News
"Parents' Worst Common Core Fears Materialize" - Sunshine State News Interviews Dr. Effrem
November, 2013The real facts about Common Core associated data privacy problems completely void Politifact's bogus attacks on Dr. Effrem and FSCCC. Nancy Smith, executive editor of Sunshine State News, did an important story on the recent breach of private student data from the inBloom database in Sachem, NY that allowed a hacker to "access records in the Sachem School District and leak personal student data to a web forum. The records included medical and disciplinary reports." (Emphasis added.) Medical records may also include psychological records.
Smith rightly points out the origin of these alarming data privacy problems:
Problem is, the student database is linked both to Common Core and to President Obama's Race to the Top initiative. Those programs together offered school districts $4 billion in grants if they chose to participate. (Emphasis added).
Smith interviewed Dr. Effrem to both gain a Florida perspective on how this data breach is not surprising given Common Core and Race to the Top and how government is gathering this data:
Karen Effrem, M.D., president of Education Liberty Watch and co-founder of Florida Stop Common Core Coalition, called the Long Island incident "more evidence that the student database is not secure."
What's more, these concerns aren't limited to school districts in New York. According to The New American, schools in Delaware, Colorado, Massachusetts, Kentucky, Illinois, Louisiana, Georgia and North Carolina have committed to "pilot testing" and information dissemination by sending students' personal information to the inBloom database.
Effrem told Sunshine State News, "A number of standards will be used for the psychological training of children starting at a young age ... One of the main goals for uniform national assessments is for the federal government to have access to highly personal individual student data.
"It isn't just teachers and school officials who can request and get students' records," Effrem said. "It's also 'a contractor, consultant, volunteer, or other party to whom an agency or institution has outsourced institutional services or functions ...'
"Common Core completely strips the child of privacy," she said.
Effrem has outlined the Common Core process of data collection on the Stop Common Core Coalition website.
Many New York districts are fighting to get out of the inBloom database, but are being held in against their will by the state. These problems will only worsen as the federally funded, federally supervised national tests aligned to the psychosocially based Common Core standards come on line. Both national testing consortia, PARCC and SBAC, have signed agreements to give individual student test data to the federal government that will contain responses to psychological and attitudinal questions.
