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.
How much bleeding out of freedom do we need before we take action –to demand from Congress an end to the privacy erosion that’s going on in multiple big-data bills right now? (To track what’s going on in Congress, click here).
Taking liberty, including privacy, for granted is a lazy, dangerous luxury. We suppose that freedom is as forthcoming as sunlight, but Constitutional norms of freedom are the new kid on the block historically, and both intentionally and unintentionally, Congress –and initiatives of the U.N. promoted in our Congress, are running away with our rights today.
So what? Still not moved? Please, then, take a moment for the real “why” factor: remember what life looks like when freedom gets fully eroded.
Remember the 1600’s – People who read the Bible in England were burned at the stake by their own government. This was a catalyst for pilgrims to leave, to establish this country’s liberty.
How many of those pilgrims would have made it to Plymouth Rock alive, if the English government had had a data sharing system like the one proposed in S.2046 (FEPA) where every government agency can and must share data on individuals, with every other government agency?
Remember the 1930’s – Innocent millions in the Soviet Union were intentionally starved to death under Stalin’s communism. There were no Constitutional norms for those people to point to, before their lands were eminent-domained (collectivized) by their governments, prior to the extermination of the people. I recommend reading Execution by Hunger, by a survivor of that time.
Remember the 1940’s – Throughout Europe, led by Hitler, governments killed millions in state-sponsored death. The yellow star that Jews were forced to sew onto their clothes to mark them as enemies of the government would be much more easily removed than digitized social security numbers, names and family information that FEPA and CTA will hand to the federal government through individuals’ data collected by FAFSA, SLDS, IRS, Census, statistical agencies, and more. Soon after this, in 1948, George Orwell wrote 1984, which I wish everyone voting for big data bills in Congress would read.
Remember 1958-62 – In China, about 45 million were killed under Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” initiative. You can learn a lot about the erosion of freedom by reading the remarkable history Life and Death in Shanghai, written by a survivor of that murderous time.
(And today, in China, there is no privacy and no digital freedom: everyone is inventoried, everyone is watched; everyone is punished or rewarded according to the government’s value system.)
Remember the 1970’s – In Cambodia, millions were killed by Khmer Rouge communists who had control of Cambodia. The government, unleashed from any Constitutional principles, turned on its own citizens in a way that was not predictable.
Remember the 1990’s – In Rwanda, Africa, close to a million were killed by their government. (Rwandan I.D. cards had people’s ethnic groups listed on them, making it easy for the government’s military, with lists of ethnic data, to find individuals labeled “government opponents”. Note: this is historical fact, not fake news, not fearmongering. This is an example of modern, governmentally-organized, data-mining-related, genocide.
All of these abominations happened because:
1) government had amassed power, including at least some personal data about victims, upon which to base punishing decisions, and:
2) leaders were evil.
But the dead! These were real people– with nicknames, with holidays, with faith, with families. They might have had friends in the government whom they liked, whom they trusted– but without a Constitutional fortress in place, good intentions are nothing.
Individuals can’t punish or kill others unless they amass power over them. Why is eroding freedom not a clear and present danger to Congress? Why do we keep writing big-data bills and passing them into law, which authorize more and more power of one set of individuals over others? I have two theories: 1) big money influencing big votes and 2) a pop culture that celebrates conformity, dependency, obsession, victimhood and socialism instead of self-reliance, choice and accountability, virtue, individual worth and freedom.
Ask yourselves this, Big Money and Pop Culture: “Are control freaks, bullies, and liars things of the past, things of distant places? Is communism nowadays going to lead to happiness and wealth, even though in the past it has always led to piles of dead bodies? Is there nothing historically sacred to defend?”
The thing that the man or woman in the concentration camp or the killing field would have done anything to reclaim– freedom– is without question dying as bills authorize unelected bureaucrats and unelected researchers full access to your personal data. It seems that congressional bills value constitutional principles (that would have kept control freaks and bullies in check) like used kleenex.
Is it too big a leap for us to say that giving away the average American’s personal power over his or her data is a path toward misery and loss? I guess so, because so many legislators and citizens even in supposedly conservative Utah all now sway to the tune of tech-justified, big-data justified socialism — the same Americans who cry patriotic tears when they see the flag pass by in a parade and who campaign with, “God Bless America.” They don’t seem to get it anymore.
It’s not the left wing leading the pack. Did you know who was involved in big data pushing now? Trey Gowdy? Orrin Hatch?Paul Ryan? Marco Rubio? What was of such great value that it rose above sacred Constitutional principles of CONSENT and privacy and personal liberty, to these supposed conservatives who are pushing the big-data bills?
Meanwhile, patriotic Americans who read these bills and voice their concerns are being ignored or rebutted by Congress.
Names like Jane Robbins, Joy Pullman, Jakell Sullivan, Cheri Kiesecker,Lynne Taylor, Peter Greene, Emmett McGroarty, and so many, many, many others are exposing and challenging the erosion of data privacy and autonomy. But they aren’t making headlines. Please read them anyway.
