"Indoctrinate the kids. To hell with their parents!"

I was very angry to read of the latest intrusion into the lives of our children and families.

Some K-8 students are being subjected to blanket screening by untrained, unlicensed personnel, with serious questions about use or protection of the resulting records. And parents not only haven’t consented to this process, they haven’t even been told it’s happening.

. . .

This psychological assessment is administered not by licensed mental-health professionals but rather by teachers ... every month the teacher must answer 72 questions about each of the perhaps dozens of students in her class. She must assess whether the student “carr[ies] himself with confidence,” whatever that means for a 5-year-old, and whether he can “cope well with insults and mean comments.”

. . .

The point of these amateur mental-health assessments is to determine which students need further intervention. The educrats seem unconcerned that these determinations could be influenced by inevitable biases of the untrained teachers making the subjective assessments. Might a teacher who appreciates an exuberant child rate him differently than would a teacher who values quiet attention? Would one teacher flag a bouncy child for possible Attention Deficit Disorder, while a teacher with a different personality assesses a quiet introvert as abnormally withdrawn? Would both of these students be destined for mental-health treatment — and possibly dangerous medication?

And what about the confidentiality of these “assessments”? ... if they were performed and recorded by medical professionals, they would be kept strictly confidential under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). But that’s not the case when the administrators of the assessment are teachers ... schools and education agencies may now share a student’s records with literally anyone in the world as long as they use the right language to justify the disclosure — and they need not tell parents they’re doing so.

There's more at the link.

The infuriating thing about this gross invasion of our children's and our families' privacy is that it was never debated, discussed or authorized in a public forum by our elected representatives.  Instead, it's been pushed through by unelected, faceless bureaucrats who are seldom, if ever, held accountable for their decisions, or the results of those decisions.  They can encroach upon our privacy in the confident expectation that they will be allowed to do as they please.  (Note, too, that the company promoting these techniques stands to profit handsomely from their implementation, which - of course - will use its standardized testing tools and techniques.)

You can learn here which states are currently implementing this program.  There are moves afoot to introduce it in other states as well.

As Susan Goldberg points out:

In other words, your child isn’t just learning facts, he’s learning how to interpret and communicate those facts in a socially acceptable way that is sensitive to the feelings of others. Facts may not care about your feelings, but school administrators held under the Fed's thumb do. I wonder how George Orwell makes these folks feel? Perhaps like “two legs are good, but four legs are better”?

Sounds like a social justice warrior's wet dream to me . . . turn every child into a cookie-cutter SJW before the kid has a chance to learn to think for him- or herself.




Peter