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:
Dear Superintendent Dickson, State School Board, Diana Suddreth, Rich Nye, Governor Herbert, Tami Pyfer, and Legislators,
To what degree does Utah maintain constitutional control over science education?
I’m writing to clarify whether Utah has or has not adopted controversial, common science standards (NGSS) and whether we are using those non-approved standards in current or future tests for K-12 children, without proper vetting and fully informed public consent.
I’m trying to reconcile promises –made by multiple superintendents to the public and to the legislature, that common science standards would never happen because of political and “philosophical differences”– with the attached PDF from the board’s website. It says that a science MOU in common with other states is set to be approved this Wednesday.
Utah’s voting taxpayers strongly oppose common, nationalized standards; some because of content, and some because nationalized programs work against intellectual freedom and local control.
Anti-Common standards sentiment was powerfully illustrated in Utah’s last gubernatorial election, when Governor Herbert was booed at conventions for his promotion of Common Core, and was beaten when GOP delegates voted. He very narrowly won the final vote after changing his speeches with sudden, fervent promises to repeal the Common Core.
Those promises lacked integrity and evaporated after the election, but the illustration makes clear that Utahans want the common standards gone.
It can be alarming when superintendents make promises that common science standards will never take over here, when no vote to approve common NGSS standards has happened, and yet the public can see that someone is furtively, gradually, replacing Utah’s traditional science standards with controversial NGSS standards.
On the Board’s PDF, we see that Utah is set to approve use of a common test bank for students’ science tests. Since tests are based on standards, and since Utah’s official policy is that we have our own science standards, not the common NGSS standards, how can Utah share a test bank with many other states? Without using the common science standards that they use, or without making those states use our science standards, it doesn’t make sense.
Please clarify.
What makes sense, but won’t likely be admitted, is that the current Superintendent and her co-workers personally buy into the philosophies of the ed tech elite, inspired by the Pearson- Microsoft-Gates cartel. They admire Gates and NGSS. Unlike many of their fellow Utahns, they love the common standards, so they are using their positions of power to guide the state in the direction to which they personally subscribe, against the will and without the knowledge of the people.
Shouldn’t these moves be transparent to the public? It seems our top education officers give lip service to local control, but in actions, create the very opposite.
Students and taxpayers who value liberty and classic education standards deserve informed consent and open debate, prior to Utah’s use of any kind of additional common standards.
“Consent of the governed” is a crucial founding concept, one of the best phrases ever penned, one I hope this group will ponder before moving further away from local control.
According to its vision document entitled “American Revolution 2.0”, the pro-Common Core investment group GSV Advisors is plotting a lucrative U.S. “revolution” (GSV’s own words) that will include pushing the school choice movement and abolishing locally elected school boards. GSV is co-hosting its huge ed-tech summit in Utah in May with Arizona State University.
The very fact that a financial institution has a 27-point business plan that involves removing local control in education –and that it’s promoting that vision to a national elite-only audience ($2,795 ticket) right here in Utah, in a few weeks –is very unnerving. How many voters who want to preserve local control can afford a $2,795 ticket?
Look at page 302 of the GSV vision document if you think I am inventing this madness about eliminating local control.
GSV lists a “Strategic Battle Plan” for fifteen years, with 27 steps to that plan. First of the twenty-seven steps is “Common Core”. Fifth is “No Child Left Behind 2.0” (which was ESSA). Twenty-first is “Eliminate Locally Elected School Boards”. Read. Share it with your ed-tech friends.
This vision feels as creepy as it feels greedy. Remember, this is coming from a financial investment company, but the document’s title is “American Revolution 2.0” –and in its conclusion, it poses in the language of the founding fathers, pretending to care about, or to even comprehend, liberty:
“A System whose characteristics are thus marked by every example which may be defined a failure, is unfit to be the platform of the knowledge citizens of the future….We, therefore, the Representatives of Education Innovators of the United States of America, solemnly publish and declare, that our students ought to have the chance to succeed, that they have access to the best learning technologies, and that as free and independent learners, have the full power to choose their path to success in life. And for the support of this Declaration, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
Using the language of our noble founding fathers to promote this greedy, $elfish, anti-liberty agenda –brazenly pretending to do it for the cause of liberty –is sickening to me.
I would never, ever, ever invest in any of these networks of companies that profit from the destruction of local control of education. Boycott Pearson, Knewton, Aspen, Lumina, and the countless, countless ed-tech groups that are in this collusion against local liberty. Don’t use CEDS common data standards for education. Don’t profit from the thieves of liberty. Walk away.
I am certain that the average person working for Pearson or Gates or Aspen or Microsoft or Lumina may have no idea that he/she is daily empowering a devastating collusion against local liberty in U.S. education, yet the fact remains that this is exactly what’s happening.
And Utah friends, it’s happening under your noses.
In a few weeks, in May 2017, international big names in the ed-tech world will convene in Salt Lake City at GSV’s Ed-Tech Summit with ASU.
The average person can’t go. It costs $2,795 per person, just to walk in the front door of the two day conference.
The very long list of summit speakers includes former Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan and GSV founder Deborah Quazzo, who is listed as “a prolific angel investor” who leverages “technology in the global $4.9 trillion education and talent technology sectors.”
A prolific angel investor? I’m not sure what that means. I do know that Quazzo is the co-author of the GSV document “American Revolution 2.0” that aims to eliminate locally elected school boards.
Here she is, onstage with Bill Gates at last year’s summit.
Deborah Quattro and GSV! Our ed-tech industry is looking to these for guidance?! It makes me quake to think that hundreds of ed-tech leaders will listen to her, to Arne and to the others. Will they see the GSV vision document as some sort of blueprint, recklessly forgetting the God-given Constitutional rights and duties of local control of education? Such rights go away when unelected businesswomen, philanthropists and governments “partner” behind the backs of voters and take over what used to be real learning, the kind that happened between one teacher and her students. The new ed-tech allows extremists’ philosophies, dumped from socialist think tanks through massive online curricula, to fill student devices and minds, thinly disguised as pedagogy.
The list of sponsoring companies at Salt Lake City’s upcoming GSV summit? I bet you can already guess. These are the not-so-secret combinations: Gates. Lumina. The Center for Education Reform. National Geographic. USAFunds. Amazon. Microsoft. Et cetera.
The purpose of this post is to ask you to testify this week to the newly created White House Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking (CEP)– either onlineorin person— against CEP’s idea of studying to remove protective barriers on unit-level data for federal access and policymaking.
Here’s why.
Apparently chafing against constitutional and tech barriers against unrestrained access to student-level data, the federal government, this year, invited 15 people to help remove those barriers.
They named the group The Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking (CEP) and passed a law (led by Dem. Senator Murray, Speaker Ryan and President Obama) that gives the semblance of authority to the commission and allows them to post on the White House website.
The law passed in March.
The CEP’s stated purpose is to increase “use of data in order to build evidence about government programs“.
How would this be done? CEP doesn’t say on its website, but the trend in data mining is to push for unit record data sharing.
Individual students are, in computer jargon, “unit record data“. CEP promises to focus on “existing barriers” that are standing in the government’s way of accessing data [unit record data included] or, in their words, “data already being collected” [by states, in SLDS systems]. That data is none of the federal government’s business. In my opinion, it’s none of the state’s business. My data belongs to me. My child’s data should not be harvested without my written consent. The state never asked before it began to longitudinally study my child. And now, the feds want full access to disaggregated data to “build evidence” of all kinds.
CEP’s website claims that “…while protecting privacy and confidentiality” the Commission will “study how data, research, and evaluation are currently used to build evidence, and how to strengthen the government’s evidence-building efforts.”
