while another one says it should. Who’s shut down?
How does “countering information warfare” differ from countering free speech? The newly created Center for “Global Engagement” (what a misnamed center) gets to pick– and to pay– its winners in the intellectual and moral debates of journalism, academia, religion and politics.
On what basis will this center determine liars from truth-tellers? Where’s the voting voice in deciding what information should be countered? American founders enshrined free speech as a cornerstone of the USA because no mortal entity should be designated as the enforceable-by-law, undebated truth source. Until December 2016, no such entity existed in our country.
And the U.S. Congress never even got an opportunity to discuss, argue or even vote specifically on this new “Global Engagement” information-countering center. It was sandwiched. That was by design; this wouldn’t have passed in an open atmosphere of debate, and its creators knew it.
In the same manner that (as Senator Lee explained) the pushers of ESSA passed ESSA, federal NDAA also passed: without proper debate, without any news coverage prior to passing into federal law.
New American Magazine reported that it was buried “deep inside the 1,576-page National Defense Authorization Act… Because NDAA funds the military and is considered ‘must pass’ by lawmakers… politicians often sneak outlandish schemes into NDAA”.
The portion of NDAA that I’m reading is Section 1259C. It establishes the “Global Engagement Center” for six reasons (see below) with nine functions (see below) and one appointed person (not elected/not removable) as “coordinator,” of the many “detailees” and appointees.
The federal reasons for the ten million dollar center I will now paste in full. Please don’t be misled or overly reassured by the bill’s frequent use of the term “foreign”. This applies to absolutely everyone, foreign and domestic. (The military is supposed to seek enemies both foreign and domestic, and it does.)
Why was the Center established?
“The purposes of the Center are—
(1) to lead and coordinate the compilation and examination of information on foreign government information warfare efforts monitored and integrated by the appropriate interagency entities with responsibility for such information, including information provided by recipients of information access fund grants awarded under subsection (f) and other sources;
(2) to establish a framework for the integration of critical data and analysis provided by the appropriate interagency entities with responsibility for such information on foreign propaganda and disinformation efforts into the development of national strategy;
(3) to develop, plan, and synchronize, in coordination with the Secretary of Defense, and the heads of other relevant Federal departments and agencies, whole-of-government initiatives to expose and counter foreign propaganda and disinformation directed against United States national security interests and proactively advance fact-based narratives that support United States allies and interests;
(4) to demonstrate new technologies, methodologies and concepts relevant to the missions of the Center that can be transitioned to other departments or agencies of the United States Government, foreign partners or allies, or other nongovernmental entities;
(5) to establish cooperative or liaison relationships with foreign partners and allies in consultation with interagency entities with responsibility for such activities, and other entities, such as academia, nongovernmental organizations, and the private sector; and
(6) to identify shortfalls in United States capabilities in any areas relevant to the United States Government’s mission, and recommend necessary enhancements or changes.
The federal center’s functions I will now paste in full. Remember that this law applies to anyone seen as a potential enemy, foreign or domestic.”
What will the Center do?
“The Center shall carry out the following functions:
(1) Integrating interagency and international efforts to track andevaluate counterfactual narratives abroad that threaten the national security interests of the United States and United States allies.
(2) Integrating, and analyzing relevant information, data, analysis, and analytics from United States Government agencies, allied nations, think tanks, academic institutions, civil society groups, and other nongovernmental organizations.
(3) Developing and disseminating fact-based narratives and analysis to counter propaganda and disinformation directed at United States allies and partners.
(4) Identifying current and emerging trends in foreign propaganda and disinformation based on the information provided by the appropriate interagency entities with responsibility for such information, including information obtained from print, broadcast, online and social media, support for third-party outlets such as think tanks, political parties, and nongovernmental organizations, and the use of covert or clandestine special operators and agents to influence targeted populations and governments in order to coordinate and shape the development of tactics, techniques, and procedures to expose and refute foreign misinformation and disinformation and proactively promote fact-based narratives and policies to audiences outside the United States.
(5) Facilitating the use of a wide range of technologies and techniques by sharing expertise among agencies, seeking expertise from external sources, and implementing best practices.
(6) Identifying gaps in United States capabilities in areas relevant to the Center’s mission and recommending necessary enhancements or changes.
(7) Identifying the countries and populations most susceptible to foreign government propaganda and disinformation based on information provided by appropriate interagency entities.
(8) Administering the information access fund established pursuant to subsection (f).
(9) Coordinating with allied and partner nations, particularly those frequently targeted by foreign disinformation operations, and international organizations and entities such as the NATO Center of Excellence on Strategic Communications, the European Endowment for Democracy, and the European External Action Service Task Force on Strategic Communications, in order to amplify the Center’s efforts and avoid duplication.”
I’m thinking about the past five years in this ed reform information war. Members of the business-political-edu elite dismissed the voices who opposed the Common Core Initiative, calling us “misinformed” despite every evidence and document we shared. The elite posed as purveyors of truth about Common Core, without providing any documentation for their “facts”.
Now that Americans have generally sided with those who used to be called “misinformed,” politicians are hiding their support of it with relabels, pretending that Common Core does not exist any more, or saying that they oppose it, even if by their past actions (Betsy DeVos) we see that they do not.
What if the elite could have silenced the anti-common-core opposition via a federal countering-misinformation center? Under such a federal center, the actual truth– that the Common Core Initiative harms teacher autonomy, student privacy, and classical education– would never had become widespread because it would have been “misinformation” countered by the global engagement center.
If you have read 1984 by George Orwell, remember the dystopian government’s “Ministry of Truth” that controlled political literature, telescreens, and more. The protagonist, Winston, worked as a sort of editor at the Ministry of Truth, falsifying historical facts and news daily, as he was commanded to do. If the Ministry of Truth said that 2 + 2 = 5, then it did.
The hopeful thing keeping the newly created Global Engagement Center of the U.S. Government from behaving exactly like Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, is the spine of We, the People. Orwell wrote, in 1984, that “the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies.” I think America is ready to rise up and shake off the flies.
I am so annoyed. Those words actually came out of the mouth of the CEP Commission leader: “Ripping the Band-Aid (of data privacy and control) probably would not fly.” But pulling it off using (in his words) “baby steps” is the CEP’s plan, he said in the video of yesterday’s meeting.
Four-hour federal meetings posted on YouTube are not fun to watch. These arrogant –and, let me remind you, unelected CEP members, who we cannot possibly fire (they’re appointed) –spout blah-blah-blah that can consistently be summarized as something like: “… I feel great about the way we persuade the elite and rob Americans of privacy –without widespread knowledge and completely without consent.”
Wait: Before I say one more word: TOMORROW, 12-14-16, is the deadline for public input on privacy v. fed authority over data —here’s the comment link.
Please comment, even if all you write is something very short and very simple: “I believe in informed consent. I oppose non-consensual data mining. Stop this madness.” Do it, please: https://www.regulations.gov/docket?D=USBC-2016-0003
You and I both suspect that zero consideration will be taken by the CEP of the comments from the public. Do it anyway. Don’t let them think nobody sees or opposes this assault on personal data privacy. And yes, it’s about disaggregated data. See the quotes below, repeatedly speaking about PII. (Personally Identifiable Information as defined in federal FERPA includes so much, even biometric information: behavioral data, DNA samples, nicknames, bus stop times, family history, academic history, fingerprints, blood samples, etc.)
Since CEP has disabled embedding of its public meeting, I’m embedding a video that suffices as a metaphor for the whole thing, before I tell you what went on in the meeting itself.
See how this carnivorous sundew plant injests this insect? It illustrates the stealthy federal hunger for individuals’ data. As individuals (the insects) are drawn to the sweet federal dollars (nectar) coming from the hungry plant (federal government) the tentacles of the plant (federal data mining; SLDS and CEDS) become more and more attached until the insect finally loses all autonomy.
Here’s one where a carnivorous plant lures and later digests a mouse.
If state legislators and administrators would exercise some self-reliance, tighten their financial belts, turn to ourselves (localities) to fund schools and other agencies instead of using federal funds or national, corporate lobby cash, which only give money in exchange for data– then the federal and global data mining traps would fail.
States are stupidly giving away our vital liberties, addicted to the sweet, sticky money that we’ve been lapping at federal troughs.
I am longing to see evidence that our friends in freedom (in D.C. or here in Utah) are making the smallest peep to protect our children from this ongoing, slow-motion, tsunami-like data grab. Maybe it’s happening behind the scenes. I pray at least that that is so.
So, unembedded, if you want to hear the federal “Let’s Take Student Data Without Consent” Commission (aka CEP Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking) is saying, check out this link. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXasJLAWgtc
Ironically, CEP disabled the video‘s embedding function (it’s a public meeting) but if you look at this link, at hour 1:25 to 1:31 you’ll hear this question from an attendee, followed by a CEP response that summarizes the event:
“Let me try and ask what I think is a very difficult question, and I don’t expect you to be able to answer it, but maybe we can start a conversation that could be useful to us. So, I see census as having made a lot of steps to move in the kinds of directions that are suggested or anticipated by the Commission bill, in that you are working to bring data from other agencies or you have, into the — you’ve broadened their mission and you are bringing together data from many agencies and allowing researchers in and outside of government to access the data that you’ve brought together. What are the ways that you could expand those efforts? Um, and I’m not suggesting that we talk about a single statistical agency across government, but how could there be more of a coordination or maybe a virtual one statistical agency where census is playing a coordinating role, or what kinds of movements in that direction should we think about? What kinds of things have you thought about? What are the barriers to moving toward more coordination between the statistical agencies?”
The response at 1:29 from the CEP:
“…One of the biggest constraints that everybody involved in this sort of endeavor faces is the different rules that are attached to data that are sourced from different agencies or different levels of, you know, whether it’s federal or state… that if there was broad agreement in, that, you know, if there was one law that prosc– had the confidentiality protections for broad classes of data, as opposed to, you know, here’s data with pii on it that’s collected from SSA, here’s data with pii on it that’s collected from the IRS; here’s data with pii on it that’s collected from a state; versus from a statistical agency– if data with pii on it was treated the same, you know I think that would permit, you know, organizations that were collecting pii-laden data for different purposes to make those data available more easily. Now, that’s probably a pretty heavy lift… do this in sort of baby steps as opposed to ripping the band aid. I think ripping the band-aid would probably not fly.”
Summary: the CEP just said that “ripping the band-aid” of privacy off the arm of the American people will “probably not fly”; so the CEP has got to “do it in sort of baby steps.”
I don’t think I’m going to watch the rest of this dog and pony show. I’m going to write again to Mia, Jason, Mike and Gary.
What are you going to do? Send CEP a comment? Email your legislators? Say a prayer for the privacy of American people? Re-read 1984 to motivate yourself to care?
You can attend the CEP’s next public meetings in various places across the nation by visiting the CEP federal site here.
A news bomb about the theft of student data exploded in Utah’s Deseret News last July, but nobody noticed, apparently.
The article’s headline — “Wrongful Termination Lawsuit Puts Spotlight on Utah Autism Rates” — focused primarily on things other than the data theft. It highlighted former University of Utah research professor Judith Zimmerman’s allegations that university researchers were falsifying Utah’s autism rates.
But to me, the unheadlined bomb that the article dropped was the 750,000 students who had their data and their families’ data stolen by unauthorized “researchers”. The families now have no way of knowing this happened.
Zimmerman was fired for raising concerns about protected student data that she said the researchers had “compromised and accessed without proper authority.” She told the Deseret News that unauthorized individuals took 750,000 sensitive records with neither parental nor schools’ consent. This private “medical and educational information” included “names, birthdays, information about medical characteristics… special education classification and parents’ names and addresses,” reported the Deseret News.
How would these families now be notified? I wonder: with the whistleblower fired and with a years-long lawsuit and likely gag orders pending, the only people who now could potentially contact those families would be still employed at the university –who, being accused of the wrongdoing, certainly won’t go out of their way to inform the affected families right now.
I’m not going to discuss the ways in which the stolen records, and the children they represented, are vulnerable to potential crimes of credit card fraud, health insurance identity theft, crimes of predatory stalkers or the mandates of well-or-ill-intentioned governmental activists.
I’m here to ask –and answer– a very simple question that I hope readers are asking: how could this have happened? How were three quarters of a million records of children just lying around under the noses of any unscrupulous university researchers?
You, your children, and your grandchildren are in the SLDS whether you like it or not –unless you pay 100% of your own money in tuition for a 100% private school, and always have. There is no other way to opt out. I’ve tried.
Don’t get me started about how blindly stupid Utah is (all states now are) for having –and continuing to support– the SLDS.
We’re subject to this SLDS data surveillance system simply because in some USOE cubicle, some clueless grant writer responded to Obama’s mess of pottage and decided that the state of Utah might exchange students’ privacy for a $9.6 million dollar federal grant.
Utah traded all students’ data records, longitudinally (permanently) into this data-slurping machine, euphemistically titled the State Longitudinal Database System, which the feds designed and oversaw— all for the love of money and nonconsensual research.
Without parental consent, Utah children’s data now is daily being collected –using schools to vaccum it up. This is not a legitimate situation, but you can’t blame schools. They are being used. They have to give daily data to the state/fed system, or they lose funds/grind to a halt. In a recent Utah rulemaking statement, we read: “all public education LEAs shall begin submitting daily updates to the USOE Clearinghouse using all School Interoperability Framework (SIF) objects defined in the UTREx Clearinghouse specification. Noncompliance with this requirement may result in interruption of MSP funds.”
So we can’t believe the ear candy we’re told, about how this data mining is about keeping data on kids so teachers can do their best teaching. It’s not staying in the local school for teachers and administrators to legitimately peruse, but it goes into the federally designed, federally interoperable SLDS database held at UECP/U of U which many state agencies can peruse and which the feds can already partially peruse.
Every state has an SLDS system. The feds paid the states to build them. The feds told the states how the SLDS’s had to be built. Utah got nearly $10 million to make Utah’s federal SLDS in 2009. And the grant’s been renewed to keep trading cash for students, in recent years.
Utah children and their families thus have their data sucked away to where unelected, unaccountable “researchers” are entrusted with data via SLDS. The University’s “Utah Education Policy Center” (UEPC) is a founding partner in the Utah Data Alliance, which controls Utah’s SLDS system. According to UEPC’s website:
“Five other partners include the Utah State Office of Education (public education), Utah System of Higher Education, Utah College of Applied Technology, Utah Education Network, and the Department of Workforce Services. UEPC serves as the research coordinator for the Utah Data Alliance. UEPC coordinates access for individuals and organizations interested in collaborating with the Utah Data Alliance, or researchers interested in accessing data for research purposes.”
That’s a long answer to a short question. That’s how the data got stolen.
Here’s the follow up question: what’s keeping the other millions of records of students from going the same way that those 750,000 records went?
Ask your legislator that question. Ask him/her to show you any proper privacy protections that are actually in place. (FERPA was shredded; don’t let them pretend there’s protection anymore under FERPA.)
We do not even have the freedom to opt out of SLDS tracking. But all of this can change– if more good people speak up– act.
How did the fox persuade the gingerbread boy to get on his back? The fox said that he would never eat him, but would surely protect the gingerbread boy from everyone who was trying to eat him on the dangerous side of the river.
On shore stood the hungry horse, the farmer, the dog, the others– and the fox said that he could help the gingerbread boy to get away. The fox protected the gingerbread boy like the federal government is protecting your child’s personal data.
Every time I read an official promise like this recent CEP statement (and there are so many; even the federal alterations to FERPA sounded like the CEP statement) –I think of the gingerbread boy. The CEP (federal “Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking”) promises that the government only wants more individual “data in order to build evidenceabout government programs, while protecting privacy and confidentiality.” I think of the fox “protecting” the gingerbread boy.
That fox wanted to eat the boy just as much as the dog and the farmer and everyone else did. Even the gingerbread boy probably suspected it, but he really, really wanted to cross that river.
When the government says that it can and will protect privacy while accessing greater amounts of data, I think:
Alyson Williams, who worked in data management for the publishing industry, a mother who has written and spoken much about education and data reforms over the past several years, has just given a speech at the Agency Based Education Conference.
She asks us to consider how current trends toward consent-less gathering and use of student data are to be affected by frameworks already in place (such as SLDS databases) and by new movements, such as the federal Commission on Evidence-based Policymaking (CEP) and the Competency-based Education reforms now arising in many legislatures (including Utah’s) today. She points out that a key cheerleader for Competency-based Education is Marc Tucker, the avowed enemy to local control of education who is, nonetheless, a mistakenly respected advisor to the Utah legislature. How might Marc Tucker’s CBE Baby affect my children and yours?
I agree with Joy Pullman: “I shouldn’t have to give a flying fig about whom Donald Trump picks for this position.”
But we care, and the figs are flying, because there’s so much power unconstitutionally wielded by the executive branch over local education.
Although Trump did say in a campaign interview that he wanted to eliminate the Department of Education, it does not look as though that’s going to happen, sadly. The next best thing is to name a local-control oriented, constitution-loving Education Secretary.
A similar public letter from Parents Against Common Core asked Trump to consider, along with Dr. Bill Evers, Dr. Larry Arnn, Dr. Sandra Stotsky, Dr. Peg Luksik, or Dr. William Jeynes.
Frighteningly though, this week Trump interviewed Michelle Rhee, one of the top ten scariest education reformers in the nation, for the job; the scandal-pocked former Commissioner of Education in D.C. and author of a creepy ed reform book, “Radical” is no friend to children, to opt-out liberty, or to the free market. Of “letting them choose wherever they want to go,” she said, “I don’t believe in that model at all.” So, Goodbye freedom, under Rhee.
