Obama Wants Your Children’s Data: Common Core Early Learning Initiative
President Obama is very interested in your kids. He wants to know virtually everything about them.
We found this out while researching the Common Core Standards. We saw that in order for states to apply for the Race to the Top grants; a “competition” of sorts for states to put on their best faces and vow to do anything and everything, including giving up their children for a little extra money, they had to beef up their data collections systems on the children in school.
The assurance that states would indeed set these State Longitudinal Data Systems for collecting data in place allowed them to be able to qualify for federal funds. The other requirement for the grant was to adopt the Common Core Standards.
As soon as a kid hits Kindergarten everything about their life will be tracked. Data will be collected on every aspect of their learning abilities, their families, their health and many other factors and then stored in this massive SLDS that will then share the information with just about anyone who “needs” to see it.
Any information gathered before was protected by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, where parents had to give signed permission for their child’s information to be shared.
Obama gutted the FERPA in December of 2011 essentially stripping parents’ rights to guard their children’s information.
But, wait, apparently Kindergarten is not early enough to get to know every move your child makes. Let’s roll that back a couple years…in fact, we’ll go to pre-natal, shall we?
States are receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in discretionary spending, to fund universal preschool through Race to the Top early learning grants and the biggest boondoggle in American history; the Affordable Care Act. In case you’re wondering, this is how Obama got by the Congress; he didn’t need to ask for the money that would likely not be forthcoming.
This allows states to be able to carry out their plans to their Pre-K and early childcare plans. It sounds good, right? We can really make sure to get data and information on small children and be able to “intervene” with health problems, socioeconomic problems, and educational problems before they actually have a problem. We just love kids and we want to be able to see everything that affects them and step in and take the place of their parents. That’s not so bad, right? It’s for the children!
Recently my colleagues and I began searching through the Oregon Department of Education to see just what the early learning initiative would involve.
First, we found that Oregon passed SB909 in 2011 which would allow the governor to implement early childhood education programs and make sure to get the departments providing help to all families and children in Oregon to be more “streamlined.”
Upon passage we found was an 80 page document outlining how the system for keeping track of children, especially children in low income, minority, or “high risk” situations was not adequate. As it is Oregon has all kinds of government programs in place to monitor early childhood care and education.
Also included in this document are all programs in place that currently keep records on children and families.
The organizations include, but may not be limited to:
Oregon Health Authority
Oregon Department of Education
Oregon Commission on Children and Families
Oregon Department of Human Services
Oregon Employment Department
Federal Agencies
Most of these agencies have at least one office in each county.
In a section marked State Alignment Recommendations it reads in part:
“Oregon has a wide range of programs, services, and organizations focused on early childhood care and education. In addition mental health, healthcare, and addiction services overlap the work of early learning. Although some of these programs and services are delivering what we believe to be good results, Oregon does not consistently track results or make investment decisions based on results. In addition, these systems do not work in concert, and are largely disconnected from the K-12 education system. We need an integrated system to ensure results for children and families and for the citizens of Oregon. All systems and services should share the goals of getting children ready for school at kindergarten and reading by the end of first grade…”
In a separate but related Oregon document under the section entitled: Vision for the Early Childhood Integrated Data System the goal is stated as:
“An integrated data system that brings together data from early learning, health, and human services at the level of the child (0-5), provider, and community to improve coordination and streamlining of services, guide resource allocation, and provide accountability for early childhood investments. The data system will interface with the Oregon Department of Education Longitudinal Data System, thus providing data on children from birth through higher education. As the early learning data system evolves it will integrate with the applicable health and human service data systems.”
This is what I see here. A massive effort to connect all of these governmental agencies, county by county, state by state and then linked to the federal government.
Any and all of these things will be in the system, where any government agency in the state will have access to and the data from all other state agencies. And let us not forget that the data can be sold to a third party.
It will be funneled to the federal government. Although Arne Duncan has said that any state data will not be connected to and collected by the federal government, it appears as though this is a flat out lie.
Here is what Duncan stated earlier this summer about the data collection that will take place:
Pardon me while I scroll back up and re-read a paragraph…yes, here it is: The data system will interface with the Oregon Department of Education Longitudinal Data System, thus providing data on children from birth through higher education. As the early learning data system evolves it will integrate with the applicable health and human service data systems.”
And above that we name all the agencies we are collating…the last one mentioned is…Federal Agencies.
Now indulge me as I see a child who is a little behind his peers in reading and math but not exceptionally far behind. What about a kid whose parents have been in the military? How about the kid who has had the flu a couple times this year. And Lord, please protect any child who might live with a smoker!
What’s going to happen to them? “Well meaning” government bureaucrats, under this nightmarish Big Brother scenario, who work for Health and Human Services, can do invasive “home health visits” for those in “high risk” categories.
Those categories include:
• Families where mom is not yet 21;
• Families where someone is a tobacco user;
• Families where children have low student achievement, developmental delays, or disabilities, and
• Families with individuals who are serving or formerly served in the armed forces, including such families that have members of the armed forces who have had multiple deployments outside the United States.
In the above linked article, Constitutional attorney and author Kent Masterson Brown says that even though the government claims it is voluntary, it is not.
Here are 2 scenarios he outlines:
“The eligible entity receiving the grant for performing the home visits is to identify the individuals to be visited and intervene so as to meet the improvement benchmarks,” he said. “A homeschooling family, for instance, may be subject to ‘intervention’ in ‘school readiness’ and ‘social-emotional developmental indicators.’ A farm family may be subject to ‘intervention’ in order to ‘prevent child injuries.’ The sky is the limit.”
“Intervention,” he added, quoting Brown, “may be with any family for any reason. It may also result in the child or children being required to go to certain schools or taking certain medications and vaccines and even having more limited – or no – interaction with parents. The federal government will now set the standards for raising children and will enforce them by home visits.”
So we have massive amounts of information that will be collected under the new early learning initiative. Virtually everything about your child, and yourself, will be included. It all funnels through the myriad governmental agencies and goes straight to the fed. They will even collect information on all of your sources of income and where it comes from.
In case we need further proof that all of this is coming down through the early learning debacle read this last little bit of information: One very important area that is emphasized by HHS is the “development of comprehensive early childhood systems that span the prenatal-through-age-eight continuum.”
Add that with the P-20 system that collects data on kids from Pre-K through college and you have, literally, cradle to career nanny over site on a child’s life.
In fact, it’s before cradle. It’s pre-natal.
All in the name of helping children? I think not. All in the name of power and control. The federal government wants to know everything about you and your child. And this is how they’re doing it.
A sneaky, underhanded, backdoor way of starting an “educational reform” program that when broken down and looked at from all sides, is a way of implementing the federal government into your everyday life.
Even if the Common Core were the best education standards ever implemented and was proven to be the best standards on the planet, we would still have to reject it and all of its data tracking nightmares.
Because just like the Patriot Act that gave the government permission to monitor phones in the United States, where people said, “Just because they CAN spy doesn’t mean they WILL,” well…we all know how that turned out. We can all recall the governmental giant, the IRS, who used and abused their power to threaten and break down conservative groups. That is a scary thought…what happens to the child whose parents are Republicans? Or, under a different regime, Democrats?
You open that door and someone, some administration; some force will go through it. You know that old saying that “You can’t un-ring a bell?”
This leaves me to wonder exactly when they will start requiring stool samples. I know quite a large handful of people who would be more than happy to oblige.