They made scary, transformative changes effortlessly, as unelected bureaucrats dangled money (our taxes) in front of other unelected bureaucrats. No representation.
In 2013, Senators Warner, Rubio and Wyden called for a federal “unit record” database to track students from school through the workforce. That was shot down; Congress didn’t want to end the protective ban on unit record collection. In 2008, reauthorization of the Higher Education Act expressly forbade creation of a federal unit record data system.
“A unit record database has long been the holy grail for many policy makers, who argue that collecting data at the federal level is the only way to get an accurate view of postsecondary education…
…[V]oices calling for a unit record system have only intensified; there is now a near-consensus that a unit record system would be a boon… An increasing number of groups, including some federal panels, have called for a federal unit record system since 2006: the Education Department’sadvisory panelon accreditation, last year; the Committee on Measures of Student Success, in2011; andnearly everyadvocacy group and think tank that wrote white papers earlier this year for a project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation…
… through linkage with Social Security or other databases, it could track graduates’ wages… The Obama administration — unable to create a federal unit record database — has offered states money to constructlongitudinal databases of their own…”
It is time to stand up.
We missed the public meeting and the public hearing last month, but we can still speak at next week’s public testimony at the Rayburn Office Building.
If you can be in D.C. next Thursday, and want to offer public comment to offset the Gates-funded organizations that will be speaking in favor of sharing unit-record data, please send an email to Input@cep.gov. Ask for time to speak on the 21st of October. They ask for your name, professional affiliation, a two sentence statement, and a longer, written statement.
At the very least, you can send your opinion online to the CEP at: https://www.regulations.gov/docket?D=USBC-2016-0003
My submission to the CEP is below. Feel free to use it as a template.
Dear Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking,
I love the American concept of voter-based, Constitution-based, elected representative-based, policymaking. It’s why I live in America.
In contrast to voter-based policymaking there is evidence-based policymaking, which I don’t love because it implies that one entity’s “evidence” trumps individuals’ evidence, or trumps individuals’ consent to policy changes.
Former Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson said something about education that also applies to educational data and policymaking:
“The best way to prevent a political faction or any small group of people from capturing control of the nation’s educational system is to keep it decentralized into small local units, each with its own board of education and superintendent. This may not be as efficient as one giant super educational system (although bigness is not necessarily efficient, either) but it is far more safe. There are other factors, too, in favor of local and independent school systems. First, they are more responsive to the needs and wishes of the parents and the community. The door to the school superintendent’s office is usually open to any parent who wishes to make his views known. But the average citizen would be hard pressed to obtain more than a form letter reply from the national Commissioner of Education in Washington, D.C.”
Local control, and consent of the governed, are two foundational principles in our great nation.
Because the CEP is not an elected body, it does not actually hold representative authority to collect, or to recommend collection, of student-level evidence, or of any evidence, without written consent; and, for the same reasons, neither does the Department of Education.
Because the fifty, federally-designed, evidence-collecting, State Longitudinal Database Systems never received any consent from the governed in any state to collect data on individuals (as the systems were put into place not by authority, but by grant money) it follows that the idea of having CEP study the possible removal of barriers to federal access of those databases, is an egregious overstep that even exceeds the overstep of the State Longitudinal Database Systems.
Because federal FERPA regulations altered the original protective intent of FERPA, and removed the mandate that governments must get parental (or adult student) consent for any use of student level data, it seems that the idea of having CEP study and possible influence removal of additional “barriers” to federal use of data, is another egregious overstep.
As a licensed teacher in the State of Utah; as co-founder of Utahns Against Common Core (UACC); as a mother of children who currently attend public, private and home schools; as acting president of the Utah Chapter of United States Parents Involved in Education (USPIE); as a patriot who believes in “consent of the governed” and in the principles of the U.S. Constitution; and, as a current tenth grade English teacher, I feel that my letter represents the will of many who stand opposed to the “study” of the protective barriers on student-level data, which the CEP’s website has outlined it will do.
I urge this commission to use its power to strengthen local control of data, meaning parental and teacher stewardship over student data, instead of aiming to broaden the numbers of people with access to personally identifiable student information to include government agencies and/or educational sales/research corporations such as Pearson, Microsoft, or the American Institutes for Research.
To remove barriers to federal access of student-level data only makes sense to a socialist who agrees with the Marc Tucker/Hillary Clinton 1998 vision of a cradle-to-grave nanny state with “large scale data management systems” that dismiss privacy as a relic in subservience to modern government. It does not make sense to those who cherish local control.
It is clear that there is a strong debate about local control and about consent of the governed, concerning data and concerning education in general. NCEE Chair Mark Tucker articulated one side of the debate when he said: “the United States will have to largely abandon the beloved emblem of American education: local control.If the goal is to greatly increase the capacity and authority of the state education agencies, much of the new authority will have to come at the expense of local control.”
Does that statement match the philosophical stand of this commission? I hope not. Local control means individual control of one’s own life. How would an individual control his or her own destiny if “large scale data management systems” in a cradle-to-grave system, like the one that Tucker and Clinton envisioned, override the right to personal privacy and local control? It is not possible.
I urge this commission to use any influence that it has to promote safekeeping of unit-record data at the parental and teacher level, where that authority rightly belongs.
Update 3/10/16: Utah’s legislative session has passed, but HB 358, the student privacy bill, has not been funded. And so we are stuck, at least for another year, without proper protections for our children. (If you don’t know why that’s bad, begin by reading a recent article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, by Jane Robbins, on why Georgia is considering a student privacy bill):
Robbins explains, “…parents have heard glowing claims that ‘digital’ or ‘personalized’ learning will transform education, but they may not understand exactly what this means…[I]nteractive programs, marketed by private ventors, frequently use sophisticated software that collects massive amounts of highly personal information about the student’s behaviors, mindsets and attitudes”. She mentions the fact that the U.S. Department of Education is gung-ho on slurping up that personal, psychological information about beliefs and attitudes, as evidenced in its own published draft reports. (Must-reads!) Robbins makes the real point when she writes, “The issue here goes far beyond data security. It is whether the government and private companies have any right to collect this highly sensitive data in the first place.”
Not passing/funding the Utah HB 358 privacy bill, while passing and funding HB 277, the digital education bill, was crazy. It was the worst mistake of this entire legislative year.
Does the legislature not know that data is the new gold rush, and that education vendors are behaving as if this is the old wild west, without solid laws to govern student data sharing and partnering and selling? Does the legislature not know that to the federal government, also, data is the new gold rush as well, and that our own Congressman Jason Chaffetz held recent hearings against the Department of Education for its data insecure practices– and gave the Dept. an “F”?
Think of it this way: legislators just barely bought the children and teachers of Utah the trendiest, shiniest $15 million vehicle (HB 277) while saying, “We are unable –or unwilling — to pay for seat belts and air bags” –though the safety features would have cost a tiny, tiny fraction (one-sixteenth) of what the vehicle cost.
Where are their brains?
That digital vehicle, HB277 is worthless, at least to this mom, without the seat belts for the kids. I, for one, will not allow my own children to get into that wild, glittering ride.
If it does not pass (and get funded) tomorrow, the Utah legislature is silently informing us that privacy protections for children’s data do not really matter, and that citizens should not have rights to personal ownership over their personal data.
Even though HB 358 is scheduled for a hearing today at the Capitol: Tuesday, March 8th, at 5:00 p.m., the bill is in trouble because the executive appropriations committee did not fund it. That’s almost the same thing as killing the bill. (The appropriations committee needs to hear from MANY of us, as fast as possible. See below for contact information.)
