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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.