Tag Archives: Barack Hussein Obama

Jun 6 2015

Vitter’s Student Data Privacy Bill Gains Grassroots Support


MAY 14, 2015 BY SHANE VANDER HART 

http://truthinamericaneducation.com/privacy-issues-state-longitudinal-data-systems/vitters-student-data-privacy-bill-gains-grassroots-support/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TruthInAmericanEducation+%28Truth+in+American+Education%29

 

U.S. Senator David Vitter (R-LA) introduced the “Student Privacy Protection Act,”  a bill that addresses problems with FERPA and would amend the General Education Provisions Act to strengthen student privacy.  Numerous grassroots activists representing 32 different organizations released a joint statement.

“Parents are right to feel betrayed when schools collect and release information about their kids. This is real, sensitive information – and it doesn’t belong to some bureaucrat in Washington D.C.,” Vitter said. “We need to make sure that parents and students have complete control over their own information.”

The bill summary Vitter’s office released lists four actions this bill would implement if passed.

Rolling Back Department of Education Regulations:

  • The Student Privacy Protection Act would reinstate FERPA’s original protections by clarifying who can access student data and what information is accessible. It also requires explicit authority for authorized representatives to conduct audits and evaluations of education programs.
  • ED regulations in these three areas expanded the amount of information available without prior consent of a parent or student, as well as when and to whom that information could be released

Ensuring Parental Consent in All Cases

  • The bill implements new, more robust guidelines, in order to protect student privacy, for schools and educational agencies to release education records to third parties, even in cases of recordkeeping.
  • These entities will be required to gain prior consent from students or parents and implement measures to ensure records remain private. Further, educational agencies, schools, and third parties will be held liable for violations of the law through monetary fines.

Extending Privacy Protections to Home School Students

  • FERPA does not currently apply to students who do not attend a traditional education institution, such as students who are homeschooled, despite some states requiring homeschoolers to file information with their school district.
  • This bill extends FERPA’s protections to ensure records of homeschooled students are treated equally.

Limits Appending Data and Collection of Additional Information

  • The bill prohibits educational agencies, schools, and the Secretary of Education from including personally identifiable information obtained from Federal or State agencies through data matches in student data.
  • Federal education funds will be prohibited from being used to collect any psychological or behavioral information through any survey or assessment.

Below is the joint statement and the groups represented.

We; the undersigned groups that have grave concerns about the loss of student and family data privacy, psychological profiling, and career tracking related to the Common Core standards, aligned state tests and longitudinal data systems; are grateful to Senator David Vitter for introducing and do strongly support The Student Privacy Protection Act.

This legislation provides important protections in the following areas:

  • Rolling back the disastrous extra-congressional regulatory changes that vastly expanded access of third parties to our children’s personally identifiable data, now limiting that access and requiring parental consent in all cases
  • Holding educational agencies, schools, and third parties liable for violations of the law through monetary fines, damages, and court costs
  • Prohibiting psychological or attitudinal profiling of students or gathering of sensitive family information via any assessments, including academic assessments or surveys
  • Extending data protections for homes chooled students required to submit educational data to public school districts
  • Prohibiting educational agencies, schools, and the Secretary of Education from including personally identifiable information obtained from Federal or State agencies through data matches in student data.
  • Banning Federal education funds to states or districts that film, record, or monitor students or teachers in the classroom or remotely without parent or adult student and teacher consent.

We strongly urge the senators of our respective states to co-sponsor this critically important piece of legislation and our congressional representatives to author and co-sponsor this bill in the US House.

Organizations supporting:

  • American Principles in Action
  • Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee
  • Eagle Forum
  • Education Liberty Watch
  • Home School Legal Defense Association
  • Women on the Wall
  • Special Ed Advocates to Stop Common Core
  • Stop Early Childhood Common Core
  • Arkansans for Education Freedom
  • Arkansas Against Common Core
  • The Florida Stop Common Core Coalition
  • Florida Parents RISE
  • The Tea Party Network
  • Georgians to Stop Common Core
  • Opt Out Georgia
  • Idahoans for Local Education
  • Hoosiers Against Common Core
  • Iowa RestorEd
  • Iowa for Student Achievement
  • Kansans Against Common Core
  • Louisiana  Against Common Core
  • Common Core Forum
  • Stop Common Core Massachusetts
  • Stop Common Core in Michigan, Inc.
  • Minnesotans Against Common Core
  • Missouri Coalition Against Common Core
  • South Dakotans Against Common Core
  • Tennessee Against Common Core
  • Truth in Texas Education  
  • Truth in Catholic Education  
  • WV Against Common Core
  • Wyoming Citizens Opposing Common Core
Jun 5 2015

Ellen Nakashima: With a Series of Major Hacks, China Builds a Database on Americans


What they may also be doing is getting information on those they will need to eliminate after they take us over.

Pundit Planet's avatarpundit from another planet

DigitalDC

China hacked into the federal government’s network, compromising four million current and former employees

Ellen Nakashima reports: China is building massive databases of Americans’ personal information by hacking government agencies and U.S. health-care companies, using a high-tech tactic to achieve an age-old goal of espionage: recruiting spies or gaining more information on an adversary, U.S. officials and analysts say.

