The last two weeks SD Rostra published Part One and Part Two of a presentation by Citizens for Quality Education made during the April 22 Poway Unified School District Board meeting on the implementation of Common Core State Standards in schools.
Below is Part Three of that four-part presentation.
The concerns expressed by the group are of impact to all schools, not only those in the Poway area.
Guest Commentary
by Mary Baker, Jeannie Foulkrod and Steve Sarviel, Citizens for Quality Education
Common Core State Standards for Education
All Californians should be very aware of the new education standards that the State adopted under Governor Schwarzenegger for Math and English. This is supposed to be integrated by all districts by 2015, whether the districts have funding or not. Please read the series of articles taken from a recent Citizens for Quality Education presentation to the Poway Unified School District (PUSD) that address real concerns about the new standards.
Obviously, PUSD has its well publicized financial issues, but no one would disagree that the district has an excellent reputation statewide. It would not be beneficial to change a curriculum that is NOT broken, either for parents, business owners, homeowners or students in the district. Please do your own research and comment on the issues. This cuts across party lines as it is about education and privacy for our children and their families.
Poway Unified School District Board Meeting – Presentation on Common Core State Standards, Part 3 of 4
This is very important regarding privacy of the students and their families. You will be shocked at the data that will be collected and SHARED about the students. This is a link to example data sets for middle school.
Longitudinal Data Systems and Data Tracking
The national assessment Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) is being rewritten to match the Common Core State Standards. This enables the US and California Departments of Education to track whether or not districts, teachers, and students are meeting the standards effectively. Layered into these electronic, adaptive assessments are longitudinal data tracking and data mining systems. That term, longitudinal, means that our children will be tested and tracked from pre-K until after they are hired workers in the future. The top government officials are not shy about their intentions for surveillance and data mining.
According to Education Secretary Arne Duncan,
“…each governor in the 50 states had to provide an “assurance” they would pursue reforms… [One] of the assurance[s] governors provided was in the area of data systems. More robust data systems and a new generation of assessments can assist teachers and principals to improve their practices and tailor their instruction…”
The Pioneer Institute states that the US Department of Education is investigating how public schools can not only collect unique, non-personally identifiable student identifiers but also how they can collect unique and personal “non-cognitive” student attributes.
Did you know: The Family Education Rights and Privacy Act known as FERPA was recently amended by the Obama Administration to allow the release of student records for nonacademic purposes and undercut parental consent provisions? FERPA was created to protect personal information rights. Now it has been modified, quietly without your knowledge, to invade your privacy. In March, documents were filed with a federal court in Washington, D.C. to challenge changes to FERPA. Ask your state and federal elected representatives about their intentions.
Even, Fordham University Law School, a proponent of the CCSS, reports that state educational databases across the country ignore key privacy protections for the nation’s K-12 children.
We want to know what our school district is doing to protect the privacy of students and their families.
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Comments 5
I realize this administration is attacking personal information at every angle, from the IRS, healthcare and now education so I hope the readers tie all of this together….money, health and group think education. This is very important if you have any children in your life in a state that has accepted this standard.
We have too much privacy as it is now, so gathering of more information on our children to sell off to the highest bidder(s) for whatever is in their best interest should help solve the problem of too much privacy we suffer from now. Maybe it will go towards debt reduction. NOT.
In all seriousness, parents need to wake up and get out whatever modern day equivalents of pitchforks and tar and feathers there are. Every politician from the school board members to assembly, state senate, governor, congressman and US Senator need to be held to task on this.
I read on here earlier about a site http://www.informedvoter.info That place has enough information on this Common Core crap to make anyone sick to their stomach.
The only way we are going to stop this madness is to tell everyone we know that it’s happening and demand some action from the political so called “leaders”.
The most burning question is, “What are parents going to do about this?”
Start with the Poway School Board and work your way up. First, let them know, this is unacceptable. Phone calls, emails and personal visits all are in order. Every parent who cares about the privacy of their kids should attend school board meetings and speak out. The next one in Poway is TONIGHT at 6PM. Then, every board member should be emailed and called. Explain to them you vote and will remember their response to you on this.
Next step: Start calling and emailing your state representatives.
The alternative is being purely apathetic and assuming a slave to master like relationship with the bureaucratic machine. Who’s government is this anyway?
Tell your education departments and district boards to start learning for themselves what the Common Core is all about. Tell them to study the promotional information that state and local devotees cite. You, and they will find a very different picture even from the promoters of this travesty when they see the whole story and not just a fractional piece of “what might be possible.” There are many risky, untested pieces of this reqrite of our American education system. The program is intentionally being introduced and installed with as low a profile as possible. What if it doesn’t work? What is the exit strategy? What about the still fertile local ideas for improving education and student success? Will they be snubbed out by a nationally dictated education standard and curriculum mandated by nationalized standard testing? Think thinkers. Get on this now.
And, by the way, go to the “Vatican city website” of common core and read what they have to say. http://www.corestandards.org. Here is what they claim makes a big difference about the CCSS program and the supposedly disjointed programs in the states.
“What makes this process different from other efforts to create common standards?
“This process is state-led, and has support from across the country, including CCSSO, the NGA Center, Achieve, Inc, ACT, the College Board, the National Association of State Boards of Education, the Alliance for Excellent Education, the Hunt Institute, the National Parent Teacher Association, the State Higher Education Executive Officers, the American Association of School Administrators, and the Business Roundtable.”
NOT ONE OF THE ORGANIZATIONS THEY CITE IS A STATE, STATE LEADING, OR EVEN A REGIONAL EDUCATIONAL ORGANIZATION. The leading is all being done by national trade organizations and DC based lobbying (political) groups that have conflicting interests in the business of education publishing and consulting. Did you ever have any opportunity to discuss what your local school district was doing to advance this remake of your school system? HA! That’s a rhetorical question if you didn’t get it.
The next steps in the process are to force this mess down the throats of the public, the parents, the students, and the teachers. [That’s just nice words that mean, you’re going to pay for it whether or not its acceptable.]