Lawmakers in Congress are pursuing a dizzying array of troubling bills to gather all sorts of data on parents and children — so much that one leading education researcher is referring to it all as an epidemic of “data rape” in which abusive government is targeting American school children. In conjunction with everything else happening in education and mental health, it is clear that a massive assault on liberty and privacy is underway.
Of the nearly 200 data-related bills sitting in the 116th Congress right now, Lynne Taylor of Common Core Diva zeroed in on the ten that have the most overlap with education. In a series of seven articles on the ten most concerning pieces of legislation, Taylor breaks down the bills, their nexus with education, and the many reasons to oppose them. Combined, these bills would contribute to the ability of the government to know virtually everything about everyone, from cradle to grave.
In particular, Taylor examines the Head Start Improvement Act (H.R. 62), the Ending Common Core and Expanding School Choice Act (H.R. 69), the STEM Research and Education Effectiveness and Transparency Act (H.R. 627), the Grant Reporting Efficiency and Agreements Transparency (GREAT) Act (H.R. 150/H.R. 50), the Medicaid Provisions and TANF Extenders Act of 2019// MOMS Acts ( H.R. 260/S. 116), the Concussion Awareness and Education Act (H.R. 280), the Educational Opportunities Act// Support Vets STEM Careers Act (S. 5/HR 425), and more.
Each bill serves its own purpose. For instance, one hands out billions in federal vouchers for parents to put their children in government-controlled Pre-K programs, allowing the feds to mold and gather even more data on the youngest Americans. Another sets up more data-gathering and tracking of health under the guise of preventing “head injuries.” Several of the bills push more government “mental health” services on Americans from birth to death. And on and on the list of unconstitutional abuse goes.
Much of the infrastructure for the federal government’s Orwellian data-gathering and data-mining machinery exists already. Using the Common Core national education standards and the associated tests, and the data-gathering components of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), and the spying capabilities under the Patriot Act, along with a battery of other statutes and programs, the feds already posses more data than any government in history ever dreamed of having even a few years ago. And it is only getting worse.
“Our data is the single uniting factor for collectivism in the shift away from being American to becoming global citizens,” Taylor told The Newman Report in a statement about her latest research. “It is our data, by which we can be controlled by the hands of others supporting an agenda that’s against our free will, so we may be herded into manageable groups by our government.”
Under the U.S. Constitution, the federal government is not authorized to be meddling in education or mental health at all. It also has no authority to commandeer state governments or to gather all this data on citizens. Instead of battling bill by bill, Americans must work to have the Constitution enforced, thereby ending all of these outrageous infringements. The alternative is total tyranny.
