Common Core means “there are over 300 data elements the government is going to be collecting about your children and about you.”

Tea party activist Tim Curtis during an Oct. 15 meeting about Common Core

Tapping into concerns about privacy, some opponents of Common Core have portrayed the new educational standards as a tool the government can use to spy on children and store data on them. And they aren’t talking about a few test scores here — but a big ol’ heap of data on every student.

“There are over 300 data elements the government is going to be collecting about your children and about you,” Tim Curtis, an activist with the tea party group 9/12, said at a meeting Oct. 15 in Tampa about Common Core.

A similar data claim surfaced in the Peach State earlier this year. During the summer PolitiFact Georgia checked a statement by a Common Core opponent claiming that more than 400 data elements on each child would be collected under the national standards initiative.

Like the Georgia claim, Curtis’ claim detailed a massive amount of data for the government to collect on each child and his or her family. We decided to engage in a little data mining of our own: What type and amount of information will the government collect on students and their families, and is it because of Common Core?

Common Core refers to a set of national education standards adopted by 45 states, the District of Columbia and two U.S. territories. The standards were created after years of discussion by private nonprofit groups and state education departments. The goal: to better prepare students for college and careers and ensure that students in different states learn the same academic concepts. The Obama administration has used its education funding grant process, Race to the Top, to encourage states to use the new standards, but no state is required to adhere to Common Core.

Florida is one of the states that approved Common Core. Amid backlash, the state Board of Education voted Oct. 15 not to adopt reading or writing samples associated with the new national benchmarks — though local school districts can still choose to do so.

Curtis told us that when he said the “government” will collect data he meant the school district as well as the state and federal education departments.

“In order for Common Core to work its supposed magic, all of this information is going to have to be consolidated at the federal level,” Curtis told PolitiFact Florida. “Only then will they be able to compare state to state across the board.”

Many Common Core opponents point to the National Education Data Model, saying that Common Core will lead the government to collect hundreds of data elements on students.

But that data model is just that — a voluntary model that states can use for guidance about how to organize student data that they already collect, said Jack Buckley, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. Helping states or districts organize their data is something that the feds have done for many years, long before Common Core, he said.

Buckley said he never counted the data elements in the National Education Data Model but that 400 is probably accurate. Since 2011, the focus has been on a different model called Common Education Data Standards, which has more than 1,000 elements, Buckley said.

“For whatever reason a lot of Common Core opponents seized upon this as if it has anything to do with Common Core, which it doesn’t,” he said.

We contacted a few school districts in Florida to ask about their plans for data collection. Officials told us no additional data would be collected because of Common Core. We also found multiple education experts who disagreed with Curtis’ claim, including from former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s foundation.

The bottom line: States have been collecting data on students — and sharing it in aggregate with the U.S. Education Department — since long before Common Core. And that doesn’t change because of Common Core.

School districts collect students’ names, the classes in which they are enrolled, their reading and math proficiency, and whether they graduated on time, said Paige Kowalski, director of state policy and advocacy for the Data Quality Campaign, a national advocacy organization.

States collect the data to help them make decisions — for example about tests. The U.S. Education Department can only access aggregate data — for example, what percentage of third-graders in Florida are proficient in reading — not the test scores of a particular third-grader.

In fact, laws predating Common Core prohibit a federal database of personally identifiable information on students.

“Absolutely nothing has changed in terms of what the state is collecting from districts as a result of adopting Common Core standards and implementing them,” Kowalski said.

Our ruling

Tim Curtis, an activist against Common Core, said that thanks to Common Core, “There are over 300 data elements the government is going to be collecting about your children and about you.”

Common Core State Standards do not include new requirements for the government to collect data on schoolchildren. It’s true that school districts and the state of Florida already collect a long list of data on students. That data is aggregated for the federal government, after stripping out students’ personal information, and that data collection doesn’t change whether or not states adopt Common Core.

Common Core opponents are mixing two separate issues here: the transition to Common Core and data collection that already occurs.

We rate this claim Mostly False.