Texas students given most stunningly intrusive home survey ever? *UPDATE*: Classroom exercise in bias analysis

Texas students given most stunningly intrusive home survey ever? *UPDATE*: Classroom exercise in bias analysis

*UPDATE*:  Breitbart reports that this story was generated incorrectly to begin with, apparently due to how the list of questions was represented when it was first posted online.  The list of questions is not a survey sent home with students, but a classroom exercise in analyzing how an “author’s biases may come through in his or her writing.”

According to Breitbart:

Actually, the person who originally uploaded the image took it down once Breitbart Texas began investigating the validity of the survey on Tuesday. The purportedly intrusive questionnaire is attached at the bottom of this story.

The list of questions, again, is real, and was discussed in several pre-AP Texas History classrooms.  But it was not distributed as a survey of students’ actual home lives.

Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?

I am thrilled, of course, to be featured in the Tweet Breitbart author Merrill Hope has embedded as an example in the story.  I regret having been in error in taking the other sources on this story at face value, and apologize to anyone else who ran with this story and now feels blindsided.

That said, I don’t regret finding the story believable.  There is too much information out there on the intrusive intentions of the education industry’s, and the Obama administration’s, push on data collection against students and their families.  It is, in fact, believable that a school district would attempt to gather such information on families.

The story will be left here with the update featured.

 

Judging by the content of a survey sent home a few days ago, as the public schools kicked off the year in Texas, there may be an outbreak of demonic psychosis among school administrators.

OK, maybe that’s a little harsh.  But as the Politichicks ask:  “Parents, can you think of any reason to ask your child even ONE of these questions?”

There’s certainly no valid reason related to effective education.  But the survey sent home with the Texas 7th-grader definitely conforms with the type of wildly invasive data collection on public school students that’s been previewed over the last few years by reporting on federal and state education initiatives.

survey CommonCore

Common Core is one of those initiatives, and people are likely to call this phenomenon “Common Core” because that’s a catch-all term now.  The sources cited in my October 2014 post (last link) make clear that the same individuals and groups responsible for Common Core are responsible for the “Big Data” collection push, and other features of Obama’s transformation of American public education.  So it becomes increasingly meaningless — and disingenuous — to insist that “Common Core” itself is nothing more than an innocent set of educational standards.  The people are right on this one.  Common Core is a Trojan Horse, and it’s fatal to pretend that that’s not reality.

(As reported yesterday, another connection in the Common Core nexus is funding and program design sourced to the Muslim Brotherhood, and Islamist foundations in Qatar and Libya.  So we’ve got that going for us.)

Meanwhile, pick your favorite question from the home survey distributed to some Texas 7th graders this month.  I like these:

My family knows how to keep our clothes from being stolen at the Laundromat.

My family knows how to move in half a day.

During the holidays, my family hires a decorator to decorate the house.

My family knows how to host the parties that “key” people attend.

But perhaps my very most favorite is:

My family “buys a table” at several charity events throughout the year.

The People’s Commissars do need to know where the wealthy kulaks are, come the revolution.

 

J.E. Dyer

J.E. Dyer

J.E. Dyer is a retired Naval Intelligence officer who lives in Southern California, blogging as The Optimistic Conservative for domestic tranquility and world peace. Her articles have appeared at Hot Air, Commentary’s Contentions, Patheos, The Daily Caller, The Jewish Press, and The Weekly Standard.

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