Jane Robbins, at Truth in American Education, writes about FEPA, “Senators, do you want your children’s and your families’ highly sensitive data shared across the federal government without your knowledge and consent, for purposes you never agreed to? Do you want researchers or private corporations to have access to it?”
Robbins lists the 108 types of data stored in one agency (Dept of Ed, via FAFSA) and asks senators to consider the insanity of opening up all agencies’ data to share with one another and with private “research” entities. From name and social security number of students, parents and stepparents, to how much money parents spend on food and housing, to the parents’ net worth of investments, the 108 items are only a tip of the data-sharing iceberg. She asks senators to stop #FEPA (which already passed the House and will soon be up for a Senate vote; read the full bill — S.2046 here.)
Big Data is Prone to Prejudice and Political Manipulation
No Research or Experience Justifies Sweeping Data Collection on Citizens
Government Doesn’t Use Well the Data it Already Has
Data Collection is Not About Improving Education, But Increasing Control
Americans Are Citizens, Not Cattle or Widgets
She concludes here article: “In the United States, government is supposed to represent and function at the behest of the people, and solely for the protection of our few, enumerated, natural rights. Our government is “of the people, by the people, for the people.” We are the sovereigns, and government functions at our pleasure. It is supposed to function by our consent and be restrained by invoilable laws and principles that restrain bureaucrats’ plans for our lives. These include the natural rights to life, liberty, and property. National surveillance systems violate all of these.”
Jakell Sullivan has been researching and writing for nearly a decade about education reforms and data reforms that harm liberty. This recent talk, given at an education conference at Agency Based Education, reveals the corporate-government partnershipping strategy to undermine local values, including religious freedom, which necessitates big-data bills to that align schools globally to UN-centric, data-bound values.
CHERI KIESECKER
When Cheri Kiesecker was cited as one who had falsely attacked these big-data bills, and was rebutted in a handout given to Congress from Congressional staffers, you might have known she had hit on truth. Why would Congressional staff take the time to research and write a rebuttal to a simple mom writing at Missouri Education Watchdog?! Read her analysis of the big-data bills here. Read her rebuttal to Congress here.
She wrote, “I am a mom. My special interests are my children. I write as a parent, because like many parent advocates, blogging is the only (small) way to be heard. And No. My concern DOES NOT “arise from a misunderstanding of what the bill does to the personal data that the government already has”…
MY CONCERN IS THAT THE GOVERNMENT HAS CITIZENS’ AND ESPECIALLY SCHOOL-AGED CHILDREN’S PERSONAL DATA,WITHOUT PERMISSION…AND IS EXPANDING ACCESS, ANALYSIS OF THIS DATA, AGAIN WITHOUT PERMISSION.
It’s not your data. Data belongs to the individual. Data is identity and data is currency. Collecting someone’s personal data without consent is theft. (When hackers took Equifax data, that was illegal. When the government takes data… no different.)
If you support parental rights, you should not support HR4174 or its sister bill S2046. “
Dear Readers:
Like Cheri, Jakell, Joy, Jane and countless others, we can each do one small thing for liberty. You could talk to your kids or grandkids about the founding of the USA. You could help a friend register to vote. You could call your senators and tell them to vote no on each of these big-data bills that DO NOT protect privacy as they claim that they can. Write an email. Call a radio station talk show. Write an op-ed. Do it even though we are in the middle of the Christmas bustle. (Actually, do it especially because we are in the middle of the Christmas bustle, which is when the dark side of Congress always counts on not being watched as it passes bad bills.)
I’m asking you to sacrifice a little time or maybe just your own insecurity, to join the writers and speakers whom I’ve highlighted above, to make your own voice heard, for liberty’s sake. Here is that number to the switchboard at Congress: (202) 224-3121.
Even if we don’t turn the Titanic away from the iceberg, even if freedom keeps eroding away, we can live or die with the failure, knowing that we honestly valued freedom enough to try.
Knowing that the history of liberty is “the history of the limitation of government power,” I ask you to take action to stop the bills known as FEPA (HR4174/S.2046) and CTA (S.1121). This post will focus on the first bill, which is already teetering on the edge of passing into law.
FEPA is a pompous euphemism that stands for Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking. But “evidence based policymaking” means that they’ll redefine data theft and stalking by calling it “evidence-based research”. Because if agencies and organizations on the state and federal level participate in the data-looting act together, it doesn’t feel quite like looting or stealing, as it would if just one well-intentioned, evidence-collecting creep stole data by himself.
All the fancy commissions and all the big-data infatuations in the world cannot change a wrong principle into a good one. I’d love to ask the CEP leaders face to face whether big data is so important that freedom basics should be made obsolete. Do we no longer worry about having our personal personal power limited– in consequence of personal data being taken? No big deal?
I used to think that while all Democrats pushed for increased government, all Republicans sought limited government. Not now: Republicans Orrin Hatch, Paul Ryan, and even Trey Gowdy are supersizing government to empower big-data goals in their current bills– without any informed consent from the individuals whose data will be confiscated.
