Whose Children Are They?

"We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children: your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are our children. So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities."
Melissa Harris-Perry, a professor of political science at Tulane University and MSNBC host

Professor Harris-Perry’s sentiment is not limited to MSNBC.

The U.S. Department of Education agrees with her words. The Department has granted States waivers from the No Child Left Behind program if they participate in the Common Core Standards initiative funded through President Obama’s Race to the Top grants.

States have applied for and received Race to the Top grant money. Their grant applications act as the contracts between the federal government and the participating state. Once the state has received the funds, they are legally obligated to honor the words of their grant applications.

In short, each participating state agrees to:
• Adopt the national common core standards as the educational objectives for that state, even if that adoption means that the state must either change or abandon their own standards, and provide evidence to the federal government that the state has done so;
• Align all curriculum to the new common standards;
• Create assessments that are based upon the common standards, and demonstrate to the federal government that they are doing so;
• Create and maintain a data base of students and educators to track compliance.

The States participating in the Race to the Top program are demonstrating their compliance by officially joining Consortia. The assessment Consortia is called the Smarted Balance Assessment Consortium. That organization has signed a separate Cooperative Agreement with the U.S. Department of Education. That Cooperative Agreement stipulates that the Consortia will make student-level data available to the federal government on an ongoing basis.

State grant applications clearly state that student data includes information from birth, through early childhood, elementary and secondary school, post-secondary school, and workforce entry. The data includes both academic and demographic information on each child. Parents may not opt their children out of the data system.

When asked, federal officials claim that the national database does not violate privacy laws, so no parental consent is needed by schools to share student records with any "school official" with a "legitimate educational interest" ‒ which includes school-contracted private companies.
This is not the first time that the government has attempted to redefine our children from "family member" to "government property".

So let us begin our work in protecting our little ones with a bit of history. This link will connect you to the video of a presentation I made in 1992 called, "Who Controls Our Children?", which lays out the history, philosophy, and agenda of the re-definers.

In the 1990’s, the government initiatives had different names, and when we beat their programs, they regrouped, and are now trying to achieve the same wrong agenda under new titles.

We need to let them know that their fancy titles don’t change a thing.

Whose children are they? Ours!