Anita Hoge -- The End of Family Privacy Rights

THE END OF FAMILY PRIVACY RIGHTS

By Anita Hoge
October 4, 2013
NewsWithViews.com

Demand an Investigation into FERPA and the Illegal Access to Your Child's Personally Identifiable Information

"The assessment would look beyond academics to get a complete picture of the whole student," stated Jon Erickson of ACT. "There would be interest inventories for students, as well as assessment of behavioral skills for students and teachers to evaluate.”

American citizens must immediately request a federal investigation into the amended regulations of FERPA, Family Education Rights in Privacy Act. Your immediate support AND action are required.

Education has been used to set up data trafficking of personally identifiable information in the United States. Our rights are being trampled on. Your children and grandchildren will be at an incredible risk in the future as federal legislation is being prepared that changes how we teach our children. These are the changes:

There will be no more grades like A,B,C,D or F;
Curriculum will not be based on academics;
Dispositions and values will be tested and remediated;
Competition will be eliminated;
Grade levels will be eliminated;
The school year will no longer be based on 180 days;
Your locally elected school board will become obsolete.

Your child must meet government standards which include changing your child’s values toward socialistic values. Data is given to large foundations and corporations for free so they can develop testing, curriculum, and software to change your child’s values toward government approved attitudes and values. This is a gross violation of your and your child’s individual freedom.

Most people, including our legislators, do not know that FERPA, Family Education Rights in Privacy Act, has changed. Your family privacy is NO LONGER protected. Your children’s personally identifiable information is being given out for FREE to large corporations to research how to "change your children into global citizens."

Our plan is to open a privacy investigation and expose the illegal release of this personal information to foundations, organizations, non-profits, and businesses that will profit from your children's data. The amended FERPA regulations were issued without Congressional oversight. Obama has issued an Executive Order to change how the government and what the government collects on families. A huge shakeup would take place in the U.S. Department of Education IF hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Americans make requests calling for an investigation into the expanded FERPA regulations that exceeded their statutory authority and are contrary to law. We could STOP the illegal rampant research on individual children’s values, attitudes, and dispositions presently called for in the proposed reauthorization of federal legislation, ESEA, Title I, and Special Education funds, IDEA, that will be used to fund remediation of your child's attitudes, values, and dispositions. Your action could place a huge monkey wrench in the cogs of the unruly and unconstitutional U.S. Department of Education.

Please help. Your urgent action is needed.

THERE ARE TWO STEPS:

STEP 1 is a letter to your Congressman and Senator for a federal investigation.

STEP 2 is a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request through your Congressman and Senator for contracts and agreements that will expose who has access to your child's personally identifiable information unknown to you or our legislators.

Questions added at the end of this article must be answered.

Please contact ALL of your legislators TODAY!

STEP 1

Dear Honorable _________

I am requesting a federal investigation into the Family Education Rights in Privacy Act, (FERPA) amended regulations that went into effect January, 2012. It is my understanding that there was no Congressional authorization to expand the FERPA regulations. It is also my understanding that there are certain sections of these FERPA regulations that ALLOW for redisclosed personally identifiable information to be released because of a new definition of “school officials.” The new definition now includes and allows “outside vendors, contractors, non-profits, corporations, and businesses” to access our children's personally identifiable information without informed written parental permission and they may also receive it without any monetary expenditure.

Redisclosure is also allowed to organizations conducting studies for, or on behalf of, educational agencies or institutions to develop, validate, or administer predictive tests and/or to improve instruction.

The extraordinary circumstances of this redisclosure of private information with the "unlocking" of this data will ultimately benefit these corporations and businesses when the information used to research and develop assessments, curriculum, digital software, and teacher training is sold back to our states and local districts. This is appalling. The invasion of privacy of our children and our families is without recourse. This must be stopped.

The trafficking of this information is an invasion of privacy and is unknown to most parents and legislators. But more important, this data is being proposed to be used to develop personalized software career modules and assessments for measuring specific behavioral changes on individual students proposed in the Common Core College and Career Ready Standards that recently included the measurement of values and dispositions. This invasion of privacy becomes an invasion of freedom. Collecting the information is one breach of law. But, the development of techniques and software to change my individual child's attitudes, values, and beliefs is a breach of monumental concern in these United States and violates personal freedom.

I have attached a list of documents that must be requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), so that you may validate who the vendors, non-profits, and businesses are that currently have access to our children's personally identifiable information in written agreements with the U.S. Department of Education and states involved in testing consortiums.

I anxiously await your reaction/reply to these serious concerns and request that a federal investigation into FERPA is done immediately. Please take steps to ensure that our children are protected. All data transfer must be stopped/ frozen until the investigation is closed.

Sincerely,

Anita B Hoge

(taxpayer/parent: please include your snailmail and email address and tel. no.)

STEP 2

Request a Freedom of Information Act, (FOIA) from your US Congressman and Senator for the names of all foundations, contractors, organizations, non-profits, businesses, etc, who have access to and use Personally Identifiable Information, PII. The FOIA list follows:

Freedom of Information Act Requests

RE: Redisclosure of Personally Identifiable Information on Students According to 99.31 of the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act, FERPA (Unknown to Parents and Legislators)

Request the Cooperative Agreements, Memorandums of Understanding, and/or any Written Agreements to be able to access PII, personally identifiable information, between the US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, or Office of Science and Technology and the following:

• Partnership for Assessment of Readiness of College and Careers, PARCC, and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium.

• Florida acting as the fiscal agent for each of the states in the PARCC consortium and Achieve, Inc as project management partner

• Washington State acting as the negotiating partner for each state in the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium and WestEd, the project management partner

• States using the American College Testing, ACT (Aspire, Explore, or Plan,) and/or Pearson, Inc. to measure Common Core Standards.

