'Womb-to-workforce'
data-mining scheme sparks revolt Group calls for moratorium, asks for investigation.
Privacy
advocates are calling for a moratorium on the Pennsylvania school system’s
sweeping data-collection program, which they say is part of the federal
government’s goal of being able to track the development of every child “womb
to workforce.”
All 50 states have been mandated by the U.S.
Department of Education to establish inter-connected “longitudinal databases”
accumulating information on every student from pre-kindergarten through
college.
Two groups, Parents Against Common Core and
Pennsylvanians Restoring Education, are asking Gov. Tom Corbett to place a
moratorium on data collection in the Pennsylvania Information Management System
or PIMS. The system gathers information on students in all 500 school districts
across the state and some schools have started collecting behavioral data that
goes beyond testing for academic knowledge, according to the two organizations.
The two groups are also asking the state
attorney general’s office to launch an investigation into possible violations
of student privacy laws.
“We are asking the governor to rescind all
contracts and written agreements that the Pennsylvania Department of Education
has with any commonwealth entity and any outside contractor who can access
personally identifiable information on our children in violation of federal
law, state policy, and Chapter 4 (state code) regulations,” reads a statement
issued by Pennsylvania Restoring Education and Pennsylvania Against Common
Core.
While Pennsylvania has become ground zero in the
backlash against what is seen as an increasingly invasive student tracking
system, all 50 states are in the process of expanding and digitizing their
student records under the direction of the U.S. Department of Education. The
goal is to have all state systems plugged into a centralized database storing
sensitive student information.
The expanded data collection has been enabled by
federal stimulus grants issued as far back as 2010. Growth in the student
data-mining industry has also been buoyed by President Obama’s 2011 executive
order weakening the rules against releasing student data, which is regulated by
the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act. Obama’s proposed rule change
showed up in the Federal Register in April 2011 and took effect in January
2012, setting the stage for the development of a nationwide data-collection
system capable of tracking individual students throughout their school and
college careers.
The administration sold
the policy as an advancement in “personal learning” with some vague parameters
spelled out in a January 2012 press release.
But Obama’s executive
order allowed more than just personal learning. At the stroke of a pen, it
opened access to highly sensitive student data to third-party contractors, as reported
by WND in May. That story also
reported the growing backlash among parents in several states who are now
“opting their children out” of standardized tests. The number of such tests
being administered in public schools has exploded since the implementation of
Common Core while the scope and nature of the testing has also been greatly
expanded to include skills outside the traditional academic realms of math,
social studies and language arts.
But the full scope of the data being scooped up
is even more breathtaking than previously thought. It goes beyond standardized
testing to include surveys, observations of student behavior and other
subjective analyses made primarily by teachers. The more advanced a school is
in the process of digitizing records, the more likely they are to require
teachers to feed data into the system documenting attitudes, beliefs, values,
dispositions. These are known as “interpersonal skills” or “soft skills.”
Each student assigned a ‘unique’ number
Activists in Pennsylvania led by Anita Hoge have
gathered documents that show the state is allowing contracts with third-party
vendors who have access to confidential student records without the informed
written consent of parents. Hundreds of data points are connected to each individual
student through a “unique number” assigned to the student in direct violation
of state law, said Hoge, a member of Pennsylvanians Restoring Education and an
expert on the student assessment industry.
The information gathered can be used to create a
psychological profile on each student, said Hoge.
“We are well documented and we have parents who
are ready to come forward and demand access to all of the data that has been
collected on their children,” Hoge told WND.
She said each teacher under this system is also
assigned a unique identification number to ensure that they are inputting the
required data on their students.
“Innovation Lab Network piloted the program and
they said the teachers were the key to the whole thing,” Hoge said.
Tim Eller, press secretary and director of
communications for the Pennsylvania Department of Education, told WND in an
email that the department “does not collect anything outside of what is
required by law.”
