Download here - Pittsburgh Catholics Against Common Core

The United States Department of Education attempts intervention to improve “noncognitive”
factors by instituting assessments of children’s dispositions and psychological programs into the
classroom.
Not well publicized in Common Core are the plans by the Department of Education to improve the
“noncognitive” factors that they claim help our children to be successful in school and life. This is
where the data mining agenda gets really creepy as it goes beyond data collection actually includes
plans to assess and to try to modify our children’s “noncognitive” factors of grit, tenacity, and
perseverance. The United States Department of Education states that these are “essential to an
individual’s capacity to strive for and succeed at long-term and higher-order goals, and to persist in
the face of the array of challenges and obstacles encountered throughout schooling and life.” This
plan to enhance these “noncognitive” factors was extensively discussed in the draft document
recently put out for public comment entitled “Promoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance: Critical
Factors for Success in the 21st Century”. This report was funded and sponsored by the US
Department of Education Office of Education Technology. This brief focused on ways to measure
these factors in students from pre-school age on up to high school. It also talked about ways to
modify the classroom to “promote” noncognitive factors. This is tied into Common Core because
“persistence” is now a part of the common core state standards in math. Perseverance is
incorporated into the math practice standard where it states that students will ”Make sense of
problems and persevere in solving them.”
What are grit, tenacity, and perseverance? As defined by the USDE paper, grit is the ability to work
toward a goal over a period of years despite facing challenges and adversity. Tenacity is the
mindset and skills that allow a student to look beyond short-term concerns toward long-term goals
and withstand challenges that may be in the way. Perseverance is the student’s ability to complete
schoolwork in a timely manner to the best of his or her ability. While it sounds great that they are
trying to improve these factors, it is the way they go about it in this report that is disturbing.
Much of this report talks about ways to measure grit, tenacity, and perseverance in children. It lists
multiple surveys children can take, informant surveys completed by teachers, parents or “other
observers who are visiting or watching video of the classroom as a researchers or evaluators.”
Another way they can track your students is using school records collecting school data, data on
social services used, juvenile record, foster care, accomplishments both in and out of school. So
much of this data can be easily collected by contracting with outside sources.
“An important area for future research is understanding connections between enduring
dispositions and “micro level” process factors”. New technologies can be used to institute
Educational Data Mining which tracks data on students and learning analytics that allow for microlevel analysis of learning at the moment it’s happening. How does this micro-level analysis happen?
The report talks about a variety of monitoring technology that records physiologic data from
biofeedback equipment. These biofeedback devices can measure your children’s’ responses to
stress, certain activities and their response to various interventions used by the teacher.
Affective computing is the study and
Development of systems and devices
that can recognize, interpret, process,
and simulate aspects of human affect.
Emotional or physiological variables can
be used to enrich the understanding and
usefulness of behavioral indicators.
Discrete emotions particularly relevant
to reactions to challenge—such as
interest, frustration, anxiety, and
boredom—may be measured through
analysis of facial expressions, EEG
brain wave patterns, skin conductance,
heart rate variability, posture, and eye tracking
facial expression
conductance
Camera
posture analysis
chair
pressure mouse
wireless skin
sensor
The report also talks about using fMRI (functional MRI) that supposedly allows one to see which
parts of the brain are active during stress or anxiety and the effects of certain interventions.
They do acknowledge that these interventions are costly and probably not practical for most
classrooms. However, I don’t feel comfortable just assuming that this will never happen because
the technology isn’t there. Remember it wasn’t long ago that a cell phone was only something you
could make calls on. Now it is a computer, a GPS, a camera, a radio, etc.
The stated goal of the educational data mining and monitoring of children’s behavior is to promote
grit, tenacity, and perseverance. The US Department of Education reviews about 50 researchers
and their programs promoting grit, tenacity, and perseverance. They are talked about as a way to
change children’s dispositions in an attempt to instill these “noncognitive” factors. “While the
consensus across the literature review and interviews was that there is still a need for empirical
evidence that grit, tenacity, and perseverance can be taught as transferable competencies, there is
a wide range of programs and approaches that are already showing promise and positive results in
this area –not necessarily by teaching ‘grit’ directly but through providing a supportive environment
and /or opportunities to develop fundamental psychological resources.” They all but admit that we
don’t have the evidence that we can actually teach students these intangibles but are forging on
anyway.
These reviews are lengthy and make great reading for those wanting to cure insomnia. Promoting
grit, tenacity, and perseverance seems to be well meaning and lofty goals as these are qualities we
all want our children to have to get them through challenges in life. The concern here is that the
USDE seems to have unilaterally decided that these are the desirable qualities they think our
children must have to be successful. And of course their opinion cannot be incorrect. The problem
is that today the desired "noncognitive" factors are grit, tenacity, and perseverance, but who is to
say that tomorrow the desired factors won't be conformity, dependence, and secularism.
When you read the analysis, one is struck by the fact that these education interventions are all
couched in positive language and tout feel good phrases like "character education", "authentic
curriculum that focuses on deep understanding and connections to students' lives", "multicultural
and antiracist teaching" and my personal favorite "pedagogical paradigm". The problem is that
specifics in all this are very much lacking. Ask yourself, "What does any of this mean?" What are
they doing to my child? It is not clear in many of these psychology interventions that there is any
evidence that they actually work or translate to real life. Our children are being treated here like
guinea pigs in a massive lab experiment. There is so much opportunity here for indoctrination,
teaching of secular values, and psychological manipulation. If they can institute any of these
programs in our schools and then layer the micro level monitoring using biofeedback devices on
top, then how easy will indoctrination become then?
In addition, our teachers are not trained to implement these psychological strategies on our
children and would need extensive training. They do admit several times in the report that teachers
would require specialized training to implement these different programs. . One wonders about
the cost of this and how successfully they could be trained to properly implement a program even if
it was proven to work.
This does sound conspiratorial and very Orwellian. The data mining system is already being put in
place, the plans are being made to infuse our schools with these psychological intervention
programs, and the biofeedback technology is available. The US Department of Education is not
asking WHETHER any of this stuff should be done, they are figuring out HOW to implement it
all. Once all this is in place, you really will lose control over what morals you teach your child. The
proverbial camel’s nose is already under the tent; it is now our responsibility to push it out.