Posted on 03/19/2013 9:20:26 AM PDT by Lucky9teen
JUST SAY NO!
Yesterday, Glenn Beck and his team at The Blaze TV aired a terrific program with teachers and activists exposing some of the basic myths and failures of the Common Core racket (click on the link and be sure to sign up. Glenns network is doing invaluable, forward-thinking work). It was heartening to see the trailblazers receive the time and attention tthey deserve. And its just the tip of the educational iceberg.
My column today delves further into the creepy Fed Ed data-mining racket. Dont just sit there. Get involved. As always, see the links and resources at the end of the column for ways to learn more and join those on the frontlines of reclaiming parental and local control of our childrens classrooms. And minds.
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Time To Opt Out of Creepy Fed Ed Data-Mining Racket
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2013
Last week, I reported on the federal governments massive new student-tracking database, which was created as part of the nationalized Common Core standards scheme. The bad news: GOP leadership continues to ignore or, worse, enable this Nanny State racket (hello, Jeb Bush).
The good news: An independent grassroots revolt outside the Beltway bubble is swelling. Families are taking their childrens academic and privacy matters out of the snoopercrats grip and into their own hands. You can now download a Common Core opt-out/disclosure form to submit to your school district, courtesy of the Truth In American Education group: CLICK HERE.
Parents caught off guard by the stealthy tracking racket are now mobilizing across the country. Echoing families across the city, Big Apple public advocate Bill de Blasio blasted the tracking database in a letter to government officials: I dont want my kids privacy bought and sold like this. On Wednesday, prompted by parental objections, Oklahoma state representatives unanimously passed House Bill 1989 the Student Data Accessibility, Transparency and Accountability Act to prohibit the release of confidential student data without the written consent of a students parent or guardian.
As I noted in last weeks column, the national Common Core student database was funded with Obama stimulus money. Grants also came from the liberal Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (which largely underwrote and promoted the top-down Common Core curricular scheme). A division of conservative Rupert Murdochs News Corp. built the database infrastructure. A nonprofit startup, inBloom, Inc., evolved out of the strange-bedfellows partnership to operate the invasive database, which is compiling everything from health-care histories, income information and religious affiliations to voting status, blood types and homework completion.
But it gets worse. Research fellow Joy Pullmann at The Heartland Institute points to a February Department of Education report on its data-mining plans that contemplates the use of creepy student monitoring techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging and using cameras to judge facial expressions, an electronic seat that judges posture, a pressure-sensitive computer mouse and a biometric wrap on kids wrists.
The DOE report exposes the big lie that Common Core is about raising academic standards by revealing its progressive designs to measure and track childrens competencies in recognizing bias in sources, flexibility, cultural awareness and competence, appreciation for diversity, empathy, perspective taking, trust (and) service orientation.
Thats right. School districts and state governments are pimping out highly personal data on childrens feelings, beliefs, biases and flexibility instead of doing their own jobs imparting knowledge or minding their own business. And yes, Republicans such as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush continue to falsely defend the centralized Common Core regime as locally driven and non-coercive, while ignoring the database systems circumvention of federal student privacy laws.
Why? Edu-tech nosy-bodies are using the Common Core assessment boondoggle as a Trojan horse to collect and crunch massive amounts of personal student data for their own social justice or moneymaking ends. Reminder: Nine states have entered into contracts with inBloom: Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Louisiana and New York. Countless other vendors are salivating at the business possibilities in exploiting public school students.
Google, for example, is peddling its Gmail platform to schools in a way that will allow it to harvest and access families information and preferences which can then be sold in advertising profiles to marketers. The same changes to federal student privacy law (known as FERPA) that paved the way for the Common Core tracking scheme also opened up private student information to Google. As FERPA expert Sheila Kaplan explains it, Students are paying the cost to use Googles free servers by providing access to their sensitive data and communications.
Its a Big Brother gold rush and an educational Faustian bargain. Fortunately, there is a way out. It starts with parents reasserting their rights, protecting their children and adopting that old motto from the Reagan years: JUST SAY NO.
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The Big Brotherism is getting pretty spooky.
Google + Bill Gates?
I know what those boys can do when they put their minds to it.
just call what they are doing "Able Danger" and the evil man behind it all is former Rep. Curt Weldon. Done!
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