Rather than merely asking for a right or wrong answer to a math, history or science question, the new assessment industry is capable of boring into a child’s attitudes, values, opinions and beliefs, all of which parents and privacy advocates say is no business of the government’s.

The pushback has led some state education systems to recommend a reduction in the amount of high-stakes testing in public schools.

But, parents beware, the sudden realization that maybe too much testing is going on is not going to lead to less data being collected. Quite the opposite.

But what if your child’s teacher could have access to a software application that allows her to collect data on your child in real time, without ever rolling out a test?

Enter the BOSS app. It is just one of countless new data-collection products available to school systems looking to collect data on the sneak.

Think back to 8th grade: do you remember ever talking out loud or being “disruptive”?

Imagine if the punishment was an armed police officer approaching you and shooting you with a Taser gun, frying your nervous system with electrical voltage, for being “disruptive.”

That’s what happened at Powhatan Junior High School on Friday, according to reports.

An officer at the school shot an 8th grade student with a Taser gun for “being disruptive.”

The Powhatan Sheriff’s Department claims that it started when the student was “disruptive” in the cafeteria.

The student was then taken to the assistant principal’s office, where, they claim, the “disruptive” behavior continued.

An armed police officer stepped in and decided to try to place the student in handcuffs, but the student reacted by trying to flee, according to reports.

That’s when the officer pointed his Taser gun at the student and shot him as the student was running away from the officer.

With global moral hazard having long ago become institutionalized, and codified as "monetary policy", catering almost exclusively to the TBTF entities in the financial sector, we were surprised it took as long as it did for Obama to announce (as he did last week), that the administration is now studying "new bankruptcy options" for student loan borrowers: code word for an across the board student debt moratorium, or forgiveness.

A Christian university in Michigan has told students that they are forbidden from raising money for a group that benefits homeless LGBT youth because to do so would “conflict” with the university’s “mission and practices.”

According to Blue Nation Review, students at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Michigan wanted to hold a bake sale to benefit Fierce Chicago, a relief group dedicated to providing services to LGBT homeless youth, who make up an estimated 40 percent of kids under 18 in the U.S. who have no place to live.

Why is this a problem? Because as the TBAC revealed a few months back, the default risk from the $1 trillions in student loans is several orders of magnitude above the 9% student loans which the Fed has revealed as currently "in default", as one has to add those 12% of loans in deferment and 11% in forbearance to the entire risk pool. In short: a third of all student loans are likely to end up unrepaid!

Now that April 15th is on the horizon, many taxpayers are bracing themselves for the inevitable penalty that will hit them if they don’t sign up for Obamacare. It’s estimated that at least 3 million households may have to pony up 1% of their income, or $95 per adult, if they don’t have insurance; a number which is poised to expand to 2.5% for the 2016 tax year.

However, for all its bluster and intimidating language, the Affordable Care Act might not have any teeth. Recently, a tax expert writing for Forbes noticed that Obamacare, while far-reaching and burdensome in terms of what it demands from the American people, offers little to no repercussion for anyone who would be tempted to avoid it.

Arlington, Texas – A fully loaded and equipped SWAT team invaded Webb Elementary School for “Career Day” this week.

The officers weren’t there to raid the school or arrest anyone, but they certainly looked like they were going to so. The SWAT officers were all carrying high-powered weapons and wearing paramilitary gear as if they were about to raid a terrorist organization.

The police proudly bragged about the event on their Facebook page, posting a number of pictures with fully-clad SWAT members standing on a stage in front of small children.

The police say that they were there to “educate” the children, but were these theatrics truly necessary for a career day at an elementary school?

One of the comments on the facebook post by Arlington police summed up the entire premise of such a display:

Two New Mexico high school students who organized what became thousands of kids to walk out of class this week appeared on national TV Thursday to explain why they did it — and describe the ugly reality that is Common Core.

Students across the country are required to take an annual Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC test, which is aligned with Common Core standards. For students in New Mexico, scoring on PARCC exams determine 50 percent of their grade.

The tests “don’t encompass the learning styles of many different other students and that kind of leaves people out,” Guiney added.

