Monthly Archives: November 2016

Uncloaking Mandarins, Oxymorons, and the Leap Frog Straight to Wave 4 Education Reforms

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Let’s go back in time again to pertinent facts that prominent people do not bother to mention in describing whether they are “pro-Common Core” or “anti-Common Core”. In the 80s, it turns out, most everyone that matters now had a common vision for the “reinvention” of public education and where and how it should be carried out that still controls the actual implementation today. Now it is firmly mandated by federal law that is far better understood with some of these old quotes taken from the the Educational Excellence Network created by the well-known Diana Ravitch and Chester Finn back in 1981.

I thought I had used juicy quotes in my book Credentialed to Destroy explaining the links between the Common Core and competency-based ed now and what were called the Reading and Math Wars in the 90s. Maybe that legacy is why people pretend to be for (or against) something that functions precisely as what they once funded or advocated for. Never pointing out those relevant links. I do think everything gets put into the accurate frame though when someone in charge acknowledges that ‘Curriculum Frameworks’ (someone should have told the Catholic Schools that that term actually was in use long before ‘standards’) are always about “fundamentally new notions of school curriculum” and that the implementation therefore:

“will be complex. They require paradigm shifts in understanding math and science, shifts that basically require a brand-new view of mathematics and science. The good news is that teachers and local educators are responsive to these new views. But full, deep, and complete implementation of them is likely to take at least several years of concerted effort.”

Public controversy over what was usually just thought to be Outcomes-Based Education threw off the full implementation in most places and the real purpose of the Common Core was to get everyone in K-12 education anywhere in the United States (actually the world, but this is a post not another book) on the same page as what was laid out first in the 80s. It appears to me that much of the anti-Common Core organized effort has been coordinated and financed by groups with ties to both the pro-Common Core effort as well as that Educational Excellence Network (EEN) and its vision.  The Internet and the computer servers it accesses can be purged, but not all the old books that were written crowing about that new vision. Once the details are laid out, it has not been hard to get copies of enough verifying sources to prove the consistency of the vision to what federal law now requires and what is being pushed as School Choice on President-Elect Trump.

Old books then are almost as good as HG Wells’ Time Machine so let’s consult them in earnest. California was the first state to roll out Curriculum Frameworks and it started with math and science with language arts (what we know as the infamous Whole Language) and history in the following year. Diana Ravitch was co-author of that California History-Social Science Framework while she also served as Director of EEN. Chester Finn left to be an Under Secretary of Ed under Bill Bennett between 1985-1988 (during Project Education Reform: Time for Results) . Here’s a short overview of the shift away from facts and towards what we now call in statutes “higher order thinking skills” and “challenging academic standards” in ESSA that must be assessed annually for ALL students.

“Subsequently, concern about the technical core shifted toward a curriculum that emphasized concepts rather than isolated facts, thinking and the creation of meaning rather than passive knowing, and problem-solving and expression so that knowledge could be used to address meaningful problems. There has been a corresponding shift in instructional strategies away from just direct instruction on a narrow view of issues to a complex set of instructional strategies that promotes inquiry, active learning, group cooperation and social cohesion in a heterogenous classroom.”

That’s the real reason academic tracking had to go away. The Wave Theory has nothing to do with the beach unfortunately and was a means to lay out the phases of state education reforms since 1983. The 1987 California PACE Study found that the needed change in teacher practices and support for the kind of “demanding curriculum” laid out above (Wave 3) needed a new conception of schools and how they would work (Wave 4).  Wave 4 then is what now goes by the euphemism School Choice and it presupposes and is designed to accomplish that kind of wholesale transformation of school content and what is to now constitute knowledge.

Here’s the money quote–“Wave IV involves a restructuring of school organization  and resources to support fundamental changes in curriculum and instruction. The restructuring typically involves shared decision-making, site-based management, major curriculum reform and a renewed sense of teacher professionalism. But rather than seeing these reforms in isolation, Wave IV involves linking these reforms to changes in the schooling experience for students.” Being an Education Advocate, Insider, or a nominee for the Department of Education who claims to be “Anti-Common Core” and “Pro-School Choice” is to either be deliberately disingenuous or to fail to understand the factual history of these education reforms.

That is not a tear at Ms DeVos and other discussed nominees are even more tainted by these ties to EEN. The same Bradley Foundation that helped finance the book in the last post also financed EEN as well as the 1987 Bradley Commission on History in Schools. Let’s quote from a 1989 book published by EEN as it sounds remarkably similar to the California vision and Wave  3. “To develop judgment and perspective, historical study must often focus upon broad, significant themes and questions, rather than the short-lived memorization of facts without context. In doing so, historical study should provide context for facts and training in critical judgment based upon evidence, including original sources, and should cultivate the perspective arising from a chronological view of the past down to the present day.”

A less convoluted way to say that would be to cultivate a Worldview to guide each student’s future perception and their interpretation of daily experiences. That is what curriculum reforms and learning standards now like the Common Core have in common with what California and the EEN pushed in the 80s with common financing of both EEN and School Choice, then and now. In his 1991 book We Must Take Charge, Chester Finn thanks both the Olin and Bradley Foundations for their support of EEN as well as special shout-outs to both Lamar Alexander and Bill Bennett. Since both of these men would also serve on the Education Policy Committee of EEN in the early 90s with so many others who are well-known School Choice advocates, before EEN closed up shop formally and rolled into the Fordham Institute in 1996, let’s look at that book. I will note first though EEN’s path. Columbia U, then Vanderbilt where Finn was an ed prof, then the Hudson Institute, and now Fordham.

