New Age Nanny State White Paper
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Social Emotional Learning Issues Page
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Students may suffer tangible harm from SEL assessments or evaluations, even if such reports are accurate. If they are inaccurate or misleading, the damage can be enhanced.
Key to understanding the threat is understanding the nature of modern statewide longitudinal data systems (SLDS). Since 2002, the federal government has incentivized the building of massive SLDS, so that pre-K through 12 student data can be collected and tracked. Most recently, USED’s Race to the Top program awarded over $4 billion to states that agreed to certain federally approved education innovations, including enhanced student-data systems.
One justification offered for this data-grab and data-tracking is to enable teachers to look back throughout a student’s school career to see the results of all his interactions with the school system so far. If a student had a rough sixth-grade year, perhaps with a disciplinary suspension, that difficulty would be preserved in the SLDS for all subsequent teachers to learn about. The SLDS is the end of the “clean slate." ...
Via the 2012 gutting of regulations under the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), this data might also be disclosed to entities in other states or countries and to unlimited researchers who are interested in the emotional makeup of children and adolescents. And under the relaxed regulations, such disclosure of personally identifiable information could occur without parental consent, or even parental knowledge. This could also include sharing sensitive data without consent between the federal government and international agencies, and between government and private entities.
The possibility—or probability—that this data will at some point be hacked is significant. As revealed in two hearings of the U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee,250 USED has shown itself utterly incapable of protecting student information. The same can be said of multiple other federal agencies.
It’s beyond the scope of this paper to examine all the (increasing) gaps in the privacy and security of student data. The bottom line is that any data, SEL or otherwise, included in an SLDS or in the custody of corporate vendors is likely to remain there potentially forever and might be disclosed to all manner of other entities with their own agendas and often without consent.
The goal in such a system shifts from promoting the individual liberty of the student, to promoting the good of corporations and the managed economy.
Government data collection and sharing does not set well with most people. It has always been my observation schools and universities miss the mark, when it comes to guiding graduates toward lucrative career paths.
We are not opposed to more career and vocation assessments, by individual choice, however individual data collation for any purpose is dangerous. The idea that a minor’s personality deficits can be charted and stored in data which follows them to high school and career without knowledge or permission is wrong. We want to see this practice either drastically modified to reflect individual choic
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