I have been head-bangingly furious about the lack of proper privacy protections for my children since 2012, when I found out that there was such a thing as a State Longitudinal Database System (SLDS)– here and in every other state–and when I then asked to opt out of SLDS tracking, I just received the State School Board’s official “no” letter.
In America, land of the free! In Utah, land of family-friendly liberty. Here, I was told that I was not allowed to opt my child out of SLDS, so that being tagged, tracked, and longitudinally stalked, from day one in school until my child was a working adult and beyond, was a mandate.
I also found out that:
1- Although it starts with the word “State,” the SLDS is federally paid-for and is aligned to federal data standardsand is federally interoperable;
2. Those who house Utah’s SLDS have zero legislative oversight. Incredibly, when SLDS began in 2009, there was zero vote-taking; SLDS came because of a grant application filled out by a clerk at the state office of education simply asking for a federal SLDS grant, and then it was implemented without voter approval. Yet SLDS is 100% applied to all school children, non-consensually.
4. FERPA (federal privacy law) was altered in 2009 by the Department of Education to become almost meaningless. Despite a huge law suit, FERPA stayed in its altered, privacy-harming state. So: in-state or beyond, proper privacy protections do not exist. (For more on that, see the recent hearings of Rep. Jason Chaffetz against the U.S. Dept. of Education)
5. SLDS interfaces with many other state agencies in the Utah Data Alliance, so there is no guarantee that a student’s private data, collected by a school, won’t end up in the data silo of another agency totally unrelated to education. SLDS has the ability, if state policy allows, to also interface with federal agencies’ data, other states’ and even other nations’ data collections.
This situation has literally kept me up at night, many nights, including tonight.
Along with countless other moms and dads, lawyers, think tanks, and legislators, I’ve done a lot of research and writing and speaking and pleading on this subject. See some of what I learned and shared in the past four years, here or here or here or here or here or here or here or here.
I tell you all this in case you are new to this issue so that you’ll understand how INCREDIBLY important passing HB 358 is.
House Bill 358 ought to be treated as one of the very most, if not the most, important bill at the Capitol this year. But the legislature is saying that there isn’t enough money to pass the privacy bill, which has an implementation price tag of $800,000. Oddly, the legislature has agreed to fund the FIFTEEN MILLION DOLLAR technology grant program, HB 277, but that technology bill is meaningless without privacy protections for students’ data.
Is the “no funding for HB 358” decision truly a budgeting pinch decision, or is it a matter of the legislators not caring enough about the rights of students to have privacy?
Here are a few of the lines in the bill that I really appreciate:
Line 463 says: “A student owns the student’s personally identifiable student data”.
Lines 494-503 say that schools have to give disclosure statements to parents, promising not to share certain types of data with out a data authorization.
Lines 775-792 prohibit psychiatric or psychological tests or analysis without prior written consent of parents, and specifically protect data collection about sexual orientation and behavior, mental problems, religious beliefs, self-incriminating behavior, appraisals of individuals with whom the student has a close family relationship; income, etc, and that written consent is required in all grades, kindergarten through 12th.
The bill designates three different types of data that schools may collect: necessary, optional, and prohibited.
Even though the “necessary” list seems too long, at least it limits data collection. It will collect data “required by state statute or federal law to conduct the regular activities of an education entity” such as name, date of birth, sex, parent contact information, student i.d., test results or exceptions from taking tests, transcript information, immunization record or exception from an immunization record, drop out data, race, etc.
Line 346-351 The “optional” list includes IEP information, biometric information, and information that is required for a student to participate in federal data gathering programs.
Lines 356 – 376 The bill also defines “personally identifiable student data” as data that cannot be legally disaggregated (identified by a particular student) (See lines 224-227 for disaggregation language):
356 (i) a student’s first and last name;
357 (ii) the name of a student’s family member;
358 (iii) a student’s or a student’s family’s home or physical address;
359 (iv) a student’s email address or online contact information;
360 (v) a student’s telephone number;
361 (vi) a student’s social security number;
362 (vii) a student’s biometric identifier;
363 (viii) a student’s health or disability data;
364 (ix) a student’s education entity student identification number;
365 (x) a student’s social media login or alias;
366 (xi) a student’s persistent identifier, if the identifier is associated with personally
367 identifiable student data, including:
368 (A) a customer number held in a cookie; or
369 (B) a processor serial number;
370 (xii) a combination of a student’s last name or photograph with other information that 371 together permits a person to contact the student online;
372 (xiii) information about a student or a student’s family that a person collects online and
373 combines with other personally identifiable student data to identify the student; and
374 (xiv) other information that, alone or in combination, is linked or linkable to a specific
375 student that would allow a reasonable person in the school community, who does not have
376 first-hand knowledge of the student, to identify the student with reasonable certainty.
We need to protect our kids! This bill NEEDS to pass!
If you’ve ever read 1984 and remember Big Brother; if good old-fashioned history books have taught you that tyranny has been far more dominant than liberty throughout world history (with the exception of a freedom experienced in the U.S. under the Constitution for a few 200+ years) –or if you’ve been paying attention to the recent struggle between big-data and individual rights– then you know: allowing any person or government –unfettered– to track individuals without their consent, for virtually the duration of their entire lives, is a very bad idea.
We need as many emails and phone calls or texts as we can muster before 5:00 p.m. tomorrow, Tuesday, March 8, to the following representatives, and especially to Speaker of the House Greg Hughes and President Niederhauser:
Senator (President) Niederhauser wniederhauser@le.utah.gov
Senator Sanpei dsanpei@le.utah.gov
Senator Hillyard lhillyard@le.utah.gov
Senator Dunnigan jdunnigan@le.utah.gov
Senator Adams jsadams@le.utah.gov
Representative Gibson fgibson@le.utah.gov
Senator Okerlund rokerlund@le.utah.gov
Here they are, ready to cut and paste into your email: dsanpei@le.utah.gov lhillyard@le.utah.gov jdunnigan@le.utah.gov jsadams@le.utah.gov fgibson@le.utah.gov rokerlund@le.utah.gov greghughes@le.utah.gov wniederhauser@le.utah.gov
I know there are five hundred things you could be doing. But this will take awhile.
SETRA, or “Strengthening Education Through Research Act,” a federal bill that passed the U.S. Senate on December 17th has not yet passed the House of Representatives, and must not.
(Call 202-224-3121 to speak to your representative in Congress.)
There is a lot to explain about SETRA, and I won’t even hit it all tonight.
SETRA was written “to strengthen the federal education research system”. That’s sentence number one. It begs this question: where does the U.S. Constitution permit federal education or federal education research?
Is this communist China, where nationalized education is normal? Did I dream that the Constitution gives zero power to the federal government to dictate even a crumb about education?
Why are we even considering a bill that starts out with that sentence? Furthermore, when did a single parent in this entire country give informed consent for a single child to be used as an unpaid, unwitting guinea pig for federal research? How dare the government research the thoughts and beliefs of my child and yours, using our tax dollars, without our consent?
In section 132 of SETRA, the government aims to collect, from your child and mine, “research on social and emotional learning”. –How so? Sensitive surveys are forbidden by PPRA, right?
Education Liberty Watch notes that PPRA (a federal law that is supposed to prohibit collection of psychological, sexual, or religious mindsets) only applies to student surveys– not to curriculum! It’s a loophole. Check out Cornell law school’s information on PPRA.
So what SETRA aims to do, in gathering sensitive “social and emotional” data, it can do, because of that loophold. SETRA’s aims are not prohibited. The data miners simply have to hide their psychological stalking inside the curriculum. And this is easier and more common than most of us realize.
