by Daisy Luther, guest author
Just in case we haven’t provided you with enough creepy dystopian news lately, the nation’s leader in Creepy Dystopia, California, has a brand new program. The “Cradle to Career Data System” will study and document everything about a child born in the state.
But don’t worry, it’s for your children’s own good.
What the heck is the “Cradle to Career Data System”?
Beginning at birth and stalking the child until he or she joins the workforce, California wants to keep on eye on all sorts of demographics and variables. They’ll do this by collecting information from “partner entities.”
They’ll use this information, according to the Pasadena Star, to “provide appropriate interventions and supports to address disparities in opportunities and improve outcomes for all students.”
Who are these partner entities, you ask?
The “partner entities” include (but are not limited to) “state entities responsible for elementary and secondary education data, entities responsible for early learning data, segments of public higher education, private colleges and universities, state entities responsible for student financial aid, childcare providers, state labor and workforce development agencies, and state departments administering health and human services programs.” (source)
So, your kid’s teachers, principles, professors, babysitters, and the purveyors of any state services you happen to use will all cough up every detail of your child’s life.
Of course, California just wants to help.
This to me has hints of communist countries who pluck the brightest students from their home and educate them to work for the state. However, the admitted goal is data collection for the folks who make the rules.
Easily the creepiest thing to come out of California since “The Silence of the Lambs” was released into theaters, the “Cradle to Career Data System” aims to collect the ethnic, economic and educational records of every child in the state, track their grades and their progress into early adulthood, and make some form of the data available to policy makers, analysts and activists. (source)
This isn’t a maybe. It’s already passed as a trailer bill (so it didn’t go through the usual legislative process) and has been funded with a budget of $10 million.
The governor’s Office of Planning and Research is now authorized to enter into contracts with “planning facilitators” who will convene advisory groups “comprised of representatives of students, parents, labor, business and industry, equity and social justice organizations, researchers, privacy experts, early education experts, school districts, charter schools, and county offices of education.” (source)
Californians, your children’s privacy is at stake here. They are going to become part of a pile of data that will be used to enact future laws to assure “equity.”
But at any time, these records will be there, the life of your child, every time they got sent to the principal’s office, who stands up to authority, who has special skills or talents, what the child’s parents are like. That person’s entire life in one handy file.
And pardon me if I don’t believe the data collection will stop once they get a job. Data is king right now, so why give up on a good thing?
We’re already tracked everywhere we go once we’re old enough to have a cellphone or use the internet. But this starts right, as the title of the program points out, at the cradle.
Why are they doing this?
It’s all about “social justice.” Think quotas on steroids.
“Advocates have been demanding data for the people in the Golden State for years,” the Equity Alert explains, to “answer key questions about whether and how our state schools, colleges, universities, and workforce systems are closing racial equity gaps and serving Californians.”
It sounds as if the goal is to go beyond laws that ban discrimination and beyond affirmative action into a brave new world, one in which government bureaucrats tally the economic success of each racial and ethnic group and sub-group and award government funding in an effort to reach “equity.” (source)
Of course, we all know that things like this are actually not equitable, at least not to kids from groups who are not considered to be “at risk.”
There’s no word yet on whether or not parents will be able to opt out on behalf of their offspring.
This certainly normalizes being surveilled
We’ve written a great deal on this site about the social credit system and the surveillance state in which we live. To me, a program like this seems like just another nail in the coffin of privacy. Don’t think that this will stop at the border of California.
These kids will, from their first moment of awareness, be concerned about their permanent record. That’s an awfully big burden to put on someone who still eats with his fingers and wears pull-ups to bed. These children will spend their entire lives under a microscope, for better or for worse, while some data entry person types their every action of note into their record.
If you want to have a social credit system like the one in China, I guess you’ve got to start early.
