Blasting the Cover Off School Data Mining
By Marilyn Snyder
Published in the Redlands Daily Facts, October 3, 2013
If someone told you that your child who attends a Redlands public school was required to reveal to school authorities information about your religion, political affiliation, income range, and family’s health history, would you want to know more before you got really, really angry?
If your child was already setting family records for the most parent-teacher conferences in a one-month period, would you want that disciplinary information along with your child’s name to be in a database collected by his school and delivered to the Department of Education (USDE), then made available to the Departments of Labor and Health and Human Services or any other organization that wants it?
Would you be stomping down to the principal’s office tomorrow to find out how your family’s personal information could possibly be disseminated like that?
Start stomping.
The state of California has spoken and the Redlands Unified School District must obey.
Why? “Because we said so, that’s why.”
Sorry, that’s the entire answer you will get from the education establishment. Here’s a brief of how the schools gained that kind of authority over you and your family.
Three years ago, a bare two months after the Common Core Standards (CCS) were finalized by two Washington, D.C., trade associations, the California State Board of Education adopted them.
No doubt you and the rest of us were all on summer vacation.
With no public discussion or input from school districts, teachers, parents or citizens, national standards in grades 1 through 12 English Language Arts and Mathematics were imposed on California schools.
But wouldn’t you think that if California, along with 45 other states, were going to sign on to these over-reaching national standards, the hoopla would have been humongous?
Even typical tea party members who stress the importance of following the Constitution and want smaller government control tend not to have heard about CCS.
What kind of standards are they, anyway? And why should you care?
To look at the government version of CCS, go to www. corestandards.org.
There you’ll find the spiffy official version.
To hear a contrary opinion, check out the Stop the Common Core videos, Parts 1-5, on www.youtube.com. Or keep reading this column.
As an educator who desires greater adherence to the Constitution, I appreciate that education was originally held to be a local issue, that each school district in the country could determine their own curricula depending on their needs.
That RUSD can no longer determine the language arts and math curricula of its students stuns me.
How can that be? Because California had to agree to make no changes or deletions to the CCS when they adopted them. And that means you have absolutely no recourse if you don’t like them.
That RUSD must collect personal data on children and families and give that data to the government is a blow beneath the belt.
It was horrendous when we discovered that the National Security Agency (NSA) was collecting every Verizon phone call. It got worse when it was revealed that their data mining included every single phone call in the country … and every email … and every text.
But now that the current administration’s USDE is requiring states to hand over personally identifiable data — well, that’s more than a little 1984-ish, isn’t it?
CCS is a foot in the door of federalized control of education.
Actually, it’s more like a blasting cap in the secret data mining done by the federal government.
If the feds have a database of every child in the U.S. starting in first grade, how extensive will that database look by the time they turn 18? Is that OK with you?
For more info, www.stop commoncore.com, www.redlandsteaparty. com, or attend tonight’s RTPP meeting where Lydia Gutierrez, candidate for California State Superintendent of Public Instruction, will address the topic of the Common Core.
Want to organize a stomping party?