He predicted that if all schools switch to the Common Core teaching style the PARCC tests are geared to, “some students are going to stop going to school.”

The Maryland parents under investigation over letting their children walk home by themselves have been found "responsible for unsubstantiated child neglect" by local child protective services.

Danielle and Alexander Meitiv said they received a letter last weekend notifying them of the Feb. 20 decision in a case that has garnered national debate over parenting styles and philosophy. They plan to appeal the finding but said they first consulted with an attorney before commenting publicly Monday.

Officials began investigating Meitiv and her husband after someone called police last Dec. 20 to report that their children — Rafi, 10, and Dvora, 6 — were walking home from a playground about a mile away from their house in Silver Spring, a Maryland suburb outside Washington, D.C.

Police had also received an anonymous call about the kids two months earlier, on Oct. 27, after the kids were playing at a closer park, just blocks away from their home. That case was later dropped by CPS.

A “Confronting Campus Rape” discussion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on Monday night delved into the rights of the accused versus the rights of the accuser, a panel discussion during which participants suggested campus rape victims are largely mistreated and dismissed.

Some in the audience even suggested that the accused should not be innocent until proven guilty, and the emotionally charged talk included suggestions by UW-Madison professor Anne McClintock that “men on campus … are at greater risk of being assaulted on campus than they are of being falsely accused of a rape” and that “this university does expel students for plagiarism, but not for rape.”

A UW-Madison student on the panel who described herself as a rape survivor said she had, however, successfully gotten the first male student ever expelled from UW-Madison for rape.

Not enough American exceptionalism

Testifying against the bill earlier this month, Kansas National Education Association general counsel David Schnauer called the legislation “a solution looking for a problem,” arguing that its real effect would not be to protect minors from harmful materials, but to undermine “legitimate educational programs and curriculum.”

Hell No, We Won’t Go –1967
No Way, We Won’t Pay –2015

Fifty years ago students burned their draft cards to protest an immoral war against the people of Vietnam. Today it’s a different kind of war, immoral in another way, waged against young Americans of approximately the same age, and threatening them in a manner that endangers not their lives but their livelihoods.

There are at least four good reasons why America’s young adults – and their parents – should take up the fight against financial firms who are holding high-interest student loans that total more than the nation’s credit card debt, and more than the total income of the poorer half of America.

The history of Europe is being taught to pupils in a ‘distorted’ way in order to promote the EU, a leading British historian has claimed.

Professor David Abulafia, of Cambridge University, said the ‘soft push’ for further European integration that had been seen in French and German education was beginning to ‘creep in’ to British classrooms.

I examined seventh-grade “Civics in Practice” and it contained numerous factual inaccuracies. For example, on Page 100 it states, “The Constitution can be changed in two ways; formally by Amendment, and informally by Government.” This notion of dictatorship is enhanced by eighth-grade textbook “United States History,” which states on Page 185, “The President issues Executive Orders. These commands have the power of law.”

While some called us book-burning Nazis, Page 274 of “Civics in Practice” states, “Citizens must be alert to propaganda” and glittering generalities is a “type of propaganda which often uses words such as freedom and patriotism.” This world government indoctrination is augmented on Page 425, where a geographical map of North America eliminates the United States, and places our great nation in nine new “cultural nations.”

For pointing this out, one public speaker at the School Board textbook workshop called us “narrow-minded, racist Bible-thumpers.”

The public educational system is totally broken, and if you need proof look no further than considerations of the Colorado Board of Education to allow local districts to cut science and social studies from graduation requirements.

Incredibly, these “proposed reductions…stem from the group’s conclusion that the bar should be college readiness, not success.”

This week an Oklahoma legislative committee voted overwhelmingly to effectively ban the teaching of Advanced Placement U.S. history classes. The bill’s author, Rep. Dan Fisher (R), said that state funds shouldn’t be used to teach the course — which students can take to receive college credit — because he believes it emphasizes “what is bad about America” and characterizes the United States as a “nation of oppressors and exploiters.” Fisher’s proposal to replace the ready-made, nationally used, college-recognized AP curriculum — studied by hundreds of thousands of high school students each year — with a homegrown substitute would cost the state an estimated $3.8 million.

