Coming Soon to a School Near You: Data Mining Your Privacy

“Where is the evidence to support the rhetoric surrounding ‘Common Core?’ This is not data-driven decision making. This is a decision grasping for data…” ~ Dr. Christopher Tienken, Seton Hall University, NJ

by Nicole Haas, Smart Girl Politics Action: What would you think if your kids went to school and their every move was tracked and documented? Not just test scores and attendance, but detailed behavioral issues, personal preferences and any perceived learning disabilities or health concerns, for starters.

That is precisely what looks to be happening with the implementation of Common Core, the new standardized educational curriculum most states adopted sight-unseen in exchange for federal grant money.

The perpetrators of Common Core say they believe that detailed data must be collected on all students to facilitate better learning. Bill and Melinda Gates are at the heart of Common Core including funding the newly privately held data tracking business, inBloom, that pledges to assimilate, store and ‘guard’ all this collected information.

Nine states have agreed to be guinea pigs for the beginning stages of information mining without giving parents a chance to opt out. In New York, education officials are already uploading private information about students – names, addresses, test scores, learning disabilities, attendance and disciplinary records – into the $100 million database.

Concerned parents are expressing their anger that their children’s private information is being bought and sold between government and private companies. “I’m outraged,” says one mom of a 9 year old son in New York. “I send my child to school to be educated. I never agreed to have his information shared with private companies or stored in databases.”

Few people have even heard of Common Core, let alone the data mining component that goes along with it. However, as details slowly emerge about the program it has a growing number of concerned citizens asking questions. For instance…

• Can our children’s data be sold and to whom? The short answer is, ‘yes’ and to whomever they want.
• What if data is miscalculated or logged under the wrong person or family, etc.? What’s to stop an educator from abusing the system and ‘mislabeling’ someone as a problem child out of personal retaliation?
• Couldn't a child forever be labeled a ‘trouble maker’ after going through a rebellious phase? Absolutely.
• How far will the personal data mining go? With iris scans?
• Could the data collected be used against the student or their family? Certainly we've seen this type of practice happening lately!
• What if inBloom is hacked and all that private information is accessed? What if the company is sold?
  
• Will educators have time to educate? Or will they be incessantly testing and data collecting?
• Don’t our kids have the right to grow up with a certain amount of anonymity?
  What and why EXACTLY is this personal information being mined?

It is increasingly coming to light that this high-tech snooping is, in part, designed to program our children along certain vocational pathways to prepare them for the workforce. In essence, stealing their American dreams of what they want to be or could be, while steering them to where their data collectors think they should be when they are eventually spit out into a highly controlled, government manufactured economy.

If this sounds too Orwellian, take a look at this inBloom database prototype including the “Career Pathway Type” section. This extremely long, detailed model seems to be just the tip of the iceberg when it comes how far this information extracting will go.

I understand how this could sound like hyperbole, but I would ask you to click on the links in this article and do your own research. Because once this Common Core monster really takes hold, it could be nearly impossible to reign back. And once your child’s information is out there in cyberspace, it will be impossible to take back. There is no evidence that children will reap any rewards from this program and they don’t have a voice to defend their own right to privacy. How will they feel about this personal invasion when they are old enough to realize how they were being used and manipulated?

So again, I urge all parents and freedom loving patriots to look into this. It’s all very real and it’s all starting to happen, NOW.

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