Education Liberty Watch Provides Testimony Against Common Core in Missouri
Dr. Karen Effrem, President of Education Liberty Watch, presented oral and written comments to the Missouri State Board of Education on January 14th. The event also included an excellent presentation by Dr. Mary Byrne, a brilliant and dedicated special education teacher and leader of the Missouri Coalition Against Common Core also testifying against the standards and Cheryl Oldham of the Chamber of Commerce offering the same tired talking points without data about why Common Core should be fully implemented.
Here are excerpts of a report from St. Louis public radio:
“We’re turning five- and six-year-olds into good little corporate board members,” Effrem said.
She said the emphasis on skills that students are too young to have can lead to symptoms such as avoiding schools, insomnia, panic attacks and self-mutilation.
“It is turning teachers who do not necessarily have training in psychology essentially into psychologists,” she told the board, “and that could be potentially dangerous because these assessments will go into child’s record and essentially follow them for life.”
New and Exciting Changes and Projects at Education Liberty Watch!
Since my move to Florida, I have been trying to divide my policy work between the two states. As you can imagine, with all that is happening on the education front that has proven a difficult task. Therefore, after discussion with our wonderful board, the decision has been made to more fully focus on the massive problems caused by the Common Core system of national standards, federally funded and supervised national tests and invasive data collection in Florida. Florida has become “ground zero” for the imposition of Common Core due to the political (of both parties), corporate, and foundation Establishment that wants a nation of trained workers instead of educated citizens. If we can stop it here where it is most entrenched, we have great hope that other states will follow suit. And with your financial help, we can!
The bad news is that Common Core is the culmination of everything that the Maple River Education Coalition, EdWatch, and now Education Liberty Watch have been fighting these many years. It consists of national control of education standards resulting in a national curriculum of low level, psychosocially-based workforce training skills, monitored by national assessments that test attitudes and beliefs far more than academic knowledge, and very invasive data collection.All of that results in a “womb to tomb” dossier on every child that will include career tracking that continues the School to Work system, psychological profiling, genetic data from early childhood and home visiting programs and many other tyrannical and unconstitutional outcomes about which we have been warning and fighting for many years. We need your support to stand for truth and freedom against this extremely well-coordinated and funded effort.
The great news is that parents and citizens in Florida, Minnesota, and across the country are standing up to protect their children and grandchildren and the future of our republic. The first of our special announcements is that under the auspices of Education Liberty Watch, I, along with Randy Osborne, a very experienced lobbyist and political strategist and Chrissy Blevio, a phenomenal grassroots organizer, have had the privilege of co-founding the Florida Stop Common Core Coalition (FSCCC). This statewide organization, is composed of almost 40 state and national groups including Heritage Action for America; The American Principles Project; FreedomWorks; The Tea Party Network, a Florida coalition of 80 tea party groups; and the Florida Parent Educators Association, the largest homeschooling organization in the country.
Besides bringing together this coalition, here is a sample of what FSCCC has been blessed to be able accomplish with much more detail available on our website (www.flstopcccoalition.org):
- Stop one of the most invasive student data mining bills in the nation
– a bill written by Jeb Bush’s foundation.
- Produce an extensively documented forty-five page policy analysis and an informative, eye-catching bookmark discussing the major of many problems with the Common Core system.
- Move Florida Governor Rick Scott from being an ardent supporter of Common Core to writing an executive order to hold three public hearings on the standards, and not even mentioning the standards in public any more. FSCCC and our coalition partners were heavily involved in those hearings.
- Get former Governor Jeb Bush, one of the nation’s leading proponents of Common Core and despite the millions of dollars from the corporate and political establishment as his disposal, to admit at a national education conference, “This is a fight on the right. This is not a happy, little place where we’re having a debating society. This is a fight…Right now, I would say, it’s a draw at best.”
- Conduct debates, forums, and interviews all over Florida resulting in over forty media mentions or interviews of FSCCC or its leaders, including nationally respected writers and media personalities like Glen Beck, Michelle Malkin, Joy Pullman of the Heartland Institute, Shane Vander Hart of Truth in American Education, and Richard Viguerie of Conservative HQ.
- Because of your support, I have also had the privilege of speaking at several national conferences; attending the national data conference of the National Center for Education Statistics thanks to the great work of former board member Polly Sorcan to understand the plans of the other side, and meeting with multiple congressional aides regarding Common Core and data privacy issues.