There should be no chance that she’s chosen. (Even though she’s suddenly, cutely, dressing in red, white and blue to meet the president elect, do not be fooled!)
I hope Trump’s receiving a storm of anti-Rhee letters this week from parents and educators at his public input website. He’s probably going to make his announcement this week. Please, please speak up.
This must-read article is partially reposted from Emily Talmage’s blog (Maine mom against common core). I think my favorite part is the video clip at the end, depicting a real cat and a real alligator, where the cat swats and intimidates the alligator, causing it to retreat in fear. What an iconic metaphor for what we the little people are trying to do as we fight the machine.
Several weeks ago, I wondered in a blog post whether or not public education would survive the next administration. Admittedly, I was all but certain at the time that Hillary Clinton would be our next president, and my predictions were more than dismal: more screen time for even our youngest children, inflated local budgets, invasive school-wide and individual data collection, a proliferation oflow-quality online K-12 and higher education programs, etc.
Ever since the big shock of Tuesday night, however, I’ve been scrambling to say something coherent about what we can expect now that Donald Trump really is going to be our next president.
Will public education survive?
Here’s the funny (and by that I mean incredibly scary) thing about federal public education policy: the big agenda – the real agenda – seems to survive no matter who is put in charge.
The real agenda – the ongoing march toward a cradle-to-grave system of human capital development that relies on the most sophisticated data collection and tracking technologies to serve its unthinkably profitable end – is fueled and directed by a multi-billion dollar education-industrial-complex that has been built over the course of decades.
It’s an absolute beast, an army of epic scale, and it’s a system that has the same uncanny ability to blend in with its surroundings as a chameleon.
Take, for example, the new “innovative assessment systems” that are being thrust on us every which way in the wake of ESSA. Under the banner of free market ideology, the far-right American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is promoting the very same assessment policies that far-left groups like the national unions and the National Center for Fair and Open Testing are now pushing. And though some claim that one ideology is merely “co-opting” the ideas of the other, the reality is that they lead to the same data-mining, cradle-to-career tracking end.
Consider, too, the massive push for blended, competency-based, and digital learning – all unproven methods of educating children, but highly favored by ed-tech providers and data-miners.
Most of these corporate-backed policies were cooked up in Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, and then made their way not only to the far-right ALEC, but also to left-leaning groups like the Center for Collaborative Education, the Coalition for Essential Schools, and the Great Schools Partnership. Depending on what sort of population each group is targeting, these wolves will dress themselves up in sheep’s clothing and make appeals to different values. For the right, they will package their policies in the language of the free market and choice; for the left, they will wrap them in a blanket of social-justice terminology.
Pull back the curtain far enough, however, and you will see they are selling the same thing.
There is, of course, no question that Hillary Clinton has been deeply entrenched in the education-industrial-complex for many, many years – even profiting from it personally – and that the big agenda was going to move full speed ahead if she were elected.
But what will happen now that we’re guaranteed to have a President Trump?
Unfortunately, we need look no further than the man leading Trump’s education transition team to understand how much trouble we are in.
Not long ago, Gerard Robinson, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, was one of only eleven members of the Executive Team of Jeb Bush’s “Digital Learning Now!” council, along with Joel Klein of NYC Public Schools, Gregory McGinity of the Broad Foundation, and Susan Patrick of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning.
Former Gates Foundation executive Tom Vander Ark, who sits on the board of the world’s creepiest education organizations while overseeing a giant portfolio of digital and online learning companies, picked Robinson as one of his top ten reformers to watch back in 2010.
It should be no surprise, then, that Robinson recently told EdWeek: “I see [Trump] supporting blended learning models, alternative learning models,” and that he will “likely want to continue significant investments in colleges and universities, but also closely track how well graduates do in the labor market.”
For those of you now protesting that Trump said he would get rid of the Department of Education, well, President Reagan said that too, but then he sponsored a report called “A Nation at Risk” which kicked the role of the federal government in education into high gear. According to Robinson, Trump may “streamline” the department …whatever that means.
As for rumors circulating that either Ben Carson or William Evers of the Hoover Institute will be tapped for the role of Education Secretary under Trump, I think we’re more likely to get someone akin to what Robinson told Edweek: “Someone from the private sector, who may not have worked in education directly, but may be involved in philanthropy or some kind of reform.”
So what does this mean for us? For our kids, our schools and our communities?
More than likely, it won’t be much different nor any less dismal than what I wrote when I assumed Hillary would be president: more screen time for even our youngest children, inflated local budgets to support one-to-one tech initiatives, invasive (way more invasive) school-wide and individual data collection, and a proliferation of low-quality online K-12 and higher education programs.
Unless!
And this is a big unless..
Unless parents and activists from across the political spectrum can mobilize now and stand up now to say enough is enough. We knowwhat the big agenda is, and we aren’t going to manipulated by superficial policy change anymore.
This means that those who lean right can’t afford to go back to sleep once they hear talk of school choice and vouchers and the elimination of Common Core, and those leaning left can’t afford to throw in the towel or be led astray by phony anti-privatization movements run by neoliberal groups pushing the same darn thing as everyone else…
Zeide is a scholar and a lawyer, not an activist for student privacy. She lays out the pros and cons of Competency Based Education with probing ethical questions.
She also notes at minute 14 that there is a movement to use unit record data, which I have been stressing in recent posts concerning the activities of the federal CEP — “Commission on Evidence Based Policymaking”.
She does not use the word “Orwellian,” speaking of unit record data, but I do. If that governmental stalking of individuals idea bothers you, give online comment at the CEP Commission’s website. That CEP comment deadline is this weekend. Be heard.
If words don’t come easily, just say that student privacy is very important, and that consent is important, and that a move to a database of individual unit records is unacceptable in our free country.
Utah’s liberty-loving, anti-common core community did a lot of happy dancing last night when candidates Alisa Ellis, Michelle Boulter and Lisa Cummins won three seats on the state school board. This election showed what can happen when people actually get to vote, instead of having the governor appoint board members, as had happened for so many years in the past.
Utah’s board finally has vibrant voices and votes for parent-and-teacher directed, not federal-corporate directed control of curriculum, testing, and student data.
Although the Utah anti-common core community was saddened that the heroic Dr. Gary Thompson (pictured above with Senator Mike Lee and Lisa Cummins) did not win his bid for a seat on the state school board, his campaign had an undeniable impact in raising awareness about student mental health, student data privacy, and the supremacy of family /parental rights. How often Dr. Thompson repeated this truth: “Parents are, and always must be, the resident experts of their children”.
The spirit of what Dr. Thompson’s all about thrives in Alisa, Michelle and Lisa.
The news of three of our strongest freedom-fighter parents taking three seats on the state school board is nothing short of miraculous.
The purpose of this post is to ask you to testify this week to the newly created White House Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking (CEP)– either onlineorin person— against CEP’s idea of studying to remove protective barriers on unit-level data for federal access and policymaking.
Here’s why.
Apparently chafing against constitutional and tech barriers against unrestrained access to student-level data, the federal government, this year, invited 15 people to help remove those barriers.
They named the group The Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking (CEP) and passed a law (led by Dem. Senator Murray, Speaker Ryan and President Obama) that gives the semblance of authority to the commission and allows them to post on the White House website.
The law passed in March.
The CEP’s stated purpose is to increase “use of data in order to build evidence about government programs“.
How would this be done? CEP doesn’t say on its website, but the trend in data mining is to push for unit record data sharing.
Individual students are, in computer jargon, “unit record data“. CEP promises to focus on “existing barriers” that are standing in the government’s way of accessing data [unit record data included] or, in their words, “data already being collected” [by states, in SLDS systems]. That data is none of the federal government’s business. In my opinion, it’s none of the state’s business. My data belongs to me. My child’s data should not be harvested without my written consent. The state never asked before it began to longitudinally study my child. And now, the feds want full access to disaggregated data to “build evidence” of all kinds.
CEP’s website claims that “…while protecting privacy and confidentiality” the Commission will “study how data, research, and evaluation are currently used to build evidence, and how to strengthen the government’s evidence-building efforts.”
They made scary, transformative changes effortlessly, as unelected bureaucrats dangled money (our taxes) in front of other unelected bureaucrats. No representation.
In 2013, Senators Warner, Rubio and Wyden called for a federal “unit record” database to track students from school through the workforce. That was shot down; Congress didn’t want to end the protective ban on unit record collection. In 2008, reauthorization of the Higher Education Act expressly forbade creation of a federal unit record data system.
“A unit record database has long been the holy grail for many policy makers, who argue that collecting data at the federal level is the only way to get an accurate view of postsecondary education…
…[V]oices calling for a unit record system have only intensified; there is now a near-consensus that a unit record system would be a boon… An increasing number of groups, including some federal panels, have called for a federal unit record system since 2006: the Education Department’sadvisory panelon accreditation, last year; the Committee on Measures of Student Success, in2011; andnearly everyadvocacy group and think tank that wrote white papers earlier this year for a project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation…
… through linkage with Social Security or other databases, it could track graduates’ wages… The Obama administration — unable to create a federal unit record database — has offered states money to constructlongitudinal databases of their own…”
It is time to stand up.
We missed the public meeting and the public hearing last month, but we can still speak at next week’s public testimony at the Rayburn Office Building.
If you can be in D.C. next Thursday, and want to offer public comment to offset the Gates-funded organizations that will be speaking in favor of sharing unit-record data, please send an email to Input@cep.gov. Ask for time to speak on the 21st of October. They ask for your name, professional affiliation, a two sentence statement, and a longer, written statement.
At the very least, you can send your opinion online to the CEP at: https://www.regulations.gov/docket?D=USBC-2016-0003
My submission to the CEP is below. Feel free to use it as a template.
Dear Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking,
I love the American concept of voter-based, Constitution-based, elected representative-based, policymaking. It’s why I live in America.
In contrast to voter-based policymaking there is evidence-based policymaking, which I don’t love because it implies that one entity’s “evidence” trumps individuals’ evidence, or trumps individuals’ consent to policy changes.
Former Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson said something about education that also applies to educational data and policymaking:
“The best way to prevent a political faction or any small group of people from capturing control of the nation’s educational system is to keep it decentralized into small local units, each with its own board of education and superintendent. This may not be as efficient as one giant super educational system (although bigness is not necessarily efficient, either) but it is far more safe. There are other factors, too, in favor of local and independent school systems. First, they are more responsive to the needs and wishes of the parents and the community. The door to the school superintendent’s office is usually open to any parent who wishes to make his views known. But the average citizen would be hard pressed to obtain more than a form letter reply from the national Commissioner of Education in Washington, D.C.”
Local control, and consent of the governed, are two foundational principles in our great nation.
Because the CEP is not an elected body, it does not actually hold representative authority to collect, or to recommend collection, of student-level evidence, or of any evidence, without written consent; and, for the same reasons, neither does the Department of Education.
Because the fifty, federally-designed, evidence-collecting, State Longitudinal Database Systems never received any consent from the governed in any state to collect data on individuals (as the systems were put into place not by authority, but by grant money) it follows that the idea of having CEP study the possible removal of barriers to federal access of those databases, is an egregious overstep that even exceeds the overstep of the State Longitudinal Database Systems.
Because federal FERPA regulations altered the original protective intent of FERPA, and removed the mandate that governments must get parental (or adult student) consent for any use of student level data, it seems that the idea of having CEP study and possible influence removal of additional “barriers” to federal use of data, is another egregious overstep.
As a licensed teacher in the State of Utah; as co-founder of Utahns Against Common Core (UACC); as a mother of children who currently attend public, private and home schools; as acting president of the Utah Chapter of United States Parents Involved in Education (USPIE); as a patriot who believes in “consent of the governed” and in the principles of the U.S. Constitution; and, as a current tenth grade English teacher, I feel that my letter represents the will of many who stand opposed to the “study” of the protective barriers on student-level data, which the CEP’s website has outlined it will do.
I urge this commission to use its power to strengthen local control of data, meaning parental and teacher stewardship over student data, instead of aiming to broaden the numbers of people with access to personally identifiable student information to include government agencies and/or educational sales/research corporations such as Pearson, Microsoft, or the American Institutes for Research.
To remove barriers to federal access of student-level data only makes sense to a socialist who agrees with the Marc Tucker/Hillary Clinton 1998 vision of a cradle-to-grave nanny state with “large scale data management systems” that dismiss privacy as a relic in subservience to modern government. It does not make sense to those who cherish local control.
It is clear that there is a strong debate about local control and about consent of the governed, concerning data and concerning education in general. NCEE Chair Mark Tucker articulated one side of the debate when he said: “the United States will have to largely abandon the beloved emblem of American education: local control.If the goal is to greatly increase the capacity and authority of the state education agencies, much of the new authority will have to come at the expense of local control.”
Does that statement match the philosophical stand of this commission? I hope not. Local control means individual control of one’s own life. How would an individual control his or her own destiny if “large scale data management systems” in a cradle-to-grave system, like the one that Tucker and Clinton envisioned, override the right to personal privacy and local control? It is not possible.
I urge this commission to use any influence that it has to promote safekeeping of unit-record data at the parental and teacher level, where that authority rightly belongs.
Senate President Niederhauser and House Speaker Hughes
The State School Board race has never drawn much attention before. But this year, the Salt Lake Tribune reported, businesses and even top-tier elected officials are personally campaigning and fundraising for and against certain candidates.
Yesterday’s headline was: “Niederhauser and Hughes ask Business Leaders to Help Defeat UEA-Backed School Board Candidates“. Yesterday, too, business organizations such as the Utah Technology Council and the School Improvement Association joined Niederhauser and Hughes in a fundraising webinar that promoted a slate of pro-Common Core candidates who happen to be not favored by or funded by national teacher’s unions.
I understand why someone with a conscience would campaign against out-of-state big UEA-NEA money buying Utah’s state board election. So they should.
But I don’t understand why these groups have chosen to campaign against both the anti-Common Core candidates (in blue) as well as against the UEA-backed candidates (in red) as they showed in this slide at yesterday’s insider fundraising webinar:
But my bigger questions are: how do the Speaker and the Senate President dare to campaign for Common Core candidates, thus going directly against Governor Herbert’s call to end Common Core alignment in Utah?
Have they forgotten the reasons that their party is strongly opposed to all that the Common Core Initiative entails?
Have they forgotten Governor Herbert’s letter that called for an end to Common Core and SAGE testing just four months ago? (See letter here.) For all the talk about wanting to move toward local control and to move against the status quo, this seems odd.
Next to the governorship, there aren’t more powerful offices in the state than those held by House Speaker Hughes and Senate President Niederhauser. So what does this powerful endorsement of a certain slate of candidates signify?
First, it signifies what is probably a sincere concern for (partial) local control: In the fundraising webinar held yesterday (by Hughes, Niederhauser, the School Improvement Network and the Utah Technology Council) the following slide was displayed: Out of $308,512 raised for the political action of the Utah UEA (teacher’s union) $300,000 of it came from out of state. Hughes and Niederhauser are right in being alarmed at that money’s probable effect on local control.
(What they didn’t highlight is this: all of the anti-Common Core candidates’ funding, combined, doesn’t come close to what even one of the UEA-funded candidates are spending because none of them are backed by corporate or political powers.)
Secondly, it signifies Utah leadership’s alignment with Obama’s vision for education, which among other things mandates sidelining certain subjects in favor of others. Niederhauser told the Tribune that he didn’t want any board member’s vision to “dominate the board” which, to him, meant to “supplant business and technology representatives.” So he wants to make sure that business and technology is at least as dominant as any other interest. The School Improvement Network is of the same opinion.
We could ask why. Why, specifically, would legislators be endorsing the fields of business and technology over the fields of languages, medicine, history, social work, the arts or any other thing? And where’s the idealogical division between what NEA wants and what Niederhauser-Hughes want? Is it fair to speculate that NEA corporate funders are in competition against the Education First corporate funders, and all of this is just an economic struggle pretending to be a struggle for the children’s best interests? Utah tax dollars are, after all, the passionate pursuit of multiple players in the now $2 Billion per year ed tech sales industry.
Many people know that both Hughes and Niederhauser’s political campaigns are heavily funded by Education First, a Utah political action committee for Prosperity 2020 that puts businesses first.
Not voters first. Not education –broadly– first; this is education as defined by the ed-tech sales industry and by Obama’s 2020 vision. Read it in their own words. In an Tribune op-ed taking credit for passing legislation that Education First had lobbied for, you’ll see little focus on funding for paper and pens, school basketballs, violins, gluesticks, old-fashioned books, or heaven forbid, large teachers’ salaries– no, ed funding to Education First means to fund the priorities that precisely (coincidentally?) match Obama’s 2020 vision: early childhood education (which competes with free enterprise/private preschools), workforce development (China-styled central planning) “community schools” (Obama’s vision to integrate healthcare with academics and with socio-political movements “using government schools as a hub”) and standardized personalized learning (an oxymoron that cements Common Core academics and its data tags).
Don’t mistake this as a fight between tech lovers and tech haters. None of the candidates for state school board are anti-technology, though the smart ones are pushing for improved laws governing student privacy in this modern age.
So what are Hughes and Niederhauser really saying when they say they’re for the pro-tech candidates? What does that really mean? That Utahns should sit back and let the ed tech sales industry, or businesses, sit in the driver’s seat for educational decision-making? That’s the stated aim of Education First (in Utah) and of Obama’s 2020 (nationally) and, according to his Tribune quote above, it’s also the aim of President Niederhauser.
Education First doggedly, directly, lobbies citizens, governments, and school districts, to strong-arm their narrow vision, that businesses should “help” direct education. They refer to my child and yours as the economy’s. They call children “human capital” on their website. This is, when ripe, the 1992 Hillary-Tucker dream coming true, with the collective economy dictating to the individual on the assembly line.
