Common Core: P20 SLDS, a tracking system for your child

Common Core-P20 SLDS, a tracking system for your child

SLDS means: Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems.

SLDS is a citizen tracking program, and a grant program, that rewards states financially for participating.  It’s also called P-20, which stands for preschool through age 20 (workforce) tracking.  I see citizen tracking as creepy and Orwellian.  What do you see?

The federal website shows, here– 

http://www2.ed.gov/programs/slds/factsheet.html 

— that SLDS was presented as a financial prize to states, a grant, under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.  It sounded good, but in reality, its purpose –besides the uneven redistribution of taxpayers’ money– is to track citizens (students).

The assumption was that everyone everywhere would approve of citizen tracking and would want to be tracked.  A secondary assumption is that the government’s holding detailed, intimate information about its citizens would never be used against anybody wrongly, and that none of this has nothing to do with constitutional rights to privacy.  (For more on that, click here: 

http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/rightofprivacy.html )

I highlighted the first element of data to be collected because it speaks about PII, personally identifiable information.  PII can be a name, a social security number, a blood sample, handwriting sample, a fingerprint, or almost anything else.  The fact that the government included “except as permitted by federal/state law” is VERY significant because the federal Department of Education did the dastardly deed of changing federal privacy law, known previously as the protective, family-empowering, FERPA law.  The Department of Education did this without Congressional approval and are now being sued by the Electronic Privacy Information Center for doing it.  But as it stands now, FERPA has been altered and won’t be put back to its formerly protective state.  So parental rights over children’s data, and parental consent rules, have been cast aside.  –All in the name of getting lots and lots and lots of data available, whether with malignant or benign intention, especially for federal use.

Here it is, pasted directly from the government site and available in English or Spanish:

en Español

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: $250 million

Grantees: States

Type of Grant: Competitive

Purpose:

The program provides grants to states to design, develop, and implement statewide P-20 longitudinal data systems to capture, analyze, and use student data from preschool to high school, college, and the workforce.

Program Requirements:

Since it started in fiscal year 2005, the program has awarded grants worth $265 million to 41 states and the District of Columbia. The Recovery Act competition requires that the data systems have the capacity to link preschool, K-12, and postsecondary education as well as workforce data. To receive State Fiscal Stabilization Funds, a state must provide an assurance that it will establish a longitudinal data system that includes the 12 elements described in the America COMPETES Act, and any data system developed with Statewide longitudinal data system funds must include at least these 12 elements. The elements are:

An unique identifier for every student that does not permit a student to be individually identified (except as permitted by federal and state law);
The school enrollment history, demographic characteristics, and program participation record of every student;
Information on when a student enrolls, transfers, drops out, or graduates from a school;
Students scores on tests required by the Elementary and Secondary Education Act;
Information on students who are not tested, by grade and subject;
Students scores on tests measuring whether they’re ready for college;
A way to identify teachers and to match teachers to their students;
Information from students’ transcripts, specifically courses taken and grades earned;
Data on students’ success in college, including whether they enrolled in remedial courses;
Data on whether K-12 students are prepared to succeed in college;
A system of auditing data for quality, validity, and reliability; and
The ability to share data from preschool through postsecondary education data systems.

BCN Editorial and summation:

An excerpt from the web site below:

http://www.tn.gov/firsttothetop/programs-data.html

“Many conditions in addition to students’ academic experience influence learning and the Tennessee Department of Education will bolster the current longitudinal data system by adding information from other child serving agencies like the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services to inform best practices and help reduce achievement gaps in the near- and long-term.”

This is a compilation of sensitive information, from different federal agencies, being placed in your child’s P 20 database, to follow him or her into adulthood, possibly contributing to an influence on their job hunt with eventual prospective employers. 

It used to be water under the bridge if your child was unfortunately molested, abused or had some behavioral type problem. It used to be hopeful that enough time would elapse between the event and adulthood and the issue would be long dealt with and forgotten. 

Today,with the assistance of the P20 database, this information will follow your child well  into adulthood and be in full display for every teacher and employer to view and make employment decisions based on this data.

The site further explains,
“Tennessee will build a longitudinal student data system that will push the frontier in collection and utilization of P20 data and promote improvements in program administration and educational outcomes. The initiative will significantly increase teacher, school, and district-level use of near-real time student data by employing sophisticated, as yet underutilized longitudinal data for predictive and retrospective identification of student achievement growth and academic risk factors.”

Perhaps the P20 will get as invasive as Common Core amasses large amounts of personal information about students. Michelle Malkin cites research by Joy Pullmann of the Heartland Institute, who discovered a report by the Department of Education revealing that Common Core’s data mining includes “using cameras to judge facial expressions, an electronic seat that judges posture, a pressure-sensitive computer mouse and a biometric wrap on kids’ wrists.”

“Pushing the frontier”, “real time data”, “as yet underutilized data collection.” This tells me that many, yet not mentioned data points will be collected on your child. Perhaps, religious affiliation, blood type, DNA map, fingerprints or parents affiliations or political leanings. I don’t know but the “frontier” is wide open and once established the sky could be the limit.

Source of info:

What is SLDS and Why Should I Care?

P20 database program:
http://www.tn.gov/firsttothetop/programs-data.html

http://m.christianpost.com/news/common-core-cirriculum-a-look-behind-the-curtain-of-hidden-language–92070/

I encourage you to visit this blog frequently. It is full of information on this subject.

While BCN interjected opinion into the article above the whatiscommoncore.wordpress.com blog is to receive full credit for their content.