Psychological or belief data can be mined without openly labeling the effort a psychological, religious, or emotional survey– and even without the knowledge of teachers or school administrators. For example:
Education Liberty Watch points out that an English Language Arts curriculum that is being used in over 40 Florida school districts and several California districts, a curriculum published by the College Board, called SpringBoard, contains many psychosocial, or belief-based, questions such as this:
Activity 4.9 Justice and Moral Reasoning
I should pay all my taxes because-
I could go to jail if I do not
people will think of me as a good citizen
my taxes along with those of others will help to pay for services used by all
Students are then made to rate themselves, based on having mostly “a” or “b” or “c” responses, as “pre-conventional,” “conventional” or “post-conventional” based on psychological, moral levels and stages of reasoning. This is a psychological test, yet parents are not given notice nor asked for their consent.
It’s not a bad idea to teach math students to persevere. It is immoral, though, to pretend that a math test is testing only math, when it is also testing the psychological attribute of perseverance or another nonacademic attribute or belief– without the informed consent of a parent.
And if politicians and corporate giants get their way, it won’t be possible for a student or parent to avoid this type of psychological data mining by opting out of the high stakes tests, because stealth testing is here to take high-stakes testing’s place.
Hiding the test from the student (and from the teacher and from the parent) by embedding it in the curriculum does solve many of the problems of high-pressure testing. But it makes the problem of nonconsensual data mining worse. And it would make opting out of the governmental inventorying of human beings impossible. Thanks to “integration of testing into an aligned curriculum, the aims of SERTA can still mine your student’s data– with or without high-stakes testing.
Some people still don’t believe that federal and state governments really aim to gather data about the mind, heart and soul of each child. In the bureaucrats’ own words, read it.
The Department of Education wrote that 21st century “competencies” would include “noncognitive” (nonacademic) factors. Read that report, entitled “Promoting Grit, Tenacity and Perserverance,” if you can find it; recently, the White House has removed its prior link to the published report.
Similar language about schools needing to gather belief-based, or social/emotional data, is found in countless other places.
See, for example, Utah’s own 2009 federal SLDS (State Longitudinal Database System) grant application language, which promised the state would gather noncognitive student data from Utah’s children, about “resiliency” and “social comfort and integration” via “psychometric census.” (Utah did “win” that federal grant, twice, and so we do have the federally designed SLDS system, as does every single United State.)
Ask your congressman: where is the language in SERTA that would prohibit state SLDS systems from feeding personally identifiable information to the federal agencies?
Where is the language in SERTA that would penalize governmental and private entities who shared or sold student information?
Where is the prohibition on sharing personal student information with international entities, such as PISA, TIMSS, or SIF?
Where are the enforcement remedies when student information is mishandled?
Where is any actual prohibition on a national database, while SERTA encourages states to share and feed out data, ironically calling it “voluntary” sharing –though neither students nor parents ever gave consent to gather or use SLDS-nested information?
There’s more that really needs to be pointed out about SERTA.
Nonduplication?
The thrifty seeming concept of nonduplication, or not overlapping and wasting energy, is used falsely, repeatedly, in SERTA, to justify the data grab.
The idea that database meshing is needful “in order to reduce burden and cost” (page 4) is supposedly justified so that the federal Secretary of Education shall “use information and data that are available from existing federal, state and local sources”. On page 12, it extends the database meshing to private entities, too: “such research and activities carried out by public and private entities to avoid duplicative or overlapping efforts”. Where are the rights of the people being data-mined?
Will state, local, and private sources just idiotically hand this student data over to the federal agencies, buying the absurd notion that privacy rights pale in comparison to the opportunity of unburdening the federal workday or bank account?
Not Just Children’s Data; Adults’ Data, Too?
It is discouraging to note that SERTA strikes the “children” from the previous bill to replace it with the word “students,” repeatedly (page 77, page 117). This replacement may broaden the reach of the data mining capability of the federal system to include not only children in public schools, but anyone in any environment that can be called a learning environment– I’m guessing: workplaces, libraries, universities, public housing facilities, rehabilitation facilities, hospital learning centers, refugee camps? Adults are repeatedly mentioned in SERTA, in addition to being included in the more generic term “students.” And SERTA says that “adult education” and “adult education and literacy activities” are used as they are defined in section 203 of the Adult Education and Family Literacy Act, which is part of the Workforce Investment Act of 1998. The federal link to that bill is currently broken, so I have not read that definition yet. But I think it’s safe to say that SERTA is not just about “improving research” for kids. It feels as if it’s all about Big Brothering every single citizen.
Cementing the SLDS (de facto federal) Database Systems?
In fact, on page 109, SERTA mandates that a year after it passes, and every three years thereafter, the federal Secretary of Education will prepare a report about each state’s “progress” and “use of statewide longitudinal data systems”.
Fact: SLDS databases are, by federal mandate, designed with interoperability frameworks that mean they create one big, connect-able database of fifty matching state databases. Utah’s grant application reveals, “the current School Interoperability Framework (SIF) v2 standard fulfills the needs of LEA to LEA, LEA to postsecondary, LEA to USOE, and USOE to EDFacts data exchanges.” In plain talk, that means that schools, universities, the state office of education, and the federal EDFacts data exchange use the same interoperabilities so they can share any data that their policies will allow them to share. These groups will say that “it’s just grouped data, not personally identifiable, that is shared.” But the personally identifiable data is housed and CAN be shared, if and when policy allows. Proper protections are not in place. Even federal FERPA privacy laws, upon which SERTA relies, and which SERTA mentions –was shredded by the Dept. of Education in the same year or two that it pushed Common Core tests, common SLDS systems, and Common Core Standards, on all the states. FERPA no longer requires parental consent for the sharing of personal student data. That’s a “best practice,” now, and not a requirement, and government failing to get any consent carries no punishment.
Yet SERTA relies on FERPA each time it (repeatedly) says something like “adhering to federal privacy laws and protections” (for example, see page 111).
When SERTA says potentially reassuring things, such as the idea that “cooperative education statistics partnerships” are not to be confused with a national database system (page 44) or that “no student data shall be collected by the partnerships… nor shall such partnerships establish a national student data system,” I do roll my eyes.
National student data systems are ready to plug in, like fifty separate puzzle pieces in a fifty piece puzzle; there are fifty SLDS systems– one per state. So the federal plan has already been established with state SLDS databases. The hole is dug; the concrete is poured. Now, with SETRA, they are asking for a permit to build. Congress can say no!
They must. Privacy matters. It is a basic freedom.
Do not believe the people who say that it does not matter, or that it’s already gone– because of Facebook or NSA or Social Security numbers being used as national I.D.s. It’s not yet true. Privacy is still far from “all gone,” and it is worth fighting for!
The autonomy of your child, free from Big Brother in his or her future, is worth fighting for.
Remember the Declaration of Independence. It says that governments derive their just powers from the CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED.
Without consent, government actions are unjust. The SLDS systems are nonconsensual systems.
They came via federal bribe, aka federal grant when unelected, unthinking, nonrepresentative bureaucrats in each state office of education applied for the federal money in exchange for the federally designed and nationally interoperable SLDS systems; no citizen nor representative voted.
These monstrous State Longitudinal Database Systems use schools and other entities to create even huge “data alliances;” this is the basis for SERTA’s potentially frightening, increased powers. Any language in SERTA implying that there is no plan for any national database is deception.
Don’t give the feds the authority to build that glary-eyed, Big Brother skyscraper on top of us, just because they already dug a foundation and poured concrete under us while we weren’t all paying attention.
ESEA, a huge bill about data and federal roles in local education, is being rammed through in the dark. The vote is in a week and there’s no access to the final bill yet. Senator Lee is right. This process is wrong.
