Resist Invasion of Privacy at Schools. Hillary Clinton Will be Proud.

Scientific experiment = Creative Dissent.  Become a STEM ready student and constitutional scholar.

Ed Morrissey at HotAir writes about the "Nanny of the Month" and the winner is Northside School District’s requirement for students to wear RFID tags to attend class.  Morrissey links Reason's TV information on the tracking chip program which is not designed so much for educational and alleged safety purposes as it is for government funding:

This month’s lineup of of busybodies includes the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, where administrators may ban booze in dorms–even for students of legal drinking age (guess those college kids would just stay dry!). Then there’s Chi-Town, where officials are using GPS devices to track food trucks to make sure they don’t wander within 200 feet of any fixed businesses that sell food, including convenience stores. Violators could face fines of $2,000. Compare that to the $100 fine you’d face for parking in front of a fire hydrant and you get an idea for just how seriously city officials take the threat of competition. (Good thing the Institute for Justice is on the case.)

 But this time the nanny of the month comes to us from deep in the heart of Texas, where administrators at San Antonio’s Northside school district are tracking kids with radio frequency identification chips. Dozens of electronic readers have been installed in the school’s ceiling panels to keep tabs on the kiddos while they’re at school. The official number-one reason for going RFID is to “increase student safety and security,” but–since district funding goes up when attendance goes up–it’s clearly all about the Benjamins.

 With school-based tracking going back to at least 2004, the Lone Star State has been something of an RFID trailblazer. In fact, Northside is considering expanding the program to cover all of the district’s 97,000 students.

We've written several posts about government agencies tracking children from birth and the reasons why:

• Money
• The establishment of a data system for a managed workforce

However, the most insidious result of these tracking chips and longitudinal data system informatmion is the loss of freedom and practice/ownership/inherent belief of personal responsibility.  The government is now in control of your child's future and you have given it away to a centralized bureaucracy under the guise of advertising campaigns telling you your student will not be successful without the government's knowledge/tracking of personal data.

The comments from the HotAir readers recognize the long term detrimental effects of these political/private relationships and the power afforded to the state and taken away from individuals:

If I had kids I would not want them being conditioned to believe that it is acceptable for the authorities to track their every movement.

 and

administrators at San Antonio’s Northside school district are tracking kids with radio frequency identification chips. Dozens of electronic readers have been installed in the school’s ceiling panels to keep tabs on the kiddos while they’re at school. The official number-one reason for going RFID is to “increase student safety and security,

It is a trade of liberty, for security….and they shall have neither.
This is a ruse, it’s conditioning. Once these kids are trained to give up a little bit, they’ll give a little more. Oh yes, it’s passive monitoring I’m sure.

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made,above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

One reader has a solution  for dissent from these governmental mandates:

Ok. Schools say you have to wear those badges. But I don’t think the regulation says anything about the badges being EFFECTIVE.

Hey, kids! Here’s a hint. Google the phrase “Faraday cage”. For about a buck’s worth of copper screen, you can create an envelope around the badge that will destroy the effectiveness of the tracking device. Resist!

Hillary Clinton should approve of creative dissent and applaud this rejection/circumvention of tracking as she was quoted in 2003: 

"I'm sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and disagree with this administration, somehow you're not patriotic.  We need to stand up and say we're Americans, and we have the right to debate and disagree with any administration."

Try the Faraday cage science experiment.  Doesn't the government tell us it wants STEM ready students?  Explain to your school administration it's your scientific creativity at work to protect your individual liberties.

 

 

A Teacher who knows what Common Core Means to the Teaching Profession

There is an interesting discussion on Hotair.com regarding teacher tenure.  There are some interesting comments specifically about tenure but the conversation expanded on how the real problems in education are much deeper and wider than just teacher tenure.  Read the full article and thread here.