Hoge disagrees. Even though Obama weakened
FERPA, the data-collection system still violates the Protection of Pupil Rights
Amendment to the General Education Provisions Act, Hoge said.
Code 22, chapter 4, of Pennsylvania law also
forbids the Department of Education from giving out students’ personally
identifiable information. The law states that only aggregate information may be
released to certain third parties.
“All of those contracts they have with outside
providers will have to be rescinded,” Hoge said. “So they’re in violation of
Chapter 4. They can’t give out that information. That’s why we are asking for
the attorney general to investigate.”
The two groups issued the following statement to
WND: “We demand a moratorium on the collection of data because of contracts that
have been discovered and are signed by the Pennsylvania Department of Education
to disclose personally identifiable information, which is personal data on the
students and his/her family, without the parent’s knowledge or consent. This
includes information on every student’s personality, attitudes, values,
beliefs, and disposition, a psychological profile, called Interpersonal Skills
Standards and Anchors. This data has been illegally obtained through deceptive
means without the parents’ knowledge or consent through screening, evaluations,
testing, and surveys. These illegal methods of information gathering were
actually fraudulently called ‘academic standards’ on the Department of
Education website portal.”
Hoge said two members of Pennsylvanians Restoring
Education and a parent of school-aged children met Oct. 20 with state officials
in Harrisburg. “This is when we exposed the contracts,” she said. Present at
the meeting were several legislative-aide attorneys, a state legislator and a
representative of the governor’s office.
Two days later, Hoge received an email stating
that the list of “interpersonal skills” had been scrubbed from the state
Department of Education website portal called Standards Aligned System or SAS.
Hoge’s group is now demanding all curriculum aligned to the “illegal
psychological standards” also be removed from the classroom.
The state has notified all 500 school districts
that the portal had been cleansed of all “affective domain standards” that had
nothing to do with academic content.
This is a “temporary fix,” Hoge said. Just
because they have been removed from the website does not mean they are no
longer being used in the classroom.
“These standards and interventions continue to
be forced on students and remediated in the classroom every day. A search on
the SAS portal reveals over 2,394 lesson plans that align to these now
repudiated ‘standards,’” Hoge said. “The parents of Pennsylvania want all
affective domain standards, all curriculum and related lesson plans expunged
from the classrooms, as well as from the website portal.
“Parents are demanding that Gov. Corbett and the
Pennsylvania Department of Education cease collecting and disclosing personally
identifiable information on Pennsylvania students and their families
immediately.”
A model for the nation
Hoge, a longtime education activist, said her
investigation concluded that Pennsylvania’s system is a model for the nation.
The goal is to develop a dossier on each U.S. citizen feeding into a national
database, she said. The local school is the head of the beast, the place where
data collection begins on each child.
But before such an all-inclusive data system
could be implemented, there needed to be a national ID number created for each
student, a number that would follow the child from pre-K through college and
into the work force.
Enter eScholar of White Plains, New York. This
data-management firm was awarded a contract to create a unique tracking number
for every one of Pennsylvania’s 1.8 million students. It performed the task within
six months in 2006, apparently without the knowledge of any of the students’
parents.
The system eScholar
created “allows the Pennsylvania Department of Education to track and share
data for students from pre-kindergarten all the way through their post-secondary
education,” according to a summary of the contract on the firm’s website.
State officials started laying the groundwork
for the system in 1999. That’s when the Pennsylvania Department of Education
commissioned a study to determine the feasibility of implementing a statewide
student identification system.
“The study concluded that because of the strong
local-control sentiment in the state, there would never be such a system. But
that was before No Child Left Behind (NCLB),” according to an analysis of
Pennsylvania’s system by eScholar.
The eScholar document goes on to describe how it took several years to build support
for the creation of such an all-inclusive student-tracking system. But a system
of this nature would eventually be seen as necessary to comply with President
Bush’s No Child Left Behind education initiative.
