Arizona State Rep. Mark Finchem, earlier this year, proposed a bill to repeal and replace Common Core. Although the bill passed in the House, it failed by two votes in the Senate.
According to Finchem, one of the most common concerns he heard from parents were related their kids’ personal privacy. Finchem says that “while the media and some members of the Legislature were focused on the standards and curriculum components of the bill, parents and educators were focused on the need to protect our students’ Personally Identifiable Information [PII] and a prohibition against the collection and distribution of it.” The bill also sought to protect parental authority.
On Wednesday, Finchem and his group, a coalition of parents, teachers, and children, who participate in Arizona’s public education system, announced their demand “for relief from the current practices and policies employed by the US Department of Education, Secretary Arnie Duncan et al, Arizona Department of Education, and Superintendent Diane Douglas.”
The federal statute dealing with parental authority and protections for PII is commonly known as FERPA. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (20 U.S.C. § 1232g; 34 CFR Part 99) is a Federal law that was passed and signed into law to protect the privacy of student education records. The law applies to all schools that receive funds under an applicable program of the U.S. Department of Education.
In 2012, President Barak Obama signed an Executive Order directing the US Department of Education [DoED] to make changes to its interpretation of the statute, which it said were necessary because it needed to “judge the effectiveness of government investments in education.” The DoED essentially gave itself permission to distribute “personally identifiable information” about children that participated in government education to departments outside of DoED.
The group is encouraging everyone to visit their website, www.itsmypii.com.
Data mining is big business. As Brad McQueen, author of The Cult of Common Core writes, lead researcher on LearnSphere, Ken Koedinger, a professor of human computer interaction and psychology at Carnegie Mellon, is setting up “another data suctioning/storage system called LearnSphere which will collect “student behavioral” data…” LearnSphere, according to McQueen, “will allow researchers to store their data on their own servers, rather than at a central location, and give them greater control over who can access their data. The Obama administration changed the education privacy regulations (FERPA) so that private companies could suction and store student data without notifying parents or getting their permission.”
According to the article, Part II: Who’s mining your kid’s data?, Arizona’s students’ PII has been “collected and shared with a wide variety of entities for a wide variety of purposes. It also appears that the students, whose data was shared, were not always – either directly – or indirectly – beneficiaries of the “knowledge” gained from their PII.”
Related articles:
Part I: ADE Agrees To Share Students’ Personally Identifiable Information
Opponents to “totally data mined existence” face stiff opposition
Nat’l Science Foundation grants $5M to Carnegie Mellon University to suction student data