“This is part of their strategic goal — to increase their intelligence collection via big data theft and big data aggregation. It’s part of a strategic plan.”

— U.S. government official, on condition of anonymity

Groups of hackers working for the Chinese government have compromised the networks of the Office of Personnel Management, which holds data on millions of current and former federal employees, as well as the health insurance giant Anthem, among other targets, the officials and researchers said.

Hong-Lei

“We wish the United States would not be full of suspicions, catching…

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Jun 5 2015

Taking ‘America’ Out of US History


Subject: NY Post: Taking ‘America’ Out of US History

A stellar group of American historians and academics released a milestone open letter Tuesday in protest of deleterious changes to the Advanced Placement US History (or APUSH) exam.

The signatories are bold intellectual bulwarks against increasing progressive attacks in the classroom on America’s unique ideals and institutions.

Parents in my state of Colorado have been mocked and demonized for helping to lead the fight against the anti-American changes to APUSH. But if there’s any hope at all in salvaging local control over our kids’ curriculum, it’s in the willingness of a broad coalition of educators and parents to join the front lines for battles exactly like this one.

As the 55 distinguished members of the National Association of Scholars explained this week, the teaching of American history faces “a grave new risk.”

So-called “reforms” by the College Board, which holds a virtual monopoly on AP testing across the country, “abandon a rigorous insistence on content” in favor of downplaying “American citizenship and American world leadership in favor of a more global and transnational perspective.”

The framework eschews vivid, content-rich history lessons on the Constitution for “such abstractions as ‘identity,’ ‘peopling,’ ‘work, exchange and technology,’ and ‘human geography’ while downplaying essential subjects, such as the sources, meaning and development of America’s ideals and political institutions.”

The scholars, who hail from institutions ranging from Notre Dame and Stanford to the University of Virginia, Baylor, CUNY, Georgetown and Ohio State, decried the aggressive centralization of power over how teachers can teach the story of America.

This is not a bug. It’s a feature.

These so-called reforms by the College Board, after all, are part and parcel of a radical upheaval in testing, textbooks and educational technology. It’s no coincidence College Board President David Coleman supervised the Beltway operation that drafted, disseminated and profits from the federal Common Core standards.

The social-justice warriors of government education have long sought, as the NAS signatories correctly diagnosed it, “to de-center American history and subordinate it to a global and heavily social-scientific perspective.”

Their mission isn’t to impart knowledge, but to instigate racial, social and class divisions. Their mission is not to assimilate new generations of students into the American way of life, but to turn them against capitalism, individualism and American exceptionalism in favor of left-wing activism and poisonous identity politics.

Teachers, according to the late far-left historian Howard Zinn, aim to “empower” student collectivism by emphasizing “the role of working people, women, people of color and organized social movements.” School officials aren’t facilitators of intellectual inquiry, but leaders of “social struggle.”

The APUSH critics make clear in their protest letter that they champion a “warts and all” pedagogical approach to their US history lessons. But they point out that “elections, wars, diplomacy, inventions, discoveries — all these formerly central subjects tend to dissolve into the vagaries of identity-group conflict” as a result of the history-exam overhaul.

‘‘Gone is the idea that history should provide a fund of compelling stories about exemplary people and events,” the scholars point out. “No longer will students hear about America as a dynamic and exemplary nation, flawed in many respects, but whose citizens have striven through the years toward the more perfect realization of its professed ideals.”

This is precisely why I dedicated the past two years to writing my latest book, “Who Built That: Awe-Inspiring Stories of American Tinkerpreneurs.”

When it comes to understanding our free-market economy, the Founding Fathers’ embrace of private profit as a public good, and the boundless entrepreneurial success stories of individual American achievement, our children’s diet is woefully unbalanced.

Reclaiming our kids’ minds begins long before students reach the AP US history classroom. Restoration begins at home.

malkinblog@gmail.com

Jun 5 2015

Afterburner with Bill Whittle: ‘The Tomorrowland Lie’


Apparently George Clooney is in a new movie entitled Tomorrowland. In Bill Whittle’s new Afterburner video which is called “The Tomorrowland Lie” he takes on the message of this movie.

Jun 4 2015

Thomas Sowell explains how and why political race hustlers act the way they do


Paying the Price — Kinder, gentler policing isn’t making Baltimore safer.

Re-Posted from the American Spectator

By – 6.2.15

Baltimore is now paying the price for irresponsible words and actions, not only by young thugs in the streets, but also by its mayor and the state prosecutor, both of whom threw the police to the wolves, in order to curry favor with local voters.

Now murders in Baltimore in May have been more than double what they were in May last year, and higher than in any May in the past 15 years. Meanwhile, the number of arrests is down by more than 50 percent.

Various other communities across the country are experiencing very similar explosions of crime and reductions of arrests, in the wake of anti-police mob rampages from coast to coast that the media sanitize as “protests.”

