Missouri Education Watchdog: What the Missouri Department of Revenue and Department of Elementary and Secondary Education Have in Common

Missouri Education Watchdog: What the Missouri Department of Revenue and Department of Elementary and Secondary Education Have in Common:

What the Missouri Department of Revenue and Department of Elementary and Secondary Education Have in Common

by stlgretchen

The Missouri Department of Revenue copied and sent private information on Concealed Carry permit holders to Homeland Security without the knowledge of the permit holder,  despite the fact this was against state law.  Does this sound a bit like the collection of 61 data points our educational state agency is gathering on students?   Commissioner Chris Nicastro informed the legislators about the data gathering by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education in HB616 testimony but she did not offer:

• what 61 data points are being gathered
• why they are gathered
• which organization/agency mandated this data mining
• where the data is being sent
• what the data is being used for

Did your school alert you to this data mining?  Did you give permission for your student/family data to be disseminated to the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortia?  Did you know student/family/ teacher/principal data is then sent to the Federal Government by the consortia?

This was accomplished within the last two years via the Governor and Commissioner signing onto a Memorandum of Understanding with the consortia in May 2010.  In July 2011, the consortia signed a MOU with the Department of Education to send it personally identifiable student data.  The US Department of Education then can send this information to any other federal agency and third party it deems appropriate.  Did you know any of this?

Maybe the legislators can ask DESE why the student data sharing information and practice was never shared with the legislators until House testimony in HB616. The legislators might just want to start this investigation