• Contractors who have been given redisclosed PII on students to develop curriculum, computer adaptive digital software, and/or any testing development. These "school officials" may be identified as private sector contractors, consultants, volunteers, or other parties to whom an agency or institution has outsourced services or functions, including, non-profit organizations, corporations, or businesses to do experimental research, develop curriculum and/ or computer adaptive resources for individual students. These contractors may include Microsoft, Pearson, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Educational Testing Service, ACT and The Center for Disease Control.

• Request the purchase agreement and amount for each written agreement between any "school official" and the US Department of Education, PARCC, and/or Smarter Balanced Assessment, for the purchase of obtained redisclosed data on personally identifiable information, PII, on individual students to develop curricula or computer digital programming or experimental testing materials.

• Request any Requests for Proposal, RFP, or Written Agreements between any private sector working group, defined as a "school official" in FERPA, 99.31, including PARCC, Smarter Balanced Assessment, Wested, or Achieve, ACT or ETS, who are developing and expanding Common Core Standards to new individualized criteria to " improve instruction", called, CCCR, College Career Citizenship Readiness, in which Citizenship measures dispositions and attitudes.

• Request any memorandums of understanding or cooperative agreements to test and measure disposition test items that are " difficult to measure" according to Race to the Top grants that may infringe on personal privacy rights and violate federal law for redisclosing psychological information without informed written parental consent.

• Research using data on individuals as identifiers for interventions for changing dispositions or "improving instruction," without the informed written consent of the parent, violating privacy laws, personal liberty, and illegal access to mental health criteria.

• Request sample test items or test blueprints with scoring criteria that will measure dispositions, values, and non-cognitive areas in the new College Career Citizenship Ready Standards, CCCR, that are being introduced to the Common Core Standards by the CCSSO, ETS, and the Gordon Commission.

Questions that your Senator and Congressman must find answers to:

1. Do these contractors pay for the data on our children? Are they using the data to make a profit?

Example: are contractors developing testing, software, or curriculum that must be paid for by the taxpayer when they get our children's data for free? Most businesses PAY for lists of people; such lists are very expensive.

2. Experts in tax law say that non-profit organizations--like ACT, a testing contractor, Pearson, software publisher, as well as their partnership with the Gates Foundation-- who are creating “a full series of digital instruction resources," appear to be using their tax exempt foundations to push their business interests. Is this a violation of the federal tax code? How many other non-profit organizations are using this data for profit?

"The program ACT is rolling out, in partnership with leading global education company Pearson, also emphasizes improving the way educators use data from assessments in teaching. Erickson says many teachers now administer tests and evaluations without knowing how to interpret and use the results to students’ benefits." [Source]

3. Is the datum on individuals, which will assuredly be used for the personalized education modules in the new proposed ESEA (Title I) regulations and new special education (IDEA) regulations being proposed, paid for as Intellectual Property to that individual, since a profit will be made on that individual’s information collected without their consent or the consent of the parent? Is your child a commodity whose personal data is allowed to be sold without his or your permission and without reasonable compensation? These proposed regulations will have federal dollars " follow the child".

4. Data trafficking between the Department of Education and other outside contractors may contribute to violations of Cyber Security Laws when redisclosure of personally identifiable data is shared and does NOT request informed written parental permission of uses.

5. It's NOT about academics. What type of data is being collected by the testing contractors? ACT, a testing contractor, states that it is testing the "whole child". Is psychological information being collected to produce curriculum for " behavior change" ? The CCSSO has added dispositions to the Common Core Standards. Is it illegal to transfer "mental health" information without the informed written permission of the parent?

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6. Freeze/stop all data transfer. Demand an investigation into the FERPA illegal dissemination of personally identifiable information from the Department of Education regarding these possible violations of privacy.

Carbon copy everyone. Legislators, newspapers, privacy organizations, internet outlets.

"Please notify Anita Hoge regarding date of your correspondence with your Congressmen and Senators and keep her informed regarding exactly which elected officials have responded to your letters, specifying what they plan on doing or have done."

Your E-mails can be sent to:
dumbdown00@yahoo.com
Email subject line should say "FERPA".

In 1990 a federal investigation was completed against the Pennsylvania Department of Education, after filing a federal complaint against the Educational Quality Assessment, EQA, & the US Department of Education's National Assessment of Educational Progress, NAEP, under the Protection of Pupils Rights Amendment. Forced the Pennsylvania EQA to be withdrawn. Forced the US Department of Education to do their job to investigate the psychological testing of children without informed written parental consent. NAEP was never investigated because the Department said I didn't have standing, although documents had proven that NAEP did experimental research & used different states to pilot their agenda by embedding their test questions into the Pennsylvania EQA as well as other state tests.

Subject & main researcher for the book, Educating for the New World Order. My story is told about an incredible journey into the devious & deceptive operations of our government to change the values, attitudes & beliefs of American children to accept a new world order. The first to document the expansive data collection operation of our government establishing micro-records on individual people in the United States. Experimentation, illegal testing, & data collection is exposed.

Lectured all over the Unites States in the 90's about illegal & controversial testing, curriculum, & collection of data by our government. Arranged & lectured town hall meetings all across the state of Pennsylvania to withdraw affective student learning outcomes to stop Outcome Based Education. In January of 1992, parents in Pennsylvania won the battle against OBE when the Independent Regulatory Review Board had requested that the State Board of Education remove all outcomes which dealt with attitudes, habits, traits, feelings, values, & opinions which are difficult & subjective to measure & that the remaining outcomes be defined & coordinated with academic requirements that can be measured. The battle continues.