Unless the Senate ditches it next week, which is extremely unlikely, it will become national law. But do you know what’s emerging in the bill? Does your senator know?
The news media haven’t covered it, and Congress hasn’t debated it. In fact, the House of Representatives suspended its rules to pass the House version super quickly, without a normal roll call vote: because it was supposedly so uncontroversial that there was no reason to have a real debate nor a recorded vote.
Unpaid moms at Missouri Education Watchdog and expert lawyers at American Principles Project each recently published important warnings about the FEPA bill. But proponents of FEPA rebutted those moms and lawyers. What followed were brilliant, unarguable rebuttals to that rebuttal. If truth and liberty were prime concerns to Congress, then FEPA would, following the study of these rebuttals, surely be gone. But no.
Do you remember another Thanksgiving week, with freedom-harming bills slimeing their secretive way through Congress without debate, while most of us were too busy eating cranberries and turkey to pay attention? Remember, after the ESSA bill passed, that then-Secretary Duncan boasted about the secretive nature of passing the ESSA bill into law.
He said, “We were intentionally quiet on the bill – they asked us specifically not to praise it – and to let it get through. And so we went into radio silence and then talked about it after the fact. . . . Our goal was to get this bill passed. . . [W]e were very strategically quiet on good stuff”.
Additionally, although the majority of the public commenters who wrote to the CEP said that they were opposed to the data-sharing of student records without consent, FEPA does direct agencies to ignore their concerns.
FEPA says that agencies must report “statutory restrictions to accessing relevant data”–in other words, muggle bureaucrats must find ways to overcome people’s privacy rights.
FEPA gives no provisions for data security, while encouraging and enabling unlimited data swapping between government agencies.
FEPA creates a “National Secure Data Service” with such extensive data sharing that creation of one central housing agency would be completely redundant.
RESPONSE TO HOUSE MAJORITY STAFF’S ARGUMENTS IN FAVOR OF FEPA
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Claim: FEPA doesn’t create a centralized data repository.
Rebuttal: FEPA moves toward the recommendation of the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking (Commission) to create a “National Secure Data Service” by 1) requiring each agency to create an evidence- building plan; 2) requiring the OMB Director to unify those plans across the entire federal government; 3) creating a “federal data catalog” and a “national data inventory”; and 4) requiring various councils to recommend how to vastly increase data linking and sharing among federal agencies, with states, and with public and private research entities.
Claim: FEPA doesn’t authorize any new data collection or data analysis.
Rebuttal: Regardless of whether FEPA expressly authorizes new data collection, it 1) incentivizes agency heads to expand, not maintain or minimize, data collection; 2) creates new sources of data for agencies by allowing unfettered access to other agencies’ data; 3) creates a process whereby public and private organizations can access non-public government data; 4) allows the OMB Director to expand the universe of statistical agencies and units; and 5) allows one person, the OMB director, to decide via post-enactment “guidance” what if any data will be exempt from sharing as too private or confidential.
Claim: FEPA “does not overturn an existing student unit record ban, which prohibits the establishment of a database with data on all students,” so parents need not worry about their children’s personally identifiable information (PII).
Rebuttal: FEPA doesn’t overturn this ban – that will almost certainly come later. But its extensive data-linking and data-sharing mandates create a de facto national database, whereby the data stays “housed” within the collecting agency but can be accessed by all. Title III specifically authorizes data “accessed” by federal agencies to be shared. This will threaten the security of not only the student data already maintained by the U.S. Department of Education (USED), but also the data in the states’ longitudinal data systems.
Claim: FEPA doesn’t repeal CIPSEA but rather strengthens it.
Rebuttal: FEPA strengthens nothing. It merely reiterates the same penalties (fine and jail term) in existence since 2002 that have rarely or never been enforced. Worse, FEPA increases threats to privacy and data security by mandating increased access to confidential data and metadata and encouraging unlimited data-swapping with no provisions for data security.
Claim: FEPA “does not respond to the Commission’s recommendations to repeal any ban on the collection or consolidation of data.”
Rebuttal: FEPA directs agency heads to identify and report “any statutory or other restrictions to accessing relevant data . . . ” Because the entire thrust of the bill is to use more and more data for “evidence-building,” the inevitable next step will be to implement the Commission’s recommendation of repealing these pesky statutory obstacles to acquiring “relevant” data.
Claim: FEPA will make better use of existing data.
Rebuttal: The federal government has reams of data showing the uselessness or harm of existing programs. When the government continues to fund those programs despite this data (see Head Start and manifestly ineffective programs under ESEA), there’s no reason -none- to assume it will change its behavior with even more data.
The following list of contact information is supplied by Missouri Education Watchdog Cheri Kiesecker. Please don’t just share this on social media; actually call, yourself. Actually tweet, yourself. Others may not be doing their part. Please, do yours and a few extra calls, if you can.
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.
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.
COMMON CORE 
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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