Education First wants a high “concentration of science and engineering occupations” in Utah, which you may or may not agree with; what I hope you do agree with is that this new, business – public ed partnershipping governance system, with business being handed power to influence schooling, when taken to the extreme, is fascism. In fascism, there’s no distinction between government and business. And the voter has no say.
Do we want to walk down that slippery slope? Do we want the Education First business community to be given power in schools?
Whether promoting science and engineering at the expense of other subject and careers is the will of the people, or not, really doesn’t come in to the discussion. Prosperity 2020 has said that businesses will “provide a business oriented plan to improve results” for schools.
If Hughes or Niederhauser would respond to my emails to them, I would ask them this: how is it any more helpful toward Constitutional local control– if that is what you really want– to let businesses take over the driver’s seat for educators, as your financial backers aim to do, than for out of state (NEA) funding to call the same shots? Either way, students and schools and voters lose personal freedoms to self-appointed experts who think they know best.
So when Niederhauser worries that “big money groups effectively buy the election,” he is right. The hundreds of thousands of dollars pouring in to NEA-UEA approved candidates’ purses should raise eyebrows. But shouldn’t the same eyebrows rise too, seeing in-state big money groups like Education First and Prosperity 2020 now, as in the past, funding the pro-Common Core candidates –and funding Hughes and Niederhauser themselves– effectively buying the election in the very same way?
Meanwhile, none of the liberty-first, anti-Common Core candidates, Alisa Ellis, Lisa Cummins, Michelle Boulter or Dr. Gary Thompson, are richly funded. All they really have to stand on is true principles of liberty –and word of mouth.
Many voters know that Common Core is anti-local control. The Governor almost lost in the primary to anti-Common Core challenger Jonathan Johnson because of this. The Governor was repeatedly booed at political conventions this year because he had been such a promoter of the Common Core, prior to his turnaround. What will the governor say about Niederhauser’s and Hughes’ current effort? More importantly, what will voters say?
Dr. Gary Thompson, a district 10 candidate for state school board, said today:
“I was pleased the that the Speaker of the House and Senator Neiderhauser identified who the “anti common core” education candidates are in this election. I was pleased to be labeled as one of them. This provides a clear choice for members in the community to chose from as they please. Comments made by the Speaker in regards to the UEA did not receive a prior endorsement by this campaign. I look forward to having a professional, cordial discussion with my UEA endorsed opponent on September 28thregarding education issues that will affect our children in District 10″
For anyone wanting to watch the debates between state school board candidates, please check that schedule here.
Pictured below are the candidates for state school board that I endorse, whom the UEA, NEA, UTC, SIN, Senate President and House Speaker do not:
For true local control of education:
Alisa Ellis, Michelle Boulter, Lisa Cummins, Dr. Gary Thompson.
Recently, a friend mentioned that she was happy that Common Core was finally gone, and that we could finally look toward something better.
Why did she think the Common Core Initiative was over? It’s grown.
But it’s hidden, for the most part. Feds and states don’t use the term anymore because it’s so unpopular; in my state, they call it “Utah Core Standards” –although, if pressed, state school boards will admit that these are Common Core: they have to be, or they wouldn’t get federal funding. Also, the D.C. legislators were told that the new federal law, ESSA, had gotten rid of Common Core and had returned control to states. How untrue that line was; the Department of Ed had just renamed it “Challenging State Academic Standards”. Common Core standards and data tags are still in the driver’s seat for all the new movements in ed reforms: from the #GoOpen Initiative, Open Educational Resources movment, and the Learning Registry to federal SETRA which is being voted on right now. Read on.
(Don’t get depressed. We can take bold action to reclaim many of our lost freedoms. We know that pretending that everything is fine, or pretending that it’s too late or too difficult to change things, is wrong. So choose the right.)
First, remember this: Common Core academics and data mining are utterly married.
The most “commonizing” thing about the Common Core Initiative was neverthe set of academic standards (“Common Core State Standards”- which have recently been federally renamed “Challenging State Academic Standards”. We can call them anything we want as long as the feds can see that they still align to the data and testing programs so that we can be tracked.)
In the screenshot below, we read that CEDS is a partnership that includes the federal Department of Education and the CCSSO (private co-copyright holders over the Common Core academic standards). Whether you think the capacity for government to monitor free citizens over the course of our whole lives is good or bad, you can’t deny that that was and is the agenda of CEDS and SLDS.
This screenshot is the reason that I’ve never understood why so many say that Common Core has nothing to do with data collection, and that saying so is a conspiracy theory; these are clearly conspiracy facts: the government conspired with the private trade group CCSSO to standardize educational data nationally –without allowing legislatures or voters to vote on the matter, simply by calling the initiatives voluntary and by using cash incentives to make the standardization initiatives happen. Money for both the academic standards and the data standards came from two main sources: unelected philanthropist Bill Gates, who profits wildly from the initiatives, and from the federal Dept. of Education. Follow the money trails if you want to know what’s being built.
Federally approved academic standards, bad as they are, can still be interpreted locally to some extent. Federal data standards, though, are like matching keys in matching locks: there’s only one way they’ll work, and that’s if they are exactly, precisely the same.
So CEDS standards are used in all fifty states’ database systems because the funding and instructions for construction of those systems using CEDS came from the feds. CEDS standards are also used in the federal EdFacts Data Exchange. They’re also used in the digital testing, whether it’s end of the year testing or embedded curricular testing, in every state. They’re also mandated every time your state gets a new federal cash infusion for its State Longitudinal Database System. If your state moves toward embedded tests in an effort to get rid of over high-stakes testing, as my state is, then CEDS will still be used and your child will still be tracked. Now with the federal push for “Community Schools” that must share students’ medical and mental health data, combined with academic data, common data standards across agencies has become the federal “must”.
CEDS interoperability and standardization are the height of fashion and efficiency, but are also the death of individual flexibility and local control and citizen data privacy. Worse, the education reformers, both political and corporate, are not content to just standardize academic standards, testing, and data mining tags between states. They also want to standardize these things globally.
(If humans were angels, this might not pose any problem. The history of the human race, however, tells a sad tale of bullying and tyranny that has been significantly interrupted only by America’s noble founders. Since we cannot trust human nature generally, the U.S. Constitution logically placed checks on human power, and placed balances against human ambition, so that individual freedom would not be deleted by the noble-or-not initiatives of bullies. Humans are not angels, and giving so much power to governmental– especially globally governed– entitites, is flat-out stupid. Where are your rights to freedom of speech, of religion, of conscience, when the Constitutional rights have been demoted in the move toward global citizenship, and global data mining?)
The twin movements (of global content regulation over education and of global data standardization) are quickly apparent in these three things:
THE LEARNING REGISTRY – a gateway for “approved” federal data and lessons, partnered with global data and ed systems; this is the main tool of the #GoOpen initiative. The Learning Registry defines itself as “a new approach” to “sharing data” that aggregates information about the “publisher, location, content area, standards alignment, ratings, reviews, and more.” It claims that finding educational resources and assessing their quality is a “burden” on educators. That responsibility will be taken over, to unburden educators– by the federal dept. of ed working with the federal dept. of defense. As much as I love to give and receive, I don’t want to share or have shared with me, educational content under the moral and educational “guidance” of the department of defense and of education. Appealing to my sense of altruism is not going to help. Ironically, Midgely admits that the love of money is the root of #GoOpen. At minute 13:52 in that video, he says, “to be honest, there’s a lot of money to be made as well”. He says that digital badges will be the common currency of K-20 and adult, corporate education. Although Midgely says that “you don’t have to conform your data sets,” and “we accept native formats” and that the system is peer-based, not censored, I think: but it’s run by the federal government. How is that peer-based? Who runs the show? What happens, down the road, when an educational resource hasn’t been run through the registry filter? Is it the orphaned, unusable resource? This registry was designed by the Dept. of Education, by federal Deputy Director of Ed Tech, Steve Midgely (whose video about the registry is here. ) Is it not weird that this learning registry is co-created by the Department of Defense and the Department of Education? And that its global partners include the “federated community” of the Soros-partnered Ariadne in Europe; the Global Grid for Learning, a Gates baby; the U.N.’s OER and more? Is this registry going to marginalize traditional, classical books and lessons even further than Common Core’s glorification of “informational text” did to English literature? Remember: Common Core never outlawed Shakespeare, but it endorsed informational text reading in the English classrooms to the point that many public schools today have no room for much Shakespeare. The endorsement of whatever the Learning Registry finds endorsable, will likely marginalize other content, if and when the registry becomes the new pink. Endorsement means the feds are picking winners and losers.
THE #GoOPEN INITIATIVE – the name of the federal campaign serving the learning registry. For it, the federal Dept. of Ed is proposing a regulation to make it impossible to receive federal funds for any curriculum building that doesn’t fit in with the registry and #GoOpen. Local ideas for public education will not be funded if not in line with the registry and the campaign to #GoOpen. (Utah is one of the main guinea pigging states in #GoOpen. Not proud of that claim to fame.)
TRANSFER OF THE INTERNET FROM THE U.S. TO THE GLOBALISTS – Sept. 30, 2016 is Obama’s date to make that reality. Have you read the letter from a tiny handful of Republican legislators that exposes the huge mistake this transfer will be for liberty? The internet is now used by the whole world, but it is an American national treasure, and its key operating functions were funded by U.S. taxpayers. Why give authority over the Internet away? The letter points out that transferring power over the Internet away from the U.S. will “greatly endanger Internet freedom” (look at how countries like China and Iraq censor the writings of their citizens online.) It points out that it will “significantly increase the power of foreign governments over the internet.” It also points out that U.S. taxpayers funded the key operating functions of the internet. The supreme law of our land, that upholds freedom from censorship and freedom of religion, can not exist in the soon to be globally-governed internet future. What will happen to the ways in which we learn, if the Internet is to be controlled by countries who do not prize free thought?
Jane Robbins and Jakell Sullivan co-authored this article at Townhall.com, which is reposted here with permission. Please note the links to learn more.
In May 2014, conservative columnist George Will warned that Common Core represented the “thin edge of an enormous wedge” and that “sooner or later you inevitably have a national curriculum.”
Will’s concern is now closer to realization. One lever the U.S. Department of Education (USED) may use to hasten this outcome is the #GoOpen Initiative, through which USED will push onto the states Common Core-aligned online instructional materials. These materials are “openly licensed educational resources” (Open Educational Resources, or OER) – online resources that have no copyright and are free to all users. Utah is part of the initial consortium of states that will be collaborating in #GoOpen.
#GoOpen is part of a larger global and federal effort to institute OER in place of books and traditional education (in fact, USED appointed a new advisor to help school districts transition to OER). More disturbingly, another part of this scheme increases the federal government’s ability to monitor and track teacher and student use of these online resources – and perhaps even influence the content.
This outcome could result from a related, joint USED-Department of Defense initiative called the Learning Registry. The Registry is an “open-source infrastructure” that can be installed on any digital education portal (such as PBS) and that will facilitate the aggregation and sharing of all the linked resources on the Registry. The idea is to “tag” digital content by subject area and share on one site supposedly anonymous data collected from teacher users (content such as grade-level, recommended pedagogy, and user ratings). That way, Registry enthusiasts claim, teachers can find instructional content to fit their particular needs and see how it “rates.”
Putting aside the question whether USED should push states into a radical new type of instruction that presents multiple risks to students and their education (see here, here, and here), the Learning Registry threatens government control over curriculum. Here’s how.
USED has proposed a regulation requiring “all copyrightable intellectual property created with [USED] discretionary competitive grant funds to have an open license.” So, all online instructional materials created with federal dollars will have to be made available to the Registry, without copyright restrictions.
[Federal law prohibits USED from funding curricular materials in the first place, but this Administration’s violation of federal law has become routine.]
The Registry will compile all user data and make “more sophisticated recommendations” about what materials teachers should use. So federal money will fund development of curricular materials that will be placed on a federally supported platform so that the feds can make “recommendations” about their use. The repeated intrusion of the word “federal” suggests, does it not, a danger of government monitoring and screening of these materials.
And speaking of “user data” that will fuel all this, the Registry promises user anonymity. But consider the example of Netflix movie ratings, in which two researchers were able to de-anonymize some of the raters based on extraordinarily sparse data points about them.
Despite Netflix’s intention to maintain user anonymity, its security scheme failed. How much worse would it be if the custodian of the system – in our case, USED – paid lip service to anonymity but in fact would like to know who these users are? Is Teacher A using the online materials that preach climate change, or does he prefer a platform that discusses both sides? Does Teacher B assign materials that explore LGBT issues, or does she avoid those in favor of more classical topics? Inquiring bureaucrats want to know.
In fact, in a 2011 presentation, USED’s bureaucrat in charge of the Registry, Steve Midgley, veered awfully close to admitting that user data may be less anonymous than advertised. Midgley said, “[Through the Registry] we can actually find out this teacher assigned this material; this teacher emailed this to someone else; this teacher dragged it onto a smart board for 18 minutes. . . .” [see video below]. The Registry will also use “the math that I don’t understand which [will] let me know something about who you are and then let me do some mathematical operations against a very large data set and see if I can pair you with the appropriate relevant resource.”
Sure, all this will supposedly be done anonymously. But teachers should hesitate to embrace something that could possibly reveal more about them than they bargained for.
USED would protest that this is all hypothetical, and that it would never abuse its power to influence teachers and control instructional content. But with this most ideological of all administrations, denials of ill intent ring hollow (remember Lois Lerner?). If the power is there, at some point it will be used. Never let an “enormous wedge” go to waste.
Thank you, Jakell Sullivan and Jane Robbins, for this eye-opening report.
In case you missed the rally speeches and missed the Fox News report, here begins a series of posts featuring the speakers at this week’s rally at the state capitol, where Utah voters had the opportunity to hear from candidates for Utah State School Board.
The rally was entitled “Elevating Education: Common No More”.
Radio host Rod Arquette introduced each school board candidate speaker and the gubernatorial candidate Johnathan Johnson. Each speaker declared that Utah can elevate education beyond the Common Core.
The first video shows Dr. Gary Thompson‘s speech; below is the text version of that speech. (Other candidates’ speeches will be posted soon.)
Text of Dr. Thompson’s speech:
Communities are judged by how well they treat the most vulnerable children amongst them.
If given the honor of representing parents and teachers as a State Board Member, I will only ask four questions regarding any policies placed in front of me regarding our children and students:
1. Does the policy conform to industry standard ethical practices?
2. Does the policy allow ground level parental control and teacher choice?
3. Are stealth psychological evaluations and data collection being performed on children without your knowledge and informed consent?
4. Is the policy based on “Voodoo-Pseudo Science”, or independent, peer reviewed research?
Our School Board’s failure to view education policy via these four principles has resulted in 12 dangerous realities in place in Utah public schools:
I call them the “Dirty Dozen”:
1. Lawmakers recently deemed the SAGE test invalid for teacher evaluations, yet did nothing to protect our most vulnerable children from the same flawed test.
2. Many Utah Standards are developmentally inappropriate for our younger children.
3. Not one independent developmental psychologist was active in writing Utah K-3 Educational Standards.
4. The test used to measure knowledge of Utah Standards, the SAGE test, has never been independently validated to measure academic performance.
5. Without parental knowledge and informed written consent, Utah schools are collecting our children’s most intimate cognitive, behavioral, emotional, and sociological information.
6. Utah’s test vendor, AIR, is currently using Utah public school children as “experimental lab rats”, as part of the largest, non consensual, unethical, experimentation ever performed on Utah soil.
7. Performing unethical, experimentation on Utah’s children place many of them at risk for serious emotional, behavioral and cognitive damage.
8. Common Core special education practices are harmful, not based on sound science, and put our divergent learning students at risk for suicide. Utah has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the Country.
9. The Utah State Board of Education does not have effective policies in place requiring technology vendors to follow ethical and privacy guidelines, designed to protect parents and children from exploitation and harm.
10. Student data security and privacy is a myth.
11. Utah’s Preschool and Kindergarten programs are not supported by independent, peer-reviewed research.
12. Utah’s adoption of the Common Core Federal mandate to have ALL Kindergartners reading, as opposed to emphasizing play, is abusive, and flies in the face of 75 years of child developmental research.
Since the advent of Common Core, the Board of Education, and the Utah State Office of Education, have dismissed “The Dirty Dozen” as “dangerous misinformation”, and have accuse parents like me of spreading fear into the community.
Today I draw a line in the sand, and for the sake of my children and Community, I ask State School Board Chairman Dave Crandall to do the same.
The contrasts between us could not be more evident.
One of us will protect your children….
One of us is dangerously wrong.
As such, if Chairman Crandall produces independent, peer-reviewed verification that ANY of the “Dirty Dozen” are factually false or “misinformed”, I will apologize to the community and resign from the race.
In Exchange, I challenge Chairman Crandall to publicly acknowledge the existence of “The Dirty Dozen”, as THE most pressing, dangerous assault on parental rights, teacher autonomy, and child safety present in Utah Public Schools.
If Chairman Crandall ignores this, and ignores this challenge, I believe he is not fit to serve another term representing our children, and I respectfully request for him to immediately drop out of the election.
I ask the next Governor of this State, sitting on this stage; I ask Governor Johnson to place the destiny of the next generation of children into the hands of local parents and our talented ground level teachers, as opposed to catering to technology special interest groups, who now own many Utah lawmakers.
I ask parents to demand that our education leaders base their decisions on ethics, and the rule of constitutional law, as opposed to agenda based, harmful mandates being forced upon our children via the U.S. Office of Education, and adopted without question by the Utah State Office of Education, and the State Board of Education.
