Missouri Senate Bill 239: No RFID Chips or Polar Bracelets in Missouri?

Senator Ed Emery files a bill in Missouri that would not allow such practices as RFID tracking of students or Polar Go Fit bracelets for tracking information.

Bill Gates, Fairy Tales, Technology, High Stakes Testing and the Sunday Education Weekly Reader 06.10.12

The genius-beasts of reform education and their technological "advances"

Welcome to the Sunday Education Reader for 06.10.12.  Tweets of the week include the oft-dismissed learning discipline of memorization, the joys of using social media in the classroom, the harm to the brain using social media, stress reducing behaviors by students because of high stakes testing...and a story coming out of a science fiction novel (or a Bill Gates grant) on how to determine teacher effectiveness.  This last tweet is really unbelievable.  

• The British system believes fairy tales and memorization of poetry is important in curriculum.  Doesn't sound like American Common Core standards and the emphasis on factual reading....Primary school children to be expected to learn and recite poetry http://gu.com/p/387nm/tf

•  (The principal) replaced the school's "static, boring" website with what has become a heavily used Facebook page, and his teachers encourage students to research, write, edit, perform and publish their work online.  I hope students' jobs are never boring...it will be quite a shock to the students and expectations of life...Making students literate in the digital age http://buff.ly/p7v5M8 

•  Is too much social media a bad thing?....BBC News - Texting at night 'disrupts children's sleep and memory' http://bbc.in/KTmgFl 

•  “Now I have to worry about this, too? Really? This shouldn’t be what they need to do to get where they want to, ” said Dodi Sklar, after listening to her ninth-grade son, Jonathan, describe how some classmates abuse stimulants....Seeking Academic Edge, Teenagers Abuse Stimulants: At high schools across the United States, pressure over g... http://nyti.ms/K9RoB4 nyt

•  And you thought Polar Go Fit bracelets providing student information was invasive?  Now your human capital can wear a bracelet providing information on bodily reaction to teaching methods.  Schools may not have to rely on those assessments after all to determine who is a good teacher or a bad teacher....Is the Galvanic Skin Response bracelet the best education reform idea yet? http://dianeravitch.net/2012/06/09/just-when-you-thought-it-couldnt-get-crazier/

Polar Monitors Used to Track Student Depression, Suicide, Cancer, Alcohol/Drug Use, Sexual Activity? Public Student Data Stored on polargofit.com website

Polar Monitors may not only measure and provided data to schools about physical activity and heart rates in PE classes, there may also be assessments relating to student suicide, depression, cancer and diabetes risk.  It can even track student sexual activity, drug and alcohol use.  The company states this these invasive assessments are only suggested for those students 18 years or older, but is this the type of information that should be gathered by educational institutions on students of any age?  

The circumvention of FERPA law will allow this information to be disseminated on your student to various federal agencies and private companies.  The article contains a nifty link so you can see how this information will be gathered and how with the click of a mouse, broadcast to the cloud(s).


You can also read how school districts are funding these expensive monitors while cutting teachers and support staff.  We'll be writing more about this in the future and provide links so you can determine if your school district is signing onto this program providing your student's data and personal information to entities, probably without your knowledge or active permission.

This is from "Is the Privacy of the American Student at Risk" at The Revered Review:

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School:  A place where children learn to read and write. A place where they learn mathematics, science and history. Moreover, a place, away from home, where children are supposed to be safe.

Yet now it’s a place, across the country, where children’s hearts are being monitored, their activities are being tracked, and it’s being determined if students are obese or overweight. In addition, health risk assessments are being made on students and the information can be stored or saved as a PDF file.

In this physical education class, students are training using spin bicycles. However, in many schools, students are using Polar monitors in physical education classes. (Photo Credit: MJMonty)

Some students across the country, including in many small towns—are now wearing heart rate monitors and activity monitors—sometimes, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week—as part of their schools’ phys ed programs. The New York Post reported that three schools were using these monitors and some, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and parents, questioned the possible intrusion into students’ privacy.

(Link here to continue reading the rest of the article from Revered Review)

Why Should You Stand Up Now?

