Friday, Michael and I had Carolyn McLarty on during the first hour of the podcast to talk about citizen lobbying. It was a great show! I really urge you to check out the whole thing on YouTube or Rumble.
After Carolyn had gone, Michael and I talked about numerous issues, but one of those was about the data being collected on students. In the video below, Michael and I talked about how many apps and computer programs students now use at school and how those are often collecting data from their interaction with the program/application.
This article is from our original blogspot and was written in 2014 when we were trying to stop the State Longitudinal Database. I suggest you at least open it and scan it because it gives some pretty good examples as to how classroom data mining is happening through programs and applications used in the classroom.
Here are Michael and I talking about that very thing on Friday’s show.
This morning, I found a message in my Facebook messenger from an old “common core” friend. She sent me a website – the Kids Count Data Center. I remembered having seen that years ago, but I hadn’t looked into it recently. I scrolled through Oklahoma’s collected data categories and was – once again – completely freaked out by what I found.
The data is apparently provided by the Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF) – a non-profit organization started by the man who created UPS. The AECF credits itself with helping to start the foster care system while moving toward the abolishment of orphanages.
I ran AECF through Data Republican and was not able to find that they take tax dollars of any kind, nor are they granted monies from organizations that take tax dollars. I was able to find some of the organizations they fund, however, and two things are clear; they donate to large organizations that do collect lots of taxpayer dollars and they donate lots of money to leftist, ‘social change’ organizations. This makes me wonder at the reasons for which they are collecting so much data on kids.
From the AECF website I was able to find out that the only grant given in Oklahoma was to the Oklahoma Policy Institute, headquartered in Tulsa. No shock then – after running them through Data Republican – the OPI is funded by a number of leftist organizations including the George Kaiser Family Foundation and the Tulsa Community Foundation.
This is interesting and concerning. Statistics can be made to say whatever the person using the statistic wants them to say. What do leftists want with all this data?
The AECF makes no bones about the fact that they are collecting all their data to influence policy decisions made by legislators.
Here’s a PERFECT example. “The First Eight Years” is a report created by the AECF populated with data collected through the Foundation. Why? To give policymakers reason to FUND early childhood education with tax dollars – tax-funded DAY CARE essentially – on the notion that it’s the “best way to ensure a successful workforce in the future”.
Apparently their strategy has worked in Oklahoma since 2006, when the Oklahoma legislature created OECP – the Oklahoma Early Childhood Program (OECP) – headquartered in…wait for it…TULSA. The OECP is tasked to “improve the quality of early education and expand capacity to serve children from birth through age three statewide.” (bold for emphasis)
According to this 2011 Tulsa Today article, the George Kaiser Family Foundation gave the Tulsa Community Action Project (CAP) 92 million dollars from 2004 to 2011. CAP is an OECP ‘partner’. So is Tulsa Educare – also funded by Kaiser.
Because I was offended by the fact that the AECF would/could collect information on kids NOT IN SCHOOL, I clicked on the data point called, “Young Children Not In School”. This data came from the U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey. So, families actually taking this survey, coughed up to the federal government that their kids weren’t in school and that information was entered into the US Census Bureau database – which is shared with the public and across government databases.
This is the reason the AECF gives for collecting this data on babies.
High-quality prekindergarten programs for 3- and 4-year-olds can improve school readiness, with the greatest gains accruing to the highest-risk children. Head Start and the expansion of state-funded programs since the 1990s have greatly increased access to preschool. But many children, especially 3-year-olds, continue to be left out, exacerbating socioeconomic differences in educational achievement.
What is ‘school readiness’? What is high-risk? Whatever the AECF, CAP, OECP says it is – usually based on a definition created by some group in the ‘get money from tax payers to take babies away from their parents’ scam.
At this point, I’d like to point out information from the OECP’s 2024 Annual Report.
Please note, this is supposed to be a state agency, yet George Kaiser funds the majority, while the state of Oklahoma comes in a paltry second. Also note, wages and benefits are the majority of the spending here because all the staff are involved in thinking about things related to how to grade childcare centers and the children inside. Here are two things the staff did last year.
They determined how attached to the caregiver BABIES and TODDLERS were. Shouldn’t we care more about the fact that these babies are in a place where they are NOT becoming attached to their parents?
And then there’s this:
Yes, Oklahoma is measuring the literacy of babies and toddlers and the state of Oklahoma is using tax dollars to do this, while partnering with an Obama donation bundler.
And let’s think on this just a minute. According to the OECP annual report, 3,666 children were ‘served’ by this program. Do the math. That’s an expense of almost ELEVEN THOUSAND dollars a child – for DAY CARE that the state and its private partners have dubbed EARLY EDUCATION.
In closing (for now), I’m going to add the diagrams I created while studying the State Longitudinal Database back in the 20-teens. THIS is why all this data collection is a problem. Once the data is collected, it goes everywhere and everywhere it goes, it populates databases that follow kids throughout their public school and work careers. Hopefully, it’s obvious why this is bad. Hopefully, it’s obvious why we need our lawmakers to protect our kids from this kind of intrusive nonsense that does nothing but build reasons for taking more and more tax dollars from citizens to fund more and more ways to take their tax dollars – and babies.
