Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
The Student Right to Know Before You Go Act would let the Education Department track students through college and into the workforce, creating a federal database of remediation and graduation rates, salaries by major and program and success rates for recipients of Pell Grants and veterans’ benefits. Policymakers and consumers want to know. Privacy advocates hate the idea and some colleges oppose it too.
Data mining kids crosses the line, argues Joy Pullmann, a Heartland Institute fellow, in an Orange County Register commentary.
The U.S. Department of Education is investigating how public schools can collect information on “non-cognitive” student attributes, after granting itself the power to share student data across agencies without parents’ knowledge.
The feds want to use schools to catalogue “attributes, dispositions, social skills, attitudes and intrapersonal resources – independent of intellectual ability,” according to a February DOE report, all under the guise of education.
To get stimulus funds in 2009, states had to agree to share students’ academic data with the Education Department, Pullmann writes. But federal databases could expand to include ”health care history, disciplinary record, family income range” and more — potentially lots more.
The department recommends schools start tracking and teaching kids not just boring old knowledge but also “21st Century Competencies” – “recognizing bias in sources,” “flexibility,” “cultural awareness and competence,” “appreciation for diversity,” “collaboration, teamwork, cooperation,” “empathy,” “perspective taking, trust, service orientation,” and “social influence with others.”
What will the feds do with all this information? It’s a “disturbing question,” writes Pullmann.
Data miners can figure out your intelligence, sexual orientation, politics, religion and more by looking at what you “like” on Facebook, according to University of Cambridge researchers. Men who “like” Glee tend to be gay! Who knew? People who “like” curly fries tend to be intelligent. That’s because curly fries are tasty.
As debt-laden college graduates wait tables, mix drinks and push brooms, the backlash against the “college for all’ idea is growing. But defenders, led by President Obama, say they never wanted everyone to go for a bachelor’s degree.
Also on Community College Spotlight: Human sexuality students at Western Nevada College are required to masturbate, keep sex journals and write a term paper on their sexual histories, according to a federal lawsuit filed by a former student who charged invasion of privacy and sexual harassment.
“Almost all public school teachers have sex,” writes PZ Myers on Pharyngula. “Most of them enjoy it and do it repeatedly.”
Public school teachers may be Democrats, Republicans, perhaps Communists. They are atheists, Episcopalians, Baptists, Scientologists. Above all, they’re human.
All of your public school teachers go home at the end of the school day and have private lives, where they do things that really aren’t at all relevant to your 8 year old daughter, your 15 year old son. That you pay taxes to cover their salaries for doing their jobs during work hours does not entitle you to control the entirety of their lives.
“Local prudes” fired a teacher who’d been a sex worker years after she gave up the trade. Myers remembers his geometry teacher, who was fat, sweaty, odd — and a fantastic teacher.
Every year he rewarded the best of his students with an invitation to his house for a formal party, with snacks and Nehi soda. He was single and weird, but there was no worry about impropriety — there’d be a score of us there, who would all be treated politely as adults, which was mind-blowing right there. He’d play music for us: opera and show tunes.
. . . The people who didn’t care that he was a fantastic, enthusiastic math teacher who taught students self-respect and to love math only saw a strange man who didn’t fit in, who was odd, who fit certain stereotypes, and who obviously could not be trusted.
After a whisper campaign, he was fired. Myers is still mad about it.
Once a porn star, Tera Myers taught science for four years in St. Louis. She was forced to resign when a student discovered her past.
Tera Myers — a k a Rikki Andersin, the buxom, blond star of such XXX-rated gems as “Tight Ass” — last week was outed by one of her male students at Parkway North HS in St. Louis, where the 38-year-old mom has taught juniors for the past four years.
After a meeting with administrators, she agreed to resign.
Myers was forced out of a teaching job in Kentucky five years ago for the same reason. In an interview on “Dr. Phil,” she said “she’d made the biggest mistake of her life turning to porn 15 years ago when she was broke.”
St. Louis school officials think Myers’ resignation teaches that what goes online stays online. It also teaches that there’s no forgiveness for past mistakes — acting in porn is legal, if sleazy — if sex is involved. I know Myers’ male students would giggle about her for awhile, but should she be hounded out of teaching as a result?
Despite federal law giving teachers the right to know their students’ educational and disciplinary records, administrators cite confidentiality to keep teachers in the dark, writes Ms. Cornelius on A Shrewdness of Apes.
After one recent (unknown) incident, we were called into an impromptu faculty meeting to be told that something bad was going on and to ask to keep an ear out for rumors or information that could help in the administrators’ investigation. One brave soul actually asked “Look out for what?” The repeated response? “I can’t tell you due to confidentiality, but let me know if you see or hear anything about this incident.” Once again– what incident?
If high school teachers reported every rumor they heard, they’d have no time to do anything else, Ms. Cornelius writes.
By cartoonist Signe Wilkinson
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