One of the problems with Common Core is the data mining. There are some very intrusive questions asked of young children about their families (does anyone in your house own a gun? what religion are your parents?). This data is collected (along with data predicting the success of your child in future years). The law allows videos of your child to be taken and stored in ‘the cloud.’ The proponents of Common Core have always gone out of their way to assure parents that this data is secure and cannot be accessed by anyone not entitled to access it. They also have overlooked the fact that the data will follow the child from kindergarten through five years into the workplace.

Lady Liberty posted an article today about the security of the data involving your child. The article quotes WRAL News in Raleigh, North Carolina:

CARY, N.C. — A Panther Creek High School student was arrested Wednesday in connection with a hack of the school’s computer system last fall, police said.2

Saivamsi Hanumanthu, 17, of Pilot Hill Drive in Morrisville, was charged with felony accessing government computers, felony breaking and entering and misdemeanor accessing government computers. He was released on a unsecured $15,000 bond to the custody of his parents.

Cary police began investigating unauthorized access to Panther Creek High’s computers on Oct. 13 and later determined that the system had been hacked into several times and that student grades had been changed.

Wake County school officials discovered that an email sent from one Panther Creek High teacher to another a few days before the initial hacking contained keystroke-tracking malware, according to a search warrant in the case.

We either need dumber high school students or smarter computers.

Lady Liberty concludes her article by stating:

I’ve noted a lot of issues with Powerschool since it was implemented both here and in other states. I’ve also noted issues with other Pearson products. Everything from the system going down to wiping out entire gradebooks, and from delayed report cards to DDOS attacks.

Now we have a high school student getting into it multiple times to change his grades.

But your child’s data is safe, they said…

Small wonder Pearson sold Powerschool last year to Vista Equities. NC went with the very pricey Powerschool because of the established relationship with Pearson, now they’ve sold it off.

As a point of interest, as an elementary parent, three years after Powerschool went live I still don’t have access to it, which is arguably a FERPA violation.

Another reason to get rid of Common Core.