EdAction
Maple River Education Coalition PAC
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Chaska, MN  55318 
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December 6, 2001

HR1 Doublespeak Continues - Student Testing and Privacy Protection?

by Karen R. Effrem, MD
Maple River Education Coalition Board of Directors

The November 26th summary from the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on the HR1/S1 conference report proposals to be ratified Thursday, December 6th, contains many positive statements.

A first reading should give hope to those who want the federal government to stop its incessant probing of children’s attitudes and beliefs via assessments that are supposed to measure academics and the accumulation of every last detail of student and family life. Sadly however, the contradictions continue in the summary even without the final language. Most of these supposed "protections" are an illusion. They will not stop the federal takeover of education contained in this 1000 pages of mandates and regulations.

Our alert of December 4th explained how the NAEP will be the national test even though that is supposed to be prohibited, and how in fact, it is being used for rewards and sanctions via the states even though the summary says no rewards and sanctions will be based on the NAEP.

Here are several more contradictions and questions raised by this summary regarding the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) requirement, what it assesses, and the data privacy ramifications:

  1. According to the summary, the law will be "ensuring that students understand they do not have to take the test and do not have to finish the test or answer questions they are uncomfortable answering." Really?

    This sounds nice, but how? In Minnesota, students already are not required to take the NAEP or the state assessments, but are never told that, and are often coerced into doing so. Will this be any different?

    How will the law ensure "that students understand they do not have to take the test" while at the same time "require a small sample of students in each state to participate in the … NAEP"?

    If the NAEP primarily asked true academic questions, instead of probing personal data and belief, students would not have to be ensured that they "do not have to ... answer questions they are uncomfortable answering."
  2. "The summary says that the bill requires "the Education Department, in consultation with Congress, to review concerns regarding the content of NAEP and whether or not it is appropriate to use NAEP as a ‘high stakes’ test, including financial consequences."

    This is a very good idea. Why was this not done before changing the law to "require" a small sample of students in each state to participate in the … NAEP?" The content clearly shows that a majority of questions evaluate attitudes and beliefs instead of academics. (See the NAEP Test.)

    There is evidence from as far back as 1969 that this has been the plan all along. In her book, Cloning of the American Mind, Beverly Eakman analyses a book by Walcott Beatty, Improving Educational Assessment and an Inventory of Measures of Affective Behavior. Her analysis reveals:

    "… federal funding for schools would hinge on data collection at the local level and the use of national testing [NAEP] objectives in obtaining this data, including information on attitudes and opinions, would be the key …. Beatty emphasized the collection of non-cognitive information, with the caveat that the whole arrangement avoid the appearance (emphasis by Eakman) of establishing a national test or curricula." (p. 76)

  3. The bill tries to allay this concern by "adding language requiring that questions be objectively scored and do not ask students to publicly disclose personal or family beliefs or attitudes: ‘such assessments shall use widely accepted professional testing standards, objectively measure academic achievement, knowledge and skills, be tests that do not evaluate or assess personal or family beliefs and attitudes or disclose personally identifiable information.’" This is excellent language and the Committee and Chairman Boehner are to be commended for working to keep it in the conference report.

    However, if the final language does not contain a penalty for violation of this section, it will be ignored. If it is not ignored in this administration, it will be ignored in the next. We should not have to depend on the whims of bureaucracy for our children’s freedom.
  4. We are also told that the law will be "ensuring that the background questions for all NAEP tests are limited in scope and directly related to gathering the necessary information." How much personal data is "necessary?" In whose opinion? Aren’t the questions about the parents’ level of education, what kind of reading material is in the home, and whether the student attended Head Start already considered "necessary" by some education bureaucrat? (See the NAEP Test.)

    Such detailed information would not be "necessary" if the federal government was not interfering in education that should be locally controlled, if it was assessing real academic achievement, and if it was not keeping dossiers on every public school student in America. (See number 5 below).
  5. "No Child Left Behind" will supposedly be "limiting the conditions on collecting personally identifiable information, including a prohibition on the federal government maintaining records containing such information."

    Does this mean the entire National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) infrastructure will be dismantled? Will the 300 page NCES data handbook, directing schools to collect the NAEP and state assessment data, as well as religion, mental health data, housing data, mothers’ prenatal data, and such important academic data as the oral soft tissue condition of the mouth, cease to exist? (http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2000343)

    Will those 29 organizations like the Department of Defense and the Rand Corporation and all the national testing companies that make the state assessments stop automatically getting the NAEP data? (See Eakman, p. 70-71) I have already been told the answer to this is no by a prominent education staffer. Until the NCES and all of the other federal data banks like SPEEDE/ExPRESS that keep reams of personal data on students for life are defunded, this assurance is meaningless.

    (For more information on Student Data Collection, see Congressional testimony, and Part I of Beverly Eakman’s book, Cloning of the American Mind: Eradicating morality through education, Huntington House, Lafayette, Louisiana, 1999)
  6. Another assurance meant to calm opposition to the NAEP as the national test is "making the test more accessible to parents and more responsive to their concerns, while protecting the integrity of the test data."

    The only way to make the NAEP more responsive to parental concerns is not to make it the national test by requiring it as the "validation" of the assessments, based on federally required non-academic standards, such as the civics and government standards of the Center for Civic Education and Goals 2000. It will be responsive when it does not assess attitudes an beliefs and demand personal and family data.

The 4th Amendment to the US Constitution says that Americans, including our precious children, are "to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures..." How can our children be "secure in their persons" when the federal government is collecting and storing vast amounts of personal data and intimate thoughts and beliefs of these innocent school children? Congress seems to be agreeing with Paul Popenoe of the American Eugenics Society and editor of the Journal of Heredity, who said in 1926 as quoted on the cover page of Eakman’s book:

"The educational system should be a sieve, through which all the children of the country are passed ... It is very desirable that no child escape inspection ..."

The 10th Amendment says, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people. There is absolutely nothing in the Constitution about federal control of education, a national psychological assessment masquerading as an academic test, a national curriculum, or federal student data banks.

Congress needs to reject this unconstitutional federal invasion of education and privacy. If it passes, the President should veto it. If he signs it, the Supreme Court should strike it down. To paraphrase Moses, "Let our children go."