After several hours of debate on Tuesday night, the student government at the University of Toledo in Ohio shut down a hearing on a resolution to divest from firms abetting Israel’s crimes.

Just before the vote was to take place by the student senate, the university’s Student Judicial Council, part of the student government, announced that it had ruled a resolution calling for divestment “unconstitutional” on the grounds that it was “discriminatory” and “one-sided.” The ruling allowed no recourse or debate and the entire vote was then scrapped.

As The Electronic Intifada reported, the university administration had insisted that discussions relating to the resolution be conducted in a secretive manner.

An innocent male student was reportedly banned from entering large areas of his liberal-arts school in Oregon after a female classmate accused him of slightly resembling a rapist she encountered months prior in another state.

According to Professor Janey Halley, who detailed the incident in an article for the Harvard Law Review, the unnamed male student was forced to abide by the restraining order despite being found innocent during an extensive school investigation.

“I recently assisted a young man who was subjected by administrators at his small liberal arts university in Oregon to a month-long investigation into all his campus relationships, seeking information about his possible sexual misconduct in them…” Halley wrote.

Calling the investigation “an immense invasion of his and his friends’ privacy,” Halley stated that the ensuing punishment resulted in the near-complete dismantling of his education at the college.

At the Unviersity of Toledo in Ohio tonight, student activists will argue in favor of a resolution to divest from US companies profiting from Israeli violations of Palestinian rights.

But the university administration is mandating that they must do so in a “closed meeting,” preventing both the resolution’s supporters, opposition and the general public from hearing presentations to the student government.

The resolution voting process will also be done by secret ballot, meaning that the student body won’t be able to know how their representatives voted on the resolution.

Southampton University has rejected calls to cancel a conference on Israel and international law, after the Jewish Leadership Council (JLC) said it would "have a detrimental impact on cohesiveness."

The conference, 'International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism', is billed as "the first of its kind", and is being organised by Southampton-based academic and former Israeli Oren Ben-Dor, and Palestinian-American law professor George Bisharat.

According to the Jewish News, several "Jewish community leaders" have expressed their "opposition" to the conference and "lodged protests with the university's vice-chancellor."

I started a PhD program in Environmental Engineering because I worried about climate change. It didn’t take long for me to become a skeptic.

My first paper, a study about precipitation intensity over the U.S., was rejected by reviewers because it contradicted the climate model projections. Though they could find nothing wrong with the methodology, they decided observational data must be flawed because climate models couldn’t possibly be wrong and wrote that the paper could not be published.

People inflation and technological upheaval are some of the primary culprits behind widespread unemployment. It’s time to become generalists again.

Professor John McAdams is being stripped of tenure by Marquette University for writing a blog post that administrators characterize as inaccurate and irresponsible.

Academics all over the United States ought to denounce the firing of the 69-year-old, a Harvard Ph.D. who taught courses on American politics and public policy. If tenure can be taken away based upon one controversial blog post, what protection does it offer? How many tenured professors will censor themselves from participating in public conversation to avoid a similar fate? Marquette has violated core academic values, regardless of what one thinks of McAdams' commentary or the shabby treatment of the graduate instructor he was criticizing (who deserves sympathy for the horrifying torrent of misogyny others directed at her).

The campaign for divestment from companies that assist and profit from Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights took a big step forward in California this weekend.

The board of the University of California Students Association (UCSA) passed two resolutions at its 8 February meeting in Los Angeles urging university governors to divest from companies including Boeing, Caterpillar and Hewlett-Packard that make weapons and systems Israel uses to commit violations of Palestinian rights.

What’s the problem? Well, Cohen is not only a well-known scholar, he is a prominent public intellectual and commentator on U.S.-Russian relations. Recently he has criticized in print and on television U.S. and European policy in Ukraine. This has led some journalists and “pundits” (but few, if any, scholars) to claim that he is “Putin’s American toady,” as The New Republic put it. He has also been branded an “apologist,” a “useful idiot,” and a “dupe.”

