RNC Adopts Anti-Common Core Resolution & Florida Goes in Wrong Direction

Karen R. Effrem, MD  – President

Despite the fact that the Republican National Committee has listened to the grassroots and moved towards freedom in education and student privacy by unanimously adopting an anti-Common Core resolution, the Florida Legislature has moved in the completely opposite direction.   The education appropriations bill, SB 1076 that implements the Common Core standards and aligned assessments passed the full legislature and is being sent to Governor Scott and SB 878, the horrific data tracking bill passed the full Florida Senate. (See our reports about SB 878 here and here).

Although there were some good efforts to protect some sensitive student data and Florida activists used their best efforts to warn senators about the truly invasive data collection in SB 878, Jeb Bush and corporate interests whispered in the ears of leadership and other senators and won the day.  The bill passed on April 10^th unanimously, because the senators had been deceived into believing that student data had been protected.  Although Senator Galvano did put some stronger language in to shield some of the more sensitive data and make it anonymous from outside researchers and corporations, for which he deserves thanks, the fact remains that far too much personal data is still being collected by the State of Florida on innocent children and their families and given to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).  Thanks to the weakening of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) that data can be shared with other federal agencies.  The attitude is that all of this data on our children belongs to the government and if we, their benighted parents scream and beg, maybe they will protect it or say they are going to do so.  The questions never get asked, “Why are you collecting so much data on our children without consent?” and “By what authority do you do so?”

Although he may not have intended it to come off that way, when author of SB 878, Senator Galvano, was interviewed for the Bradenton Herald after Chrissy Blevio and other members of Liberty in Action who live in his district protested the still alarming amount of data collection in the passed bill, his remarks seemed very patronizing.  He said these parents “are well-intended but they misunderstand” and the paper portrayed his views of his constituents as laboring under a cloud of “confusion” and “a case of misinformation.”  For the edification of Senator Galvano and the rest of the legislature, these parents are not confused or misinformed, they are justifiably angry as the rest of the parents in the state will be when they find out what has happened to their children’s privacy.  Here are the facts:

1)      Although the bill limits some of the sensitive data given to corporations and outside researchers, all of that sensitive data that we showed from the National Center for Education Statistics National Data Model is and will still be collected by the state and given to the federal government whether parents like it or not. This data still includes:  Bus Route, Bus Stop, Arrival Time, At Risk Status, Amount of Non-school Activity Involvement, Distance From Home to School and hundreds of other data points.  Because the bill requires the Governing Board to “promote adoption of a common set of data elements identified by the National Center for Education Statistics to support the effective exchange of data within and across states,” one can be sure that those data points will still be included.

2)      The data that is not covered by Senator Galvano’s good amendment (“student’s or a student’s family’s juvenile delinquency records, criminal records, medical records, biometric information, religious affiliations, beliefs, political affiliations or beliefs, and sexual or attitudes, or behavior”) will still be given or sold to outside corporations and researchers.

3)      Hopefully the data will be aggregated, anonymized and de-identified as stated in the amendment.  However, because of the wording used in the amendment,” the Florida Department of Education is not required to, but “may assign an anonymized random identification number to each record before providing access to data.”

4)      Conspicuously absent from the list, despite our multiple pleas, are mental health records and psychological data such as the  “psychological resources, mindsets, learning strategies, effortful control, attributes, dispositions, social skills, attitudes, and intrapersonal resources” that the U.S. Department of Education plans to measure in the Common Core aligned assessments (p. 17 and 49 of pdf) via all of their fancy affective computing equipment, such as wireless skin conductance bracelets, facial expression cameras, etc. (See p. 62 of the pdf from the same report).

In addition to all of the data privacy issues in SB 878, SB 1076, the education appropriations bill about to be signed by Governor Scott is moving full steam ahead to force Common Core standards and their aligned, psychologically manipulative assessments on every public school, student, and teacher in the state of Florida.  Here are some of the many issues with this bill:

1)      The phrase “Common Core” is used over 40 times in this bill.

2)      SB 1076 absolutely requires every public school to give the Common Core Assessments even though they are still not complete and there is NO COST ANALYSIS, so districts and counties have no idea what is coming in the form of enormous unfunded mandates.

3)      The only hope is that there is some language that requires the State Board of Education to consider “funding, sufficient field and baseline data, access to assessments, instructional alignment, and school district readiness to administer the common core assessments online” when developing the implementation schedule will allow the public, teachers and the counties to time enough to scream about how bad and expensive this all is.

4)      There is a tremendous amount of career tracking and emphasis on vocational education over academics in the bill. The word “career” is used 115 times in the bill and the word “academic” or ”academics” is used only 61 times.  Even that is misleading, because the term “applied academics”: is used nine of those times.  Applied academics is defined in the bill as “adult general education through which persons attain academic and workforce readiness skills at the level of functional literacy (grade levels 6.0-8.9) or higher so that such persons may pursue technical certificate education or higher-level technical education.”  It is tragically notable that the functional level of the so called “college and career ready” Common Core standards has been pegged by experts to be right at 7^th grade.

5)       There are now two different “designations” for a standard high school diploma in the State of Florida, an academic one called a “scholar designation” and a career and technical one called a “merit designation” that requires students to graduate with one or more industry certifications.”  This appears to be a diluting of the academic worth of a standard high school diploma.  Combine this with the strategic plan of the State Board of Education to have lower academic goals for some students based on race, with the goal for only 74% of African-American students reading and doing math at or above grade level compared to 86-88% of white students and you have the recipe for what one African American activist called a “caste system.”

6) The bill requires that students must choose their career by the end of 8th grade by taking a mandatory course that “must result in a completed personalized academic and career plan for the student.”  How many kids know their career plan in detail by 8th grade?  Why should the State of Florida be forcing children to choose that early unless it is to develop a career tracking system that caters to the needs of business and the state more than to children and their families?

This method of education and career tracking has been tried in other countries in the past and has been a dismal failure.  It was stopped in Minnesota and and across the country in the early 2000s by dedicated activists in groups like EdWatch and the Constitutional Coalition, including Renee Doyle, Allen and Julie Quist, Michele Bachmann, Michael Chapman and Donna Hearne. If we are going to educate our students to reach for their own goals and dreams, not those of the state and corporations, preserve our children’s and families’ privacy and have future generations to which to pass on the American heritage of freedom, this system must be stopped.  Specific action steps for those in Florida will be available at Floridians Against Common Core Education.