◼ Although high information Americans are becoming aware of the federal takeover of education through Common Core Standards, there seems to be little recognition yet that Common Core gives schools and third parties unprecedented access to students’ personal information. The federal government is acquiring a massive amount of data that can be sold to the highest bidders. This is an invasion of student and family privacy and a violation of our 4th Amendment rights. - Carole Hornsby Haynes, Ph.D.
...The range of data that can be collected includes hobbies, psychological evaluations, medical records, religious affiliation, political affiliation, family income, behavioral problems, disciplinary history, career goals, addresses, and bus stop times and locations.
Research Fellow Joy Pullmann at the Heartland Institute said the February 2013 report by the USDOE, “Promoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance,” p. 44, reveals that Common Core's data mining includes “…using cameras to judge facial expressions, an electronic seat that judges posture, a pressure-sensitive computer mouse and a biometric wrap on kids’ wrists.”
...The Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington is suing the USDOE in an effort to stop the illegal collection, storage, and sharing of student data. President and executive director Marc Rotenberg said that, “Once the data gets out there it has all sorts of ramifications. It weakens the [FERPA] structure Congress put in place because Congress understands that a lot of student data can be stigmatizing, keeping people out of jobs, for example.”
ParentalRights.org President Michael P. Farris maintains that personal privacy is being destroyed by those who want to track children. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child has browbeaten nations to create a national database so that the government can track children, purportedly to protect their human rights.
Touting this centralized database system as a method to personalize student education is a naïve notion by the tech industry, which evidently thinks the massive problems of public education can be fixed with a bit of slick technical engineering.
Student data mining is merely the Trojan horse for a nationwide tracking system of our citizens. Our children are being used as guinea pigs while those complicit with this Marxist government enjoy their new found riches.