A 9-year-old in Texas was suspended after Kermit Elementary School officials called it a threat when the boy, Aiden Steward, told a classmate he could make him “disappear” with a ring forged in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional Middle Earth’s Mount Doom, the Odessa American reported.

The Stewards had just watched “The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies” days earlier and Aiden was just using his imagination to reenact some of his favorite scenes on the playground.

There are now daily stories emerging of police officers assigned to schools assaulting and abusing children, indicating that the epidemic of police brutality in America is more far reaching than previously thought.

Today’s woeful tale is set in Houston, Texas where a former student of South Houston High School is suing the Pasadena Independent School District and an offending police officer after it emerged he had received a severe beating with a baton merely for cussing at the cop.

"No state . . . shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." So says the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution, a document held dear by Carl Cohen, a professor of philosophy and longtime champion of civil liberties who has devoted most of his adult life to the University of Michigan. So when Cohen discovered, after encountering some resistance, how his school, in its admirable wish to increase minority enrollment, was actually practicing a form of racial discrimination—calling it "affirmative action"—he found himself at odds with his longtime allies and colleagues in an effort to defend the equal treatment of the races at his university.

A professor who was fired from a tenured position at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign because of his tweets criticizing the Israeli government’s bombing of Gaza last year has filed a civil rights suit against the University and its top officials, saying that his firing violated his First Amendment right to free speech and other constitutional rights, and basic principles of academic freedom.

Minnesota’s largest school district is discussing screening high school students for depression and anxiety in the classroom.

Last night, the student government at the University of California at Davis voted in favor of a resolution to divest from corporations profiting from Israel’s occupation.

In a landslide vote — eight voting yes, two against and two abstaining — the student government at UC Davis recommended that the University of California system’s governing body divest from Caterpillar, G4S, Veolia Environment and Raytheon.

The divestment victory comes just months after the UC Davis administration appeared to be receptive to efforts by the Anti-Defamation League — a leading Israel lobby group — to treat boycott, divestment and sanctions efforts as “hostile events” that the university should deem security threats.

Recently, major changes came to school lunches because of the efforts of the First Lady, Michelle Obama. The USDA claims that “the new standards align school meals with the latest nutrition science and the real world circumstances of America’s schools.”

It was only recently that dozens of teenagers posted their lunches to social media, specifically calling out Michelle Obama for the reforms she pushed.

Common Core-aligned report cards are now grading students based on their “sensitivity to others,” as well as “grit” and “gratitude” across California.

Instead of having standard grades based on students’ proficiency in classes alone, these “detailed reports” now report whether students are sensitive and assigns them a grade.

The University of Pennyslvania is now offering a “Wasting Time on the Internet” class that will earn students credit.

The class, literally named “Wasting Time on the Internet,” is being taught by Professor Kenneth Goldsmith this Spring 2015 semester. In 2010, Professor Goldsmith also taught “Uncreative Writing: Robotic Erotica/Erotic Robotics: Scribing a Non-Expresssive [sic] Sexuality.”

Goldsmith writes for his new class that “students will be required to stare at the screen for three hours, only interacting through chat rooms, bots, social media and listservs.

“Distraction, multi-tasking, and aimless drifting is mandatory,” the description adds.

The Obama administration said it would drop a plan to tax so-called 529 college savings accounts, after the proposal sparked widespread criticism over its potential impact on the middle class.

From her hometown in India in 2010, Bhanu Challa said she had no reason to doubt that Tri-Valley University was a legitimate American school where she could pursue a master's degree. Its website featured smiling students in caps and gowns and promised a leafy campus in a San Francisco Bay Area suburb.

Months later, her hands were in cuffs as federal investigators questioned her motives for being in the U.S. Authorities told her that Tri-Valley was a sham school. It was selling documents that allowed foreigners to obtain U.S. student visas, and in some cases work in the country, while providing almost no instruction, according to federal investigators.

We look to a day when people will not be judged by the content of their character, but by the color of their skin.

And the configuration of their chromosomes.

This seems the hope of a panel of professors and activists at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, assembled to improve campus race relations and tackle matriculator misogyny. And relating to this they put forth an idea:

Women and blacks should be called on first in classroom discussions.