The document states: “It took a few years before
state education agencies realized the impact of the data requirements for NCLB.
(Pennsylvania) was no different. However, it soon became apparent that the way
data were collected and managed was about to change forever. It was virtually
impossible to meet the reporting and accountability requirements of NCLB
without a longitudinal data system. A longitudinal data system required some
way of tracking students from year to year, a student identification system.
Governor Rendell responded during the first year of his administration by
launching the Pennsylvania Information Management System (PIMS) initiative. In
2004, a statewide advisory council of education and government stakeholders was
formed to help move PIMS forward and help build support.”
All 50 states involved in massive student data
project
Hoge said the 50 states are at varying stages of
designing and implementing their own statewide longitudinal databases.
“Some have them set up, some are in the process
of setting them up, it depends on the state and how much money they have,” she
said.
The first two federal grants to Pennsylvania
exceeded $20 million.
“The contracts are huge, absolutely huge, to
implement this system,” Hoge said. “So you had to have a state department of
education that was willing to take the lead and set up the entire system.”
Pennsylvania’s former secretary of education,
Gerald Zahorchak, was among the first state education chiefs to take the
millions in federal money and run with the program. For his efforts, he
received a national leadership award in 2008.
Pennsylvania was one of 20 states that initially
received a combined $250 million in federal stimulus funds to develop and
implement data systems capable of tracking student progress from early
childhood through college graduation.
“The Statewide
Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) grants will help deliver much-needed data into
the hands of educators and policymakers,” according to a Pennsylvania Department of Education press release from 2010.
All 50 states submitted applications for the
database grants in late 2009.
“In three short years, we have gone from having
no comprehensive SLDS (database) to becoming a national leader in this regard,”
former Pennsylvania Gov. Edward Rendell said in the state’s grant application.
“In 2008, the Data Quality Campaign, a national collaborative campaign to
improve the collection, availability and use of high-quality education data,
awarded Governor Rendell and former Secretary of Education Gerald Zahorchak its
annual Leadership Award.”
To help school districts get acclimated to the
intensive data-mining system Pennsylvania bureaucrats established a statewide
electronic help desk.
“They set up the whole system with a huge help
desk because the data has to be entered perfectly and if any of the districts
are having problems entering the data they can call the help desk,” Hoge said.
“It’s the whole package: The national ID with ‘womb to workplace’ tracking and
the model curriculum from Common Core. And the teacher also has a unique ID so
they can make sure the teacher is teaching from the model curriculum. We can
prove it now. We can prove what they are doing. We have the documents.”
She said the U.S.
Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics “has its fingerprints all over this system.” In
one of its grant contracts the state of Pennsylvania actually used the term
“womb to workforce” to describe the statewide database that will track each of
its young citizens.
“PDE (Pennsylvania Department of Education) has
made great strides designing a comprehensive K-12 data system and creating a
solid foundation for a ‘womb to workplace’ information system,” states
Pennsylvania’s 2009 grant application with the National Center for Education
Statistics, a copy of which has been obtained by WND.
The state’s application goes on to boast that it
had already stored two years of data in a “state data warehouse.”
“Equally important, we have successfully
fostered a data-rich culture, supporting continuous educational improvement at
all levels of the system,” the application explained.
Hoge says Pennsylvanians Restoring Education has
documented evidence of a “systemic collusion” between the Pennsylvania
Department of Education and the National Center for Education Statistics to
create a national ID without the knowledge of citizens.
The next step for the education database is to
link it with the Department of Labor with the addition of the last five digits
of the student’s Social Security number or link to the unique ID created by
eScholar, she said, citing written correspondence between former Pennsylvania
Secretary of Education Zahorchak and former Secretary of Labor Sandi Vito, a
copy of which has been obtained by WND.
