Government Nannies at Your Door

“We’re from the Government and we’re here to help you.”

Do those words give you a warm, fuzzy feeling? The sponsors of the “Welcome to Washington Baby Act” think so. “A welcome hug from the State of Washington,” is how one Legislative Aide described the bill. The bill in the House of Representatives is HB 1771 and the companion bill in the Senate is SB 5683. It would establish a universal home visiting program for families of newborns. There are many disturbing aspects to this bill.
Read more.

Come to our presentation

Social Emotional Learning: Creating the “Perfect” 21st Century Child

Sponsored by Research Mom and Citizens United for Responsible Education

(Lavender Building on the corner of Jackson and N. Cincinnati)

• Government schools are re-programming your child’s social and emotional state from preschool through K-12.
• Time is already scarce for teaching basic academics and doing test prep, so why add social/emotional learning?
• This encroaches on parents’ rights to raise their own children.
• Data-collection on your child is essential to it all.

Learn about this and more.

For more information, contact:

Shannon Benn (509) 487-1219

Joyce Fiess (206) 715-7786

SEL: “Social Emotional Learning” or “Something Evil Lurks” ?

Social Emotional Learning is an increasing focus of schools and school legislation. The “experts” believe that they can improve students’ academic performance, peer relationships, outlook on life — everything– by embedding social emotional learning into each day’s activities and lessons. After all, that’s what schools are for, right? To treat the “whole child?”

This is a dangerous trend. The influences at schools – peer pressure, conflicting values presented in the curricula, the selective presentation of controversial issues–already serve to distance children from their parents. Now the education elites plan to assess children’s social emotional state- sometimes through stealth assessments,  and on the basis of that data-mining they can personalize a curriculum to “help” the children’s psyches.

Please see the article from the blog Curmudgucation:

Does Social Emotional Learning Belong in School? 

We thank our friends from Truth in American Education for bringing it to our attention.

Stealth Assessments

For years, school administrators have been talking about bringing more computers into the classroom.  Parents have assumed that this was to enable students to hone their computer skills and to gain knowledge about the world. Surprise! It has turned out that the world is gaining knowledge about your child.  Read Jane Robbins’s commentary about data-mining  from the website, Truth in American Education here.

MEDUSA

Multi-fad Education Dooms USA

By Lucy Wells

THE LATEST FAD

Educational fads usually have names that sound like perfect solutions to our failing educational system. People are inclined to assume good intentions, so they give these fads a chance. Yet the fads, tragically, victimize generation after generation. [read more]

A Connecticut mom was left appalled and angry when a school district’s kindergarten application asked whether her child was delivered by C-section or not. The district was asking extremely intrusive questions, ostensibly to detect any potential health or emotional problems in enrolling youngsters. Read about the survey here.

School staff are increasingly becoming pseudo-psychologists and -psychiatrists. Meanwhile less and less academic information is being taught.

Remember you can refrain from answering questions in school forms (or other forms, for that matter)  that you find too intrusive.

Would you let your children reveal their innermost feelings and thoughts to a perfect stranger? No?
Yet when they take the Common Core assessments, they are asked to reveal their thoughts and beliefs to a computer which will track, record, and retain every response.  In fact, the school need not use just assessments to mine this information. They can use any assignment done on a computer or tablet, or even use an “education game” as a stealth assessment.

Please be aware, that the Common Core assessments are not “standardized tests” as we knew them from the past. The Common Core assessments are adaptive to each child, so each child receives different questions–this is not “standardization.” (We have explained the difference between standardized tests and assessments in a previous post.)

Education expert Mercedes Schneider comments on the use and abuse of power surrounding the assessments. She refers to the PARCC assessments, but the comments can also be applied to the Smarter Balanced assessment used in Washington State. Read her blog post, “The Powerful, Enforced Silence around Standardized Testing.

Yesterday, we posted that Pearson which administers the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) Common Core Assessments spied on students’ social media and wanted to suspend a student whom they thought had breached test security.

Now it has come out that the other of the two Common Core assessment consortia, Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC), is also advising state education departments to spy on student social media. Washington State is a member of the Smarter Balanced consortium.

Read the article…

See Smarter Balanced Assessment’s guidance sheet.

(Photo- courtesy of photoexplorer at FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

It was confirmed that Pearson, a United Kingdom-based testing company involved in the development of Common Core Assessments, was “monitoring” the social media accounts of  New Jersey students taking the PARCC Common Core Assessment.  A student had sent a tweet about the PARCC assessment after school, and Pearson contacted the New Jersey Department of Education (NJ DOE) to have the student suspended, ostensibly on grounds of the student having breached test security. There was no evidence that the student had cheated. Pearson’s monitoring of the students’ social media was done in cooperation with the New Jersey DOE.

This is alarming on so many levels. Apparently, this is not the only student whom Pearson asked to be suspended. Why is a multinational testing company in cooperation with a US state governmental department delving into the social media of the students in New Jersey? Is this happening in other states as well?

PARCC (Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) is one of the two consortia producing Common Core Assessments; the other is the SBAC (Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium) of which Washington State is a member. We do not know if Washington state students will also be “monitored?”

Read more….

(Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono at FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

As we said before, robo-graders just evaluate whether a piece of writing contains complex sentences, long words, observes the punctuation and grammar conventions, and has other writing features which can be programmed into a computer. The computer can’t tell if the writer has made factual errors. According to Les Perelman, Director of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “E-Rater doesn’t care if you say the War of 1812 started in 1945.”

To prove his point, he and three students from Harvard and MIT created an app which generates essays that  the robo-grader will deem well-written, according to the algorithms of its programming. They call their program BABEL– Basic Automatic B.S. Essay Language Generator.

Read their hilarious essay. The essay received a top score of 6 points.

Now, because of Perelman’s criticisms–which the assessment company cannot refute–the Educational Testing Service is refusing to cooperate in further verification trials. See the article about Mr. Perelman being censored.