Michelle Malkin’s true to her word. She said her New Year’s Resolution would be to expose the truth about Common Core, and she’s well on her way. Her fourth installment in the series “Rotten to the Core” is out.
In “The Feds’ Invasive Student Tracking Data Base” Malkin brings up the fact that while millions of Americans worry about government drones spying on citizens from the skies, millions are unaware that Washington is already spying on us using a web of recent “education reforms” known as the Common Core Initiative.
Malkin shares a link to the National Data Collection Model which asks states to report intimate details of an individual’s life, including bus stop times, parental names, nicknames, languages spoken, and more.
Reading her article made me think of last year’s “child privacy no more” revelation.
Last year, when I first learned these student data tracking facts, I contacted my state school board to ask if there was an opt-out privilege. Could my public school attending child NOT be intimately tracked by the state’s SLDS data collection system? The answer came back, eventually. They said NO. They blamed it on the technology: the technology doesn’t allow us to opt certain children out.
The idea of “data driven decision making” has become a passion to many educrats, corporate icons and government leaders (Think Obama, Duncan, Joanne Weiss, –or Utah’s own John Brandt, David Wiley, and Judy Park).
“Data Driven” is a concept used as justification for behavior that in the end amounts to corporate/government stalking of children –without any parental consent.
I’m not using the word “stalking” facetiously. Does the governmental obsession with personal data collection differ from stalking?
Individual stalkers have their reasoning for doing what they do, that makes sense to them, just as gleaning student data without parental consent that makes sense in Utah’s education leaders’ own heads, too.
I can think of only one answer to the question of how these differ: an individual stalker tends to stalk just one person at a time and rarely “inspires” millions to help stalk.
So what do we do? Let’s look at our options. We can:
1. Dismiss facts and call student stalking by government a silly conspiracy theory —even though there’s nothing secret about it— as many do.
or–
2. Wake up, stand up and tell our state leaders that we and our children have had enough.
Our Governor’s To-Do list:
1. Read the Constitution closely and think about what freedom looks like, in comparison to what Utah leaders promote;
2. Shut down Utah’s SLDS, P-20, and Prosperity 2020 systems;
3. Fire John Brandt, Judy Park, the Utah Data Alliance staff, and everyone who works as if “1984” was an instruction manual for school improvement;
4. Stop accepting money and directives from the Dept. of Ed.;
5. Cancel membership with the National Governors’ Association;
6. Get rid of the trojan horse of Common Core which serves the tracking goals of the federal and corporate elite;
7. Insist that only parents of school-aged children, people who honor freedom, not socialism –and know the difference– serve on any school board;
8. End cradle to grave tracking in the state.
COMMON CORE 