Meanwhile, lest you think that nothing is happening back in Minnesota, please know that while quieter on the surface, much has been happening in the North Star State as well. With much support and excellent comments from many across the state Education Liberty Watch took a stand against the illegal and revisionist social studies standards and offered testimony to the Minnesota legislature on many topics. Our wonderful treasurer and board member, Marjorie Holsten, has been speaking all over the state on the dangers of Common Core and advising a new group, Minnesotans Against Common Core (www.commoncoremn.com). And most exciting, our second big announcement is the formation of the Minnesota Child Protection League, also under the auspices of Education Liberty Watch.
MNCPL was founded by ELW’s predecessor group, EdWatch president Renee Doyle, and vice president, Julie Quist, as well as long-time child and family advocate Barb Anderson, and activists Michelle Lentz and Mimi Anderson, who is now a new ELW board member.
Here is some information about their very important goals and focus in the next year from their excellent website – www.mnchildprotectionleague.com:
- The MN Child Protection League is united in action to protect all children from exploitation, indoctrination and violence.
- The MN Child Protection League’s number one issue for 2013/2014 is protecting children from Dayton’s Bullying Bill, HF826, because it is UNSAFE, UNFAIR and UNFUNDED!
- No one should be bullied, including LGBT. But HF 826 is NOT about stopping bullying.
- They have developed a popular and compelling movie HF 826 “EXPOSED” that is available on their website.
Your past support has been an amazing blessing and has set in motion all of this tremendous work. However, the forces working to expand government, indoctrinate our children, limit educational options and destroy liberty have really stepped up their efforts and are spending hundreds of millions of dollars.Like David in the Bible and our nation’s Founders that stood against the most powerful empire on earth, because we have the truth on our side, with God’s Providence and your continued and gracious help, we can defeat this evil plan.
On behalf of Education Liberty Watch, the Florida Stop Common Core Coalition, and the Minnesota Child Protection League, I humbly ask you to continue supporting our efforts. Any donation of any size is a great investment in the freedom and future of our children and this nation. Fully tax deductible donations are gratefully accepted online on the front page of our website at http://www.edlibertywatch.org or by mail to:
Education Liberty Watch
9601 Annapolis Lane North
Maple Grove, MN 55369
In Liberty,
Karen R. Effrem, MD
President
Problems with Data Privacy in Relation to Common Core Standards, The Family Education Rights and Privacy Act, and The Education Sciences Reform Act
Karen R. Effrem, MD
President – Education Liberty Watch
The type and amount of personal, family, and non-academic data collected by the schools, reported in state longitudinal databases and used for research by the federal government was stimulated by the passage of the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002 (ESRA) and has grown rapidly since then. Loss of student and family data privacy has been accelerated by the proliferation of education programs funded by the federal government, especially in the early childhood realm and including home visiting programs that collect a plethora of medical, psychological, and family data and the effort to integrate standards, programs and data literally from “cradle to career” through P-20W education program integration and state longitudinal databases that were part of the Head Start reauthorization of 2007 and required by the Race to the Top and Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge grant programs starting in 2009.
ESRA is up for reauthorization. That law allows the National Center for Education Statistics to collect data “by other offices within the Academy and by other Federal departments, agencies and instrumentalities.” and “enter into interagency agreements for the collection of statistics.” That data covers from preschool through the work life of every American citizen and includes “the social and economic status of children, including their academic achievement,” meaning every aspect of their lives and the lives of their families. This combined with the weakening of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) to be described below is a great danger to the privacy of American families and makes the data collection by the IRS and NSA look tame.
In addition, although ESRA makes an effort to prohibit a national database of individually identifiable student data in section 182 by saying, “Nothing in this title may be construed to authorize the establishment of a nationwide database of individually identifiable information on individuals involved in studies or other collections of data under this title;” that language appears to be negated by this language in Section 157:
“The Statistics Center may establish 1 or more national cooperative education statistics systems for the purpose of producing and maintaining, with the cooperation of the States, comparable and uniform information and data on early childhood education, elementary and secondary education, postsecondary education, adult education, and libraries, that are useful for policymaking at the Federal, State, and local levels.” (Emphasis added).