I close from a quote from an American who was buried yesterday in Kentucky, Muhammad Ali. His example and courage inspired my father to pursue a dream of becoming one of America’s first generation of black medical doctors in modern history:
“Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given, than to explore the power they have to change it.
Impossible is not a fact…. It’s an opinion.
Impossible is not a declaration…. It’s a dare.
Impossible is potential…Impossible is temporary….Impossible is nothing.”
Thank you for your time and consideration. May God bless this great, and truly exceptional Nation.”
————-
Dr. Thompson’s campaign website link is here: http://www.vote4drgary.com/#!Dr-Thompsons-Utah-CapitolTown-Hall-Speech/b8v6m/575b6c780cf24c9615a7f130
Early voting begins tomorrow, and voting ends June 28th. Please vote wisely. No elected position in this state affects your children and your family more than the state school board position.
Governor Herbert surprised a lot of people this week, including me.
After spending the past six years promoting, marketing, and providing workforce alignment strategies to serve Common Core, and after rising to the throne of Common Core’s organization, National Governors Association, to become its chair, and after going out of his way to have the Utah Attorney General provide “proof” that Common Core supposedly represented local control– after all of this, Herbert has now turned his back on the Common Core and has written a letter to the State School Board, asking it to move away from Common Core.
Regardless of the Governor’s motives in this election year, regardless of the possibility that Utah might just endure a wasteful rebranding effort that could redeliver Common Core under a new name (as many other states, have done and done and done) –I still see this letter from Governor Herbert as a home run for the freedom team.
Read it. The letteradmitsthat Common Core is not an example of local control, that it is the federal will, and that it damages local control –of testing, data collection, curriculum and instruction.
The letter asks the board to keep these principles in mind while it moves away from Common Core: 1) maintain high academic standards; 2) keep the federal government out of educational decisions in Utah; and 3) preserve local control of curriculum, testing, data collection and instruction.
It also says, “Just as important as the actual educational standards is the process by which we arrive at those standards. This should be a Utah process with public comment and discourse.” It continues, “…[W]e all understand the shortcomings of a one-size-fits-all approach. It is imperative that any new standards are flexible enough to allow a wide variety of curricular decisions by individual school districts …I believe that our teachers need more freedom to be creative in the classroom.”
Well, those words are a surprise, and a miracle, to me.
Some people are suspicious because the governor’s in the middle of his re-election campaign, while his challenger, has been extremely successful with voting delegates because of his staunchly anti-Common Core stand. I was there when the governor got booed by a crowd over well over 1,000 delegates at the Utah County GOP Convention last month, when he spoke about Common Core; I know he is under campaign pressure, but he didn’t have to do this! He knew it would make him look like a fair-weather politician. He knew that most of those who are already voting for the more-conservative Johnson won’t change their minds and that those who already support Herbert won’t likely change their minds. So why did he really do it?
Maybe a key to why the governor wrote this letter is in its closing paragraph. His own children and grandchildren do not like the Common Core. The letter says, “I have eleven grandchildren in Utah public schools. I have seen firsthand the frustration they and their parents have had…”
What grandfather can stand up to his own grandchildren’s lobbying efforts against the Common Core? So he caved, in a good way. He’s publically admitted that Common Core is academically miserable and politically for socialists.
I cannot see this letter as anything but great news.
So what’s next? What will the Utah State School Board do?
I don’t think it can get away with yet another meaningless rebranding job. The now-somewhat-savvy Utah public won’t stand for that, knowing what so recently happened to Utah’s previously-good science standards, or knowing what happened when Oklahoma, Arizona, New Jersey, Tennessee, Indiana, and other states passed Common Core repeal laws that resulted in nothing better, but common core 2.0 (under new names). To the dismay of those who actually wanted freedom and autonomy beyond the federal 15% no-change alignment “suggestion”, better standards didn’t actually mean, better standards. But we have the advantage of other states’ errors to learn from today.
The letter didn’t spell out every problem with education reform. For example, it didn’t say, “Let’s finally permit parents to opt children out of the federal/state data data monitoring system SLDS“.
One of my happiest thoughts, after seeing this letter, has been thinking about the countless Utah teachers and administrators who have previously not felt free to speak their minds about Common Core. The governor’s letter, in many ways (and unintentionally, perhaps) helps to reclaim freedom of speech to Utah educators. While educators opposed to Common Core have mostly remained quiet or anonymous, some of those who have not, have been bypassed, mistreated or branded as “insubordinate” for speaking out– for refusing to pretend to like Common Core –either academically or politically. Some have even been pushed to resign.
But now, if even the reigning governor is saying he’s not happy about the Common Core –academically nor in terms of lost local control– then finally, perhaps, any teacher or principal can pipe up, too.
Here’s a must-read, new article at Townhall.com (here) by Emmett McGroarty and Jane Robbins, “Why Does Your Congressman Want to Psychologically Profile Your Children?”
The article begins:
“If the GOP-led Congress had not done enough damage to public education by passing the statist Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), it’s poised to make things even worse. The new threat is theStrengthening Education Through Research Act (SETRA). If SETRA passes in its current form, the federal government will be empowered to expand psychological profiling of our children. Parents must understand this threat so they can mobilize to stop it.”
It also states: “Section 132 of SETRA expands authorized research to include ‘research on social and emotional learning [SEL] . . . .’
“SEL is defined as ‘the process through which children . . . acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions.’ SEL is all the rage in public education…”
“…SETRA would authorize the federal government to sponsor research on these social and emotional attributes. This means the government may analyze a child’s psychological makeup…”
Another important point:
“…even if there were real, measurable educational value in analyzing every child’s psyche, do members of Congress really believe government has any business doing this?… SETRA also allows the approved bureaucracy to ‘establish . . . cooperative education statistics systems for the purpose of producing and maintaining . . . data on early childhood education, elementary and secondary education, postsecondary education, adult education…‘”
The article concludes: “SETRA passed the Senate on a voice vote and now awaits action in the House. House members, take note: A vote for SETRA in its current form is a vote for psychological profiling of innocent children. It’s bad enough that so-called conservatives in Congress voted for ESSA; it will be unforgivable if they vote for SETRA.”
Student privacy rights are improving in Utah! Utah HB 358 passed and was funded this legislative session.
This is very happy news for many who have been extremely concerned about the lack of proper privacy protections in our state and country. Although the bill does not provide any opt-out ability for any student from the State Longitudinal Database System, which we’ve been asking for, for four years straight, it it does take important steps in the right direction.
The bill imposes some important restrictions on how information collected by school/government systems about a student can be stored, shared, and used. It also makes the Utah law much more protective than federal FERPA (which, as you know, was deliberately damaged by the USDOE in 2009 so that it is not protective of student privacy as it had been when first written by Congress decades ago.)
In HB 358, line 472, the new law defines who owns the data. The student.
472 (1) (a) A student owns the student’s personally identifiable student data.
(Not the “village”.)
The bill also defines three types of personally identifiable data: necessary, optional, and prohibited.
For example, under “necessary” data, the bill names:
316 (a) name;
317 (b) date of birth;
318 (c) sex;
319 (d) parent contact information;
320 (e) custodial parent information;
321 (f) contact information;
322 (g) a student identification number;
323 (h) local, state, and national assessment results or an exception from taking a local, 324 state, or national assessment;
325 (i) courses taken and completed, credits earned, and other transcript information;
326 (j) course grades and grade point average;
327 (k) grade level and expected graduation date or graduation cohort;
328 (l) degree, diploma, credential attainment, and other school exit information;
329 (m) attendance and mobility;
330 (n) drop-out data;
331 (o) immunization record or an exception from an immunization record;
332 (p) race;
333 (q) ethnicity;
334 (r) tribal affiliation;
335 (s) remediation efforts;
336 (t) an exception from a vision screening required under Section 53A-11-203 or
337 information collected from a vision screening required under Section 53A-11-203;
Under “Prohibited data” which schools and third parties may not collect, the bill name:
806 …administration to a student of any psychological or psychiatric 807 examination, test, or treatment, or any survey, analysis, or evaluation without the prior written consent of the student’s parent or legal guardian, in which the purpose or evident intended effect is to cause the student to reveal information… concerning the student’s or any family member’s:
811 (a) political affiliations or, except as provided under Section 53A-13-101.1 or rules of
812 the State Board of Education, political philosophies;
813 (b) mental or psychological problems;
814 (c) sexual behavior, orientation, or attitudes;
815 (d) illegal, anti-social, self-incriminating, or demeaning behavior;
816 (e) critical appraisals of individuals with whom the student or family member has close
817 family relationships;
818 (f) religious affiliations or beliefs;
819 (g) legally recognized privileged and analogous relationships, such as those with
820 lawyers, medical personnel, or ministers…
Update 3/10/16: Utah’s legislative session has passed, but HB 358, the student privacy bill, has not been funded. And so we are stuck, at least for another year, without proper protections for our children. (If you don’t know why that’s bad, begin by reading a recent article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, by Jane Robbins, on why Georgia is considering a student privacy bill):
Robbins explains, “…parents have heard glowing claims that ‘digital’ or ‘personalized’ learning will transform education, but they may not understand exactly what this means…[I]nteractive programs, marketed by private ventors, frequently use sophisticated software that collects massive amounts of highly personal information about the student’s behaviors, mindsets and attitudes”. She mentions the fact that the U.S. Department of Education is gung-ho on slurping up that personal, psychological information about beliefs and attitudes, as evidenced in its own published draft reports. (Must-reads!) Robbins makes the real point when she writes, “The issue here goes far beyond data security. It is whether the government and private companies have any right to collect this highly sensitive data in the first place.”
Not passing/funding the Utah HB 358 privacy bill, while passing and funding HB 277, the digital education bill, was crazy. It was the worst mistake of this entire legislative year.
Does the legislature not know that data is the new gold rush, and that education vendors are behaving as if this is the old wild west, without solid laws to govern student data sharing and partnering and selling? Does the legislature not know that to the federal government, also, data is the new gold rush as well, and that our own Congressman Jason Chaffetz held recent hearings against the Department of Education for its data insecure practices– and gave the Dept. an “F”?
Think of it this way: legislators just barely bought the children and teachers of Utah the trendiest, shiniest $15 million vehicle (HB 277) while saying, “We are unable –or unwilling — to pay for seat belts and air bags” –though the safety features would have cost a tiny, tiny fraction (one-sixteenth) of what the vehicle cost.
Where are their brains?
That digital vehicle, HB277 is worthless, at least to this mom, without the seat belts for the kids. I, for one, will not allow my own children to get into that wild, glittering ride.
If it does not pass (and get funded) tomorrow, the Utah legislature is silently informing us that privacy protections for children’s data do not really matter, and that citizens should not have rights to personal ownership over their personal data.
Even though HB 358 is scheduled for a hearing today at the Capitol: Tuesday, March 8th, at 5:00 p.m., the bill is in trouble because the executive appropriations committee did not fund it. That’s almost the same thing as killing the bill. (The appropriations committee needs to hear from MANY of us, as fast as possible. See below for contact information.)
I have been head-bangingly furious about the lack of proper privacy protections for my children since 2012, when I found out that there was such a thing as a State Longitudinal Database System (SLDS)– here and in every other state–and when I then asked to opt out of SLDS tracking, I just received the State School Board’s official “no” letter.
In America, land of the free! In Utah, land of family-friendly liberty. Here, I was told that I was not allowed to opt my child out of SLDS, so that being tagged, tracked, and longitudinally stalked, from day one in school until my child was a working adult and beyond, was a mandate.
I also found out that:
1- Although it starts with the word “State,” the SLDS is federally paid-for and is aligned to federal data standardsand is federally interoperable;
2. Those who house Utah’s SLDS have zero legislative oversight. Incredibly, when SLDS began in 2009, there was zero vote-taking; SLDS came because of a grant application filled out by a clerk at the state office of education simply asking for a federal SLDS grant, and then it was implemented without voter approval. Yet SLDS is 100% applied to all school children, non-consensually.
4. FERPA (federal privacy law) was altered in 2009 by the Department of Education to become almost meaningless. Despite a huge law suit, FERPA stayed in its altered, privacy-harming state. So: in-state or beyond, proper privacy protections do not exist. (For more on that, see the recent hearings of Rep. Jason Chaffetz against the U.S. Dept. of Education)
5. SLDS interfaces with many other state agencies in the Utah Data Alliance, so there is no guarantee that a student’s private data, collected by a school, won’t end up in the data silo of another agency totally unrelated to education. SLDS has the ability, if state policy allows, to also interface with federal agencies’ data, other states’ and even other nations’ data collections.
This situation has literally kept me up at night, many nights, including tonight.
Along with countless other moms and dads, lawyers, think tanks, and legislators, I’ve done a lot of research and writing and speaking and pleading on this subject. See some of what I learned and shared in the past four years, here or here or here or here or here or here or here or here.
I tell you all this in case you are new to this issue so that you’ll understand how INCREDIBLY important passing HB 358 is.
House Bill 358 ought to be treated as one of the very most, if not the most, important bill at the Capitol this year. But the legislature is saying that there isn’t enough money to pass the privacy bill, which has an implementation price tag of $800,000. Oddly, the legislature has agreed to fund the FIFTEEN MILLION DOLLAR technology grant program, HB 277, but that technology bill is meaningless without privacy protections for students’ data.
Is the “no funding for HB 358” decision truly a budgeting pinch decision, or is it a matter of the legislators not caring enough about the rights of students to have privacy?
Here are a few of the lines in the bill that I really appreciate:
Line 463 says: “A student owns the student’s personally identifiable student data”.
Lines 494-503 say that schools have to give disclosure statements to parents, promising not to share certain types of data with out a data authorization.
Lines 775-792 prohibit psychiatric or psychological tests or analysis without prior written consent of parents, and specifically protect data collection about sexual orientation and behavior, mental problems, religious beliefs, self-incriminating behavior, appraisals of individuals with whom the student has a close family relationship; income, etc, and that written consent is required in all grades, kindergarten through 12th.
The bill designates three different types of data that schools may collect: necessary, optional, and prohibited.
Even though the “necessary” list seems too long, at least it limits data collection. It will collect data “required by state statute or federal law to conduct the regular activities of an education entity” such as name, date of birth, sex, parent contact information, student i.d., test results or exceptions from taking tests, transcript information, immunization record or exception from an immunization record, drop out data, race, etc.
Line 346-351 The “optional” list includes IEP information, biometric information, and information that is required for a student to participate in federal data gathering programs.
Lines 356 – 376 The bill also defines “personally identifiable student data” as data that cannot be legally disaggregated (identified by a particular student) (See lines 224-227 for disaggregation language):
356 (i) a student’s first and last name;
357 (ii) the name of a student’s family member;
358 (iii) a student’s or a student’s family’s home or physical address;
359 (iv) a student’s email address or online contact information;
360 (v) a student’s telephone number;
361 (vi) a student’s social security number;
362 (vii) a student’s biometric identifier;
363 (viii) a student’s health or disability data;
364 (ix) a student’s education entity student identification number;
365 (x) a student’s social media login or alias;
366 (xi) a student’s persistent identifier, if the identifier is associated with personally
367 identifiable student data, including:
368 (A) a customer number held in a cookie; or
369 (B) a processor serial number;
370 (xii) a combination of a student’s last name or photograph with other information that 371 together permits a person to contact the student online;
372 (xiii) information about a student or a student’s family that a person collects online and
373 combines with other personally identifiable student data to identify the student; and
374 (xiv) other information that, alone or in combination, is linked or linkable to a specific
375 student that would allow a reasonable person in the school community, who does not have
376 first-hand knowledge of the student, to identify the student with reasonable certainty.
We need to protect our kids! This bill NEEDS to pass!
If you’ve ever read 1984 and remember Big Brother; if good old-fashioned history books have taught you that tyranny has been far more dominant than liberty throughout world history (with the exception of a freedom experienced in the U.S. under the Constitution for a few 200+ years) –or if you’ve been paying attention to the recent struggle between big-data and individual rights– then you know: allowing any person or government –unfettered– to track individuals without their consent, for virtually the duration of their entire lives, is a very bad idea.
We need as many emails and phone calls or texts as we can muster before 5:00 p.m. tomorrow, Tuesday, March 8, to the following representatives, and especially to Speaker of the House Greg Hughes and President Niederhauser:
Senator (President) Niederhauser wniederhauser@le.utah.gov
Senator Sanpei dsanpei@le.utah.gov
Senator Hillyard lhillyard@le.utah.gov
Senator Dunnigan jdunnigan@le.utah.gov
Senator Adams jsadams@le.utah.gov
Representative Gibson fgibson@le.utah.gov
Senator Okerlund rokerlund@le.utah.gov
Here they are, ready to cut and paste into your email: dsanpei@le.utah.gov lhillyard@le.utah.gov jdunnigan@le.utah.gov jsadams@le.utah.gov fgibson@le.utah.gov rokerlund@le.utah.gov greghughes@le.utah.gov wniederhauser@le.utah.gov
“It’s not people outside the party that have thrown the conservative, grassroots base under the bus. It’s the people who have paid lip service to limited government while gorging on it. It wasn’t any outside candidate that is not a part of our movement… it was not outsiders, who are not familiar with our movement, who conspired with the establishment on Common Core. That was Republicans– who threw us under the bus. That was Republicans who are con men. And it was the heart and soul of conservative, grassroots activists, mostly everyday, ordinary moms, who shamed the Republican Party elites into backing away.
