Nature of Common Core

That was pretty interesting. I disagreed with him on several points but was particularly interested on what he had to say about data mining since that's been a hot topic at our house lately. I thought about starting a topic on it here but didn't because not many people here follow education issues.

Mo's teacher has been after me to sign up for some website that teachers use to communicate with parents. Last week she sent some form letter home that said I needed to sign up for the site, and sign and return the form letter to her so that she'd know that I'd done it.

I went to the site and read their privacy policy and terms of service and it became pretty clear that the person they really wanted information on was me! So I dug around a bit more and I was pretty horrified by what I read.

I had to respectfully decline her invitation to sign up.

Just this morning at the dog park I was asking another parent if their kid's school used anything like that and he said they did. I asked him if it bothered him that someone, somewhere was recording all this information -- academic and behavioral -- on his kid and he said he'd never really thought about it, but he was certainly going to think about it now.

This is a smart guy. Well educated. Very successful in a field where not many can say that. A world traveler. Someone who interacts with people from ALL walks of life. If he's not thinking about it I doubt very many people are.

Anyway....

Now I'm questioning who might really be behind that website and intend to do a little more research.