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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