“And now what are they doing? The same thing that they always do when grassroots conservatives call them out: they smear the people who fought against them and who call them out. They sneer at them as hysterical. They sneer at them as just “fringe movements” on the Internet. And then they go and campaign on our side, knowing that they’ve stabbed us. My job is not to tell people what they want to hear, but what they need to hear.
“We just had Governor John Kasich, a nice guy, by all means, who last night, during the debate, pretended that he was on the side of local control. Ohio grassroots activists and moms know better. This is a man who smeared home schoolers and teachers for their opposition to Common Core. I am telling you the truth. I am asking you to do your homework. I am asking you to follow the money. I know it isn’t what you want to hear. But do you want to hear the same Republicans promise you, as they have been, since 1981, that they’re going to abolish the Federal Department of Education? It’s an empty talking point. And those empty talking points need to be punctured like helium balloons.”
“There are three reasons why Jeb Bush failed: his last name, his support for Amnesty, and his cheerleading and cashing in on Common Core.”
Thank you for speaking the truth, Michelle Malkin.
With my stomach in knots at two sickening bills that are poised to be slammed through today, I will go (hopefully alongside very many other moms and dads and teachers like me, along with our children) to make the drive, find the impossible parking, and attend the hearings today at 4:00 at the House Building in our State Capitol building.
POWELL – THE SPONSOR OF THE COMMON CORE-
BASED, FORCED YEARLONG TESTING BILL
We’ll hear legislative discussion and, if we’re lucky, will hear strong citizen testimony, on both HB 164 (that’s the “Let’s force SAGE/Common Core yearlong assessment on all kids without parental consent” bill) –now a very slightly altered version of what got voted down a few days ago, which has been unfortunately resurrected by the desperate Representatives Powell/Milner, likely egged on by equally desperate Governor Herbert and his USOE.
See lines 82-85: “providing that scores on the tests and assessments… may[not] be considered in determining:
84 (i) a student’s academic grade for the appropriate course; or
85 (ii) whether a student may advance to the next grade level.”
By taking out “not” they have made it so that kids opting out of common core year-round tests may not pass the class or the grade, if this passes. That breaks many other laws that place parents as primary authority, schools as supporting authority, in a child’s education. How can parents truly have a say if the law says otherwise? Even more importantly, a yes vote on this bill is a yes vote for the common core itself, since it assumes that the tests based on those standards are valid. VOTE NO.
Also:
KING – SPONSOR OF HB264, THE ALIGNING UTAH WITH
COMMON SEX STANDARDS BILL
We’ll hear discussion on HB 264, the bill that alters Utah’s current sex education program, which is, or was, reasonably, actually about the medically correct facts about reproduction, sexually transmitted diseases, and the fact that abstinence and fidelity are great tools to avoid trouble — but now, under HB 264, is to be replaced by the “common core” national standards for sex ed, which are code named “comprehensive sexuality education,” all about altering “values, beliefs and attitudes” about sex and gender identity, with no moral judgment of any kind allowed to be taught, and no such thing as deviant or perverted behaviors to be mentioned; such seem not to exist, under the common national sex standards, separately from healthy and moral sexual behavior.
As Wendy Hart, Alpine School Board member, pointed out: “We will be told [HB 264] is about knowledge. Here’s some evidence. CDC ranks Utah 47th for STDs compared to all of the other 50 states. According to the Guttmacher Institute Utah is rated 45th for teen pregnancy and 49th for teen abortions. States such as California and New York that teach comprehensive sex education are ranked in the top 10 states for all these teenage sexual activities. So, should Utah continue with its successful abstinence-based education program resulting in Utah students ranking an average of 47th out of all 50 states for teenage sexual activity or should we change to a failed comprehensive sex education program that has produced teen sexual activity rates in the top 10 of all states?”
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With permission, I am posting the open email and letter now, from Dr. Gary Thompson, an African-American doctor of clinical psychology (who is also currently a candidate for District 10 in the battle for State School Board seats).
This letter was sent yesterday to the legislators, who will vote on HB164 today.
Subject: Memo To House/Press Release RE: Objection to HR 164-2
Dear Honorable Members of the Utah House of Representatives Education Committee:
Please find attached, my formal objection to HR 164-2, which if passed, will mandate that all Utah students be subjected to a experimental, non validated test, regardless of parental, medical doctor or psychological doctor objections. I believe that this test is not only a experimentation on Utah’s children’s without informed written consent from parents, it is by its very design, discriminatory against African American, Latino, Gifted, Autistic, and Special Education Students in Utah public schools.
It is my understanding that this Bill will be up for a (re) vote sometime early this week. Feel free to contact me directly if you have any questions, or need volumes of peer reviewed research which backs the contents of my letter.
I have been flooded with email and social media requests to address this issue from my perspective as a doctor of psychology, and father of five divergent learning, African American children.
I appreciate your civic service performed on behalf of the children in the State of Utah. Thank you very much for your attention.
Best regards;
Gary Thompson, Psy.D.
Accompanying letter:
February 21, 2016
Re: Objection to HB 164-2
Early Life Child Psychology & Education Center, Inc.
Dr. Gary T. Thompson
Utah State House of Representatives House Education Committee
Dear House Education Committee:
I am writing in regards to HB 164-2 on behalf of my five African-American children, as well as the hundreds of mothers who have graced the halls of the pediatric clinical/education child psychology clinic that I co-founded with my wife. This Bill will require all public school children in the State of Utah to take the SAGE assessment test, eliminate the option of parents to opt their children out of taking the test, and will mandate the usage of SAGE as a primary determinate for advancement in early elementary school grades, as well as graduation from Utah public high schools. The passage of this Bill will have far-reaching negative academic, psychological, ethical, economic, and legal consequences that will haunt our State for generations.
I have devoted my life to the research, study and ethical clinical usage of emotional, cognitive and academic achievement tests to assist parents, schools, and courts with making life-altering decisions for children. During my Doctoral Internship and Residency, I gained a intimate working knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of the incredible technology and psychometric qualities embedded in the algorithms of the computer adaptive tests that are now the foundational basis of the SAGE test at issue of this Bill.
The psychometric algorithms imbedded inside the SAGE test are remarkable, cutting edge, and unlike anything our generation has seen or experienced in our lifetime. As a local clinical community scientist, I have spent many hours enthusiastically reading peer reviewed studies from my colleagues over the past 8 years in anticipation of utilizing computer adaptive assessment of this nature for children in my community, as well as my own children.
I am a strong advocate for the ethical and prudent usage and inclusion of technology in efforts to assist ground level teachers with serving the academic needs of children in educational settings. The next 4 years will see innovations in this area that will be awe inspiring, as well as ground breaking in nature.
Despite my scientific enthusiasm and support for the inclusion and integration of psychometric tools, such as the SAGE test, in the academic lives of my children, and the children of my neighbors in my community, I beg you both as father, and a Doctor of Clinical Psychology, to never let this Bill see the light of day. My strong objection is not based on personal politics, and obviously has no basis in a “fear of technology”.
This Bill must not pass for one reason, and one reason only: It is still in its developmental/experimental phase, and has yet to be validated independently for its intended purpose. Without a shadow of a doubt, the corporation that the Utah State Office of Education chose as the vendor for the SAGE test (American Institute of Research), has launched the most expansive, massive, unethical experimentation on public school children ever witnessed in the history of Utah. Clinical psychology is replete with tragic, historical examples of the dire consequences associated with experimentation without the informed, written consent of its human participants. To pass a law which takes away the right of parents of protect their psychologically vulnerable children from the adverse, and well documented effects of high stakes, experimental assessment of any nature, is irresponsible, unethical, and dangerous.
One needs to look no further than the State of Florida to see the chaos, harm and damage associated with the AIR produced Common Core test currently being utilized for purposes of grade advancement, and teacher evaluations. In closing, on behalf of the parents of African American, Latino, Divergent Learning, Special Education, Gifted, Anxious, Depressed, Suicidal, ADHD, Autistic, and emotionally vulnerable children in the State of Utah, I respectfully request that the House not only allow parents to opt out of the SAGE test, but encourage them to withdraw their children when they witness excessive signs of distress associated with experimental, high stakes testing. In addition, I ask that no high stakes, experimental test produced by a corporate vendor, validated or not, ever be given the “respect” of being tied to grade advancement or high school graduation.
Using our kids as experimental laboratory rats, without the informed written consent of parents, to achieve “career and college readiness” is unethical by any professional standard, and is a direct affront to our God given and Constitutionally protected right as parents to protect, raise and nurture our children without invasive governmental interventions. Please vote “NO” on HB 164-2. “Parents are, and must always be, the resident experts of their own children.”
Respectfully Submitted;
Gary Thompson, Psy.D.
Retired Father of Five Divergent Learning Children
2016 Candidate-Utah State Board of Education-District 10
Early Life – 10757 So. Riverfront Parkway Ste. #275 South Jordan, UT 84095
Buried deep in a 2012 report on “Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics,” the US Department of Education states that one of the key applications of educational data mining is “user profiling” (page 25).
The paragraph says: “These application areas are (1) modeling of user knowledge, user behavior, and user experience; (2) user profiling; (3) modeling of key concepts in a domain and modeling a domain’s knowledge components, (4) and trend analysis.”
Later on, in Exhibit 1, we see a flow chart. It shows “student learning data” flowing into the “predictive model,” the “intervention engine” and then into the “adaptation engine.” Clearly, the goal is government-directed behavior modification following student psychological profiling.
This is sad, because “users” now include even babies, since the Department of Education has successfully pushed ESSA into law, with its “early childhood education” programs that are included in the citizen data mining venture.
The Educational Data Mining report of 2012 is not the only such report from the U.S. Department of Education. Related is its 2013 report, “Promoting Grit, Tenacity and Perseverance” which contained more of the same psychological data gathering goals.
The “Promoting Grit” report included pictures of biometric sensory devices: pressure mouse sensors, posture analysis seats, facial expression cameras, and wireless skin conductance sensors, which would mine student psychological elements, including “grit,” “tenacity,” “perseverance” and more.
In SETRA (the Strengthening Education Through Research Act, currently in the US House of Representatives, having somehow passed the Senate) we find that the federal research programs will be strengthened and enlarged so that more data, including “social and emotional learning” will be gathered for federal use.
Philosophical and constitutional questions need to be hotly debated by the House of Representatives. More importantly, these need discussion at the dinner table, by moms and dads and teachers and principals and school board members:
Will American children grow up free– as self-governing, free agents, with intellectual and moral privacy and the accompanying power to soar outside any box, as well as the power to fail? How, if even their thoughts and beliefs are monitored and subjected to “intervention”?
Do Americans want students to be profiled, centrally managed, and nudged in a predetermined, government-and-workforce approved direction –constantly monitored and told what to do? If so, what qualifies central planners to trump individuals’ and families’ desires?
Does widespread societal faith in “experts” relegate personal privacy and real autonomy to historical artifact? Should personal data be studied and behavior “intervened” by unsupervised central planners? Will this really keep us “safe,” as cogs in a centrally managed, economy-focused collective? Do we want to be a government-branded herd, or free, individual, human beings?
Here come the practical questions for how all this profiling may pan out.
If we allow government to keep psychological profiles (not just on students– since the P-20 Workforce Pipeline means preschool through workforce citizens get tagged) –then, what happens if a thirty year-old wants to buy a gun, and his background check comes back negatively because when he was in 5th grade, his data was interpreted to mean future depressed individual? And what if his 5th grade data was incorrect?
What if “at-risk academically” is redefined and applied to a student for attending a private, religious, or home school?
What if “mentally unstable” is applied to anyone who does not agree with what is being taught in school?
What if “socially deviant” is applied to anyone who disagrees, or is bored with, collectivist groupthink and group work? –The “what if” list could be endless.
We don’t want to see any “what if”s come to pass. We can put proper protections in place. Legislators, write bills and voters, actively push to get them passed –laws that will deny researchers, school systems and governments access to psychologically profiling, via tests, curricula, and standards without informed, written consent.
The fact that “profiling’s already here” is no excuse. We can begin where we are, and take a stand today. It is true that our students are already being psychologically profiled, to some degree, by the government and schools, already: look at the math standard for Common Core that requires a student to be tagged for presence or absence of “perseverance”. That’s not about math; that’s about psychology and character.
The perseverance tag and others like it will certainly be on the SAGE (Common Core, CEDSaligned) tests; notably in Utah and Florida, which use tests created and scored by the behavioral research company AIR (American Institutes for Research).
For additional evidence of current psychological profiling, look at Utah’s “Student Strengths Inventory,” which gathers nonacademic data on high schoolers.
But none of that is any excuse.
If rain is leaking through a hole in the kitchen, that does not mean we can innocently stand by while someone pokes holes in our living room roof and the bedroom ceiling, and makes plans for the removal of the roof.
The Father of the Constitution, James Madison, said that if men were angels, no government would be necessary. To that I add, if governments and corporations were angels, no privacy protections would be necessary; student data would be consensually collected, analyzed, and used to bless the lives and enlarge the opportunities of every student. But men, governments, and corporations are not angels. That’s why We, the People, need to stop invasive bills like federal SETRA; it’s why we need to write and pass good, protective laws locally.
Take action today.
Write a letter. Make a phone call. Meet with a legislator. Pray with great faith; miracles of knowledge and understanding and miracles within political workings are needed, to awaken an asleep populace and to build up protections for our children’s minds, hearts, and freedoms.
At the #AboutTheChild conference in Houston last week, B&L Network speakers said that even in the middle of a struggle we might seem to be losing, we have great power and great hope.
Although America is seeing dangerous shifts in who can and who cannot amend tests, in who controls (and does not protect) children’s data; in who gets to redefine even babies’ “educations” as a collective-economy-purposed thing; while we see corporate and federal “central planners” ram initiatives without a vote to assume “stakeholder” rights over our little ones– even in this awful situation, we can defend children’s rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happy education; that is, time-tested, soul-enlarging, non-Common Core education.
I cannot do the conference justice briefly, yet I want to try. A few moments that stood out came from these speeches:
1 Troy Towns, an Alabama minister and political activist, spoke about the numbers of people who should be actively involved in the fight against Common Core and other false reforms. He retold the story of Gideon in the Old Testament. Not only did it not bother the Lord that Gideon was vastly outnumbered; the Lord told Gideon to reduce his numbers, by sending away all warriors who were fearful. Then the Lord instructed Gideon further, to send away all those who were not alert to the enemy while drinking at the stream. Reduced to 300 people, surrounded by countless armies, the Lord then led Gideon’s group to victory… It’s not about numbers. It’s not about who appears to be winning in the moment. It is about who is on the side of true and honorable principles.
2. Daisy Whisenant, Texas advisor in the Christian Educators Association International, a Christian teacher’s union, implored listeners to let teachers and students know the truth about “separation between Church and State”. That idea is designed to prevent governments from promoting one religion above another, while upholding all religions’ freedom of speech. It is not designed to shut down religious discussions. A teacher is a government employee, but a child is not. Nongovernmental citizens (students of all ages) may speak and write freely about their religious beliefs. For more information, visit CEAI.
3. Jason Hoyt, Florida radio personality and author, discussed what “Consent of the Governed” means. The concept is also the title of his book. (Click here to find the book Consent of the Governed. ) I read it on my trip home. It teaches the history of local, state, and federal grand juries, and outlines the disintegration of that constitutional authority, which serves –or should serve– as a fourth branch and a check on the other three branches. The book shows that if “We the People” reclaim proper controls of our grand juries, we can reclaim vital, lost political power –more effectively than if we rely only on elections as the means to enforce fair government.
4. Angelique Clark, a Las Vegas high school student, spoke about the stand she took and the fight that ensued as she founded a pro-life group for teen activists. When her application for a high school pro-life club was denied, Angelique fought for her First Amendment rights inside a school, with a lawsuit to the school district that finally allowed her to form the pro-life club. She won. Her story has been seen on Fox & Friends, On the Record with Greta, Fox, Bill O’Reilly, and elsewhere.
5. Dr. Karen Effrem, a pediatrician, author and researcher, a leader of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, of the Florida Stop Common Core Coalition and of Education Liberty Watch, spoke about the amount of data being collected on every public school student in the nation without parental knowledge or consent; about the psychological and belief data-gathering goals outlined in the US Department of Education’s “Developing Grit, Tenacity and Persistance” Report; about the unfortunate, newly passed, Every Student Succeeds Act; and about the monster on the horizon, the “Strengthening Education Through Research Act“. Her presentation should be seen by every member of the U.S. Congress.
6. Dr. Peg Luksik, a former reform evaluator for the U.S. Department of Education, a lifelong teacher, speaker, and honoree by multiple U.S. Presidents, spoke about the idea of common standards. She asked the audience if there was such a thing as good standards, and answered her question: no. There is no such thing as a good set of standards because every child is so different. She has a child who is a math genius, who cannot do ballet. She has a daughter who is a ballet genius, who cannot do math. She asked: where would the proper, common standard be for those two children? The idea of top-down decision making for teachers and students is ridiculous. She said that years ago, “Outcome Based Education” was pushed on the nation, and was defeated by a handful of level-headed patriots. Common Core and its related initiatives are the same thing, repackaged. Those who would be central planners of all children’s lives must be defeated again.
7. Dr. Duke Pesta, an energetic literature professor and administrator at Freedom Project Academy, spoke about the devious history of the Common Core Initiative, up to its promoters’ most recent coup against liberty, the Every Student Succeeds Act. He emphasized the words of Arne Duncan about the Every Student Succeeds Act, and pointed out that even trusted Republican leadership betrayed liberty with ESSA. We must be smarter and faster in overturning the deceptions of this fight. (FYI, Utahns: rumor has it that Dr. Pesta will be speaking in Utah this April.)