Don’t let a handful of people decide for the entire elected Congress and the entire population of the US what education, testing, standards, and data privacy should be, without debate, and without reading the bill. The political careers of those who are ramming through this anti-freedom legislation in the dark without debate are going to be over once America wakes up and figures out what they have done to us.
I sat down and wrote out what I wanted to say this blog-video. It’s posted here, for those who don’t want to sit through twenty minutes of talking. Sorry that I had to read much of it rather than making eye contact all of the time. I just needed to get it said right.)
VIDEO CONTENT:
Happy Thanksgiving Week!
My name is Christel Swasey, and I am a teacher and a mother living in Pleasant Grove, Utah. Today is November 24, 2015. In less than one week a handful of secretive congressmen are expecting to pass a bill called ESEA, or the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, without our informed consent or the informed consent of our elected representatives.
The final bill has not even been released yet but the vote is in a week. It won’t be read by turkey-gobbling Congressmen when it is released in a few days. But they’ll be forced to vote on Tuesday, uninformed or misinformed because all they’ll read is a sheet of talking points put out by the bill’s lobbyists. This will have a disasterous, long term effect on liberty in America.
I am asking you to help #STOPESEA by calling Congress at 202-224-3121. Tell Congress to vote NO on ESEA based on what’s slated to be in it, and maybe more importantly, based on the corrupt, un-American process of passing it without giving time to read and debate about it.
I’m a big fan of a phrase in the Declaration of Independence: THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED”.
The Declaration explains that to secure our God-given rights, we the people instituted government: “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”
So government has no just powers outside of consent by the governed, and so my life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, and yours, are not secure when government is operating outside the informed consent of the governed. I am telling you that it is happening right now.
My own Senator, Mike Lee, has been an inspiration this week as he’s spoken out about this corrupt process and explained how it’s operating. He said that how the conference process is supposed to work is not how is has been conducted. Quote: “from the surface it will still look like the conference process is happening the way it’s supposed to, but beneath the surface, we know that all of this has already been prearranged, precooked, predetermined by a select few members of Congress working behind closed doors, free from scrutiny. And we know that this vote was scheduled on extremely short notice, so that it would be difficult if not impossible for the rest of us to influence the substance of the conference report through motions to instruct.” Senator Lee said, “Because process influences policy… the process expedites the passage of policies that we know don’t work—policies to which the American people are strongly opposed.” Then Senator Lee named a few of those bad policies, such as “the discredited common core approach” and the centrally planned, failed model of federal preschool which the bill will use $250 million to promote. There are many more terrible policies that ESEA will cement. I will list more later on in this video.
My own representative, Jason Chaffetz, has also been in the Congressional spotlight this week, shedding light on what the federal government, via the Dept. of Education, is doing to American privacy. I watched him in a video leading a congressional hearing on the improper practices of the Dept of Education in its student data collection and data mining programs. The hearing revealed that the federal Dept of Education has somewhere between one and two hundred ways that it collects data about your child and mine, but the Department only admits to having three because it contracts out the rest of the systems. As if that’s better. The hearing revealed that the Dept of Education received negative scores across every category of data security, and Rep Chaffetz gave the Dept. an “F”—calling it “a monster, an absolute monster”.
This is the same federal Dept of Education that is pushing, through the current ESEA bill, additional methods of mining student data.
But the things that Sen. Lee and Rep. Chaffetz oppose are not the only things that the ESEA bill will foist on us. I predict that the final version of the ESEA bill will contain many more grants to promote more “voluntary” data mining in addition to the compulsory data collection that’s already taking place; more federal preschools, more psychological profiling of teachers, students and families inside and outside of public schools under the banner of the kindly nanny state’s data-driven decision making, more career tracking, more longitudinal citizen stalking via college student and graduate reporting, more assessments or more deeply embedded forms of stealth assessments, and a subtle undermining of parental authority, teacher creativity and student autonomy from the community-centric, workforce-focused, data-focused initiatives in this bill. (We’ll see this week, won’t we?)
A group of over two hundred grassroots organizations representing most of the states in the United States signed an open letter to Congress opposing this ESEA bill. The letter outlines four things that are strong reasons to oppose ESEA. I’m summarizing. The first is–
COMMON CORE – the letter calls common core “academically inferior, developmentally inappropriate, psychologically manipulative and privately copyrighted Common Core Standards…” End quote. Now, in my opinion, the talking points that will be used to promote the bill will likely say that it’s common-core free, or at least, the bill will avoid using the phrases “common core” or “common data standards”. The bill will rely very deceptively on the fact that most people don’t know that there is an official federal definition of common core. That other phrase that the bill WILL include, repeatedly, is: “career and college ready standards” or “career and college readiness”. Do an internet search for the federal definition of “college and career ready”. You’ll find that the phrase is officially defined by the federal Dept. of Education as “standards common to a significant number of states” which can only be the common core.
The second reason that the grassroots letter asks Congress to oppose ESEA is its push for:
ASSESSMENTS THAT PROFILE CITIZENS – the letter calls an over-reliance on tests never independently validated, high-stakes standardized tests supervised by the federal government , tests that are psychologically profiling our children more than assessing their academic knowledge…a problem. The third reason to oppose ESEA is:
SLDS – State Longitudinal Database Systems (stalking of kids by the government) and the massive increase in state and federal gathering of private family, education and psychological data … without consent. The fourth reason:
CAREER TRACKING – Career tracking, which undermines self-determination by means of unconstitutional profiling…”
Some people don’t understand why it’s a bad thing for the government to centrally manage and guide (or control) citizens into different career tracks; some think that’s helpful for the individual and good for the collective economy.
But I think of a quote from my favorite Disney movie, “Prince of Egypt” where Moses says, “No kingdom should be made on the backs of slaves”.
Since student self-determination is undermined by the dictates of the government’s workforce needs, even if it is data-driven dictatorship, and since a student’s interests won’t be judged as equally important to a student’s capabilities when the collective workforce or the government is the main determiner of what that student’s career path should be, we are creating a system for our children where they are not free. Maybe it is an exaggeration to say that education reforms are aiming to build a global kingdom on the backs of children without their consent; but I think, in the long run, maybe not.
Either you believe that parents are the God-given authority over a child, or you believe that children’s lives should be managed by the government and its “data driven decision making,” for the building up of the government’s economy– in the style of countries without freedom, like China.
Either you support the continued tracking and nonconsensual stalking of your child and family, using local schools as the data collection pawns in a federal system that tracks children and families for life, –or you believe in freedom, self-determination and privacy.
Either you believe that individuals should control their own lives despite the risks that freedom allows, or you believe that the government should control the lives of the people, because of the risks that freedom allows. If you are getting sucked into believing the latter, please remember this: we the people created government. We own it; it did not create us and it does not own us. It cannot boss us without our consent. Anytime government does a thing without the full, informed consent of the governed, it is unjust and it is dangerous.
But government can and does get away with bossing and bullying –when we let go of our own power. I am asking you to use your power to call and stop ESEA this week.
Because Congress isn’t being given time to read or debate the bill prior to a vote, the bill’s promoters will pass out a sheet of biased talking points for the rest of Congress to read before they vote (this is how they got the Student Success Act passed) –and these talking points will sound so good. But they will be full of lies.
I know this because I saw the last set of talking points when they passed the house and senate versions of this monster bill. They had things that successfully deceived almost all of our elected conservatives, such as: “this bill will reduce the federal footprint” and “this bill restores power to the states and localities”—these things weren’t true.
Rather than restoring power to the localities, the bill assigned enforcement of federal priorities to the localities. Think about that: there’s a big difference between assigning federal priority enforcement and implementation to states, and actually restoring freedom to states. The new bill will likely use many phrases conservatives love while it also intrudes on basic rights and institutions, for example, on private schools and home schools by offering them attractive grants or services –in exchange for student, teacher and family data. It’s all about data—it’s all about reducing citizen privacy, because information is power.