Arizona State University is now offering a class that details the problems that “whiteness” has caused in the United States.

Under the same program that has been criticized as “militarizing” local law enforcement, campus police departments have ramped up their armed presence, with Florida State University getting a Humvee and other university officers carrying semi-automatic rifles.

Nearly all police at universities are now armed, with weapons ranging from handguns to pepper spray. About two-thirds of public and private campuses employed armed officials during the 2011-2012 school year, according to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report released Tuesday.

A school trip to the see the historical civil rights drama ‘Selma‘ by a high school history club has been cancelled by the school superintendent over concerns over language, reports WAFF.

DeKalb County school superintendent Hugh Taylor cancelled the outing by students at the predominately minority school, saying he was concerned about obscene language and “racial profanity” in the Oscar-nominated film.

Taylor was elected DeKalb County school superintendent in 2013 despite concerns that he sends his own four children to a private Christian academy.

“When they first come in my door in the morning, the first thing I do is an inventory of immediate needs: Did you eat? Are you clean? A big part of my job is making them feel safe,” said Sonya Romero-Smith, a veteran teacher at Lew Wallace Elementary School in Albuquerque. Fourteen of her 18 kindergartners are eligible for free lunches.

She helps them clean up with bathroom wipes and toothbrushes, and she stocks a drawer with clean socks, underwear, pants and shoes.

From the Washington Post article: Majority of U.S. Public School Students are in Poverty

It’s a recovery so lopsided only Timothy Geithner or an oligarch could love it. Since 2008, U.S. economic policy has concentrated on funneling as much money as possible to billionaires, keeping the poor alive and submissive through government programs, and squeezing the middle class to death while at the same time holding out the carrot of hope that things will return to how they were before (they won’t).

Following is a deeply disturbing excerpt from a civil lawsuit filed by a Caltech professor against Caltech, often named the world’s top research university. Caltech’s official name is the California Institute of Technology.

According to the lawsuit, a small coterie of Caltech professors and administrators ignored Israeli spying and theft of taxpayer-funded U.S. technology and then retaliated against the professor for reporting it.

Caltech Provost Edward Stolper, who has ties to Israel and received an honorary degree from one of its universities, seems to have been one of those leading the charge.

A Dutch university banned a public meeting on the academic boycott of Israel scheduled to take place yesterday.

Although the board of the VU, a university in Amsterdam, had originally given permission to the meeting, it decided to forbid the event at the last minute.

In a statement, Jaap Winter, the chairperson of the VU board, made an apparent reference to the recent attacks on the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and on a Jewish supermarket in Paris.

According to Winter, the “civil unrest” created by “the events of last week” evoked “feelings of exclusion and insecurity” around the public meeting.

The state of California has just passed bill AB499, which will permit minor children as young as 12 years old to be vaccinated with sexually transmitted disease vaccines like Gardasil without parental knowledge or parental consent. This means that if you live in California, school or medical personnel would be allowed to vaccinate your child against an STD without your ever knowing it.

Last month, news reports a group of fourth-year dental students had created a private Facebook group known as the "Class of DDS 2015 Gentlemen," and were posting comments promoting raping and drugging fellow female students exploded like a cluster bomb over the campus.

Young people in Britain have become a lost generation who can no longer mend gadgets and appliances because they have grown up in a disposable world, the professor giving this year’s Royal Institution Christmas lectures has warned.

Silence isn't something people usually associate with middle school, but twice a day the halls of Visitacion Valley School in San Francisco fall quiet as the sixth, seventh and eighth grade students meditate for fifteen minutes.

And school administrators tell NBC News that the violence outside of the school, which is situated in one of San Francisco's poorest neighborhoods, was spilling into the school and affecting the students' demeanor.

"The kids see guns on a daily basis," the school's athletic director, Barry O'Driscoll said, adding, "there would be fights here three-to-five times a week."

With a typical schools days filled with mayhem, O'Driscoll was skeptical when the San Francisco Public School District introduced a meditation program, called "quiet time," to four of its schools, including Visitacion Valley.