The catalog of dystopian literature that is required reading for middle and high school is quite large; from 1984, to Brave New World, to The Giver. So you would think that with all of us reading these novels, and seeing the wretched outcome which began with the best intentions, we would be on our guard against having any of that happen in our real world. Unfortunately, these books tend to plop you down in the middle of the new "utopian" society and rarely take you through the path that society traveled to get there. Recognizing that path is critical to preventing society from ending up in the dystopia. Andy Andrews has written a book that brings that path into focus as he tries to answer the question, "How Do You Kill 11 Million People?"

The book is a short read but it effectively lays out the position that we at MEW have been trying to make for almost  a year now. Andrews chooses to examine, from among many possible examples, the way the Nazi government was able to eradicate 11 million people with the minimal use of force and personnel. Through a policy of lies and incremental changes, they were able to ultimately herd people, who sometimes outnumbered the Nazi guards 100:1, to the concentration camps. The general public was not willing to envision where the incremental changes being imposed might be going.  By the time they were confronted with that reality, their fellow citizens were passing through their towns in cattle cars toward the death camps.  Even then many were not willing to face their own failure to stop the small changes that were made earlier.

One particularly chilling passage from Pastor Erwin Lutzer's book When a Nation Forgets God, illustrates how human tendencies can lead to such horrific outcomes.  A German eyewitness recalls what people thought in the last 30's. (emphasis mine),

We heard stories of what was happening to the Jews, but we tried to distance ourselves from it, because we felt, what could anyone do to stop it?

Each Sunday morning we would hear the train whistle blowing in the distance, when the wheels coming over the tracks.  We became disturbed when we heard cries coming from the train as it passed by. We realized that it was carrying Jews like cattle in the cars!

Week after week the whistle would blow.  We dreaded to hear the sounds of those wheels because we knew that we would hear the cries of the Jews en route to a death camp. Their screams tormented us.

We knew the time the train was coming and when we heard the whistle blow we began singing hymns. By the time the train came past our church, we were singing at the top of our voices.  If we heard the screams, we sang the more loudly and soon we heard them no more.

Years have passed and no one talks about it now, but I still hear that train whistle in my sleep.

The German people were not uneducated or ill informed.  They had a great Prussian education system and lots of news sources. But their leaders delivered the ultimate plan to them in stages and lied to them during the implementation phases to keep the people from rising up when they surely had the numbers (and clean conscience) to put a stop to it.  This is why groups like Missouri Education Watchdog, Homeschooling United, and Truth in American Education are trying to expose the grand plan for education and get parents to speak up when the incremental changes are being imposed.

So yes, Parkway PE teachers may have just wanted a fun tool to get kids to think about exercising more.  But the P20 database is already set up which can track individual student data. So, as long as it's been collected, what's to stop someone from adding the PolarGoFit data in there. (Maybe under: Amount of Non-school Activity Involvement , Health Condition Progress Report,  Overall Health Status)  From this point on, whatever the local school administration intended for that data is irrelevant. The data is out of their hands and the grand plan moves forward.

The plans already exist to share data from the LDS with various government agencies like Health and Human Services. This is where the data gets tied in to Obamacare.  The government already plans to pay for everyone's health care which means they really do care about what you are doing now to maintain good health. They have convinced people that all health care policy will be reasonable and responsible.  How do we know that?  Because they have promised it will all be based on data. Where will HHS get this data?  Why, from the P20 LDS of course. So you can pretty much count on that data about how sedentary you or your child was to be used to make decisions about the type and amount of health care services you or your child receive in the future.  This is not wild conjecture.  This is fact and it is pretty logical. What started as a simple accommodation on your part to wear some sort of tracking device will likely become the means by which you will be denied certain care in the future.

To all the parents who do end up going to their school board to fight against things like the PolarGoFit bracelets or the banning of home-packed lunches, while you may feel a little like someone who brings a tank to a knife fight, keep in mind that you may in fact be dismantling the train tracks before the boxcars can be loaded with human beings.

