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)

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.

Find out more about the federal data collection in this article by Emmett McGroarty and Jane robbins of the American Principles Project. The plan is to collect children’s personal information from their first early learning experience to adulthood. This article is from a few months ago, but it is still relevant now because, with the inauguration behind us, the federal government will feel free to move boldly ahead.

Imagine a future world in which every aspect of each citizen is compiled in a data base. Oh, wait, it’s already happening….starting with the early learning data base that is being implemented. Watch this video . Although it mentions Oklahoma, it applies to us in Washington as well.

A change in privacy laws included in the Stimulus bill of 2009 will allow your child’s private information to be shared by agencies and individuals. Watch the video.

“In the ‘you-can’t-make-up-this-stuff’ category, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is spending about $1.1 million to develop a way to physiologically measure how engaged students are by their teachers’ lessons.”