Creating a modern ‘Stasi
“This creates a database of human capital — your
worth, or non-worth — to the economy,” Hoge said. “The government wants to know
how you think and what you think and everything about you. This
is a government intelligence operation using education to create a dossier on
every family in this country. Attitudes and practices of each family are
unwittingly revealed in the students’ responses in the classroom and on tests
through the “Special Ed Student Snap and Student Snap.” (Source: Pennsylvania
State University, PennData Grant: Project Number 062-14-0-042: Federal Award
Number: HO27A130162)
Every person age 28 and under, schooled in
Pennsylvania, has a psychometric profile, an intelligence profile kept by the
state of Pennsylvania, Hoge said.
“In 10 years, every Pennsylvania schooled
person, age 38 and under….In 20 years, every person age 48 and under…In 30
years, Pennsylvania will have a complete psychographic on every person in the
workforce and on every child born thereafter in the workforce,” she said. “This
is an American electronic model eerily similar to East Germany Stasi of
yesteryear.”
Common Core as the vehicle
The Common Core national standards are the
“vehicle” used to standardize the data collection as the autonomy of the local
school district is stripped away and teachers in the classroom are reduced to
virtual automatons, Hoge said.
“The individual mandate, similar to the
Obamacare individual mandate for health care, requires students to conform to
this national agenda,” she said. “There is no privacy.”
She described the system as a top-down form of
federal control that bypasses state legislatures. The goal is to standardize
the entire nation’s educational system. Teachers must “remediate” each child to
ensure he or she is absorbing the attitudes, values, beliefs and dispositions
required by the system. And teachers are constantly monitored by the system to
make sure they are doing just that.
This turns teachers into virtual psychologists,
despite the fact they are not state-licensed practitioners and vulnerable to
malpractice issues, Hoge said. If students don’t meet the required proficiency
in “interpersonal skills,” teachers can be threatened with reprisals including
possible termination, according to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act
“flexibility waiver” issued by the Obama administration. These waivers absolved
school systems from certain requirements of President Bush’s No Child Left
Behind Act, but exacted a heavy toll in the form of states losing their
autonomy over classroom instruction.
An organized,
‘national system of surveillance and monitoring’ The contracts uncovered in Pennsylvania refer to Common Core as
the “model curriculum.”
Common Core provides 2,394 fool-proof validated
scripts with which to “remediate” each child to achieve proficiency in the
“interpersonal skills.” “We have also discovered that these Interpersonal
Skills Standards are also embedded in other academic areas of Career Education
and Work, Family and Consumer Sciences, and Health Safety and Physical
Education,” according to the statement from Pennsylvanians Restoring Education.
“The test contract in Appendix B for the Keystone Exams states, ‘The diagnostic
assessments are intended to be easily administered online and provide immediate
feedback of students ‘strengths and weaknesses.’”
This is nothing more than a sophisticated method
of brainwashing, Hoge said. “Clearly this data-collection system has utilized
education funds to set up a national system of surveillance and interventions
on our students that is structured from the federal level down into each
classroom,” she said. “Huge amounts of our taxpayer money have been used to
fund this system of surveillance creating a dossier on each student and their
family for the purpose of creating the worker desired by big business and
enforced by the arbitrary, authoritative state.”
She said the plan to
transform America’s school into factories that churn out “human capital” began
in 1990 when the U.S. Department of Labor established the Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills or
SCANS. ACT was awarded the
contract to develop the list of skills seen as necessary for the 21st century
global economy. This skill list formed the basis of what would later become
Common Core State Standards, which was copyrighted by the Council of Chief
State School Officers and adopted by 43 states.
In 2013, the Council decided to add non-academic
“soft” skills to the list. “We are requesting Gov. Corbett to stop the data
collection, stop the invasion of privacy… We want legislation NOW, to protect
our families, protect our children, and protect our children’s future,” stated
Pennsylvanians Restoring Education.
The group ended its statement with a chilling
conclusion.
“America used to educate its children and let
them create their own world. Now, we are creating their world and forcing them
to live in it.”
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