Teachers unions have often opposed the creation of educational standards in principle, but Common Core often comes under fire from the Right because its compliant textbooks recommend strange methods for learning math that are perhaps not well-suited to children's formation in the subject. It has also given rise to reading lists that exclude timeless classics in favor of contemporary drivel.

It has been said that children are our future, and right now the vast majority of our children are being “educated” in public schools that are rapidly being turned into indoctrination centers and prison camps. Our children desperately need to focus on the basics such as reading, writing and math, but instead a whole host of politicians, “education officials” and teachers are constantly injecting as much propaganda as they possibly can into classroom instruction. Instead of learning how to think, our children are continually being told what to think. Not only that, our children are also being trained how to live as subservient slaves in a Big Brother police state. Today, nearly everything that children do in public schools is watched, monitored, recorded and tracked. Independent thought and free expression are greatly discouraged and are often cracked down upon harshly.

Control of the struggling York City School District in Pennsylvania has been handed over to the state, effectively paving the way for public education in that county to be provided exclusively by a private company.

State officials had previously said that, if approved for a receivership (as a state takeover is called), they would bring in Charter Schools USA, an 'education management company' based in Florida, to operate the district.

A four-year-old little boy was handcuffed and then shackled by the local sheriff and taken away in a squad car, after the principal at Nathanael Greene Primary School failed to calm him down.

Back in October the boy allegedly threw blocks, climbed over desks, hit, scratched, and kicked the principal and the director of special education. Unable to gain control of a 4-year-old, the school made the ridiculous decision to call a sheriff’s deputy who is assigned to the schools.

“The boy was out of control, basically, throwing his arms around and kicking– trying to kick the deputy, trying to run away, and the deputy felt that putting the handcuffs on him was for his safety as well as everybody else’s,” County Sheriff Steven Smith said.

Tracy Wood, the boy’s mother, says the school called her to pick up her son, but when she got there, police had already taken him to the station.

Homeschooling, once steeped in negativity and subject to eyebrow-raising naysayers, is fast-sweeping the nation as an alternative educational method that comes with higher graduation rates than traditional schooling.(1) In fact, there are approximately 2.2 million students in the United States who receive home education, and experts note that its popularity has continued, rather than waned, through the years. These students have been found to score up to 30 percentile points above public-school students on standardized academic achievement tests.

Only to be followed by the good news of today;

The multitude of anti-Israel incidents, the aggressive discourse and the fact that almost every public event dealing with Israel, Judaism or the Middle East is accompanied by a loud public argument, instinctively deters many people from dealing with Israel, even in fields which have nothing to do with the conflict.

Publishing giant Pearson Inc. is set to rake in billions of dollars in profits related to the implementation of the Common Core standards, but the corporation is now dealing with legal problems exposing some of its suspicious methods that have led to its status as the King of Common Core.

The Pearson Charitable Foundation states it is closing following “a decision by Pearson plc to integrate all of its corporate responsibility activities and functions into its business as a way to maximize social impact and to no longer fund the Foundation as the primary vehicle for its philanthropic and community activities.”

The truth is, however, that corporate Pearson is closing down its charitable foundation following problems with the law that have exposed some of its methods in acquiring business.

Israeli-American real estate mogul Adam Milstein recently made headlines when it emerged that he had solicited funds on behalf of two student senate candidates at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) who espouse strong anti-Palestinian views.

When asked about the donations, which had reportedly been funneled through UCLA’s chapter of the Zionist campus organization Hillel, by Mondoweiss’ Alex Kane, Milstein feigned ignorance: “When I make a donation to the UCLA Foundation or what have you, I don’t know what they’re doing with the money.”

However, Milstein’s claims were swiftly belied by emails discovered by Chloe Hunt of UC Berkeley campus newspaper The Daily Californian.

A worksheet designed to raise awareness of racial differences has some students crying foul, reports KPRC-TV.

The assignment asked students to consider whether White Privilege exists and how it might affect their lives.

“I was shocked, I thought it was a joke,” said a student, who didn’t want to be identified. “There was a white privileges handout and a white privileges checklist and a white privileges quiz to see how privileged you are as a white person.”

Students at Lone Star College, Tomball were given a list of 20 statements about race and asked to check off which applied to them.