And the bill won’t be written in clear language that is accessible to the average person. You will have to really study it and find out what its words and phrases mean in definitions outside the bill itself, to understand what is being traded.
The bill and its talking points will likely use language to appeal to the compassionate person, but it will force the federal concept — a parent-replacing definition– of government compassion. It will promote parent-neutralizing, nanny-state enabling concepts and programs, including increased data mining –to identify (quote) ”academic, physical, social, emotional, health, mental health and other needs of students, families, and community residents.” The last bill promoted “Full Service Community Schools” and “student needs” and “wraparound services” and extended learning time that make school, not family or church, the central hub of a child’s life.
202-224-3121. Memorize that number or put it in your speed dial. Ask Congress to vote NO on ESEA.
It is wrong for you and I to sit by while the partnership of federal and corporate forces take away our authority by changing who gets to define and enforce what learning means and what will be learned –taking this authority from the parent and teacher; and reassigning it to the government;
It is wrong for you and I to sit by while the federal government narrows academic freedom by dicating a communistic, workforce-centered vision of what academic success is for;
It is wrong for you and I to sit by while the federal government cements into federal law the common core standards.
It is wrong for you and I to sit by while the federal government cements processes built on student-stalking common data standards and interoperable state databases that report to the federal edfacts data exchange, tracking children’s academic and psychological data, without consent;
It is wrong for you and I to allow any kind of assessments to be mandated upon us by federal forces, whether in the form of formal, standardized tests or stealthy, embedded tests that are quietly woven into the daily curriculum and assignments of students. These tests lock us into a federal definition of what academic excellence looks like and will narrow academic creativity in classrooms that are built on one standard and one set of data tags and tests. They certainly make things more efficient, but at the expense of a teacher’s professional judgment and her curricular liberty.
It is wrong for you and I to sit by while a few members of Congress ram a bill through, mostly in the dark, without allowing any space for analysis or debate. It is truly a dark and un-American process.
Fight for freedom with your telephone.
These freedoms, once lost, won’t come back easily: the freedom to define with our own conscience and intellect what education should look like; the freedom from invasion of privacy; the freedom from being centrally managed and tracked without consent. These are not small things.
I’m asking you to call 202-224-3121 and tell Congress to vote NO on ESEA.
Two of my favorite ed reform analysts, Diane Ravitch and Emmett McGroarty come from opposite sides of the political aisle, yet each has called on America to sit up, take notice, and take action against the Common Core movement.
Is Congress too busy, or too conflicted, to pay attention?
Diane Ravitch has long been calling for a Congressional investigation into “Bill Gates’ swift and silent takeover of American education.” She rightly called Gates’ unelected, leviathan influence an unauthorized coup worthy of Congressional investigation and wrote, “the idea that the richest man in America can purchase and — working closely with the U.S. Department of Education — impose new and untested academic standards on the nation’s public schools is a national scandal.”
Ravitch’s congressional investigation needs to happen fast, though, because– once again, we and our children are under the gun.
Emmett McGroarty, pointed out this week, at Townhall.com that the “No Child Left Behind” horror is being refried and re-offered to American school children as a worse, sweatier mess of Gates-inspired, CEDS and Datapalooza -aligned Common Core cement, now being called “The Every Child Achieves Act” (ECAA).
Think of the new ECAA bill as the 2.0 –but not from No Child Left Behind only; also from an earlier version of itself just two months ago. Remember that this “Every Child Achieves Act” bill went down in flames — thanks to actual grassroots moms and dads and teachers screaming NO earlier this year. But it’s risen from the ashes, more sly this time, like a recurring nightmare.
McGroarty writes that the ECAA targets the [parental freedom to say no to high stakes testing] Opt-Out movement. He and co-author Lisa Hudson explain:
“It [ECAA] keeps the testing requirements. A state must still have an “accountability system” that includes as a “substantial” factor student performance on standardized tests. It does try to lessen the teach-to-the-test pressures by allowing the state to determine “the weight” of the tests… But this will not alleviate such pressures. It’s like saying, ‘We’re going to beat you with a wooden bat, not a metal one.’ … each state must demonstrate that it will measure ‘annual progress of not less than 95 percent of all students’ …Now is the time for all the senators and representatives who support local control of education and all those who support federalism to stand up and get rid of the federal dictates on how often and in what subjects our children are tested.”
So, if Congress is debating passage of ECAA, and if many in Congress are pushing the bill, will Congress simultaneously investigate Common Core, and its own governmental and business allies?
Keep in mind Diane Ravitch’s call for congressional investigation of Gates and his federal allies:
“The close involvement of Arne Duncan raises questions about whether the law was broken” knowing that Gates, “one very rich man bought the enthusiastic support of interest groups on the left and right to campaign for the Common Core…”
Ravitch’s call needs to be echoed and re-echoed throughout our nation. She asks:
“Who knew that American education was for sale? Who knew that federalism could so easily be dismissed as a relic of history? Who knew that Gates and Duncan, working as partners, could dismantle and destroy state and local control of education?
“The revelation that education policy was shaped by one unelected man, underwriting dozens of groups. and allied with the Secretary of Education, whose staff was laced with Gates’ allies, is ample reason for Congressional hearings.
“…I could not support the Common Core standards because they were developed and imposed without regard to democratic process. The writers of the standards included no early childhood educators, no educators of children with disabilities, no experienced classroom teachers; indeed, the largest contingent of the drafting committee were representatives of the testing industry.
“No attempt was made to have pilot testing of the standards in real classrooms with real teachers and students. The standards do not permit any means to challenge, correct, or revise them.
…The high-handed manner in which these standards were written and imposed in record time makes them unacceptable. These standards not only undermine state and local control of education, but the manner in which they were written and adopted was authoritarian. No one knows how they will work, yet dozens of groups have been paid millions of dollars by the Gates Foundation to claim that they are absolutely vital for our economic future, based on no evidence whatever…. Local boards are best equipped to handle local problems. States set state policy, in keeping with the concept that states are “laboratories of democracy,” where new ideas can evolve and prove themselves… Do we need to compare the academic performance of students in different states? We already have the means to do so with the federally funded National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)… Will national standards improve test scores? There is no reason to believe so. Brookings scholar Tom Loveless predicted two years ago that the Common Core standards would make little or no difference. The biggest test-score gaps, he wrote, are within the same state, not between states… the most reliable predictors of test scores are family income and family education.
“… at a time when many schools have fiscal problems and are laying off teachers, nurses, and counselors, and eliminating arts programs, the nation’s schools will be forced to spend billions of dollars on Common Core materials, testing, hardware, and software.
“Microsoft, Pearson, and other entrepreneurs will reap the rewards of this new marketplace. Our nation’s children will not.
“Who decided to monetize the public schools? Who determined that the federal government should promote privatization and neglect public education? … Who decided that schools should invest in Common Core instead of smaller classes and school nurses?
“These are questions that should be asked at Congressional hearings.”
Please, please share these thoughts with your Congressional representatives. Stop the current Every Child Achieves Act. Don’t let Congressmen tell you that they can’t get involved because education is a states’ issue. It is! But because it is a constitutionally designated states’ issue, Congress must get involved and get the feds and the privateers out of our schools.
“Bald Piano Guy” is a New York teacher who sings “Opting Out” to the tune of Billy Joel’s “Moving Out,” and sings “Seen Them Opting Out on Broadway” to the tune of “Seen the Lights go out on Broadway”. He sings “The Arrogant Man” dedicated to NY Governor Cuomo, to the tune of “Angry Young Man”. He has many more YouTube performances but I’ll share just a few here.
