June 2016 magazine

Why Does Your Congressman Want to Psychologically
Profile Your Children
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SETRA would authorize the federal government to sponsor
research on these social and emotional attributes. This means
the government may analyze a child’s psychological makeup, collect the necessary data, and do Heaven knows what
with it.
Even experts in the field admit that these sorts of SEL indicators are extraordinarily subjective and difficult to define
and measure. A leading researcher in this area, Dr. Angela Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania, warns that
trying to measure these indicators and use them to trigger real-world consequences, such as school “accountability”
scores, is not realistic. Yet the federal government marches on.
But even if there were real, measurable educational value in analyzing every child’s psyche, do members of
Congress really believe government has any business doing this? Are any of them parents? Would they trust the
government – any government – with this type of highly personal information on their children?
Even worse, SETRA also allows the approved bureaucracy to “establish . . . cooperative education statistics systems
for the purpose of producing and maintaining . . . data on early childhood education, elementary and secondary
education, postsecondary education, adult education, and libraries, that are useful for policymaking at the Federal,
State, and local level.” So it looks as though longitudinal data systems, such as the state systems resulting from
federal bribery/coercion, may be established to warehouse all the data points about how children’s brains work.
Nothing to worry about there.
Especially since the federal government protects data with all the competence of Inspector Clouseau. A
congressional hearing held in November 2015 revealed that the U.S. Department of Education’s data security is
essentially nonexistent. As Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT)warned after hearing the testimony, the Department’s
negligence is likely to produce “the largest data breach that we’ve ever seen in the history of our nation.” And now
we want to add to this data trove the most sensitive information imaginable about innocent children.
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