None of this should be surprising. In her carefully researched 2010 book, Are Cops Racist? Heather Mac Donald pointed out that, after anti-police campaigns, cops tended to do less policing and criminals tended to commit more crimes.

If all this has been known for years, why do the same mistakes keep getting made?

Mainly because it is not a mistake for those people who are looking out for their own political careers. Critics who accuse the mayor of Baltimore and the Maryland prosecutor of incompetence, for their irresponsible words and actions, are ignoring the possibility that these two elected officials are protecting and promoting their own chances of remaining in office or of moving on up to higher offices.

Racial demagoguery gains votes for politicians, money for race-hustling lawyers and a combination of money, power, and notoriety for armies of professional activists, ideologues, and shakedown artists.

So let’s not be so quick to say that people are incompetent when they say things that make no sense to us. Attacking the police makes sense in terms of politicians’ personal interests, and often in terms of the media’s personal interests or ideological leanings, even if what they say bears little or no resemblance to the facts.

Of course, all these benefits have costs. There is no free lunch. But the costs are paid by others, including men, women, and children who are paying with their lives in ghettos around the country, as politicians think of ever more ways they can restrict or scapegoat the police.

The Obama administration’s Department of Justice has been leading the charge, when it comes to presuming the police to be guilty — not only until proven innocent, but even after grand juries have gone over all the facts and acquitted the police.

Not only Attorney General Holder, but President Obama himself, has repeatedly come out with public statements against the police in racial cases, long before the full facts were known. Nor have they confined their intervention to inflammatory words.

The Department of Justice has threatened various local police departments with lawsuits unless they adopt the federal government’s ideas about how police work should be done.

The high cost of lawsuits virtually guarantees that the local police department is going to have to settle the case by bowing to the Justice Department’s demands — not on the merits, but because the federal government has a lot more money than a local police department, and can litigate the case until the local police department runs out of the money needed to do its work.

By and large, what the federal government imposes on local police departments may be summarized as kinder, gentler policing. This is not a new idea, nor an idea that has not been tested in practice.

It was tested in New York under Mayor David Dinkins more than 20 years ago. The opposite approach was also tested when Dinkins was succeeded as mayor by Rudolph Giuliani, who imposed tough policing policies — which brought the murder rate down to a fraction of what it had been under Dinkins.

Unfortunately, when some people experience years of safety, they assume that means that there are no dangers. That is why New York’s current mayor is moving back in the direction of Mayor Dinkins. It is also the politically expedient thing to do.

And innocent men, women, and children — most of them black — will pay with their lives in New York, as they have in Baltimore and elsewhere.
Read more at http://spectator.org/articles/62918/paying-price

Jun 4 2015

Why Internet Freedom Is At Stake


No large government can tolerate something that they can not control and so we will see this is 3 to 6 years. They will be Taxes, fees, permits, licenses and more and we are not even talking content control which will be there as well.

PA Pundits - International's avatarPA Pundits International

The Heritage Foundation is granted the right to reproduce this photograph in print and electronic formats, including reproduction by 3rd parties, excluding use in paid advertising space and book covers. Use in paid advertising space and book covers available by separate licensing agreement. Photograph © David Hills. All other rights reserved.

By Brett Schaefer ~

Over the past 25 years, the Internet has gone from a relatively unknown arena populated primarily by academics, government employees, researchers and other technical experts into a nearly ubiquitous presence that contributes fundamentally and massively to communication, innovation and commerce.

150603_InternetFreedom-1250x650 Photo: iStockphoto

It is unsurprising that, as the Internet has expanded in importance, calls for increased governance have also multiplied.

Some governance of the Internet, such as measures to make sure that Internet addresses are unique, and that changes to the root servers are conducted in a reliable and non-disruptive manner, is necessary merely to ensure that it operates smoothly. That’s why it has been in place for decades.

A great factor in the growth and success of the Internet, from which nearly everyone has benefited directly or indirectly, is that governance has been light and relatively non-intrusive.

Some want this to change, particularly governments eager to enhance their…

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Jun 3 2015

Texas Police Play “lets make a deal” With The Constitution – Twenty Five Waco “Twin Peaks” Bikers Released Since Bond Negotiations Began Last Thursday….


I’m not a biker but I think this incident was planed

Jun 3 2015

Mystery Behind Secret Surveillance Planes Hovering Over U.S. Revealed


The Fed’s know that what they are doing to change our form of government is wrong and not supported by the citizens of this country so they will try anything to hide the truth.

Jun 3 2015

FBI says privacy must take backseat to national security in online fight against ISIS


The government is now totally out of control!

Jun 3 2015

Israel is our last hope for preventing Iran from having a Nuclear Bomb


John Bolton

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/196103#.VW1Udc9Viko

Ambassador Bolton Says Israel Must Strike Iran Soon

Clock running out as Iran marches to nuclear arsenal with ‘legitimization’ of deal, which is part of Obama’s ‘wrong ideology. Obama and Kerry want Iran to have a nuclear bomb as they see it as making the world better because it equalizes things. They are, of course, both totally insane!