As I’ve said before, please be wise and very careful about what happens in each of our states as a replacement for high stakes testing. The controlistas love to take a crisis and turn it to their own advantage.
1.THE TESTS HAVE NEVER BEEN VALIDATED. It is out of the norm for tests to be given to children that never have been validated in a formal, scientific, peer-reviewed way. Professor Tienken of Seton Hall University calls this “dataless decision making“. What does it mean to a mom or dad to hear that no validity report has ever been issued for the SAGE/Common Core tests? It means that the test is as likely to harm as to help any child.
We would not give our children unpiloted, experimental medicine; why would we give them unpiloted, experimental education? –And, did you know that Florida bought/rented the SAGE test from Utah, and now Florida points to Utah students as its guinea pigs? Where was Utah’s parental consent? Is it okay that the youngest, most helpless citizens are compulsory research subjects without the knowledge or consent of their parents?
2. THE STANDARDS (upon which the test is based) HAVE NEVER BEEN VALIDATED. Building a test on the sandy foundation of unvalidated standards –hoping but not having actual evidence on which to base that hope– that the standards are unquestionably legitimate, means that not only the test but the teaching that leads up to it, is experimental, not time-tested. The SAGE evaluates teachers and even grades schools (and will close them) based on test scores from this flawed-upon-flawed (not to mention unrepresentative/unconstitutional) system. Dr. Tienken reminds us that that making policy decisions in this baseless way is “educational malpractice.”
4. THE TESTS ARE SECRETIVE. Parents and teachers may not see test questions, not even years after the test is over. Last year’s leaked screen shots of the test, taken by a student with her cell phone to show her mother, revealed an unpleasing agenda that asked students to question the value of reading (versus playing video games). The student who took the photos was told that she was a cheater, was threatened with expulsion; and the teacher who didn’t notice (or stop) the cell phone photography was threatened with job loss. Members of Utah’s 15-parent SAGE review committee have expressed grave concerns about the quality and content of SAGE, citing “grammar, typos, content, wrong answers, glitches, etc.,” but were never shown whether corrections were made to SAGE, prior to its hasty rollout.
5. TEST ITEM CREATION IS QUESTIONABLE. SAGE questions were written by two groups: a few hand picked Utah educators, and the psychometricians at the testing company, American Institutes for Research (AIR) which is not an academic organization but a behavioral research group. We don’t know why psychometricians were entrusted to write math and English questions. And we don’t know what the percentages are– how many SAGE questions come from educators, and how many from AIR’s psychometricians?
6.THE TEST DISREGARDS ETHICS CODES FOR BEHAVIORAL RESEARCH TESTING. As Dr. Gary Thompson has pointed out, behavioral tests are normally governed by strict codes of ethics and test-giving psychologists lose their licenses to practice if they veer from the codes of ethics.
The Utah State Office of Education claims tests do not collect psychological information, but it seems unreasonable to believe the claim.
Consider:
“Behavioral Indicators” is a phrase that’s been in Utah laws concerning student testing for years. It’s old news. Happily, last month, Sen. Aaron Osmond wrote a bill to remove that language. (Thank you, Senator Osmond.) Time will tell if the new law is respected or enforced.
“Psychometric census” of Utah students was part of the agreement Utah made with the federal government when it applied for and received a grant to build a longitudinal database to federal specifications, (including federal and international interoperability specifications.) Utah promised in that grant contract to use its Student Strengths Inventory to collect noncognitive data.
The test company, AIR, is a behavioral research company that creates behavioral assessments as its primary mission and focus.
U.S. Dept of Education reports such as “Promoting Grit, Tenacity and Perserverance” promote collection of students’ psychological and belief-based data via tests, encouraging schools to use biometric data collection devices. I have not seen any of these devices being used in Utah schools, but neither have I seen any evidence that the legislature or our State School Board stand opposed to the Dept. of Education’s report or the advice it gives.
The NCES, a federal agency, has a National Data Collection Model which it invites states to follow. Since Utah has no proper legal privacy protections in place, there is nothing stopping us from accepting the invitation to comply with the Model’s suggestions, which include hundreds of data points including intimate and even belief-based points: religious affiliation, nickname, voting status, bus stop times, birthdate, nonschool activities, etc.
7. UTAH’S NEW SCHOOL TURNAROUND LAW WILL SHUT DOWN SCHOOLS OR TAKE THEM OVER –USING SAGE AS JUSTIFICATION. The bell curve of school-grading uses SAGE as its school-measuring stick; when a certain number of schools (regardless of quality) are inevitably labeled “failing” because of their position on that bell curve, they will be turned over to the state, turned into a charter school, or closed. These events will alter lives, because of Utah’s belief in and reliance on the illegitimate SAGE test scores.
8.SAGE TESTS ARE GIVEN ALL YEAR LONG. These are not just end-of-year tests anymore. SAGE tests are summative, formative, interim, and practice (assignment based) tests. The summative (ending) test is given so early in the year that content has not been taught yet. But it gets tested anyway, and teachers/students/schools get negatively judged, anyway.
9. OPTING OUT IS ONE WAY TO PROTEST DATA MINING AND TO MINIMIZE IT. The State Longitudinal Database System (SLDS) collects daily data on every school child without ever asking for parental consent. SLDS collects much more than test-gathered data. The government of Utah will not allow an SLDS opt out. And since SLDS does not have an opt out provision (while SAGE does) it makes sense to minimize the amount of data mining that’s being done on your child by not taking these tests.
10.OPTING OUT OF SAGE FIGHTS EDUCATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION. The lack of transparency, of fairness, of any shared amendment process or true representation under Common Core and its testing system defies “consent of the governed,” a principle we learned in the Declaration of Independence. “It is the right [and responsibility] of the people to alter or abolish” governments [or educational programs] destructive of life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness –or those that govern without the knowledge of, or consent of, the governed.
I believe that parents now have the right and responsibility to abolish SAGE testing, by refusing to participate.
If you haven’t yet realized that the Utah State Office of Education acts as an unaccountable bully to both the State School Board and to parents/teachers/legislators, please watch this; it is yet more reason to not allow your child to take the SAGE/AIR test, which is a science test as well as English and math:
Beware of Stealth Assessment as SAGE replacement
Please beware, however: The testing opt out movement has grown so huge (outside Utah) that some Utah legislators have decided to hop on the anti-testing bandwagon with an eye toward replacing SAGE with something from which public school parents can never, ever opt out (unless they home school or use private school). That’s called embedded testing, or stealth assessment.
Opt out of SAGE this year; fight Stealth Assessment next year.
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National News Update on Test Opt-Out Movement
provided by Fairtest.org
We’ve pulled together this special edition of our usually-weekly newsclips because of three huge stories that broke in the past several days.
– In New York, more than 173,000 students opted out of the first wave of state testing, at least tripling last year’s boycott level.
– In five states (Colorado, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada and North Dakota) computerized Common Core testing systems collapsed in a replay of the widespread technical problems which plagued Florida exams earlier this spring.
Both major developments further undermine the credibility of judgements about students, teachers and schools made on the basis of standardized exam results.
— And, in Washington DC, the U.S. Senate education committee responded to grassroots pressure for assessment reform by endorsing an overhaul of “No Child Left Behind,” which eliminates most federal sanctions for test scores. The bill does not go far enough to reversing test misuse and overuse, but it is a step in the right direction
Remember that these updates are posted online at: http://fairtest.org/news/other for your reference and for use in Facebook posts, Tweets, weblinks, etc.
