The state of California is making rapid progress on a new statewide database that has already integrated over a billion data points on children and expects to vacuum up billions more, Governor Gavin Newsom announced. The goal, supposedly, is to “transform education” and “improve career outcomes” by providing “transparency,” another way of saying eliminating privacy.
Every area of students’ lives will be surveilled, tracked, stored, analyzed, and shared. Data on everything from mental health and dental health to academics, attitudes, and even home life will be placed in the “Cradle-to-Career Data System” (C2C). Already, data sets from government schools, social services, healthcare, workforce agencies, and more has been collected and placed in the system.
Many more sources of data will eventually be added into the database. In fact, the governor’s press release explained that the state is “on the verge of uniting information from disconnected data across sectors.” This will give government “insights previously unavailable” into each child whose sensitive and private data is being collected and analyzed by bureaucrats and even Artificial Intelligence.
“By leveraging billions of data points, California’s Cradle-to-Career data system will be a game-changer for improving the quality of life for millions of Californians and highlighting ways to improve opportunity in the classroom and access to the workforce,” argued Governor Newsom, who has been viciously attacking schools trying to protect children from books featuring incest, bestiality, and rape of babies.
Without a trace of irony, Newsom even tried to paint the Orwellian data regime as a means of promoting freedom. “Through insights and innovation only made possible by this system, the Golden State is leading the nation in equitably connecting our education system to the workforce to ensure every Californian has the freedom to succeed,” he continued.
However, the goals of the state’s new “Cradle-to-Career Data System” (C2C) go way beyond better job outcomes. As U.S. Department of Education documents have made clear for over a decade, the unfathomable amounts of data being vacuumed up will ultimately be used to “predict” the future attitudes and behaviors of children. Much of this is being funded by federal taxpayer dollars, too.
In a 2012 “Issue Brief” titled “Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics,” the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology gave away the agenda. In short, data collected will be used to analyze children and predict their future characteristics so they can be guided toward the right “career” and so the state can stage “interventions” as needed.
“A predictive model combines demographic data (from an external student information system) and learning/behavior data from the student learning database to track a student’s progress and make predictions about his or her future behaviors or performance,” the report says, showcasing a number of the technologies that will be used to gather “fine-grained learner behaviors.”
California Cradle-to-Career Data System Executive Director Mary Ann Bates also celebrated the new developments. “This milestone represents a significant step forward in our mission to establish a robust, comprehensive data system that provides a nuanced understanding of Californians’ educational and professional journeys,” she said, thanking “data partners” for their help.
But critics spoke out forcefully. “Parents should be concerned about all the outside agencies now partnering with public schools that not only have access to their children, but who can collect data on their kids and share that data,” warned Brenda Lebsack, a California teacher and retired school board member who has become a prominent national advocate on behalf of children.
“These outside agencies do not have to comply with the same standards and laws for surveying minors as the school or Local Education Agency does,” she told The Newman Report, noting that multiple operations in California were surveying children without parental permission. “This is another layer of deception so parents should guard against this false sense of security given by their schools.”
Combined with “Social and Emotional Learning” (SEL) curricula that depends on data-gathering to successfully manipulate children’s attitudes, along with Artificial Intelligence able to process the unfathomable amounts of data being scooped up by the government, the implications of these new systems should alarm everyone.
The last thing would-be tyrants like Gov. Newsom, Joe Biden, and California Democrats need is detailed data on every single child in the state. In fact, this is a recipe for a Panopticon-style surveillance state that will inevitably produce tyranny. Parents who love their children have no option left but to flee the government school system and potentially even the state, as quickly as possible.