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day. (Read the whole speech.)
9. Joan Landes, a Utah therapist, crystallized the issue when she said that the problem with government initiatives like Common Core and its web of tests and controls is that it hurts human relationships. Her presentation about reversing Saul Alinsky’s evil tactics, and her idea of asking every concerned citizen to spend five minutes or five dollars as often as they can, were truly remarkable.
I spoke, too. The heart of my speech, “Reclaiming Parental Power” came from a realization I had a few nights before the conference, as I thought about the awful situation that is U.S. Education Reform today. As I wondered how we can keep going in the face of losing, losing, and losing (Common Core is still here; Common Education Standards and Longitudinal Databases are still here; the ESSA federal law makes things so much less free; and SETRA may soon make them even worse) –I had a clear thought: HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO TRADE PLACES WITH A MOM IN CHINA– or a mom in any socialist/communist nation, for that matter? You would have no freedom of expression, freedom of religion, freedom to publish, freedom to work to repeal bad laws. You hardly have freedom to think, in China. A lover of freedom living in China, loving her children, would give her arms or legs to have the opportunity to face the problems that we face. Arms and legs.
The glass will always be half full– never half empty– as long as there is a person left in America who remembers the words and the spirit of the U.S. Constitution.
Freedom is always worth the fight.
Children will always be the reason.
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This blog post is a partial, inadequate sampling that has not included many additional, wonderful speakers at the conference. Every speaker (see biographies and speaker list here) –was moving.
If you missed the conference and the livestream, you can still watch it as part of a package deal with B&L* Network by purchasing a B&L year membership here. I’m advertising it because:
The conference speakers were an inspiration, and their words need to be heard far and wide, as do the messages from United States Parents In Education (USPIE) which held a press conference as part of this conference, rolling out a campaign to #StopFedEd. Also, importantly, consider this: the conference organizer was Alabama homemaker and radio show host Diana Crews, who, with her sweet husband, a professional trucker, went into debt to make this conference happen. If nobody watches, she stays in debt. This was her sacrifice because she believes in making this issue About The Child. It’s not about the “global economy” or the “school to workforce pipeline” or about “human capital”. It is about the child.
To support B&L, click here.
* (If you want to know what B & L stands for– and I asked, and was so glad I did– it’s Bears and Lord; as in, Mama & Papa Bears and their Lord).
Moms Alyson Williams, Jenni White, Alisa Ellis and Christel Swasey, of Utah and Oklahoma, chat in a Google Hangout about their concerns and experiences with government data mining children without parental consent.
At this year’s Agency Based Education (ABE) conference, one speaker, Jakell Sullivan, presented the following remarkable research. Please watch and share.
Oak Norton, founder of ABE, shared this insight in his introduction to Jakell’s video:
“In the Old Testament we read of a curious story where “Satan stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number Israel” (1 Chron. 21:1). David’s temptation caused him to look upon his people as human capital and as a result he brought a severe curse upon Israel. As a result, God took away a portion of David’s “capacity” to build or make war by offering him one of three curses. David chose the shortest curse, pestilence, which brought upon his kingdom a three day plague and killed 70,000 men.
Statewide longitudinal database systems and digital badging are the designated “numbering” systems used by the education system in America today. When Secretary Arne Duncan and others speak about human capital, they are literally engaging in an effort to control and direct the economic future of our nation. Instead of independent thinkers, we have “common” education standards nationwide, with national assessment, tracking, and a host of other programs to bring all children into a standardization to fit them to the economic desires of those in power.
In this presentation, JaKell Sullivan enlightens and exposes what is happening in the White House and departments of education across the nation and how they are dramatically overstepping their bounds. Please watch and share this presentation, and become a member of Agency Based Education today to help support our mission.”
(You might want to tweet it to @OrrinHatch or other D.C. senators who are about to vote about ESEA/ESSA. Ask them to vote no because the bill hurts Jakell’s cause, the cause of freedom and putting family and individuals first as it entrenches standardization, gives the feds veto power over anything a state wants to do, enriches ed corporations rather than children, accepts as normal the ongoing, unconstitutional federal encroachment into education, and cements the power of student-data mining.)
Michelle Malkin’s #STOPESEA video is available on her public Facebook page; click here to view. It was posted 18 hours ago and already has over 120,000 views. I hope each viewer called D.C. (202-224-3121) or tweeted to Congress @repjohnkline @SpeakerRyan or will do so now.
Michelle Malkin said in the video that even though many have not heard of the hashtag #STOPESEA, it is one of the most important issues on the table in Washington D.C. today.
She called out the media for not covering “bread and butter” education issues like this one and praised “firebreathing moms and dads” from across the political spectrum who “have been ever vigilant on all of the issues involving federal encroachment into education”.
Minute 3:
She noted that “so much of this process is taking place behind closed doors out of view of the public with back door and back room negotiations and no sunlight and no input from the people who are most affected. That’s you and your kids and your grandkids.”
Minute 4:15
“You’ve got a vote coming up in just a couple of days on this massive piece of legislation which isn’t accessible to the public yet [wasn’t as of last night; link just added] that many of these politicians on Capitol Hill will, of course, never read, and will have two days for their staffs to digest before they cast votes on it. It is supposed to be released November 30 with the first vote on December 2nd….Same-o Same-o, business as usual in Washington, D.C., don’t you think?”
Minute 5:
“What good is it to elect new GOP leaders who promise transparency and pay lip service –the same way that Barack Obama did– and then sabotage that very process? So much for Constitutional Conservatives.”
“Not only does the process stink, but as many of these vigilant parents have been warning about, it’s the actual policy itself that stinks, too.”
” One of the few heroes out there who’s been warming about this Senator Mike Lee from Utah, who during a floor speech on November 18th warned that voting for this ESEA/NCLB reauthorization will be tantamount to doubling down or tripling down on all of the awful Common Core concepts that have taken so long for so many so-called Constitutional Conservatives on Capitol Hill to finally acknowledge. It’s the expansion of the federal role in education and the meddling in the classroom; the cementing of grant money to all sorts of crony educational special interests; along with that of course is the continued federalization of curriculum, the cementing again of contracts and special arrangements between the federal government and a lot of tech companies in the business of leveraging the power and the money that they’re making on these boondoggles on everything from textbooks to testing to technology. And that data mining aspect, of course, is something that people across the political and ideological spectrum should be objecting to and warning other parents about, and opposing.”
Minute 7:00
“Of course, it’s hard to digest all that’s in these hundreds and hundreds of still unseen pages in just a matter of days. It’s an absolute disgrace. So Monday morning, tomorrow morning, I hope those of you who have been active in any manner in opposing Common Core will see the connection here…call your congress people: 202-224-3121. ”
She emphasizes that (see minute 8:47) for those in every type of schooling system, those in “public schools, private schools, private schools, charter schools, home schools, Christian schools, secular schools— there is no safe space from fed ed. That’s one of the most important messages I want to get across tonight.”
She adds, “There are all of these strategists in Washington, D.C., who are always puzzling and pulling their chins on, ‘how do they reach out to nontraditional consitituencies” and you have to watch out because when they start talking out loud you have to watch out… that they are about to pander, pander, pander, pander, pander and move to the left on everything… how do we reach out to nontraditional constituencies? What it really means is throwing all their conservative principles and conservative constituencies under the bus in some desperate attempt to cow-tow to nontraditional constituencies. What they should be doing is looking at issues where they can find agreement with people across the political spectrum, without compromising their principles … and yes, that includes Common Core and this massive expansion of the testing racket that has usurped so much of the already limited time that there is in the classroom? Guess what? It’s not just us right-wing, fire-breathing Mammas and Pappas who care about that.”
Minute 25:
“…Issues include all of the money that is being poured into overtly political organizations that are using our kids as political and ideological and pedagogical guinea pigs. And I can’t tell you how many parents and educators who span the political spectrum who I’ve talked to over the years since I’ve started learning about this, who tell me, “I don’t agree with practically anything else you say, but you are right on this.”
“It’s finding those issues and actually listening to the people who are affected, that is going to have the most promise for Republicans who are looking to win over people who otherwise wouldn’t vote for them. Education is one of those issues.”
Former U.S. Department of Education Senior Policy Advisor Charlotte Iserbyt, patriot, whistleblower, and author of The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, has written an open letter to Senator Mike Lee of Utah, which is posted with her permission below. She asks him to follow up on his speech about the mishandling of the ESEA bill, by working to postpone further votes until an investigation is made into the House and Senate’s failure to adhere to Congressional Procedural Laws in regards to this bill.
Please read and share this letter, especially with the most freedom-friendly members of the House of Representatives, whose twitter handles are here.
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Dear Senator Lee,
You, Senator Lee, appear to be a friend of parents, teachers and plain grassroots Americans who have serious concerns related to the Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA/NCLB).
A significant number of parents and teachers wonder if the most effective way to stop the Reauthorization of ESEA might be for you to request a delay in the House vote Wednesday, December 2, due not to the controversial nature of the bill, but to the circumvention of procedural requirements in passage of all legislation by the Congress.
Concerned parents, teachers and others who have been following the history of this legislation believe there have been important and disturbing irregularities in the normal procedure related to enactment of legislation.
What has transpired since Janary when HR5 was first being considered is itself interesting.
Our first concern was when, in February, Rep. John Kline postponed the House Education Committee vote on HR5 (Student Success Act) knowing he didn’t have enough Republican votes for passage. His excuse was that an urgent Homeland Security vote took precedence.
We know that Sen. Alexander wanted to move very fast with his version of the Reauthorization of ESEA. All of us kept wondering when he would get his Senate bill in shape for a Committee vote. It took Alexander from January to July to feel comfortable in moving ahead, only after Rep. Kline managed to get a five vote majority on HR5 (Student Success Act) in July. Those of us who watched the House vote on C-SPAN can attest to Kline’s HR5 initially losing by a substantial number of votes. Suddenly, after the Congressional clock stopped ticking, the necessary five votes for passage came in. Shouldn’t that be investigated?
We parents and teachers, and other groups opposed to this legislation, ask you to speak out (formally) regarding the Senate and House Education Committee’s not following the procedural rules required for passage of legislation.
You certainly recognized that what happened in the Conference Committee’s handling of the last stages of passage of this bill was illegal, and we thank you so much for making a public statement in that regard.
“So, from the surface it will still look like the conference process is happening, is unfolding in the manner in which it is supposed to, but beneath the surface we know that all of this has already been prearranged, precooked, predetermined by a select few Members of Congress working behind closed doors free from scrutiny, and we know this vote was scheduled on extremely short notice so it would be difficult, if not impossible, for the rest of us to influence the substance of the conference report through motions to instruct.”
Could you, Senator Lee, request a postponement of any further votes by the House or Senate until an investigation is made into the House and Senate’s strict adherence to Congressional Procedural Laws in regard to the Reauthorization of ESEA?
Such a postponement would allow for not only Congress to have more time and input into the legislation, but for grassroots Americans (not the usual lobbyists who attend all hearings) to have more time to express our opposition to what we consider legislation which will end forever many of the freedoms enshrined in the United States Constitution.
Thank you very much for whatever consideration you can give to this Open Letter.
ESEA, a huge bill about data and federal roles in local education, is being rammed through in the dark. The vote is in a week and there’s no access to the final bill yet. Senator Lee is right. This process is wrong.
Don’t let a handful of people decide for the entire elected Congress and the entire population of the US what education, testing, standards, and data privacy should be, without debate, and without reading the bill. The political careers of those who are ramming through this anti-freedom legislation in the dark without debate are going to be over once America wakes up and figures out what they have done to us.
I sat down and wrote out what I wanted to say this blog-video. It’s posted here, for those who don’t want to sit through twenty minutes of talking. Sorry that I had to read much of it rather than making eye contact all of the time. I just needed to get it said right.)
VIDEO CONTENT:
Happy Thanksgiving Week!
My name is Christel Swasey, and I am a teacher and a mother living in Pleasant Grove, Utah. Today is November 24, 2015. In less than one week a handful of secretive congressmen are expecting to pass a bill called ESEA, or the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, without our informed consent or the informed consent of our elected representatives.
The final bill has not even been released yet but the vote is in a week. It won’t be read by turkey-gobbling Congressmen when it is released in a few days. But they’ll be forced to vote on Tuesday, uninformed or misinformed because all they’ll read is a sheet of talking points put out by the bill’s lobbyists. This will have a disasterous, long term effect on liberty in America.
I am asking you to help #STOPESEA by calling Congress at 202-224-3121. Tell Congress to vote NO on ESEA based on what’s slated to be in it, and maybe more importantly, based on the corrupt, un-American process of passing it without giving time to read and debate about it.
I’m a big fan of a phrase in the Declaration of Independence: THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED”.
The Declaration explains that to secure our God-given rights, we the people instituted government: “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”
So government has no just powers outside of consent by the governed, and so my life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, and yours, are not secure when government is operating outside the informed consent of the governed. I am telling you that it is happening right now.
My own Senator, Mike Lee, has been an inspiration this week as he’s spoken out about this corrupt process and explained how it’s operating. He said that how the conference process is supposed to work is not how is has been conducted. Quote: “from the surface it will still look like the conference process is happening the way it’s supposed to, but beneath the surface, we know that all of this has already been prearranged, precooked, predetermined by a select few members of Congress working behind closed doors, free from scrutiny. And we know that this vote was scheduled on extremely short notice, so that it would be difficult if not impossible for the rest of us to influence the substance of the conference report through motions to instruct.” Senator Lee said, “Because process influences policy… the process expedites the passage of policies that we know don’t work—policies to which the American people are strongly opposed.” Then Senator Lee named a few of those bad policies, such as “the discredited common core approach” and the centrally planned, failed model of federal preschool which the bill will use $250 million to promote. There are many more terrible policies that ESEA will cement. I will list more later on in this video.
My own representative, Jason Chaffetz, has also been in the Congressional spotlight this week, shedding light on what the federal government, via the Dept. of Education, is doing to American privacy. I watched him in a video leading a congressional hearing on the improper practices of the Dept of Education in its student data collection and data mining programs. The hearing revealed that the federal Dept of Education has somewhere between one and two hundred ways that it collects data about your child and mine, but the Department only admits to having three because it contracts out the rest of the systems. As if that’s better. The hearing revealed that the Dept of Education received negative scores across every category of data security, and Rep Chaffetz gave the Dept. an “F”—calling it “a monster, an absolute monster”.
This is the same federal Dept of Education that is pushing, through the current ESEA bill, additional methods of mining student data.
But the things that Sen. Lee and Rep. Chaffetz oppose are not the only things that the ESEA bill will foist on us. I predict that the final version of the ESEA bill will contain many more grants to promote more “voluntary” data mining in addition to the compulsory data collection that’s already taking place; more federal preschools, more psychological profiling of teachers, students and families inside and outside of public schools under the banner of the kindly nanny state’s data-driven decision making, more career tracking, more longitudinal citizen stalking via college student and graduate reporting, more assessments or more deeply embedded forms of stealth assessments, and a subtle undermining of parental authority, teacher creativity and student autonomy from the community-centric, workforce-focused, data-focused initiatives in this bill. (We’ll see this week, won’t we?)
A group of over two hundred grassroots organizations representing most of the states in the United States signed an open letter to Congress opposing this ESEA bill. The letter outlines four things that are strong reasons to oppose ESEA. I’m summarizing. The first is–
COMMON CORE – the letter calls common core “academically inferior, developmentally inappropriate, psychologically manipulative and privately copyrighted Common Core Standards…” End quote. Now, in my opinion, the talking points that will be used to promote the bill will likely say that it’s common-core free, or at least, the bill will avoid using the phrases “common core” or “common data standards”. The bill will rely very deceptively on the fact that most people don’t know that there is an official federal definition of common core. That other phrase that the bill WILL include, repeatedly, is: “career and college ready standards” or “career and college readiness”. Do an internet search for the federal definition of “college and career ready”. You’ll find that the phrase is officially defined by the federal Dept. of Education as “standards common to a significant number of states” which can only be the common core.
The second reason that the grassroots letter asks Congress to oppose ESEA is its push for:
ASSESSMENTS THAT PROFILE CITIZENS – the letter calls an over-reliance on tests never independently validated, high-stakes standardized tests supervised by the federal government , tests that are psychologically profiling our children more than assessing their academic knowledge…a problem. The third reason to oppose ESEA is:
SLDS – State Longitudinal Database Systems (stalking of kids by the government) and the massive increase in state and federal gathering of private family, education and psychological data … without consent. The fourth reason:
CAREER TRACKING – Career tracking, which undermines self-determination by means of unconstitutional profiling…”
Some people don’t understand why it’s a bad thing for the government to centrally manage and guide (or control) citizens into different career tracks; some think that’s helpful for the individual and good for the collective economy.
But I think of a quote from my favorite Disney movie, “Prince of Egypt” where Moses says, “No kingdom should be made on the backs of slaves”.
Since student self-determination is undermined by the dictates of the government’s workforce needs, even if it is data-driven dictatorship, and since a student’s interests won’t be judged as equally important to a student’s capabilities when the collective workforce or the government is the main determiner of what that student’s career path should be, we are creating a system for our children where they are not free. Maybe it is an exaggeration to say that education reforms are aiming to build a global kingdom on the backs of children without their consent; but I think, in the long run, maybe not.
Either you believe that parents are the God-given authority over a child, or you believe that children’s lives should be managed by the government and its “data driven decision making,” for the building up of the government’s economy– in the style of countries without freedom, like China.
Either you support the continued tracking and nonconsensual stalking of your child and family, using local schools as the data collection pawns in a federal system that tracks children and families for life, –or you believe in freedom, self-determination and privacy.
