Category — Education

A Crucible Moment: College Learning & Democracy’s Future is a report produced by the National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic. Engagement. The Task force was appointed and funded by the Department of Education, and the White House endorsed the subsequent report. It carries forward Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign vow to “transform” the nation, and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s 2013 pledge to do the same to education.

Privacy has no place in the so-called Common Core Standards. The Gates Foundation has contributed $100 million to fund the creation of a database to track public school students‘ information and academic records from kindergarten through high school. This is called the Shared Learning Infrastructure (SLI) and it is now being run by an organization called InBloom, specifically created to operate the system.

Best of all,

InBloom has stated that it “cannot guarantee the security of the information stored … or that the information will not be intercepted when it is being transmitted.”

The 1974 Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) is intended to protect the privacy of student education records. Amendments by the U.S. Department of Education in 2008 and 2011 weakened that protection and diminished parents’ control over who has access to the records.

By altering some definitions and inserting others, the Department increased the number of individuals with access to personally identifiable student information, while foreclosing parents’ ability to object.

Common Core, much like Obama Care, is based on a lie, or more accurately, several lies. Not only are the standards not “world class,” they are not necessarily better than state standards and in many cases, they are not as good.

Stay tuned, as this will be the first of three comprehensive posts this week on this topic.

Once again, the National Association of Scholars provides enlightenment regarding the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). In the Winter 2013 Issue of the NAS publication, Academic Questions, Michael Toscano addresses the question of whether the CCSS was a bottom up, as the public is urged to believe, or a top-down initiative.

Never mind that the FTC lacks authority over non-profits. The small-time tyrants at FTC don’t need to understand progressive ideology to follow their leader. They just do what comes naturally. This time the target is a 100+ year organization dedicated to the promotion of piano playing.

It’s now evident that the president lied about Obama Care. Nancy Pelosi’s comment, “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it,” takes on a whole new meaning. Politics and ideology prevailed over truth, as they always do with this president and deceptions, both overt and covert, abound.

The therapeutic state swallows up everything human on the seemingly rational ground that nothing falls outside the province of health and medicine. – Szasz

Until recently the Family Rights and Privacy Act protected personally identifiable student information from disclosure to outside agencies. However, in 2012 new USDOE regulations nullified those protections. Educational institutions may now release student records to non-governmental agencies without first obtaining parents’ written consent. The new rules also broaden the permissible purposes for which third parties can access students’ records without first notifying parents. Effective safeguards of student identification are noticeably weak.

The IRS and Department of Justice scandals rocking the Obama administration make this a timely review. They demonstrate the consequences of Unlearning Liberty.

The author is a First Amendment lawyer and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), an organization dedicated to defending free speech rights on college and university campuses. FIRE is politically ecumenical, encompassing conservatives, liberals and libertarian free speech warriors. It goes to war and to court to defend students’ and faculties’ First Amendment rights at institutions of higher education.