Common Sense Show-Dave Hodges on Common Core, data mining our children

http://www.thecommonsenseshow.com/2014/10/15/the-roll-out-of-the-hitler-youth-movement-through-the-common-core-invasive-data-mining-of-our-children/

The Roll Out of the Hitler Youth Movement Through the Common Core Invasive Data Mining of Our Children
15 Oct, 2014 by Dave Hodges
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Support for Common Core educational standards has dropped as awareness of the program has spread over the past year to new polling results.

 
The people of this country are speaking out, they are sick and tired of the intrusiveness of the Common Standards and the egregious violations of our children’s civil liberties including their (and their parents) right to privacy.
The more Americans know about Common Core, the less they like the standards. In fact, just 33% support the standards while 59% oppose Common Core according to the annual PDK/Gallup Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools.
Even key politicians are getting into debate over Common Core as Louisiana Governor, Bobby Jindal, filed a law suit, this past summer against the Obama administration in which the Governor claims that the Department of Education is holding states hostage with a form of money blackmail in order to attempt to get states to adopt the controversial and unproven Common Core standards.
I could write a treatise on the outrageous academic practices that are emerging from Common Core. The radical educational practices associated with Common Core come to us without so much as one shred of research based proof as to the efficacy of their “novel” approaches and academic sequencing of subjects. However, in this article, I am going to exclusively focus on the violations of our children’s civil liberties, the usurpation of parents rights and the slippery slope that the extreme data mining of our children is taking as we are looking more and more like a society that is intent on building a modern day Hitler Youth Movement where dissent and personal expression gives way to the collective and to communist concepts such as social justice.
 
Some schools use radio frequency identification tags to track student location throughout the school day. Other schools use what is referred to as “human monitoring services” that read student email and then contact local law enforcement when it is deemed necessary. Amazingly, the parents of the children whose privacy is being violated will never know what data is being collected.
InBloom has the backing of the enemy of the common man, namely Bill and Melinda Gates. Bill Gates has dontated $100 million in seed money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to InBloom. If the readers have read my recent articles on Ebola and the subsequent vaccines, complete with all the accompanying chicanery, then you realize that the American people should recoil in repulsion to any endeavor that Bill Gates is involved in, especially when it comes to our children. Is anyone else sick of Bill Gates yet? Whether it is the Ebola vaccine or being the original computer robber baron of the modern age, Gates seemingly has his hand in every pie. We need to get this despot out of our children’s lives.
This data mining insanity has already spread into nine states. Every test score and every interaction with a digital learning tool is recorded. Data gathering includes health, fitness and sleeping habits, sexual activity, prescription drug use, alcohol use and disciplinary matters. Students’ attitudes, sociability and even “enthusiasm” are quantified, analyzed, recorded and dropped into giant data systems.  New York State has already uploaded data on 90% of 2.7 million public school and charter school students.
Most Colorado parents have no idea of the conspiracy that is on track for full implementation by the 2015-2016 school year. The Colorado version of this insanity, being implemented by TS Gold with a $30  million dollar grant, measures the “whole child.” The whole child is education talk for complete and data mining invasiveness which measures children’s social compliance to authority as the central theme.
The term, the “Whole Child” means that TS Gold and InBloom are not just testing are for “literacy, mathematics, science and technology, social studies and the arts,” but also for “developmental domains including social emotional, physical, language and cognitive development.” Students are rated and recorded on their ability to do things like “respond to emotional cues,” “interact cooperatively” and “cooperate and share ideas and materials in socially acceptable ways.”
Under TS Gold, teachers are subjected to extensive training. at a time when they cannot keep up with the unproven protocols being imposed upon them by Common Core. One of out three teachers are leaving the profession within five years of starting in the profession. This program will only serve to exacerbate the problem of teacher attrition. And as if the relentless gathering of data was not enough, now Colorado teachers are being forced to upload student observational data derived from video and audio recordings as well as from teacher observations. The information is stored on “the cloud” and parents are unable to find out who has access to their children’s data. Is the data secure? How long will the data be stored? The data storage is often referred to as P 20. This means that this data mining of our children takes place at least from preschool through their entry into the labor force. Certainly, this give educrats such as Bill Gates the opportunity to access the data and devise unproven programs to sell back to the states in which opportunists such as Gates can make even more money.
With regard to the violation of student privacy and the usurpation of the parental authority, parents are acquiescing to this illegitimate authority. Today, 42,000 Colorado children are subjected to this tyranny. In the 2015-2016 school year, every child in Colorado will be fall under this totalitarian umbrella that Hitler and Stalin would be envious of.
At least one Colorado parent is not on board with this tyrannical violation of children’s rights. Aurora, Colorado parent, Lauren Coker, actually discovered that TS Gold assessors in her son’s public preschool had recorded information about her son’s trips to the bathroom, his hand-washing habits and his ability to pull up his pants. When Coker was not able to opt of the program because that would threaten the revenue stream to the school from Common Core, she had the good sense to pull her child from the school. Coker has tried unsuccessfully to get her son’s data removed the cloud that the school uploaded his data to.
In a seemingly unrelated area, are you upset by the fact that your most intimate medical data is on file with the IRS under Obamacare provisions? This seems unrelated to the present topic at hand. However, I do not think that is the case. This excessive data mining is taking place at every level of society. The TSA gets to grope you and your family as you travel on airplanes in an age where the TSA has not prevented even one terrorist attack and anyone with Ebola can board a plane in Africa and travel to the United States. The NSA, without a warrant and in violation of the Fourth Amendment, spies on your every electronic communication. And now the schools are spying on your children in ways  were not even deemed possible only just a few years ago.
The net effect of these intrusive practices, is that our country is being totally brought under the police state surveillance grid and something like the East German Stasi is overseeing these massive intrusions. It is bad enough that we are being forced to live in a burgeoning police state as our Bill of Rights is evaporating before our very eyes. Now our children are being assessed for compliance skills in manner befitting the most authoritarian regimes in the history of the planet.
Is anybody else concerned about the nonacademic measures that our children are being subjected to? What do the constructs of “Interact cooperatively” and behave in some manner of arbitrarily determined “socially acceptable ways”? Socially acceptable to whom? Conversely, where is the data on the teaching of such interpersonal skills as the ability to debate and defend one’s own viewpoint? Why aren’t attributes such as self-reliance and independence being taught in the Common Core curriculum? These are the skills that befit a republic form of participatory government. The social compliance are skills needed to survive under Pol Pot or Stalin or Mao!
These “skills” being data mined by corporations such at InBloom and TS Gold having NOTHING to do with education.
When the “Communist Core” intrusive data mining practices come to your child’s school, presumably in the 2015-16 school year, or shortly thereafter, what will you, as a parent do? Will you submit to tyranny or will you inform your neighbors and take a stand? If push comes to shove, will you submit or step up?