Why Does the Parkway School District Want to Monitor Physical Activity 24/7 on Students? Is it a "Nudge"? (Video)

We wrote yesterday about children wearing bracelets home in the near future (provided by the Parkway School District) to track their physical activity and sleep patterns.  The plan is to have the children wear them 24/7 for one week and to extract the data on the activity level and sleep information.   The school apparently believes it needs this data to make the correlation between physical activity (one hour of moderate to vigorous activity a day), sleep hours, and academic achievement.

This data will be noted individually and could be applied to an entire class, according to the district from the video on the Parkway's website.  (At the end of this article are notes I typed from the video).  The information on the polargofit bracelets given to the Board members begins around 48:40 and ends at 58:14.  


What is bothersome to me is there is no serious discussion about possible the legality of what the school is proposing in gathering student data, and no mention of parental permission either being sought by the school or given by the parents.   Near the end of the information given by the district employee on the bracelets, there is some laughter (the conversation is muffled) about tracking kids and using GPS's on students. 

I could not determine how much these devices would cost the district in total and I did not see it listed on the published agenda.  Here is a press release about polargofit and its mission:

"Polar Active will forever change the ways teachers educate and students learn PE" said Padovan. "With the activity monitor, students exercise based on their individual fitness level, so it shifts the focus from athletic ability to personal improvement, which is key to developing positive lifelong habits around exercise." PolarGoFit.com PolarGoFit.com is an online web service for teachers and students to monitor and track student activity. This time-saving and flexible portal allows for easy documentation of all activity data, tracking daily and long-term progress and sharing reports with students, parents and school administrators. The ability to evaluate tangible activity data helps to assess students objectively for their effort and results. This also helps encourage and motivate students to stay active for longer periods of time and maintain a healthy weight. 

About Polar Headquartered in Lake Success, NY, Polar USA is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Finland-based Polar Electro OY, which invented the first wireless heart rate monitor (HRM) in 1977. Polar now operates internationally in more than 80 countries. Polar heart rate and fitness assessment technology delivers unparalleled insight into the human body from valuable training guidance and feedback, to enabling individuals to improve their fitness level and sports performance. Polar technology is key to the success of leading fitness facilities, athletic teams, corporate wellness facilities, health insurance providers and thousands of physical education programs around the world. "

Notes from the video:

Video of the School Board Meeting December 7, 2011
http://www.pkwy.k12.mo.us/boe/archive/boe120711.cfm

48:45 starts the discussion of the bracelet. Rough transcript of the conversation. Parenthesis denotes questions from the Board.
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So kids can "self-monitor" moderate to vigorous exercise. Teachers took a class this summer and the teachers wore them through the fall.

Henry, Ross Elementary, Shenandoah Elementary Schools.

Kids see it as a cool gadget.

Goals. Health, fit, active kids ready to learn.

Kids were "jealous" so bracelets will be shared.

Used as much as they can during PE classes.

Ideally, let the kids wear the monitor an entire week 24/7 and look at sleep patterns as well as physical activity patterns. Interested in seeing the results of that and identity correlation between sleep patterns and academic achievement. **MEW comment: Is this the governmental "nudge" touted by Cass Sunstein and our Commissioner of Education Chris Nicastro?**

Start with one grade level and then add grades one at a time.

In physical education for the longest time we've just been looking at fitness data.

We don't want to just assess fitness we want to assess behavioral change w/regard to physical activity patterns with our students and then we know we've done our job and this tool here will help us do that.

(How do you follow this?)

Each day there is a graph and they try to fill up the tube with moderate to strenuous activity. Keeps 7 days worth of data. Teachers download the information in a graph to the parents.

Idea: get them into the hands of the elementary students at the beginning of the new year.

(How do you plan to use the data and how will you run the data)

We are uploading data--body strength, muscle strength--into PARS. Correlate fitness levels to MAP scores, SAT score. Hope to do the same with physical activity.

Will do individually. Sure we will have school data, entire 5th grade, we'll have the ability to track individual students.

(Question about GPS, school cameras, tracking kids. Laughter)

No, they won't be able to track our students.
Ends at 58:14

Related links:


http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2012/01/local-st-louis-schools-use-bracelets-to-monitor-children-at-school-and-at-home/


http://hotair.com/archives/2012/01/04/new-psa-you-should-feel-very-very-badly-about-your-obese-child-you-know/