Common Core Expert: Techno-Progressives Seek To Violate Your Child’s Privacy Common Core Link Learning, Student Data Mining, and Bill Gates

Below is written testimony from Sheila Kaplan who is a education and information policy expert and

researcher. Her testimony was given in support of Missouri SB 210 and HB 616 -

http://preventcommoncore.com/?p=581

The federal Family Educational Rights Privacy Act, or FERPA, was
enacted in 1974 to protect the privacy of education record
In 2008 and 2011, amendments to FERPA gave third parties, including
private companies, increased access to student data. It is significant that in
2008, the amendments to FERPA expanded the definitions of “school
officials” who have access to student data to include “contractors,
consultants, volunteers, and other parties to whom an educational agency
or institution has outsourced institutional services or functions it would
otherwise use employees to perform.” This change has the effect of
increasing the market for student data.

Thursday, 25 April 2013 

Data Mining Students Through Common Core

We understand that as a condition of applying for [Race to the Top] grant funding, states obligated themselves to implement a State Longitudinal Database System (SLDS) used to track students by obtaining personally identifiable information,” Luetkemeyer said. “We formally request a detailed description of each change to student privacy policy that has been made under your leadership, including the need and intended purpose for such changes.

http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/15213-data-mining-students-through-common-core

“Techno-progressives” at the local and federal levels are gathering more and more information on students in public and private schools — and many parents don’t realize it, says Jane Robbins, an attorney and senior fellow at the American Principles Project.

According to Robbins, “techno-progressives” hope to guide workers from birth to the workplace with their social engineering in a planned economy, which benefits vendors hoping to grow rich from big data.

Whereas self-determination and families used to guide students in choosing their career path, proponents of Common Core think they know better when it comes to jobs that communities supposedly need. Privacy safeguards for concerned parents — much less for the students themselves — have been eviscerated over the last two-and-a-half years by agreements, regulations and the allure of federal funding to school districts for extensive, non-academic information being collected on students.

“Common Core is not a political issue. It’s an issue of their children,” Robbins told The Daily Caller. “You can mess with a lot of things. You can have the IRS going after people. You can have the NSA spying on people, but when you start to mess with people’s children, they start to pay attention.”

From Robbins’ experience, most parents are surprised at how the education establishment typically “views parents as an adversary” in the process of teaching children. In her opinion, teaching — to the professionals — is not a joint effort and they want parents to remain quiet.

Most troubling to Robbins, who co-authored a 60-page report issued from the Pioneer Institute, Cogs in the Machine: Big Data, Common Core and National Testing, were the hints of where the edu-crats want to go with the future of the fine-grained student data they are seeking to collect and analyze.

Techno-progressives value smart, well-trained experts running society from the top down, with lots of data. Robbins’ eye-opening report discusses the use of physiological and psychological measurements to see how students are responding to their lessons.

In this 15-minute video interview, Robbins cites a recent appearance by Professor James Gee of Arizona State University, who has discussed how video games “cannot only impart academic knowledge, but they can change the child.” He goes on to discuss how “if you can change the child, you can change society.”

The National Education Data Model, discussed by Robbins, recommends states collect over 400 data points per child, including data on health care, voting, religious beliefs, bus stops, family income, hobbies, and extra-curricular activities. States are at varying points along this path. Robbins summarizes the report on Common Core and the new data initiatives as these education elites have “a lot of plans and not a lot of protections [for students].”

This video interview ends with Robbins discussing a February 2013 report from the U.S. Department of Education, titled “Promoting Grit, Tenacity and Perseverance,” which discusses technology capable of obtaining student information during testing or tutoring online about beliefs, attitudes, dispositions, values and ways of perceiving oneself — things critical to educational success, they say. The government report shows a “brave new world” with one set up to showing sensors gathering subtle physiological responses, something they claim “is not practical for the classroom … yet.”

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2014/07/27/common-core-expert-techno-progressives-seek-to-violate-your-childs-privacy/#ixzz38huT8MxL

Opponents of Common Core believe that private and sensitive student data will be shared with the Department of Education, the Department of Labor and potentially could be sold or compromised. Proponents of Common Core deny this. Florida Commissioner of Education Pam Stewart said at an August 2013 public meeting in Yulee that only small amounts of data about students are captured and that is for the exclusive use of the school. Yet both Bill Gates a major sponsor of Common Core, and David Coleman, author of Common Core have stated major interest in student data collection and data mining.

Gates founded inBloom  for the stated purpose of collecting student data. The Website states:

• inBloom helps school districts make it easier for teachers to quickly access a complete picture of individual student progress and identify where each student needs extra attention.

• With a clearer picture of student progress at their fingertips, teachers can more easily tailor learning materials to each student and increase one-on-one time they spend with students.

