This month in Wappingers Falls, New York, a panel presented concrete ideas for how to take back control of education from the federal government and from its corporate Common Core partners.
To these ideas, add the brilliant idea recently presented by Utah Dad Oak Norton. View that here.
Parents are in charge of their children.
It is not for corporations or federal entities to delegate an education “role” to the state or to schools or parents, like a play director hands out a role or a prop to an actor. Similarly, it’s not a school’s or any agency’s right to delegate parents as partners in their child’s education. Teaching children is not a governmental dictatorship, nor is is a community collective.
Parents and families are the authority, followed by teachers, followed by districts, followed by states. Unless a parent specifically requests involvement, it’s never a federal or corporate or a “collective” right to rule over the parent-led student’s education. The state is lower on the totem pole than the local district and the schools and families. The federal government and corporations are not even allowed on the totem pole. Neither is the United Nations despite what it has planned for local schools.
We hold the American, Constitutional right to control our own lives, and not to be bullied by outside forces, but the stream of control over education is trying to flow the wrong way: outside in.
Case in point: here is a new homework assignment for those in Common Core 101 (aka researching the unconstitutional ways in which federal ed reform is destroying representative government and parental control): Read and analyze this 268-page document for constitutional viability: “The State Role in School Turnaround“.
No, wait a minute. Don’t bother to read the whole 268 pages. Just read the title– and nothing else– and realize that it’s completely unconstitutional.
Think about it. The “state role”? Under this Republic and its Constitution, the people are in charge– under laws they have created via elected representation. The states individually are in charge –and not the federal government agencies (nor its agents or branches, like WestEd, which wrote this document.)
The phrase “School Turnaround” is a federal concept comes from Obama’s four pillars of education reform.
America, we are losing the local representative form of government, losing power to control what happens in our schools, because of central planning taking place by “councils” and “stakeholders” and “partnerships” and chambers of commerce that lack authority in schools and individuals’ lives. Money, not actual legality, is the source of the assumed authority.
The above “State Role” document happens to be new in 2014, but there are countless other, equally unauthorized, equally arrogant documents written to support mandates created by grant-givers (Bill Gates or federal Dept of Ed) who lack the authority to control our state educational system, but who are nonetheless beginning to rule over us.
Don’t buy into the posture of authority or the glossy, legitimate-seeming pdf’s and conferences. Groups like WestEd, AIR, CCSSO, NGA, Microsoft, Pearson, Achieve Inc., SBAC, PARCC, ACT, The College Board, The Center on School Turnaround, The National Center on Education and the Economy– are nongovernmental. We didn’t elect them and we can’t boot them out.
So why are we allowing them to dictate to us?
Know that we, the people, are in charge, legally, of our own children. Individuals, families, local schools are in charge, in that order, and as designated by the family, not by districts or a state.
We have to know it to defend it. Spread the word.
Jenni White of Oklahoma’s Restore Oklahoma Public Education spoke last night in Midvale, Utah, to a clapping, cheering, energized crowd that included two legislators from the Utah House of Representatives, Kay Christofferson and LaVar Christiansen, both of whom stood and spoke after Jenni’s speech to voice their support.
Feisty, hilarious, sassy and smart, Jenni White’s presentation explained that she and her group have been working for many, many years (longer than the majority of us have in Utah) to stop Common Core. The bills that were written there never got heard, or only made it through one committee hearing, year after year. It took hard work and dogged persistence to work the miracle that Oklahoma finally saw this year. Her speech was filmed and will be posted soon. Here are highlights:
What Oklahoma moms did:
1. They didn’t just work with one or two legislators. They emailed all the legislators, every week, with short, vital pieces of information to help educate them about just what the Common Core Initiative has done to schools, to student privacy, to teacher autonomy, to the voice of parents, to the power of local control of education.
2. They showed up by the hundreds during the legislative session, wearing the green Stop Common Core t-shirts, and made it impossible during rallies for legislators to walk down the halls without swerving around green t-shirted parents and teachers and students. They would not be ignored or dismissed.
3. They sent legislative baseball cards, stop common core cookie bouquets, postcards, notes, legislator memos, tweets, emails.
4. They held a “Hear the Bills!” rally to persuade legislators to at least listen, to at least let this issue have a fair hearing.
5. They did photo ops with Governor Fallin, wearing the green t-shirts, even before she had decided to stand against Common Core.
6. They had meetings statewide, educating the public, asking the public to call their legislators and tell them they wanted Common Core to be repealed and replaced with better standards like Massachusetts had prior to the Common Core-ing of America.
7. They stuck together, not allowing infighting or small disagreements to break apart their coalition of parents, teachers and citizens who wanted Common Core to go away.
Since the Oklahoma miracle, some pro-Core advocates such as Fordham Institute’s Mike Petrelli, (a financial beneficiary of Bill Gates, of course) have tried to spin the Oklahoma miracle of repealing Common Core as a disaster, saying that Oklahoma teachers have no idea what to teach right now.