Either you believe that individuals should control their own lives despite the risks that freedom allows, or you believe that the government should control the lives of the people, because of the risks that freedom allows. If you are getting sucked into believing the latter, please remember this: we the people created government. We own it; it did not create us and it does not own us. It cannot boss us without our consent. Anytime government does a thing without the full, informed consent of the governed, it is unjust and it is dangerous.
But government can and does get away with bossing and bullying –when we let go of our own power. I am asking you to use your power to call and stop ESEA this week.
Because Congress isn’t being given time to read or debate the bill prior to a vote, the bill’s promoters will pass out a sheet of biased talking points for the rest of Congress to read before they vote (this is how they got the Student Success Act passed) –and these talking points will sound so good. But they will be full of lies.
I know this because I saw the last set of talking points when they passed the house and senate versions of this monster bill. They had things that successfully deceived almost all of our elected conservatives, such as: “this bill will reduce the federal footprint” and “this bill restores power to the states and localities”—these things weren’t true.
Rather than restoring power to the localities, the bill assigned enforcement of federal priorities to the localities. Think about that: there’s a big difference between assigning federal priority enforcement and implementation to states, and actually restoring freedom to states. The new bill will likely use many phrases conservatives love while it also intrudes on basic rights and institutions, for example, on private schools and home schools by offering them attractive grants or services –in exchange for student, teacher and family data. It’s all about data—it’s all about reducing citizen privacy, because information is power.
And the bill won’t be written in clear language that is accessible to the average person. You will have to really study it and find out what its words and phrases mean in definitions outside the bill itself, to understand what is being traded.
The bill and its talking points will likely use language to appeal to the compassionate person, but it will force the federal concept — a parent-replacing definition– of government compassion. It will promote parent-neutralizing, nanny-state enabling concepts and programs, including increased data mining –to identify (quote) ”academic, physical, social, emotional, health, mental health and other needs of students, families, and community residents.” The last bill promoted “Full Service Community Schools” and “student needs” and “wraparound services” and extended learning time that make school, not family or church, the central hub of a child’s life.
202-224-3121. Memorize that number or put it in your speed dial. Ask Congress to vote NO on ESEA.
It is wrong for you and I to sit by while the partnership of federal and corporate forces take away our authority by changing who gets to define and enforce what learning means and what will be learned –taking this authority from the parent and teacher; and reassigning it to the government;
It is wrong for you and I to sit by while the federal government narrows academic freedom by dicating a communistic, workforce-centered vision of what academic success is for;
It is wrong for you and I to sit by while the federal government cements into federal law the common core standards.
It is wrong for you and I to sit by while the federal government cements processes built on student-stalking common data standards and interoperable state databases that report to the federal edfacts data exchange, tracking children’s academic and psychological data, without consent;
It is wrong for you and I to allow any kind of assessments to be mandated upon us by federal forces, whether in the form of formal, standardized tests or stealthy, embedded tests that are quietly woven into the daily curriculum and assignments of students. These tests lock us into a federal definition of what academic excellence looks like and will narrow academic creativity in classrooms that are built on one standard and one set of data tags and tests. They certainly make things more efficient, but at the expense of a teacher’s professional judgment and her curricular liberty.
It is wrong for you and I to sit by while a few members of Congress ram a bill through, mostly in the dark, without allowing any space for analysis or debate. It is truly a dark and un-American process.
Fight for freedom with your telephone.
These freedoms, once lost, won’t come back easily: the freedom to define with our own conscience and intellect what education should look like; the freedom from invasion of privacy; the freedom from being centrally managed and tracked without consent. These are not small things.
I’m asking you to call 202-224-3121 and tell Congress to vote NO on ESEA.
Even if you had time to read the final version of the new ESEA bill which will get released days from now –which you won’t, because you’ll be eating turkey– and even if you agreed with every word (which I’m betting you won’t, because Senator Alexander’s view of ed reform is sick and wrong) –but even if you liked it– shouldn’t you, on principle, still oppose its passage, based on the devious process being used, a pushing of laws into their cemented form without representative debate– very fast, and mostly in the dark?
Senator Mike Lee’s fight against this now-brewing, corrupt, “new” No Child Left Behind, inspires me. His backbone in standing up to the corruptos in Congress that are pushing ESEA is a rare treasure in politics. Do you realize that he’s fighting for the actual freedom of our children and grandchildren? This is real. Listen to him.
Senator Lee’s railed against some of the corruption; for example, its $250 million plan to hurt good preschools by pushing loser-federal preschools on all; its cementing of Common Core standards, etc. There’s more brewing that he hasn’t taken time to denounce yet, such as its creepy, parent-ditching “community school” program that puts government ahead of families, churches or anyone else in influencing kids and eating up too much of kids’ time; and its cementing of common, kid-stalking data tags (CEDS) –but you can study all of that.
(I keep calling the other members of the Utah delegation to leave messages asking them to join his fight. Please do, too.)
This process that Senator Lee speaks of is so corrupt.
It is un-American to make Congress vote on something so fast that it hasn’t been vetted or understood by voters. It is un-American to skip debate and to ditch input. We all know that this law will weigh heavily on everyone who will be ruled by it afterward. Shouldn’t voters have a real opportunity to look at the bill from all angles and then take the vote?
Senator Lee has pointed out that the process creates the policy. This is how ESEA/NCLB is to be rammed down the throat of Congress (and all of us) next week.
Step one: right now, a tiny handful of pro-reauthorization members of Congress, behind closed doors, are cooking up the poison pill.
Step 2: They’ll speed it to a vote so fast that the rest of Congress has no time to think before swallowing, no chance to offer what they are supposed to be allowed to offer: “motions to instruct the conferees” (input).
Step 3: They’ll market it under the banner of good-sounding lies and slanted press releases and news stories that will successfully deceive Americans (including our politicians) into believing that control has been returned to the localities. It won’t be true. But we’ll figure it out too late to easily reverse it. Because nobody’s going to really read the bill before they vote yes.
The draft was released a few day ago.The bill won’t be released until next week, the same week that the vote will be taken: December 2.
This hurried method is a sick pattern used by the Obama administration. We saw Secretary Duncan push states with the monetary lure of “Race to the Top” millions to adopt Common Core and its tests and SLDS systems for a chance in that race. Before that, there was the ARRA funding that was tied, among other things, to governors agreeing to get federally-approved student data collection systems and standards.
Now, the speed of ESEA will similarly maim freedom, pushing these controversial programs into nation-binding law.
I’m reposting Senator Lee’s entire speech below.
After you read it, please call. This monster will affect all Americans for years to come.
Ask for any senator and representative in D.C. at 202-224-3121. Say, “VOTE NO ON ESEA.” Done? Thank you!! Please call again. Then call for your neighbor who isn’t taking the time to call. Skip the gym or the crochet project and call some who aren’t your direct reps, too. Leave them messages — ask them to call you to account for how they plan to vote on December 2.
Politicians need constituents’ support to get re-elected. Tell them that this is a make or break issue; you won’t vote for them again if they vote yes on ESEA. Your voice and vote are leverage.
At some point today the Senate will vote on the motion to appoint conferees – or what’s often called the motion to go to conference – for a bill that reauthorizes the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, or the ESEA, which is the legislation governing our federal K-12 education policy.
Because most Americans have probably never heard of this obscure parliamentary procedure – the motion to appoint conferees – I’d like to take a moment to explain how it works… or at least, how it’s supposed to work.
When the House and the Senate each pass separate, but similar, bills, the two chambers convene what’s called “a conference.”
A conference is essentially a meeting where delegates from each chamber come together to iron out the differences between their respective bills, and put together what’s called “a conference report” – which is a single piece of legislation that reconciles any disparities between the House-passed bill and the Senate-passed bill.
Once the delegates to the conference – the conferees – agree on a conference report, they bring it back to their respective chambers, to the House and to the Senate, for a final vote.
It’s important to note here that, once the conference report is sent to the House and the Senate for a final vote, there’s no opportunity to amend the legislation. It’s an up-or-down vote: each chamber can either approve or reject the conference report in its entirety.
If each chamber votes to approve the conference report, it’s then sent to the president, who can either sign it into law or veto it.
So what we’re doing today is voting on the motion to appoint conferees for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
Earlier this year, both the House and the Senate passed their own ESEA reauthorizations. And now, we’re voting to proceed to the conference process and to appoint certain senators to participate in that process as conferees.
Historically, and according to the way the conference process is supposed to work, this vote is not that big of a deal. Voting on the motion to appoint conferees is usually, and mostly, a matter of routine.
But it’s not a vote that should be rushed through on a moment’s notice, because it is the last opportunity for senators and representatives who are not conferees – such as myself – to influence the outcome of the conference process.
We can do that by offering what are called “motions to instruct the conferees.”
For example, let’s say I was not chosen to be a conferee to a particular bill, but there was an issue related to the bill that was important to me and to the people I represent – in that case, I could ask the Senate to vote on a set of instructions that would be sent to the conference to inform their deliberations and influence the substance of the conference report.
Mr. President, this is how the conference process is supposed to work.
But it is not how the conference process has been conducted with respect to this bill, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act reauthorization.
Sure, we’re still voting to appoint conferees.
And those conferees will still convene a conference.
And that conference will still produce a conference report.
So from the surface, it will still look like the conference process is happening the way it’s supposed to.
But beneath the surface we know that all of this has already been pre-arranged, pre-cooked, pre-determined… by a select few members of Congress, working behind closed doors, free from scrutiny.
And we know that this vote was scheduled on extremely short notice, so that it would be difficult – if not impossible – for the rest of us to influence the substance of the conference report through motions to instruct.
Now, why does this matter?
We know the American people care deeply about K-12 education policy. But why should they care about this obscure parliamentary procedure in the Senate?
They should care – and Mr./Madam President, we know that they do care – because the process influences the policy.
In this case, the process expedites the passage of policies that we know don’t work – policies to which the American people are strongly opposed.
For instance, it’s my understanding that this pre-agreement may authorize $250 million in new spending on federal pre-K programs – what amounts to a down-payment on the kind of universal, federally-run pre-K programs advocated by President Obama.
This would be a disaster not only for American children and families, but for our 21st-century economy that increasingly requires investments in human capital.
We know that a good education starting at a young age is an essential ingredient for upward economic mobility later in life. A mountain of recent social science research proves what experience and intuition have been teaching mankind for millennia: that a child’s first few years of life are critical in their cognitive and emotional development.
Yet we also know that too many of America’s public schools, especially those in low-income and disadvantaged neighborhoods, fail to prepare their students to succeed.
Nowhere has the top-down, centrally planned model of public education failed more emphatically than in our nation’s public pre-K programs. The epitome of federal preschool programs is Head Start, which has consistently failed to improve the lives and educational achievements of the children it ostensibly serves.
According to a 2012 study by President Obama’s own Department of Health and Human Services, whatever benefits children gain from the program disappear by the time they reach the third grade.
But because bureaucracies invariably measure success in terms of inputs, instead of outcomes, Head Start and its $8 billion annual budget is the model for Democrats as they seek to expand federal control over child care programs in communities all across the country.
This bill also doubles down on the discredited common-core approach to elementary and secondary education that the American people have roundly, and consistently, rejected.
Mr. President, parents and teachers across America are frustrated by Washington, D.C.’s heavy-handed, overly prescriptive approach to education policy.
I’ve heard from countless moms and dads in Utah who feel as though anonymous government officials living and working 2,000 miles away have a greater say in the education of their children than they do.
The only way to improve our K-12 education system in America is to empower parents, educators, and local policymakers to meet the unique needs of their communities and serve the low-income families the status quo is leaving behind.
With early childhood education, we could start block granting the Head Start budget to the states.
This would allow those closest to the children and families being served to design their own programs – rather than spending all their time complying with onerous, one-size-fits-all federal mandates – and designate eligible public and private pre-schools to receive grants.
We know this works because many states are already doing it. In my home state of Utah, for instance, United Way of Salt Lake has partnered with two private financial institutions, Goldman Sachs and J.B. Pritzker, to provide first rate early education programs to thousands of Utah children.
They call it a “pay-for-success” loan.
With no upfront cost or risk to the taxpayers, private capital is invested in the Utah High Quality Preschool Program, which is implemented and overseen by United Way.
If, as expected, the preschool program results in increased school readiness and improved academic performance, the state of Utah repays the private investors with the public funds it would have spent on remedial services that the children would have needed between kindergarten and the twelfth grade, had they not participated in the program.
Washington policymakers should not look at Utah’s pay-for-success initiatives – and other local success stories like them – as potential federal programs, but as a testament to the power of local control.
Mr. President, we shouldn’t expand Washington’s control over America’s schools and pre-K programs. Instead, Congress must advance reforms that empower parents – with flexibility and choice – to do what’s in the best interest of their children.
The policies in this bill move in the opposite direction.
Parents and Educators Against Common Core Standards posted the following incredibly important video of this week’s “Information Security Review” of the US Department of Education which was led by Utah Representative Jason Chaffetz.
Please watch it.
Chaffetz opens the discussion (minutes 1-9) showing slides of the US Department of Education getting an “F” in protecting student data –with negative scores across every category. The students’ vulnerability, Rep Chaffetz says, is huge, not only students but for their parents, because of data collected, for example, in the National Student Loan Database which collects data that families fill out and submit together.
(He doesn’t mention this, but each state’s SLDS system gathers and feeds data from your child’s schoolwork to the state to the feds, too; for example, via the EdFacts Data Exchange.)
Next, Chaffetz says that the Dept. of Education is responsible for 4 billion dollars in improper payments (minute 8:30) which will be discussed in the next hearing in detail (not during this one).
After summarizing the mismanagement of funds and data, Chaffetz summarizes the gargantuan harms of the Department of Education: “It has become a monster, an absolute monster. We don’t know who’s in there; we don’t know what they’re doing.”
Then, the hearing begins.
Listen at minute 43 to minute 47. Those four minutes blew my mind. The US Dept. of Education’s representative, Dr. Harris, nervously skirts having to directly answer the question, at first, of how many databases it holds. It admits to three. The chairman says that it has at least 123, but if you count all of the data contractors, there are countless more. The only way that the Dept. of Education can say it only has three is by pretending that it is not responsible for, or does not subcontract out, the service, the questioner points out. And those high numbers of organizations collecting data for the US Dept. of Education mean a high probability that data will be compromised.
Meanwhile, most people believe that student data remains with the teacher and principal; those who do know that there’s a state/federal database believe that it’s a good thing; and they tell me that my opposition to permitting databases to stalk our kids is baseless, that the Utah State Office of Education does not release individual students’ information and that nonconsensual student data mining could never have a down side.
Legendary US Dept of Education whistleblower Charlotte Iserbyt has pointed out at her blog, ABCs of Dumbdown, that some members of Congress are deliberately concealing machinations of No Child Left Behind/ESEA and are planning a rushed vote so that no time is allotted for public scrutiny nor for full Congressional analysis of the huge federal law. She also points out that others, like Utah Senator Mike Lee, aren’t falling for the ruse.
“So from the surface it will still look like the conference process is happening, is unfolding in the manner in which it is supposed to, butbeneath the surface we know that all of this has already been prearranged, precooked, predetermined by a select few Members of Congress working behind closed doors free from scrutiny, and we know this vote was scheduled on extremely short notice so it would be difficult, if not impossible, for the rest of us to influence the substance of the conference report through motions to instruct.”
Senator Lee also stated that the new ESEA/NCLB aims to spend $250 million on federal preschool, even though:
“Nowhere has the top-down, centrally planned model of public education failed more emphatically than in our nation’s public pre-K programs. The epitome of federal preschool programs is Headstart, which has consistently failed.”
Senator Lee noted that the bill must be stopped because it cements Common Core:
“The bill also doubles down on the discredited common core approach to elementary and secondary education the American people have roundly and consistently rejected. Parents and teachers across America are frustrated by the heavy-handed, overly prescriptive approach to education policy by Washington, D.C. I have heard from countless moms and dads in Utah who feel as though anonymous government officials living and working 2,000 miles away have a greater say in the education of their own children than they do.”
Please call the US Capital in D.C. to ask your senators and representatives to VOTE NO on ESEA/NCLB reauthorization. 202-224-3121.
For additional information and details on who is fighting with us and why we must stop the bill,click here.
After everything scientist and patriot Vince Newmeyer has written, after everything that people in other states have said and done (and sued about) concerning the INSANE error of adopting national, common science standards; after all the parental uproar here in Utah, still, the USOE is still moving ahead with its bullheaded determination to strip Utah of any local control and align everything we do to federal standards. I am convinced that this is simply because of USOE’s passionate devotion to money –not to children, teachers or education– but to continued federal grant eligibilty. There is no other logical explanation.
NGSS standards are beloved of the Obama administration (Obama launched a global warming education initiative recently). NGSS are politicized and controversial, which Utah’s previous standards were not. NGSS have been called the anti-science science standards because they minimize the scientific habit of actually questioning settled science, while maximizing “climate change” evangelism as presented by the left wing.
If Utah teachers and parents really wanted common NGSS standards, I would have to put a sock in my mouth and go away. But the Utah Office of Education (USOE) has underhandedly presented these standards, refusing to admit that they are NGSS (by changing one word here or there) and by calling them “Utah Science Standards”.
The public comment site is RIDICULOUS. I encourage you to go there tonight and spout off, but beware; they’ve made it hard. They have almost made it impossible.
Hence my letter today, sent to the auditing department, asking them to sock it to USOE for their dishonesty and sellout of our schools and kids and real science. Here’s the board’s email address if you feel so inclined to take a stand next to me on this issue. board@schools.utah.gov
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Dear Audit Department of USOE and State Board,
I am writing to ask you to audit the USOE’s public comment survey about the new NGSS/Utah Science standards.
