Opt Out Dad Sent to Facebook Jail

Is Facebook censoring an Opt Out parent?

Kevin Ohlandt, author of the blog Exceptional Delaware, father of a special needs son, and public education advocate was posting his recent piece, “The Parent Bill of Rights for Children,” when he suddenly received a message from Facebook saying that he was no longer allowed to post or join any groups for two weeks.

“I’ve done this hundreds of times without anything like this happening,” Ohlandt said.

Ohlandt wrote the “Parent Bill of Rights for Children” in response to a recent initiative from the pro-reform, Gates-funded group Center for American Progress (CAP) to gather signatures for its “Testing Bill of Rights.”

CAP’s Testing Bill of Rights echoes the recent Trojan horse “Testing Action Plan” from the Obama Administration, which poses as a response to parents’ concerns about over-testing, but is actually an attempt to usher in a corporate-driven, competency-based “assessment system” that has long been in the works.

Ohlandt is looking for 20,000 comments or signatures on his Parent Bill of Rights, which calls for the right to opt children out of standardized tests; the right to refuse the collection and use of children’s data in blended, personalized, or digital learning programs; and the right to “reject any ‘competency-based education’ decisions for our children that we feel are not based on reasonable, valued, well-researched, or statistically-normed guidelines or analysis.”

Read the full Parent Bill of Rights here, and help spread the word while Ohlandt is behind Facebook bars.

Author: Emily Talmage

My name is Emily Talmage and I teach fourth grade at Montello Elementary School in Lewiston, Maine. In addition to teaching in Lewiston, I have also taught special education and general education in New York City, including one year at a “high-performing” charter school in Brooklyn. I also have two master’s degrees; one in Urban Education from Mercy College, and another in Developmental Psychology from Teachers College, Columbia University. I have also worked as a research analyst and assistant at the National Center for Children and Families at Columbia and Oldham Innovative Research in Portland. View all posts by Emily Talmage