The indomitable Jenni White, rather than shrink under his arrogance and criticism, happily invited Petrelli to Oklahoma for an open debate and discussion on this subject.
Petrelli has accepted, according to his Twitter feed.
Thank you, Oklahoma! We love you!
California just passed a bill to protect student privacy. I want to know why Utah hasn’t done the same thing. Those few Utah legislators who tried to pass privacy-protecting bills (Jake Anderegg, Brian Greene) were not supported by the majority of Utah politicans.
Why?!
Do we not care about student privacy?
Is privacy not a child’s fundamental, Constitutional right?
What happens when there is no guarantee of basic rights? Think about how much privacy there is in modern day North Korea, or in China.
Privacy goes hand in hand with liberty, always. Even in the fiction books and movies –over and over again, the theme is spot on: when government knowledge of every citizen trumps individual privacy, then comes hell. (See The Giver, Divergent, Anthem, The Hunger Games, 1984.)
The Fourth Amendment says that “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated”.
If the government is forbidden from coming into our homes to peruse our children’s coloring books, photo albums and diaries, why is it permitted to come into our schools to seize and read data gathered there? Do we even realize how much data is shared by schools with the state? Look here and here for starters.
Current tracking —without parental consent— of student academic, non-cognitive, behavioral, health, familial, attitudinal, and belief-data, is happening without restraint. Is this seizure of personal data not an unreasonable seizure of personal effects, forbidden Constitutionally?
It is clear that we must stand up for our children’s privacy rights. But how?
First, we must define in our Utah laws that student data belongs to the student. It does not belong to the state. Currently, the state has made the arrogant assumption that student data belongs to the state. That means tests, quizzes, homework assignments, and the picture the kindergartnener drew of her family which can easily be psychologically mined for student and family profiling. Since no student or student’s parent have given written consent to share any data generated by that student, the school has no right to hand it to the state database; the state has no right to hand it to corporate or university “research partners” nor to the federal EdFacts Data Exchange nor to the National Data Collection Model groups. That is data theft.
Knowledge is power. Learn, then contact your school board and legislature.
What to say? Ask them what they’ve done, what they know, what protective laws they can point you to.
Read the following brand new articles on this subject:
1. California Legislature Passes Stiffest Bill to Protect K-12 Students’ online data – San Jose Mercury News: http://www.mercurynews.com/education/ci_26444107/online-privacy-california-passes-nations-stiffest-protections-k
2. States Collaborate to Keep Track of Students – Pew Charitable Trusts – http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2014/09/05/states-collaborate-to-keep-track-of-students
3. What Are Schools Doing With Your Kids’ Data – Yahoo Tech https://www.yahoo.com/tech/what-are-schools-doing-with-your-kids-data-95682103324.html
4. Nine Things You Can Do Right Now to Protect Your Kids’ Privacy at School – Yahoo Tech – https://www.yahoo.com/tech/9-things-you-can-do-right-now-to-protect-your-kids-95681803099.html
If you didn’t read them, or if you didn’t email your local school board or legislature yet, asking what they are doing to protect student privacy, I ask you why not.
If you think that our Constitutional rights are secure and that the good folks you elected are out there successfully defending your constitutional rights– including the right to personal and child privacy — think again. All these rights are under fire. If we don’t have proper legal protections in place specifying how student data will be protected, then we and our children are fully un-protected.
The New York Times and Time Magazine have openly attacked and mocked the Constitution– and the rights we claim under it which include, of course, privacy and freedom from seizure of these personal effects.
Freedom and local control and individual rights, these “cool” articles say, are out of data and out of style.
Check them out for yourself:
1 Time Magazine: http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2079445,00.html
2. New York Times: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/02/07/us/we-the-people-loses-appeal-with-people-around-the-world.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1
By the way, how I found those articles was when a parent emailed them to me, saying that her child was told to write about them for a school assignment. Thank you, education system, for yet one more corrupt dump into our kids’ minds.
What to do?
Ask yourself, first: is privacy a fundamental right, or not? Does the government (or corporations) have business knowing your business or your child’s business, without your consent? If the answer is no, then ask: Where can I find a law that protects my child’s school data? Ask your school board. Ask your legislator. If they say “FERPA” tell them to do their homework. Federal FERPA was shredded a few years back. Bottom line is: we need legal protections in place ASAP. And it won’t happen until the people pressure their representatives to make those protections reality.
Please, speak up.
Now you can! Clear your calendar: come hear the incredible Jenni White, from Restore Oklahoma Public Education, who will speak on Thursday, September 11th at 7679 South Main Street in Midvale, Utah at 7:00 PM.
The event is free and open to all.
Jenni White, mother and former teacher, has been involved in fighting the Common Core Agenda in Oklahoma for years. Jenni has been featured on Glenn Beck, Fox News and multiple national media outlets. See you there!
COMMON CORE 