That language is even more worrisome in light of the grants to fund and promote state longitudinal databases in section 208 of ESRA, in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and even more heavily promoted in the Race to the Top K-12 and Early Learning Challenge programs. Continue reading »
Feds Resolute Yet Tone Deaf on Data Collection
Karen R. Effrem, MD – President of Education Liberty Watch
Attending the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) STATS DC 2013 Data Conference “Discovering Through Data” was certainly an eye-opening experience for me. Despite protestations that they are concerned about the public perceptions on privacy protection, it was very clear that they are not backing down on the amount and type of very personal private information they intend to collect on children and families from a young age and that gathering data is still a greater concern for them than individual student privacy. Here is my report showing some evidence of that contention based on sessions that I attended.
NCES Commissioner Jack Buckley won the award for most tone deaf presentation title, calling his introductory keynote speech (not kidding!) “We Are From the Federal Government and We REALLY Are Here to Help You.” In that talk, while acknowledging that the” balance [between privacy and the government’s desire for data] is in a very delicate place, and that if we fail here in a very spectacular way, much of what we have done in the last ten to fifteen years could be undone,” he also spoke of “balancing the rights of our students & their families to keep their data confidential & secret as appropriate, but also to balance the needs that we have for the massive investment in education, of understanding its returns, of understanding how the system is working, how do we improve it, with the ultimate goal always of improving the educational outcomes of our citizens…” It is clear that the “massive investment” is more important than privacy.
That data privacy is a secondary concern is confirmed by this quote from the Data Quality Campaign (DQC) website that says, “While state policymakers bear the responsibility for protecting student privacy, they need not do so at the sake of restricting the use of quality, longitudinal education data in support of their ultimate goal: improving student achievement.” It is important to note that the DQC is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, Alliance for Early Success,, AT&T, and Target, all entities that will profit heavily by having lots of data collected on our children. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is also funding a very alarming student database project called inBloom that already holds data that includes “name, address and sometimes social security number…learning disabilities…test scores, attendance…student hobbies, career goals, attitudes toward school – even homework completion.”
Buckley also complained about he and his fellow federal data gatherers being of accused of an “attempt to catalog students and track them for life based on their eye color or their genetic code…” Apparently, he was not aware of the content of all the presentations planned for the conference. Interestingly enough one of the sessions that I attended later in the conference was called P-20W Data Standards for More Successful Student Transitions and Life-Long Learning. In that session, they spoke of the data collection from early childhood through the workforce, including health and developmental (mental health) data in early childhood. Not even realizing that the early childhood presenter was from Rhode Island, I asked about that state’s plan documented in their Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge Application to combine health data, including the newborn screening, i.e. genetic, data with their preschool and K-12 data.. [We reported on this outrageous government collection of the most personal of data in Preschool Government Tyranny – “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet”] saying:
“Rhode Island’s proposed early learning data system will be linked to both the state’s K-12 data system and to the state’s universal newborn screening and health data system, helping to identify children with high needs, track participation in programs, and track children’s development and learning.” This is a classic example of the rapidly expanding philosophy that the government owns every single bit of medical and education data about you and every family member from conception until after death. We are seeing this played out in the realm of DNA medical data and now private mental health data through these subjective and worthless assessments. These assessments will then be added and linked to health data so that government bureaucrats will be able to label the young children they consider to be mentally ill or flag them for future evaluations.
The Obama preschool plan is largely based on the ideas of the Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge. That plan is to also expand home visiting programs which are accompanied by even more data collection on infants and families. Continue reading »
Issues
- Assessments + Testing (25)
- Bullying/Sex Education (6)
- Child Protection League (2)
- Common Core Standards (78)
- Curriculum + Standards (65)
- Data Collection and Data Privacy (64)
- Early Education/Nanny State (75)
- Federal Education (128)
- International Education (6)
- LGBT Issues in Education (9)
- Media Appearances (4)
- PL/CBE (2)
- Planned Economy (11)
- Politics of Education (26)
- School Violence (9)
- Social Emotional Learning/Mental Health (52)
- State Education (89)
- Testimony/Presentations (17)
- Uncategorized (13)
- Unions (10)
Education Liberty Watch Projects
ELW Allies
- American Principles Project
- Cato Institute
- Conservative Teachers of America
- Constitutional Coalition
- Eagle Forum
- Minnesota Advocates and Champions for Children
- Missouri Education Watchdog
- Restore Oklahoma Parent Empowerment
- Stop Common Core
- The Pioneer Institute
- Truth in American Education
- What is Common Core – Education Without Representation