It’s not about what Johnny can learn from his e-tablet; it’s about what the e-tablet can learn about Johnny.

Early in October (2014) the federal agency, the National Science Foundation (NSF),  awarded $4.8 million to a consortium of universities whose task it will be to develop an extensive data collection, storage, and sharing system. The purported goal? To collect massive amounts of data on students to improve instruction.

The data project is called LearnSphere–a typically ambiguous name.  What is being learned? It appears that faceless bureaucrats and researchers will learn information about the students that the students and parents have no idea is being collected–and without parents’ or  students’ permission. Data will be collected on teachers as well. Will they have the option of refusing? Most likely not.

A senior advisor at the NSF states, “”We’re now able to collect massive amounts of information on individual students we weren’t able to collect 10 years ago.”

Education Week writer Benjamin Herold  writes that the data “would likely include, for example, records of every mouse click a student makes when using a software program and information demonstrating a student’s thought process..”  and quotes the lead researcher as saying,  “we have shown some pretty interesting results in being able to detect different [emotional] states from keystroke data.”  (emphasis added)

This grant is only one of several NSF grants dedicated to data-collection.

Read the article.

Although data collection is not found within the Common Core Standards themselves, other federal initiatives mandate the extensive collection of personal student information, and the two Common Core Assessment Consortia must allow the federal government access to the data. In addition, there are many other data-collection initiatives, some of the begun many years ago before the Obama Administration. Jane Robbins of the American Principles Project explains data collection under the Common Core.

Kindergarten used to be a place to paint pictures, play with clay, make friends, and learn a few social graces. Now it is a place to be assessed and started on the path to be molded into human capital.  What has happened to common sense?

Some teachers are beginning to speak out in defense of their students. Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post writes about a Florida teacher who refused to administer one of the Florida kindergarten assessments, the FAIR test. See the article.

Although she feared she would be fired, she just couldn’t bring herself to subject her students to the assessment. Her gutsy stand led to the principal’s decision to drop the assessment. Read the follow up story.

This trend of early assessments started before the appearance of the Common Core Standards and Assessments. Now that data collection through the Race to the Top and other mandates has become a priority, the assessment machine starts in kindergarten or earlier, giving rise to such non-governmental organizations as the Early Childhood Data Collaborative. The assessments drive the curriculum and facilitate the data collection.  It isn’t even clear whether the assessments reliably or validly measure what they’re supposed to be measuring, or whether constantly assessing students actually improves education. We appreciate people like this brave teacher who speak out against them.

See what our government has in mind with respect to collecting data from the children and using it to “improve” education. Although this US Department of Education report is still a draft, it is valuable as a glimpse into the minds of the elites who plan to shape our children.
Read the report.

The Seattle School District has been uploading personal information to the data storage company ConnectEDU for the past three years. Now ConnectEDU is going bankrupt and the company is refusing to delete the personal data as stated in their contract with the Seattle School District. Read the article.

Increasing amounts of personal data are being collected on all public school students. The data collection is underway in government-funded preschools and even earlier. We encourage parents to be assertive about protecting the private information of their children. In this age of computers, this data can be stored indefinitely and can be hacked,  misused, shared, or sold. Please be vigilant.

It almost seems as if today’s definition of school data privacy is that school records are kept private from the parents. A Nevada father asked to see his four children’s school records and was told the fee would be $10,000!

In today’s computer-driven classrooms, an enormous amount of data can potentially be collected and stored indefinitely on computers. Through children’s responses on open-ended questions, a complete personality profile could potentially be compiled. We might trustingly hope that this would never happen, but just how do parents find out what information is being collected? Read the article.

The data tech company inBloom was started with seed money from the Gates Foundation. The company’s plan was to collect student data from various sources, store them in the “cloud” and allow the data to be accessed for various educational purposes. Faced with parent concerns and with recent data protection legislation from the New York […]

In December 2013, a KUOW story revealed that the Washington State Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction had signed an agreement to share student data with the Seattle Times and the Associated Press–without notification to parents or students. Not even Seattle Public Schools officials knew about this agreement. Read more…

The Homeschool Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) has produced an excellent video explaining the Common Core. Featured in the video are James Millgram and Sandra Stotsky, the only two content experts on the Common Core Validation Committee. Along with three others validation committee members, they did not sign off on the Common Core State Standards.

Watch the movie.

For more information about the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, see their website.

FERPA is the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act. On 12/02/2011, this administration published the final report on the changes it made to the Act. Educational and governmental agencies may now authorize more people and agencies to handle private student information, and those agencies, in turn, may authorize others to handle the information. The agencies […]