These “standards” are being called “Utah Science Standards” but they are in reality the same as the NGSS, common national science standards. This fact has been concealed by USOE in its presentations to the public, unfortunately, but it is true.
Today is the last day that the public is invited to comment.
I am certain that very, very few people have commented. It severely restricts and frames comments. The micromanaging nature of the survey, which is a narrow, opinion-managing effort, does not allow for true public comment on the entire scope, process, nature and academic quality of the proposed standards.
It limits commenters to specific strands of specific grades and even limits the space for commenting itself! What if I was a science teacher who wanted to explain in scientific, pedagogic detail, why it’s so wrong to take out most of what we used to teach kids about electricity, for example? That has happened. But there’s no space for it on the survey.
But there is more.
Nowhere does the survey allow a member of the public to state opposition to the fact that these standards are IDENTICAL to the NGSS common, national standards.
Nowhere does the survey allow a member of the public to state opposition to the fact that these standards are exactly ALIGNED with federally-approved standardized testing. (This is probably why USOE pushed these narrowed standards so hard; federal cash follows federally-aligned standards for embedded CEDS tags.)
Nowhere does the survey allow a member of the public to state opposition to narrowing the science survey to only 6th through 8th grades.
Nowhere does the survey allow a member of the public to state opposition to the politically slanted nature of a new, extreme interest in environmentalism, materialism, and “climate change”; the survey pretends that the science standards are only about science.
Nowhere does the survey allow space for true freedom of expression.
I could go on.
It feels as if this survey was deliberately written to constrain the public to NOT say what they may want to say; as if the survey-data-tally officers wanted to be able to throw out any comments that did brought up the controversies that the creators didn’t want to discuss.
This is certainly an auditing issue.
Millions of dollars will be spent by USOE and the school system to replace Utah’s previous science curricula. Millions will go to “trainings” for teachers to alter our traditional, time-tested science pedagogy to make it match the new, NGSS, national-federal standards.
Money will be spent (wasted) not just in an excited, misguided grab for the latest and the best, but in a sickeningly politicized, even anti-God, materialism-belief-based, green-evangelized “science” that the USOE pretends is not NGSS.
The dishonest presentation of the 6th to 8th grade science standards to the public as if they were not NGSS is an issue for an audit. Does honesty matter, or not?
The money that will be spent bases in part on this very survey, will be taken from taxpayers to put Utah on the federally aligned (unconstitutional) curriculum for politicized science, which is an issue for an audit.
For almost four years, many of us (including teachers, like me) have been carefully, sadly following the activities of the USOE as it has, time and time again, sold out what’s best for Utah’s children, teachers, and future autonomy, for money. For grant upon grant upon federal grant.
It is sickening. NGSS alignment is more of the same.
Please audit this public comment survey and let’s insist that USOE be honest. Have a public comment survey that actually invites full commentary on all aspects of this transformation of our schools.
Audit this survey, and strike it. Have an honest look at NGSS and ask the public about moving to national standards for science.
Ask the public to evaluate NGSS, and call it what it really is. Audit whether it is even legitimate science. It redefines the concept by dropping the classic scientific model of questioning, basing itself and its unquestionable “facts” on controversial issues with heavy political underpinnings, not on real, actual, open-minded science.
Kurtz’ review of Drilling Through the Core says: “It’s all here, from the most basic explanation of what Common Core is, to the history, the major arguments for and against, and so much more. The controversies over both the English and math standards are explained; the major players in the public battle are identified; the battle over Gates Foundation’s role is anatomized; the roles of the tests and the testing consortia are reviewed; concerns over data-mining and privacy are laid out; the dumbing-down effect on the college curriculum is explained; as is the role of the Obama administration and the teachers unions. I found the sections on “big data” particularly helpful. I confess that despite my considerable interest in Common Core, I hadn’t much followed the data-mining issue. Boy was that a mistake. It strikes me that the potential for abuse of personal data is substantially greater in the case of Common Core than in the matter of national security surveillance. With Common Core we are talking about databases capable of tracking every American individual from kindergarten through adulthood, and tremendous potential for the sharing of data with not only government but private groups…
That one, in essence, has the head of the Utah State Office of Education’s Special Education department telling the rest of the bureaucracy that the new No Child Left Behind reauthorization ruling from Secretary of Education Duncan won’t in any way hurt anyone in Utah; in fact, Duncan’s ruling doesn’t even affect Utah students, she says! It’s her complete handwaving away of the rule itself, as well as an admission that it’s okay with her that our rights as parents and teachers in Utah are going away. It’ s not keeping her up at night.
My letter says that Duncan’s rule for NCLB and his snipping away of the last vestiges of state authority over special education IS keeping me up at night.
I have read a letter that was sent out to the USOE/USSB concerning Secretary Duncan’s “final rule” concerning the end of state authority over special education that Duncan plans to take effect nationally September 15th. [Pasted in full after this letter]
Here is a direct quote from your office:
“The recent regulation changes taking effect in September do not impact Utah students at all.”
I am stunned at this quote. I have read the Department of Education’s directive. It certainly applies to every state if the unconstitutionally acting Secretary Duncan is to be taken seriously.
Its summary states that the rule will “no longer authorize a State to define modified academic achievement standards and develop alternate assessments based on those modified academic achievement standards….”
Further down, the page promotes the idea that forcing the same curriculum (Common Core Curriculum aka College and Career Ready) –on all students, without differentiation for special education students, is a good idea:
“Including students with disabilities in more accessible general assessments aligned to college- and career-ready standards [Common Core] promotes high expectations for students with disabilities, ensures that they will have access to grade-level content, and supports high-quality instruction designed to enable students with disabilities to be involved in, and make progress in, the general education curriculum—that is, the same curriculum as for nondisabled students.”
How can the USOE claim that this will not affect Utah students?
There are two major battles to be fought here. One is the battle for the children themselves, whose best interests are no longer to be determined (for testing nor for curriculum or standards) by their loving parents and teachers, but by the feds. This is clearly not limited to testing, but to standards and curriculum as well.
The other is the fight for our local right to direct the affairs of our children’s lives as we see fit: the fight to defend the application of the Constitution in our daily lives.
By continuing to hold hands with the Dept. of Education, rather than to stand up against this takeover of our rights, the USOE and School Board and Governor are complicit with Secretary Duncan’s federalization of special education in Utah.
Utah’s government (USOE/USSB) is freely giving away what is not theirs to give: the people’s voice, the people’s power, the people’s authority over the lives and programs of their own children. By not saying no, you have said yes.
I take this very, very seriously. The power to make decisions for our children’s lives and any programs by which our children are molded –and from which few have any alternative pathways– is a Constitutional, sacred birthright in America.
You who are elected (or paid) to be the guardians of Utah’s public education system have a duty to be a voice for US, to represent We, the People, We, the teachers, and We, the Students.
By not saying no, and by sending out letters like this one, you are representing Secretary Duncan to us, rather than us to Secretary Duncan. That is not right.
I implore you to open your eyes to see the lies of Secretary Duncan. The title itself is a complete deception: “Improving the Academic Achievement of the Disadvantaged; Assistance to States for the Education of Children with Disabilities,” –while the text of the rule states, “to no longer authorize a state to determine. Does that title match that text? Assistance equals dictatorship? Improvement equals dictatorship?
It is ironic that the ESEA reauthorization was sold to Congress as a reduction in the federal educational footprint. That was another sheer lie that should be obvious to everyone now.
I cannot stomach the ongoing tolerance of Utah’s educational leadership, that passes along, rather than stops, the bullying that flows from the Department of Education. Why has Utah’s education board and office been so willing to relinquish her own authority in these matters?
It is time for those who have a conscience to take a stand. Make a statement even if you cannot alter the course; take the public stand so that we know who is on what side of this fight over our children and our freedoms.
I suggest that you do something more than pass along dictator-like directives from Duncan to Utah’s districts.
I would start by sending Secretary Duncan a letter of reprimand for attempting to assert such falsely gotten, pretended authority over us and over our children. Perhaps our D.C. representatives will cosign.
We don’t get a second chance. Failure to say no to this “final rule” means we lose this autonomy forever.
Christel Swasey
Utah Teacher and Mother
Pleasant Grove
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Here is the letter/email referenced above, that went out today or yesterday from Utah’s Special Education Director at USOE to the State Board and USOE:
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Dear USOE Leadership and Utah State Board of Education,
In case you have been receiving concerned emails and phone calls regarding recent USDOE regulation changes taking effect September 15th that impact statewide assessments, here is some additional information, beyond that already provided by Superintendent Smith and Asst. Superintendent Nye (below).
ESEA used to allow states to create an additional state assessment, beyond the regular state assessment (in Utah, the SAGE) and the 1% assessment (in Utah, the DLM for math and ELA and UAA for science). That additional assessment was referred to as the 2% assessment. In other words, the SAGE would be used for 97% of students with disabilities, with the students with the most significant disabilities taking the 1% assessment, and 2% of students with significant disabilities (but who do not qualify for the 1% assessment) taking the 2% assessment. Although the 2% option was removed in 2013 for states applying for an ESEA waiver, this did not impact Utah, as we have never had a 2% assessment, nor were there plans to develop one. The recent regulation changes taking effect in September do not impact Utah students at all.
There is some misinformation on how students with disabilities participate in the appropriate statewide assessment. Students with disabilities may participate in the 1% assessment (DLM and UAA) if the IEP team determines that they should not access grade level standards, and require instruction aligned to the Essential Elements (EEs) (alternate core standards). You can find those EEs athttp://www.schools.utah.gov/sars/Instruction.aspx and more information about the DLM and UAA athttp://www.schools.utah.gov/sars/Assessment.aspx.
Students with disabilities who do not receive instruction in the EEs receive instruction aligned to grade-level state standards, and as such participate in the SAGE, with the provision of appropriate IEP team-determined accommodations and/or modifications. Special education is in place, and there are no planned changes to remove special education services or accommodations. However, special education services are intended to supplement grade level general education instruction, not replace it, UNLESS the student is learning under the EE standards (again, students with most significant disabilities). You can find more information about assessment participation for students with disabilities at http://www.schools.utah.gov/sars/Assessment/AccommodationPolicy.aspx.
Please let me know if you have any concerns or questions.
Ever since that dark day three years ago when I received a written response from the State Office of Education saying that the answer to my question was “No,” –NO to the question of whether a student could attend school to simply learn (as opposed to being tracked at school, as “human capital” by the state and federal SLDS and P-20w data mining systems, without parental consent or knowledge) –ever since that day, I’ve been on a quest to reclaim our basic constitutional freedom of privacy, the right to NOT be inventoried like merchandise of the state.
A lot of other people agree that privacy and freedom matter. But not all. The big money in big data is so big; data is the Gold Rush of our age, not to mention to big control issue “datapalooza movement” of our age, making it difficult to overpower the big data lobbyists and their giant piles of fat money that work very effectively against moms and dads and non-monied lobbyists and activists like you and me.
Twice, for example, a Utah state legislator has tried to run a privacy protection bill for Utah kids. Two years in a row it hasn’t even gotten close to getting off the ground in the Utah legislature. Seems that money and power talk more persuasively than children’s or family’s rights, even in Utah.
But today many organizations nationwide are joining to support and to push forward Louisiana Senator David Vitter’s congressional bill that returns control of education records to parents on the federal level. It’s big news. See Breitbart, The Hill, Truth in American Education.
The bill implements new, more robust guidelines, in order to protect student privacy, for schools and educational agencies to release education records to third parties, even in cases of recordkeeping.
These entities will be required to gain prior consent from students or parents and implement measures to ensure records remain private. Further, educational agencies, schools, and third parties will be held liable for violations of the law through monetary fines.
Extending Privacy Protections to Home School Students
FERPA does not currently apply to students who do not attend a traditional education institution, such as students who are homeschooled, despite some states requiring homeschoolers to file information with their school district.
This bill extends FERPA’s protections to ensure records of homeschooled students are treated equally.
Limits Appending Data and Collection of Additional Information
The bill prohibits educational agencies, schools, and the Secretary of Education from including personally identifiable information obtained from Federal or State agencies through data matches in student data.
Please contact your state legislators, board members and congressional representatives in support of this bill.
Board@schools.utah.gov is the email for all the members of the state school board. Find congressional legislators and state legislators here: http://www.utah.gov/government/contactgov.html
P.S. I often get asked why this matters. Last week, for example, at the Salt Lake County Republican Organizing convention, people came up to the booth where I was answering questions and asked, “What information is being collected about my child?” My response? Rather than to point them to the National Data Collection Model data points that are being requested, I simply say this truth: there are NO proper privacy protections in place; federal FERPA law was destroyed by the Dept. of Education, and we have no idea what information is being collected locally; we do know there is a database that we aren’t allowed to opt out of; we do know that there are no prohibitions on the schools/state/federal government/corporations collecting as much as they can get away with.
We know that the National Data Collection Model invites and encourages schools and states to collect over 400 data points. And we know that no laws currently prevent schools/states from doing so. It is only good intentions and individual/district policy that is preventing an Orwellian data collection reality today.
We need to establish proper, real protections. We need strong laws that establish that students and families, not the state/corporate/federal education forces, own the data and control the data. We need opt out laws from participation in the database systems too. We need to talk about this issue often and openly. And the ball is in the parents’ court. The boards aren’t fighting for data privacy. The lobbyists are actively fighting against data privacy. And no legislator will fight for your child until you demand that he does.
Ask your legislator to support Senator Vitters’ bill, and to write state laws that enforce these protections too.
“Bald Piano Guy” is a New York teacher who sings “Opting Out” to the tune of Billy Joel’s “Moving Out,” and sings “Seen Them Opting Out on Broadway” to the tune of “Seen the Lights go out on Broadway”. He sings “The Arrogant Man” dedicated to NY Governor Cuomo, to the tune of “Angry Young Man”. He has many more YouTube performances but I’ll share just a few here.
As I’ve said before, please be wise and very careful about what happens in each of our states as a replacement for high stakes testing. The controlistas love to take a crisis and turn it to their own advantage.
The Federal Register is collecting comments on and International Early Learning Study (IELS) that’s scheduled to be conducted next year. The deadline for these comments is midnight tonight, February 13, 2017! Here’s the link:
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2016/12/13/2016-29749/agency-information-collection-activities-comment-request-international-early-learning-study-iels#open-comment For more information, Dr. Karen Effrem explains more about IELS and early childhood data mining here: http://edlibertywatch.org/2017/02/urgent-submit-comments-against-global-pre-k-sel-data-mining/
The IELS is a proposed international study that seeks to collect data on kindergarteners about their academic competencies. This might sound harmless, but the most problematic aspect of this study is the effort to collect data on the children’s SEL: “social-emotional skills.” This opens the door to invasive analysis of the students’ home life and personal beliefs. It turns untrained and already overworked teachers into psychoanalysts.
Jonas Himmelstrand, Phyllis Schafly, Mireja Institute and many others have published studies about the lack of benefit and the terrible potential harms that early childhood education can do.
Student data collection also undermines parental authority and citizen privacy.
Please send a brief comment to oppose this study — today.
Below is a longer comment, submitted to the Federal Register’s call for comments by Joan Landes, a Utah clinical mental health counselor. She submitted these comments to the Federal Register’s comment site this week and gave permission to publish them here.
I am a Master’s Level Clinical Mental Health Counselor, fully licensed in my state to assess, diagnose and treat emotional and cognitive problems in individuals, couples and families. I have served as a Mental Health Counselor to treat stress, anxiety, suicidality and depression in students grade 1-12 in a charter school during school hours. I currently work in a residential treatment center for troubled teen girls. I also have a private practice which includes children and adolescents. I have served as the church leader for hundreds of youth over the last 30 years. I have taught homeschool, private school and charter schools. Finally, I have seven children of my own who are grown except one daughter in seventh grade. I think you could say I am an expert of children — what they need to be happy and how things can go terribly wrong. Along with academic training, I have spent my life in the trenches dedicated to the emotional and intellectual growth of children.
Governments should not abrogate the rights of parents to rear their children without significant interference from bureaucrats. Governments should not exploit schools as data-sweat shops, and abuse children as unpaid fodder for Big Data. If Governments and corporations adhered to minimally ethical practices, all children would be compensated a living wage ($25.00 per hour) for the data they are working to provide for the benefit of entities who will profit from the labors of these small children. Since this compensation has never been discussed, it will be no surprise that every other ethical protection for vulnerable children and their data will be violated in the rush to profit from the involuntary servitude of the young.
If entities are interested in gleaning data from children the following protections MUST be required:
1. The entire research project must pass review by a research ethics review board.
2. Parental notification and review is required of all assessments prior to the administration.
3. No surveys, questions or assessment in violation of United States Code, Title 20 1232h which prohibits (among other things), questions eliciting responses regarding parental beliefs, income, sexual mores etc.
4. All assessments to be previously researched and normed on the appropriate population and will meet superior criterion validity and reliability standards.
5. All assessments to be administered by licensed mental health professionals on an individual basis.
6. All assessments to take less than 1% of the child’s learning time per day so as to limit the child’s stressors.
7. All assessments to be interpreted by fully licensed mental health experts and research psychologists.
8. All data to be disaggregated at every point with no personally identifying information attached.
9. All children will be compensated a living wage ($25.00 per hour) for parts of every hour they are subjected to the assessments.
Without these protections in place, the object of the data accumulation becomes obvious to all who understand such things, and this purpose is absolutely unacceptable to those who hold even a shred of ethical integrity.
Joan Landes, CMHC
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