Free Republic

100 million database set up to store extensive records on millions of public school students has stumbled badly since its launch this spring, with officials in several states backing away from the project amid protests from irate parents. The database, funded mostly by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is intended to track students from kindergarten through high school by storing myriad data points: test scores, learning disabilities, discipline records - even teacher assessments of a child's character. The idea is that consolidated records make it easier for teachers to use software that mines data to identify academic weaknesses. Games,...

The passage for the seventh-grade lesson was blatantly offensive — an excerpt from a 1938 anti-Semitic children's book. But that was the point: to provide students in the Santa Ana school district with a perfect illustration of insidious propaganda. In the book, a mother and her son gather mushrooms in the forest, and she explains that, as with mushrooms, there also are poisonous people. Slapping his chest in pride, the boy says, "Of course I know, mother! They are the Jews!" When teachers expressed misgivings about the material, which also included an excerpt from a speech by Hitler, officials struck...