According to the New England Secondary School Consortium, they want your child’s personal data.

A comprehensive “college-readiness index” that takes into account academic, socioeconomic, and behavioral data is currently under development. The Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University and the Center for Education Policy, Applied Research, and Evaluation at the University of Southern Maine have been collaborating on the development of the index. Any further development is contingent on securing funding.
http://newenglandssc.org/resources/common-data-project/

This might be a good time to remind everyone about the history of the Annenberg Institute.  In another blog post “Radical Community Organizers Are Guiding Some Schools in New Hampshire,”  I detailed the history of the Annenberg Foundation:

Several years ago there was an effort by the Annenberg Foundation to improve education in the Chicago public schools. It was called the “Chicago Annenberg Challenge” (CAC). The CAC pumped $100 MILLION dollars into the Chicago public schools but when it was all over, the results were dismal.

When the focus on education becomes more about changing values, attitudes and beliefs in children vs. focusing on literacy and academic excellence, should we be surprised it ended in failure?

According to the Wall Street Journal article titled, “Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism on Schools,” Annenberg poured $100 million dollars into the hands of radical education activist and community organizers from 1995 to 1999 as a way of improving Chicago’s public schools. “The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground in the 1960s. Among other feats, Mr. Ayers and his cohorts bombed the Pentagon..”

The article goes on to explain, “The CAC’s agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers’s educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism.”

There is a powerful influence in reforming public education that does not include a focus on helping kids to become literate and productive citizens. Instead the focus of education is to transform your children into radical political activists with values and beliefs that may very well be in conflict with what you want for your children.

The CAC tied schools to working with outside radical community organizations like ACORN. Some may remember that ACORN captured national attention when it was revealed that they were involved in voter fraud.

There are good people who want to see public education improve in this country. Those people have a clear focus on “making kids smarter”. With a quality education, the sky’s the limit. When public education is focused on everything but literacy, students are often times left with two options: seek outside help from tutoring centers or fall through the cracks.

This is why it’s so shocking that schools in New Hampshire are aligning with Annenberg again. After a track record of failure and radical reforms that do not elevate the quality of education in public schools, one has to wonder why some schools like Pittsfield and Manchester would seek their assistance.

Now it appears as if the New England Secondary School Consortium wants even more data on our children.  They list the New Hampshire members as:
Former Commissioner Virginia Barry 
Paul Leather, Deputy Commissioner of Education
Chris Motika, Administrator for Integrated Programs and Title 1, Department of Education
Evelyn Aissa, Executive Director, Reaching Higher New Hampshire
Bill McGowan, Principal, Winnacunnet High School
Brian Stack, Principal, Sanborn Regional High School
Peter Stackhouse, Executive Director, Great Bay eLearning Charter School
Nancy Stiles, EX-State Senator, Chair of the Health, Education, and Human Services Committee
Connie Van Houten, Member, Manchester Board of School Committee

Remember Reaching Higher New Hampshire is the organization founded by State Board of Education Members Tom Raffio and Bill Duncan.  This is the organization thinks it’s good to “beat back parents” who dare to criticize the dumbed down Common Core standards and flawed tests in our schools.

They are/were all involved in an organization who wants to collect sensitive behavior data for a radical community organizing group.

Why is our current Deputy Commissioner, Paul Leather still involved with this organization ?   Parents in New Hampshire are not demanding that their child’s personal data be shared with an organization that prides itself on changing their child’s values and attitudes.

I’ve spoken to a representative at the New England Secondary School Consortium and asked for independent studies/proof that Competency Based Education has improved literacy in New Hampshire.  They have all the answers when you call them but oddly enough, they cannot produce any evidence CBE improves the academic outcomes for our students.

This is more dumbed down workforce training. What’s worse is that as they continue to push CBL in our schools, they want to gather MORE behavior data on our children.

How much is this costing the taxpayers of New Hampshire?

Nellie Mae grants buy access to our local schools.  They’ve already bought access to some of New Hampshire’s schools and provide grant funding to the New Hampshire Department of Education.  Not only should we pull out of the New England Secondary School Consortium, we need to stop accepting grants from Nellie Mae too.

I’ve looked at the grant application to Nellie Mae from the Pittsfield School district and there is plenty of evidence that shows that when you accept the Nellie Mae $$ grant money, you hand over all local control to the radical community organizers. They also require school districts to use faddish pedagogy that lowers academic outcomes.

Not only are we selling our local control and sensitive data on our children, they offer NO proof that this helps with literacy and academic outcomes.

Hopefully under a new Governor Sununu administration, we will see a return to focusing on literacy and academic excellence.  After almost a decade of fads and experiments on our children, we need real leaders who are focused on using methods with a track record of success.  You will find that with the Massachusetts Miracle.

Ann Marie Banfield currently volunteers as the Education Liaison for Cornerstone Action in New Hampshire. She has been researching education reform for over a decade and actively supports parental rights, literacy and academic excellence in k-12 schools. You can contact her at: abanfield@nhcornerstone.org