The HSE school district is currently in the process of giving a survey to most of their students. The survey is from a company called Panorama. Fishers High School is giving the survey on Wednesday, November 3. Part of the survey asks kids in grades 6-12 about their beliefs related to race and other “equity and inclusion” issues.
Here’s Panorama’s Director of Research, Sam Moulton, explaining this part of the survey:
As Dr. Moulton says, this part of the survey is meant to allow districts like HSE to “track progress of their equity initiatives” and to “signal the importance of diversity and inclusion”. It is, in effect, a tool of social engineering.
What’s it costing?
Lots of parents have found this survey to be objectionable, but the district is spending a lot of money on it anyway. Nothing new here: the district often spends thousands of dollars promoting things that are objectionable to parents.
For example, just this month they sent another $1000 to Child Advocates, the organization that knowingly promotes racist materials on its website, such as a book that states “the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white” and another book that explicitly calls for race-based discrimination. HSE knows that Child Advocates promotes these explicitly racist ideas, but continues to pay them for race-related trainings. Here is the receipt of this month’s payment from the Board Docs website:
And this is just the latest payment—in total they’ve paid Child Advocates over $100,000.
HSE is also spending a bunch of money with Panorama. Dr. Moulton says in the above video that the equity and inclusion survey is free; however, HSE schools has paid Panorama at least $60,630 just this year—money that I’m told comes from a Lilly grant—to utilize various other Panorama services. Here’s the receipt:
To me, $60,630 seems like more money than a survey could possibly be worth.
In addition to this huge payment to Panorama, HSE is also paying a lot of money for public relations—over $6000 just this month, in fact.
Could this PR expense be part of an effort to manipulate public opinion about their divisive social engineering? Let’s have a look at some of the district’s recent PR efforts related to the Panorama survey.
Pretending to take questions
First, HSE held an informational webinar about Panorama surveys on October 12. At this event, they spent about 90% of the time presenting what seemed like public relations spin that, as far as I can tell, nobody was asking for. At the very end, for about five minutes, a district employee read over the many parent questions that had been submitted, and he selectively summarized some issues that parents wanted more information on. No parents were allowed to speak for themselves at the event, and no followup questions were allowed. I know of some excellent parent questions that were asked but ignored. But now the district has produced a talking point: they can say they met with parents and “answered their questions.” I suppose that was probably the main point of the webinar.
Not showing parents the whole survey?
At one point in the webinar, “Mental Health Coordinator” Brooke Lawson stated that students in grades 6-12 will be asked over 90 questions on the survey. The district website that allegedly makes the survey questions available to parents lists only 60 questions for grades 6-12. It therefore appears that the district has not listed the entire survey on the website. Perhaps Ms. Lawson misspoke and she meant 60 rather than 90? I don’t know, but I fear that, as has often been the case, they are not telling the truth.
Not telling the truth about anonymity
Another example of PR spin is this webpage the district put up, which is largely an unattributed copy-paste job from materials on Panorama’s own website. On this webpage, the district has once again refused to tell the truth. For example, they copy and paste Panorama’s claim that “Student responses to the survey items are anonymous.” This is simply not true, and I think they know that it is not true. Your child’s answers will be recorded and associated with your child’s name. Panorama and HSE administrators say that they will not look at a child’s individual answers. But the Panorama software will assign scores to your child based on his or her answers, and those scores will not be anonymous: they will be open to review by relevant faculty and staff at HSE, and Panorama will use the data as well (“for the purpose of serving schools and districts” they say).
Here’s a screenshot from a video that shows how your kid’s SEL scores will appear:
Apparently Tony didn’t give the answers they were looking for, and he may need a little targeted “reeducation”! Seriously, though, these are likely fictional students that are displayed in the video only for illustration. But if this sort of information is being displayed to various people in the district and at Panorama about each student, the district isn’t telling the truth when they say that the surveys are anonymous. It’s just more PR spin.
The main worry
So where does all this PR spin leave us?
In short, here is the worry. Suppose the survey asks a student about some politically charged topic like race. And suppose the student answers the way that Panorama thinks that racists would answer, and gives similar “incorrect” answers to their other “equity and inclusion” questions. Then, although no one will see the student’s specific answers—or so they say!—they will see that the student scores “low on social awareness” or whatever euphemism they are using for “racist” this week. The student will then be targeted for intervention. Moreover, once this survey is normalized, they can slowly go to work introducing new and more politicized questions meant to “move the needle” on their political and social-engineering goals. And it all goes into your kid’s record. It’s creepy.
What will happen to this information about your child? Consider the privacy policy [archived version here] on the Panorama website, where they explicitly say:
When necessary, we share limited information with other organizations so that they can help us provide our Services.
Moreover, they also say
We can’t predict the future, and there’s a chance that our company’s ownership might change—for example through a merger or an acquisition. In that event, information may be transferred as permitted by law and/or contract, provided that the receiving entity, like Panorama, does not sell or rent information for marketing purposes.
So Panorama will share your child’s data with other organizations as they deem it necessary, and they make no promises about what will happen to their company and your child’s data in the future, which they cannot predict. Will they provide the data to college admissions boards? Probably not without your permission because of the FERPA law protecting the privacy of student records. However, if these folks are successful in getting the public to think of these scores as a standard part of academic records, I think universities could conceivably require students to provide them as part of the application process. I see no way to tell what will happen, and I don’t see how anyone could be sure based on what we have been told.
Panorama and Critical Race Theory
A final issue I want to address is the relationship between Panorama and critical race theory (CRT). Panorama is eager to state that they are not “connected to” critical race theory. This is also not true. Panorama admits to being connected with the RIDES program at the Harvard School of Education, which was their partner in producing the equity and inclusion survey. Here’s a screenshot of the Panorama page where Panorama says that they partnered with RIDES:
Tellingly, HSE did not include this fact on their website about Panorama. And no wonder why not: the RIDES program has tons of CRT-related content on their website. For example, you can see plenty of CRT content in their list of recommended books here, or here is one of their slide presentations where they spend some time raising questions like “What is whiteness?”, or here they talk of “decentering whiteness”, and here they emphasize CRT concepts like “implicit bias,” “internalized oppression,” and, as usual, “whiteness”. Finally, here is one of their fellows, who explicitly talks in her bio about her work with CRT by name. This is all CRT-related stuff, and there’s a lot more on top of these examples.
Moreover, check out this video:
In this video, Xan Tanner, Panorama founder and son in law of Attorney General Merrick Garland—who famously wrote a memo that was widely perceived as an attempt to intimidate parents who have spoken up against things like CRT and Panorama surveys—talks to another Panorama Director of Research about how one in five Panorama employees come from the Harvard School of Education where RIDES was housed. They literally say that they are trying to set up a “pipeline” from this CRT-soaked institution to Panorama. So I guess there’s no connection to CRT, but just a “pipeline”? Panorama is obviously connected to CRT, and they too are not telling the truth, likely because they see the writing on the wall, and a nation-wide backlash against CRT is underway.
What should we do?
Don’t let your kid take these surveys. HSE’s silly “deadline” for opting out has passed, but of course you’re in charge of your own children. Moreover, as a taxpayer and a parent, you pay the salaries of the district administrators who are pushing this garbage on you and your kids, and then refusing to tell you the truth. Don’t stand for this treatment. Let’s vote out the board members who support this behavior, replace them with reasonable people who respect parental authority, and demand that the new board clean house at HSE.