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All I want to do is teach. And I wish people would just let me teach the kids who want to learn. The ones who do not I try my best to inspire.
But in the end, I cannot make them. I should not be held accountable for that.
Badger40 on August 19, 2012 at 2:53 PM

You are absolutely correct. No where in the education “reforms” set forth by this administration or Michelle Rhee (the Democratic progressive Republican RINOs love) is responsibility spelled out for students and parents. What do you do with students who don’t/won’t/can’t learn and parents who don’t/won’t/can’t support their children’s educational progress or lack of progress?

This blaming of teachers (and I know good ones AND bad ones) is a screen for the real problems that plague education and it furthers the privatization movement. But think about it. The privatization is not really “free market”. The charters and vouchers operate under governmental strings. The “entrepreneurs” are using taxpayer money to open these schools, NOT their own money. There’s no gamble. It’s the SAME education.

The teacher tenure issue is something to talk about but it is not the reason schools are in the situation they are in. The reason is local school districts only have the authority to hire teachers and pay for buildings. They can’t set standards, assessments and the curriculum will need to adhere to the Common Core standards. Meanwhile, taxpayers have to pay for whatever expensive boondoggle Congress passes (NCLB) OR the $4.35 Billion check it gave Arne Duncan to “fix” education…it didn’t even VOTE on the plan (Race to the Top) which causes states to sign onto mandates that are unfunded/underfunded. One facet of RTTT, Common Core standards, creates a nationalized curriculum and will cost my state $350 Million (at least) and my state agency is $900 Million underfunded as it is.

Teacher tenure is minor in the big picture and that’s what the elites want people to focus on.

http://www.missourieducationwatchdog.com/2012/01/death-march-takeover-of-american.html

manateespirit on August 19, 2012 at 3:32 PM

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Also – it is time for Conservatives to discuss the coming Common Core Standards authored by Arne Duncan. This is the most insidious attack on local control of education in the history of this nation. I fear it is a done deal and within in 5 years we will have the few remaining teachers with a conscience leaving the system and the children they are forced to leave behind so indoctrinated they will never recover.
InTheBellyoftheBeast on August 19, 2012 at 4:05 PM

I’m sure you’ve been, or will be doing, inservices on this crap. I just got through with 2 days of it.

Now the way they present it, there are some good things about common core. But overall, it steals even more local control from communities. This is an outrageous power grap.

I think it IS a done deal. The state of ND is fed up with NCLB & even if Common Core doesn’t make it, we’ve got something similar they’re implementing called ND Mile. But at least THAT is a state initiative.

This Common Core BS has seriously made me continue considering other employment. I’m really really thinking about quitting teaching here in the next 5 years. I love teaching. I think I was born to do it. But this $hit is just getting more & more ridiculous & I didn’t think that was possible.

Badger40 on August 19, 2012 at 4:59 PM

Don't Worry about what the Legislature would do with Money from Higher Taxes. DESE, Governor Nixon and the State Board are Spending Money the State Doesn't Have Now.

The following was posted on HotAir's Green Room, written by Patrick Ishamel from the Show-Me Institute regarding a St.  Louis Post Dispatch editorial.  The Post Dispatch contends Missouri needs more money (tax increases) for government programs; Ishmael argues the expansion of government programs stifles the free market.  Ishmael believes it would be a nightmare if the Legislature had $4 Billion at its disposal to institute more governmental spending.  

Regarding education in Missouri (and other states), the outrage of the Institute should include concern about the incredible spending of money the state doesn't have for educational mandates that are unconstitutional, unproven, untested and underfunded.  It's  concerning to realize DESE, Governor Nixon and the State Board of Education have already signed us onto to at least $350,000,000 (or more) in unfunded mandates via Common Core standards via the Pioneer Institute study and a $1.6 BILLION early childhood program with Race to the Top type mandates. 

Perhaps the Show-Me Institute should do a study on the debt and mandates these agencies and politicians have signed taxpayers into funding without legislative approval.  Maybe there should be a followup article by the Post Dispatch entitled "Imagine (or, just sit back and watch it happening in real time) how much debt the governor, DESE and the State Board of Education can rack up with nary a legislative vote." 

