Common Core State Standards is a giant surveillance program targeting our nation's students.
Awareness is growing rapidly about the recent initiative to bring Common Core State Standards to schools across America. Although the standards were supposedly proposed by the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) — giving the illusion that the agenda is “state-led,” it was the federal government that endorsed the plan by offering $4 billion in grant money through Obama’s Race to the Top program to cooperating states.
Representative Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-Mo.) recently decided to take action and write a letter to U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan and is currently seeking co-signers from congressional colleagues. Congressman Luetkemeyer addressed several issues of concern with Common Core — and in the last half of his letter he emphasized the crux of the problem: data mining.
“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.”
Parents might reasonably assume that the “personally identifiable information” collected for the database will include students' test scores and perhaps other measures of academic proficiency. But they would be much less likely to imagine that the federal snoopers envision something far more extensive and invasive than merely tracking academic performance. According to the Department of Education’s February 2013 report Promoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance: Critical Factors for Success in the 21st Century, “Researchers are exploring how to gather complex affective data and generate meaningful and usable information to feed back to learners, teachers, researchers, and the technology itself. Connections to neuroscience are also beginning to emerge.” (Emphasis added.)
So far, nine states across the country have already agreed to adopt the data mining process, with parents having no say in this decision. Schools in New York, Delaware, Colorado, Massachusetts, Kentucky, Illinois, Louisiana, Georgia, and North Carolina have committed to “pilot testing” and information dissemination via sending students’ personal information to a database managed by inBloom, Inc., a private organization funded largely by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This digital warehouse will store the data and then sell it to “education technology companies, content providers and developers to support the creation of products compatible with this infrastructure,” according to the inBloom website.
The fact that Common Core Standards require children’s personal information to be relinquished to a database that emerged only three months ago and then sold to unspecified companies is worrisome to many parents and educators. “It leads to total control and total tracking of the child,” said Mary Black, curriculum director for Freedom Project Education, an organization that provides classical K-12 online schooling. “It completely strips the child of his or her own privacy.”
Schools will not only collect objective facts about students but gain a more intimate knowledge as well — even profiles of students’ attitudes and predictions of their futures that could then be used by the schools to shape outcomes. The DOE released a brief in October 2012 entitled “Enhancing, Teaching and Learning Through Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics,” in which the following was stated about data mining procedures:
A student learning database (or other big data repository) stores time-stamped student input and behaviors captured as students work within the system. A predictive model combines demographic data (from an external student information system) and learning/behavior data from the student learning database to track a student’s progress and make predictions about his or her future behaviors or performance, such as future course outcomes and dropouts.
Within the February report, the DOE displayed photographs of the actual technology that will be used on students, if the department’s plan is fully implemented. What they call the “four parallel streams of affective sensors” will be employed to effectively “measure” each child. The “facial expression camera,” for instance, “is a device that can be used to detect emotion.... The camera captures facial expressions, and software on the laptop extracts geometric properties on faces.” Other devices, such as the “posture analysis seat,” “pressure mouse,” and “wireless skin conductance sensor,” which looks like a wide, black bracelet strapped to a child’s wrist, are all designed to collect “physiological response data from a biofeedback apparatus that measures blood volume, pulse, and galvanic skin response to examine student frustration.”
http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/15213-data-mining-students-through-common-core?goback=.gde_62979_member_236481372
Louisiana withdraws student data from inBloom:
Louisiana state Superintendent John White's decision to withdraw student data from inBloom, a nonprofit organization, and to have discussions with parents in the state about privacy concerns about data being stored that included students' age, sex, and grade level. The Louisiana controversy could also offer some lessons on how states handle privacy in education in the years ahead, with all the emphasis on tracking students' academic progress.
"Any product that could help our kids, and help our teachers help our kids, is something that we're going to at least take a look at," White said when I interviewed him April 26. "We're going to go to our families and have a discussion about our data-storage practices, not having anything to do with inBloom."
What is inBloom? According to the corporate language on its website, it is "a nonprofit provider of technology services that allow states and public school districts to better integrate student data and third-party applications to support sustainable, cost-effective personalized learning." It gets philanthropic dollars from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (which also provides support to Education Week and edweek.org). You can get a sense of inBloom's goals from its website's "core components" section, where it talks about connecting student data to actual instruction using the appropriate technology, and using information from both state and local sources.
Other districts partnering with inBloom include New York City, two districts in Illinois, and one district in North Carolina. However, other than Louisiana, no state is working wholesale with inBloom, although three others, Delaware, Georgia, and Kentucky, are slated to have pilot programs this year.
In Louisiana, White said, the state had been storing student data with inBloom so that vendors in the state's Course Choice program, which allows students to enroll in academic and career education programs offered by institutions from around the state, could verify basic student information like name, sex, and birth date submitted by parents in Course Choice applications.
InBloom has a "privacy commitment" page where it tries to allay fears about violations of students' privacy. It says, for example, that, "Neither inBloom nor any other participating agency or vendor may sell, assign, lease or commercially exploit confidential student data," and that its backers, like the Gates Foundation, don't have any access to that confidential data.
The privacy and security section of inBloom's website states that, "inBloom, Inc. cannot guarantee the security of the information stored in inBloom or that the information will not be intercepted when it is being transmitted."
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/state_edwatch/2013/04/john_white_backtracks_on_controversial_inbloom_deal_in_louisiana.html