Common Core creates a womb-to-tomb dossier on kids and families

MassPrivateI

The type and amount of personal, family, and non-academic data collected by the schools, reported in state longitudinal databases and used for research by the federal government was stimulated by the passage of the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002 (ESRA) and has grown rapidly since then.  Loss of student and family data privacy has been accelerated by the proliferation of education programs funded by the federal government, especially in the early childhood realm and including home visiting programs that collect a plethora of medical, psychological, and family data and the effort to integrate standards, programs and data literally from “cradle to career” through P-20W education program integration.  

The ESRA law allows the National Center for Education Statistics to collect data “by other offices within the Academy and by other Federal departments, agencies and instrumentalities.” and “enter into interagency agreements for the collection of statistics.” That data covers from preschool through the work life of every American citizen and includes “the social and economic status of children, including their academic achievement,” meaning every aspect of their lives and the lives of their families.  This combined with the weakening of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) to be described below is a great danger to the privacy of American families and makes the data collection by the IRS and NSA look tame.

NCES Commissioner Jack Buckley won the award for  most tone deaf presentation title, calling his introductory keynote speech (not kidding!) “We Are From the Federal Government and We REALLY Are Here to Help You.”  In that talk, while acknowledging that the” balance [between privacy and the government’s desire for data] is in a very delicate place, and that if we fail here in a very spectacular way, much of what we have done in the last ten to fifteen years could be undone,” he also spoke of “balancing the rights of our students & their families to keep their data confidential & secret as appropriate, but also to balance the needs that we have for the massive investment in education, of understanding its returns, of understanding how the system is working, how do we improve it, with the ultimate goal always of improving the educational outcomes of our citizens…” It is clear that the “massive investment” is more important than privacy.

It is important to note that the DQC is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, Alliance for Early Success,, AT&T, and Target, all entities that will profit heavily by having lots of data collected on our children.  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is also funding a very alarming student database project called inBloom that already  holds data that includes “name, address and sometimes social security number…learning disabilities…test scores, attendance…student hobbies, career goals, attitudes toward school – even homework completion.”

Buckley also complained about he and his fellow federal data gatherers  being of accused of an “attempt to catalog students and track them for life based on their eye color or their genetic code…”  Apparently, he was not aware of the content of all the presentations planned for the conference.  Interestingly enough one of the sessions in the conference was called P-20W Data Standards for More Successful Student Transitions and Life-Long Learning.  In that session, they spoke of the data collection from early childhood through the workforce, including health and developmental (mental health) data in early childhood.  Libery Watch asked about the state’s ‘Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge Application’ to combine health data, including the newborn screening, i.e. genetic, data with their preschool and K-12 data..

“Rhode Island’s proposed early learning data system will be linked to both the state’s K-12 data system and to the state’s universal newborn screening and health data system, helping to identify children with high needs, track participation in programs, and track children’s development and learning.” This is a classic example of the rapidly expanding philosophy that the government owns every single bit of medical and education data about you and every family member from conception until after death. We are seeing this played out in the realm of DNA medical data and now private mental health data through these subjective and worthless assessments.   These assessments will then be added and linked to health data so that government bureaucrats will be able to label the young children they consider to be mentally ill or flag them for future evaluations.

The Obama preschool plan is largely based on the ideas of the Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge. That plan is to also expand home visiting programs which are accompanied by even more data collection on infants and families.

In addition, although ESRA makes an effort to prohibit a national database of individually identifiable student data in section 182 by saying, “Nothing in this title may be construed to authorize the establishment of a nationwide database of individually identifiable information on individuals involved in studies or other collections of data under this title;” that language appears to be negated by this language in Section 157.

“The Statistics Center may establish 1 or more national cooperative education statistics systems for the purpose of producing and maintaining, with the cooperation of the States, comparable and uniform information and data on early childhood education, elementary and secondary education, postsecondary education, adult education, and libraries, that are useful for policymaking at the Federal, State, and local levels.”

That language is even more worrisome in light of the grants to fund and promote state longitudinal databases in section 208 of ESRA, in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and even more heavily promoted in the Race to the Top K-12 and Early Learning Challenge programs.

Both Head Start and Race to the Top heavily promoted national standards and the integration of those standards across the age spectrum.  Both programs also heavily rely on standards and assessment and or screening in the mental health (psychological and socioemotional) realm.

·         According to the United States Department of Education (USED) document entitledPromoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance: Critical Factors for Success in the 21st Century, the Common Core standards system will both teach and assess these “non-cognitive” (psychological) parameters:

o   “In national policy, there is increasing attention on 21st-century competencies (which encompass a range of noncognitive factors, including grit), and persistence is now part of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics.”

o   [A]s new assessment systems are developed to reflect the new standards…attention will need to be given to the design of tasks and situations that call on students to apply a range of 21st century competencies…A sustained program of research and development will be required to create assessments that are capable of measuring cognitive, intrapersonal, and interpersonal skills.

·         According to the Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge grant applications, several states are aligning their preschool standards and their K-12 standards, these standards teach psychological  issues, which are then used for “screening” young children for mental health issues, even though the screening instruments are notoriously inaccurate.

Here are some examples of the types of the very subjective and non-academic standards used:

o   “Progresses in responding sympathetically to peers who are in need, upset, hurt, or angry, and in expressing empathy or caring for others.”

o   “Develops ability to identify personal characteristics including gender and family composition”

o   “Develops a growing awareness of jobs and what is required to perform them.”

The testing of psychological parameters in the national assessments is especially disturbing when it is understood that the national testing consortia signed an agreement with USED to submit individually identifiable student data to the federal government from the tests.

Perhaps Commissioner Buckley and the DQC are not aware that the Fourth and Tenth Amendments to the US Constitution still exist.  Perhaps they are also not aware of the data in these graphs showing that the $2 TRILLION federal “massive investment” in education has not yielded any return as far as improving student achievement or narrowing the achievement gap and that we should not be spending this money at the federal level with all of these mandates, especially for data collection.

The illegal weakening of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) that both expands the number of ways data can be collected without parental consent and increases the numbers of people and groups who may receive that personally identifiable information to the unconstitutional federal expenditures on these invasive and ineffective programs and the expansion of the kinds and amount of private data collected on students, and I believe we can all say to Commissioner Buckley that we do not want the federal government’s “help.”
http://edlibertywatch.org/2013/08/feds-resolute-yet-tone-deaf-on-data-collection-part-1/
http://edlibertywatch.org/2013/09/problems-with-data-privacy-in-relation-to-common-core-standards-the-family-education-rights-and-privacy-act-and-the-education-sciences-reform-act/

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http://massprivatei.blogspot.com/2014/01/common-core-creates-womb-to-tomb.html