• Through inBloom, districts can help teachers to quickly identify appropriate instructional materials to strengthen and supplement classroom instruction.

1. Teachers depend on a variety of sources for classroom materials. Currently, it’s difficult to find the many valuable instructional materials which exist across the country or even in their own school districts. Through its learning resource index, inBloom saves teachers valuable time by helping them more easily search for, find and share these materials.
2. Today, teachers in most school districts around the country are burdened by gathering student information from multiple databases and downloading it to spreadsheets on their personal. inBloom provides a secure, single-access point where teachers can view student data all on one computer screen to get a more complete picture of student progress.

With inBloom, teachers can more easily communicate with parents about their child’s progress through frequent, detailed updates.

So, the single largest private support of Common Core, the Gates Foundation clearly supports student data collection and data mining, because it will improve student assessment and learning. However with all of that data, much of it highly sensitive and confidential, there is a great potential for harm.

The New York Daily News reports:

 Parents are furious that New York is joining eight other states in adopting the model without giving families a chance to opt out of sharing delicate information.

“I’m outraged,” said Karen Sprowal, 52, a stay-at-home mom. Her 9-year-old son is a fourth-grader at Public School 75 in Manhattan.

“I send my child to school to be educated. I never agreed to have his information shared with private companies or stored in a database.”

A division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. built the infrastructure for the new electronic portal.

The state spent $50 million in federal grants to partner with inBloom and finalized its agreement in October to share data with the fledgling company.

But privacy experts slammed the move to disseminate vulnerable student information

“It’s a lot of smoke and mirrors,” said Khaliah Barnes, administrative law counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, which is suing the U.S. Education Department over this issue.

“What happens if a company using the data is compromised?” asked Barnes. “What happens if the company goes out of business? We don’t know the answers.”

Donna Lieberman, executive director for the New York Civil Liberties Union, slammed the city for failing to disclose the plan to the public or offer parents a chance to opt out.

“Turning massive amounts of personal data about public school students to a private corporation without any public input is profoundly disturbing and irresponsible,” said Lieberman.

The state already compiles student demographic, enrollment and state assessment records. It does not collect or share students’ Social Security Numbers.

State officials said that for the past decade they have freely given student information to companies that are expressly given permission to access the data. The information is then used by private educational companies to create teaching materials for students. States and school districts can choose whether they want to input their student records into the system.

The new service will not cost the city any money at first, though inBloom officials said they will probably start to charge fees in 2015. Representatives for inBloom did not respond to calls for comment.

Other states that have already signed on to release student data to inBloom are Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina, Massachusetts and Louisiana.

It is disingenuous for inBloom to be so glib and confident about the protection of student data when even the Department of Defense top secrets have been hacked and compromised. Some children who have some special needs, learning disabilities or some other kind of information could be harmed if that information were to get into the wrong hands. There are many things that cause great concern about Common Core, and student data and privacy is a very large concern.

Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems

The program provides grants to states to design, develop, and implement statewide P-20 longitudinal data systems to capture, analyze, and use student data from preschool to high school, college, and the workforce.

Program Requirements:

Since it started in fiscal year 2005, the program has awarded grants worth $265 million to 41 states and the District of Columbia. The Recovery Act competition requires that the data systems have the capacity to link preschool, K-12, and postsecondary education as well as workforce data. To receive State Fiscal Stabilization Funds, a state must provide an assurance that it will establish a longitudinal data system that includes the 12 elements described in the America COMPETES Act, and any data system developed with Statewide longitudinal data system funds must include at least these 12 elements. The elements are:

1. An unique identifier for every student that does not permit a student to be individually identified (except as permitted by federal and state law);
2. The school enrollment history, demographic characteristics, and program participation record of every student;
3. Information on when a student enrolls, transfers, drops out, or graduates from a school;
4. Students scores on tests required by the Elementary and Secondary Education Act;
5. Information on students who are not tested, by grade and subject;
6. Students scores on tests measuring whether they're ready for college;
7. A way to identify teachers and to match teachers to their students;
8. Information from students' transcripts, specifically courses taken and grades earned;
9. Data on students' success in college, including whether they enrolled in remedial courses;
10. Data on whether K-12 students are prepared to succeed in college;
11. A system of auditing data for quality, validity, and reliability; and
12. The ability to share data from preschool through postsecondary education data systems.

With such comprehensive data systems, states will be able to monitor their reforms and make specific changes to advance them. These data systems will capture data on students from one grade to the next, measuring whether they are on track to graduate and telling K-12 schools whether they are preparing their students to succeed in college and the workforce. The data systems also can help identify teachers who are succeeding so states can reward them, and find teachers who are struggling and help them improve.

A request for applications is being published in the Federal Register and will be available on www.ed.gov.

http://www2.ed.gov/programs/slds/factsheet.html