The legislative session in Charleston is in full swing. To some this might recall the famous quote “No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.” There seems to be some debate as to who actually said it. In doing a little research I found several attributions to Mark Twain, the famous American author and humorist. However, it appears that in reality the originator of the quote was Gideon J. Tucker, an American lawyer, newspaper editor and politician, who as a Surrogate of New York in 1866 used the phrase in a decision in a case regarding a will. You can’t always trust what you read in a history book, or on the internet.

That said, as always, there are hundreds of bills that have been introduced in Charleston this session, many of which have the potential to profoundly affect our lives, liberty and property. In the case of Common Core perhaps we can rephrase that to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness without someone tracking us. There are two bills dealing with this issue pending in the legislature.

I have expressed my concerns regarding Common Core previously in this space. One has to do with the so called P-20W SLDS grants. These are grants that stem from the American Recovery and Reinvestment act of 2009 - also known as the “Stimulus” or “Recovery Act”. SLDS stands for the State Longitudinal Database Systems.

If your eyes are starting to glaze over, let me explain. According to a brochure published by the North Carolina Public Schools, the P-20W stands for “Pre-school through Grade 20, higher education, and beyond into W, the Workforce” thus “linking data from Early Learning through the Workforce”. The brochure explains that a unique identifier or UID is assigned to a child at the age of 1, and that one of the benefits of the system is that it will enable the state to “track student performance across years and sectors” through the child’s UID in the SLDS. It states that the P-20W will not publish individual data but then says that “the exchange of individual data between agencies…is key to the P-20W system”.

An anti Common Core group in Utah called “What is Common Core” reports that their state accepted $9.6 million in stimulus money to create their SLDS and that it is interoperable. One of the founders of the group Christel Lane Swasey writes on their website, “Think about it. All states have an SLDS, and they are built to be interoperable. How is this not a de facto national database?” Beats me.

In March of last year the Washington Post published an article regarding a lawsuit brought by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) against the US Department of Education for changes it made in 2011 to the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) of 1974. According to the article, “FERPA was passed to give parents specific rights in regard to their children’s education records, rights which transfer to the student [when] he/she becomes 18 or goes to a school beyond the high school level.” That would be the right to privacy.

“But in 2011, regulations issued by the department [of Education] changed FERPA to allow the release to third parties of student information for non-academic purposes. The rules also broaden the exceptions under which schools can release student records to non-governmental organizations without first obtaining written consent from parents. And they promote the public use of student IDs that enable access to private educational records, according to EPIC”. In the Federal Register, the government defended its actions saying that new rules were necessary, “for the effective use of data in statewide longitudinal data systems (SLDS)”.

I’m not a lawyer, but the question appears to be whether or not an unelected person or persons in the Department of Education rewrote a law (FERPA) that was passed by Congress. Hopefully the EPIC lawsuit will resolve the issue.

Here in West Virginia, one of the two Common Core bills, SB 420 has been introduced in the state senate. The bill states that its purpose “is to add Workforce West Virginia and the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals to the existing entities that are to enter into a state data sharing compact, add workforce data that is to be included in the P-20W Longitudinal Data System; and to create a governing board of the P-20W Longitudinal Data System”. It bears the names of 20 state senators, 19 of whom are Democrats, the lead being Senator Plymale (D-Wayne). Senator Snyder’s (D-Jefferson) name also appears on the bill.

Also introduced this session is SB 420 and it is the antidote to SB 429. The names of all ten Republican state senators appear on this one with Senator Boley (R-Pleasants) as the lead. No Democrats on this one folks. The purpose of SB 429 “is to affirm the parent or guardian as the final authority in all matters of a student’s education and to require prior parental or guardian written affirmative consent for disclosure of any student information other than aggregate data that is not personally identifiable. The bill prohibits the State Board of Education from continuing to implement the Common Core assessments, and requires the formation of a Legislative Common Core Committee to conduct statewide hearings on the common core standards and associated assessments and to make a public report of findings to the Governor and the Legislature. The bill also prohibits the State Board of Education from expending funds for a statewide longitudinal data system designed to track students pending the committee’s report of findings, and requires a fiscal analysis of common core and associated assessment implementation.”

One of the interesting things about the growing opposition to Common Core is that it is uniting groups from opposing ends of the political spectrum. Common Core was approved in West Virginia without legislative approval and without input from the public. SB 429 provides a two year moratorium during which time that mistake can be corrected.