The legislature has become impotent. It cannot (or will not) stop the actions by governmental agencies, politicians and appointed officials which create more taxpayer debt.  This is evidenced in what has occurred in the signing onto RTTT (or RTTT like mandates), Common Core, and Early Childhood mandates.  It doesn't matter if citizens are taxed an additional $4 Billion; our agencies are instituting  programs (without tax increases) Missouri or the Federal government cannot possibly fund.   The state bill for education alone is approaching an unfunded $2 Billion. 

How's that for a nightmare?

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The Post-Dispatch’s $4 Billion Tax Hike

Missouri’s major dailies have had quite a run over the past few days. Last week, the Kansas City Star told readers that the state’s governor needed “to promote reasonable revenue-enhancing measures” — taxes — and put more money toward state programs. The notion of “government investment” features prominently in the piece, as increasingly has become the case when “revenue-enhancing measures” are suggested, post-Stimulus. What the editorial board doesn’t say is that the city’s own local taxes are already among the highest in the region.

Stratospheric municipal taxes overlayed with an even higher state tax burden? This won’t turn out well.

But yesterday the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Star‘s cross-state peer, spectacularly one-upped the KC paper. Missouri lawmakers are constrained by law in how much they can tax and spend each year and are billions below the statutory limit. How much of that difference would the Post-Dispatch like to spend?

All $4 billion of it.

A lot of folks purchased Mega Millions lottery tickets last week dreaming about what they could do with $640 million. Imagine what $4 billion would do for Missouri.

Let’s be clear: That’s a radical tax hike proposal, tucked into what is otherwise an uninspired editorial about state and local governing responsibilities. Combined state and local tax rates have stayed roughly the same for decades in Missouri, but the Post-Dispatch would have those rates hurdle skyward to provide more public services and somehow, some way, improve the economy above the status quo.

Even the suggestion that raising taxes and spending would help the state makes no sense by the newspaper’s own standards. State and local tax rates have actually increased slightly since 1980, the apparent “good ol’ days” implied by the editorial, from 8.6% then to 9% today. The newspaper can’t even claim that plummeting tax burdens are why Missouri is suffering economically, since by its own metric, taxes have actually increased over the last 30 years.

The proposal is mostly academic here in Missouri, as taxpayers and policy makers in the state would blanche at the thought of such a hike, but that doesn’t mean the suggestion isn’t troubling. If implemented, the plan would have awful real-world implications — giving families less to spend and taking capital out of the market for use in less productive government programs. It’s a roadmap to ruin, and yet the Post-Dispatch apparently doesn’t see it.

“Imagine what $4 billion would do for Missouri”? No, imagine if legislators took their cues from Missouri’s newspapers. What a nightmare that would be.

Does the Government Really Believe in "Choice"? When it Comes to Sex, Yes. Food Choices? Not so Much.

Here is an interesting post on HotAir about the "nudging".

JE Dyer asks, "What if government treated eating the way it treats sex?"

It’s a useful distinction to consider.  A particular moral idea governs left-wing views on social and health matters, and the left’s purpose with political advocacy is to put the power of government behind that view.  By examining the left’s very different policy approaches to eating and sex, we can discern the features of the morality at work.

.....If government treated obesity the way it treats sex, it would encourage schoolchildren to explore their enjoyment of Twinkies, Oreos, and moon pies; it would employ professionals to devise ways of suiting government policies to the principle that our bodies belong to us and we can put whatever we want in our stomachs; it would hold legislative hearings on the overriding importance of the freedom to eat what we want; it would resist the very idea of remedies that involve the individual eating less, or eating different things; it would pay for liposuction, cholesterol drugs, heart surgery, and diabetes-mitigation measures but not for programs of diet and exercise; it would encourage the development of drugs that could prevent fat formation regardless of what one eats; and it would make it a basic human right to be able to eat whatever one wants and have the consequences mitigated by the public. (emphasis added)


This is a most illuminating article on how the government wants to control the behavior of its citizens in a particular direction and it provides excellent examples of "nudging".