COMMON CORE 
The purpose of this post is to ask you to testify this week to the newly created White House Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking (CEP)– either online or in person— against CEP’s idea of studying to remove protective barriers on unit-level data for federal access and policymaking.
Here’s why.
Apparently chafing against constitutional and tech barriers against unrestrained access to student-level data, the federal government, this year, invited 15 people to help remove those barriers.
It’s a motley crew: a British behavioral scientist, an American data crime lawyer, a White House Medicaid bureaucrat, and piles of professors who formerly worked for the feds.
They named the group The Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking (CEP) and passed a law (led by Dem. Senator Murray, Speaker Ryan and President Obama) that gives the semblance of authority to the commission and allows them to post on the White House website.
The law passed in March.
The CEP’s stated purpose is to increase “use of data in order to build evidence about government programs“.
How would this be done? CEP doesn’t say on its website, but the trend in data mining is to push for unit record data sharing.
Individual students are, in computer jargon, “unit record data“. CEP promises to focus on “existing barriers” that are standing in the government’s way of accessing data [unit record data included] or, in their words, “data already being collected” [by states, in SLDS systems]. That data is none of the federal government’s business. In my opinion, it’s none of the state’s business. My data belongs to me. My child’s data should not be harvested without my written consent. The state never asked before it began to longitudinally study my child. And now, the feds want full access to disaggregated data to “build evidence” of all kinds.
CEP’s website claims that “…while protecting privacy and confidentiality” the Commission will “study how data, research, and evaluation are currently used to build evidence, and how to strengthen the government’s evidence-building efforts.”
In the context of the decade-long Congressional debate for and against unrestrained federal study of individuals, how can CEP simultaneously persuade Congress that it will protect student privacy while pushing Congress to increase its evidence-building efforts?
I suppose if they gain unlimited access to data but deny access to at least one person, they can call this “protecting privacy”.
They used the phrase “protecting privacy” while they:
They made scary, transformative changes effortlessly, as unelected bureaucrats dangled money (our taxes) in front of other unelected bureaucrats. No representation.
When CEP begins its planned study of “practices for monitoring and assessing outcomes of government programs,” and other “studies,” you can just insert your child or grandchild’s name wherever you see the term “government programs”.
It’s all about unit-record data: the kids.
And it’s not a new idea!
In 1998, Hillary Clinton and Marc Tucker conspired to create a system they envisioned as “seamless”; a “cradle-to-grave system that is the same for everyone” to “remold the entire American system” using “large scale data management systems”. It was exposed, but not abandoned.
In 2013, Senators Warner, Rubio and Wyden called for a federal “unit record” database to track students from school through the workforce. That was shot down; Congress didn’t want to end the protective ban on unit record collection. In 2008, reauthorization of the Higher Education Act expressly forbade creation of a federal unit record data system.
In 2013 InsideHigherEd.com reported:
“A unit record database has long been the holy grail for many policy makers, who argue that collecting data at the federal level is the only way to get an accurate view of postsecondary education…
…[V]oices calling for a unit record system have only intensified; there is now a near-consensus that a unit record system would be a boon… An increasing number of groups, including some federal panels, have called for a federal unit record system since 2006: the Education Department’s advisory panel on accreditation, last year; the Committee on Measures of Student Success, in 2011; and nearly every advocacy group and think tank that wrote white papers earlier this year for a project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation…
… through linkage with Social Security or other databases, it could track graduates’ wages… The Obama administration — unable to create a federal unit record database — has offered states money to construct longitudinal databases of their own…”
It is time to stand up.
We missed the public meeting and the public hearing last month, but we can still speak at next week’s public testimony at the Rayburn Office Building.
If you can be in D.C. next Thursday, and want to offer public comment to offset the Gates-funded organizations that will be speaking in favor of sharing unit-record data, please send an email to Input@cep.gov. Ask for time to speak on the 21st of October. They ask for your name, professional affiliation, a two sentence statement, and a longer, written statement.
If you can’t make it to D.C. on Thursday, you can catch them in a few months at similar meetings in California and in the Midwest.
At the very least, you can send your opinion online to the CEP at: https://www.regulations.gov/docket?D=USBC-2016-0003
My submission to the CEP is below. Feel free to use it as a template.
Dear Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking,
I love the American concept of voter-based, Constitution-based, elected representative-based, policymaking. It’s why I live in America.
In contrast to voter-based policymaking there is evidence-based policymaking, which I don’t love because it implies that one entity’s “evidence” trumps individuals’ evidence, or trumps individuals’ consent to policy changes.
Former Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson said something about education that also applies to educational data and policymaking:
“The best way to prevent a political faction or any small group of people from capturing control of the nation’s educational system is to keep it decentralized into small local units, each with its own board of education and superintendent. This may not be as efficient as one giant super educational system (although bigness is not necessarily efficient, either) but it is far more safe. There are other factors, too, in favor of local and independent school systems. First, they are more responsive to the needs and wishes of the parents and the community. The door to the school superintendent’s office is usually open to any parent who wishes to make his views known. But the average citizen would be hard pressed to obtain more than a form letter reply from the national Commissioner of Education in Washington, D.C.”
Local control, and consent of the governed, are two foundational principles in our great nation.
Because the CEP is not an elected body, it does not actually hold representative authority to collect, or to recommend collection, of student-level evidence, or of any evidence, without written consent; and, for the same reasons, neither does the Department of Education.
Because the fifty, federally-designed, evidence-collecting, State Longitudinal Database Systems never received any consent from the governed in any state to collect data on individuals (as the systems were put into place not by authority, but by grant money) it follows that the idea of having CEP study the possible removal of barriers to federal access of those databases, is an egregious overstep that even exceeds the overstep of the State Longitudinal Database Systems.
Because federal FERPA regulations altered the original protective intent of FERPA, and removed the mandate that governments must get parental (or adult student) consent for any use of student level data, it seems that the idea of having CEP study and possible influence removal of additional “barriers” to federal use of data, is another egregious overstep.
As a licensed teacher in the State of Utah; as co-founder of Utahns Against Common Core (UACC); as a mother of children who currently attend public, private and home schools; as acting president of the Utah Chapter of United States Parents Involved in Education (USPIE); as a patriot who believes in “consent of the governed” and in the principles of the U.S. Constitution; and, as a current tenth grade English teacher, I feel that my letter represents the will of many who stand opposed to the “study” of the protective barriers on student-level data, which the CEP’s website has outlined it will do.
I urge this commission to use its power to strengthen local control of data, meaning parental and teacher stewardship over student data, instead of aiming to broaden the numbers of people with access to personally identifiable student information to include government agencies and/or educational sales/research corporations such as Pearson, Microsoft, or the American Institutes for Research.
To remove barriers to federal access of student-level data only makes sense to a socialist who agrees with the Marc Tucker/Hillary Clinton 1998 vision of a cradle-to-grave nanny state with “large scale data management systems” that dismiss privacy as a relic in subservience to modern government. It does not make sense to those who cherish local control.
It is clear that there is a strong debate about local control and about consent of the governed, concerning data and concerning education in general. NCEE Chair Mark Tucker articulated one side of the debate when he said: “the United States will have to largely abandon the beloved emblem of American education: local control. If the goal is to greatly increase the capacity and authority of the state education agencies, much of the new authority will have to come at the expense of local control.”
Does that statement match the philosophical stand of this commission? I hope not. Local control means individual control of one’s own life. How would an individual control his or her own destiny if “large scale data management systems” in a cradle-to-grave system, like the one that Tucker and Clinton envisioned, override the right to personal privacy and local control? It is not possible.
I urge this commission to use any influence that it has to promote safekeeping of unit-record data at the parental and teacher level, where that authority rightly belongs.
Sincerely,
Christel Swasey
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