The Obama administration, shortly after taking control of the federal bureaucracy, changed student privacy laws so that government can track their progress from “cradle to career,” monitoring everything from math and reading skills to values, opinions and attitudes.
More and more people don’t like that. And they are just saying “no” to the government.
It is the amount of student data being collected that ballooned under the new Common Core national education standards, fueled fears of abuse and sparked a growing backlash against the testing system used to scoop up highly personal information.
The “opt out” movement in which parents opt their children out of the standardized tests has spread in recent weeks from New York to Georgia to Alabama.
Some teachers have also started to buck the system. Just last week teachers at Prospect Heights International School in Brooklyn, NY, refused to administer a standardized test tied to Common Core.
The cost of resisting, however, can be steep.
Meg Norris was forced out of her job as a Hall County, Ga., teacher last year after she ran afoul of mandatory testing for Common Core.
“We were one of the first counties in the nation to implement Common Core, and at first the teachers felt like we were special, we were all excited. I drank the Kool-Aid,” said Norris. “But after teaching Common Core in my class for about 18 months, I started seeing a lot of behaviors in my students that I hadn’t seen before. They started becoming extremely frustrated and at that age, 12 years old, they can’t verbalize why they couldn’t ‘get it.’”
The frustration, she believes, came from Georgia’s adoption of a set of unproven educational standards and then constantly testing students against those standards. Some schools administer up to a dozen or more high-stakes tests in a single school year.
“I had some kids that were cutting themselves, some were crying, some would stab themselves in the legs with their pencils,” Norris said.
One of the complaints about Common Core standards voiced by Norris and other teachers is that they require pre-teens to learn abstract concepts their brains aren’t yet able to grasp.
One day a student came up to Norris and asked, “Do we have to take the test?”
“No, you don’t have to do anything your parents don’t want you to do,” Norris responded.
That was when the school district opened a secretive internal investigation on its wayward teacher and she resigned.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/05/education-no-its-about-data-mining/#1xPmqferueUJpgPx.99
More and more people don’t like that. And they are just saying “no” to the government.
It is the amount of student data being collected that ballooned under the new Common Core national education standards, fueled fears of abuse and sparked a growing backlash against the testing system used to scoop up highly personal information.
The “opt out” movement in which parents opt their children out of the standardized tests has spread in recent weeks from New York to Georgia to Alabama.
Some teachers have also started to buck the system. Just last week teachers at Prospect Heights International School in Brooklyn, NY, refused to administer a standardized test tied to Common Core.
The cost of resisting, however, can be steep.
Meg Norris was forced out of her job as a Hall County, Ga., teacher last year after she ran afoul of mandatory testing for Common Core.
“We were one of the first counties in the nation to implement Common Core, and at first the teachers felt like we were special, we were all excited. I drank the Kool-Aid,” said Norris. “But after teaching Common Core in my class for about 18 months, I started seeing a lot of behaviors in my students that I hadn’t seen before. They started becoming extremely frustrated and at that age, 12 years old, they can’t verbalize why they couldn’t ‘get it.’”
The frustration, she believes, came from Georgia’s adoption of a set of unproven educational standards and then constantly testing students against those standards. Some schools administer up to a dozen or more high-stakes tests in a single school year.
“I had some kids that were cutting themselves, some were crying, some would stab themselves in the legs with their pencils,” Norris said.
One of the complaints about Common Core standards voiced by Norris and other teachers is that they require pre-teens to learn abstract concepts their brains aren’t yet able to grasp.
One day a student came up to Norris and asked, “Do we have to take the test?”
“No, you don’t have to do anything your parents don’t want you to do,” Norris responded.
That was when the school district opened a secretive internal investigation on its wayward teacher and she resigned.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/05/education-no-its-about-data-mining/#1xPmqferueUJpgPx.99
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