“Conservative’ is another adjective that is an oxymoron when applied to public policy think tanks engaged in advocacy for this transformational view of education. Let’s think of how useful it has been in obscuring this actual agenda to pretend it is conservative or locally-based. In a 1986 paper, “American Schools and the Future of Local Control,” that points out that School Choice will allow per student spending to no longer be tied to property taxes which vary community to community, Finn and his co-author Denis Doyle from yet another think tank, AEI, that likes to cloak its advocacy behind that ‘conservative’ oxymoron, admitted that School Choice was actually ‘radical’ and that local control was an “antiquated doctrine.” Not in today’s rhetoric when the School Choice lobby wants taxpayer money.

In the “New Constitution for American Education” chapter, Finn said in italics that “in the United States in the 1990s the outcome we must concentrate on and gauge our success by is cognitive learning.” In other words, governments at all levels, cloaked by declaring their intentions to be a matter of public policy pursued by think tanks, decided that the internalized functioning of each student’s mind was theirs to dictate, control, and assess. Since that reality would never be sanctioned by informed parents and taxpayers, this actual vision and intention gets obscured by rhetoric about standards, Excellence, School Choice, and a ‘thinking curriculum’. It’s not just the mind being targeted either. Finn reiterated that: “let me say it again, if we are serious about guiding the moral, spiritual, and emotional development of all our children, we cannot limit ourselves to government.”

All institutions and people connected to education must subscribe to the same vision that seeks to build a desired Worldview into Habits of Mind. In reality that is what School Choice has always been about. It’s why homeschoolers will need to take ‘high-quality assessments’ to check for the presence of the desired Worldview and motivating values as a condition of accessing Education Savings Accounts. It is how this contagion that wants to design, monitor, and control human thought itself gets put invisibly in place. Supposedly as an aid to better decision-making. Finn stated that America needed a “universal mastery of a common core is what will hold us together as Americans, equalize our opportunities for happiness and prosperity, and revitalize the nation’s civic, economic, and cultural life.”

In reality, it puts governments at every level in charge of all these areas, using education as a transformation process, for what each student must internalize as the basis and motivation for future action. It turns out that my old books made it crystal clear that ‘public policy’ is just a euphemism for governments assuming control instead of individuals themselves. Market-based public policy then is just another oxymoron cloaking who is now to be in charge and what they intend to do. I wrote Credentialed to Destroy and then started this blog with its prescient title because I wanted to try to make the hidden, but provable, transformation visions visible in time. Transformation is just another euphemism for a revolution. This one is quite nonconsensual and intended to be invisible and permanent at a neurobiological level.

I will close with another Finn/EEN quote that also explains why controlling Worldview is so important. Think of the anti-Common Core/School Choice coordinated manipulation as being about cloaking the reality below the treeline.

“In any real revolution, only the treetops are visible. The roots, trunks, and branches that support them are concealed in the minds and hearts of the populace. This is why revolutions only succeed when a revolutionary spirit invades people’s attitudes and actions…”

That would also explain the Deceit and False Narratives surrounding Social and Emotional Learning Standards, wouldn’t it?

 

Antithesis of the Briar Patch: School Choice as the Snare Instead of an Escape

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This is the beginning of the factual stories behind K-12 educational reform over recent decades that I was saving until after the Presidential election, waiting to see who won. It was my feeling based on the false narratives being spread and the facts in my possession that both candidates would end up pushing the same K-12 education agenda for the most part. Hillary Clinton because she and Bill Clinton have been involved going back to Arkansas being one of the states that volunteered in the 80s for the little discussed, federally-sponsored (while Bill Bennett was Education Secretary and with Lamar Alexander when he was the Tennessee Governor and head of the National Governors Association) “Project Education Reform: Time for Results”. Donald Trump would be pushing the same agenda because his advisors on education hyping School Choice as the panacea do not seem to be telling him its history.

So I will don my metaphorical helmet and flak jacket and begin doing it. For those not raised on Uncle Remus Tales in the South the briar patch in the title is from the “Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby” story where the captured, but cunning rabbit, convinced his mortal enemy Brer Fox that no punishment could be as dreadful as being thrown into the briar patch.

“Roast me! Hang me! Do whatever you please,” said Brer Rabbit. “Only please, Brer Fox, please don’t throw me into the briar patch.” Not having string to hang him nor being close to a stream to drown him, Brer Fox flings Brer Rabbit “head over heels into the briar patch. Brer Rabbit let out such a scream as he fell that all of Brer Fox’s fur stood straight up. Then there was silence…Then Brer Fox heard someone calling his name. He turned around and looked up the hill. Brer Rabbit was sitting on a log combing the tar out of his fur with a wood chip and looking smug. ‘I was bred and born in the briar patch, Brer Fox,’ he called. ‘Bred and born in the briar patch.'”

Being thrown in the briar patch was actually Brer Rabbit’s escape route. School Choice as it has been developed over the decades by think tanks and professors is actually a trap pretending to be a remedy so it can be put into place as a matter of law. Let’s move away from American folklore now that we have a metaphor for whether something will trap us or free us and move to a book published in 1990 called Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools by John E Chubb and Terry M. Moe. Both will later serve on an ed reform project sponsored by the Hoover Institution, the Koret Task Force, with one of President-Elect Trump’s ed advisors, Bill Evers, so he should be more than familiar with this history of School Choice, but the 1990 book was actually published by the Brookings Institution. Several fed ED grants funded the book along with the Olin and Bradley Foundations that have gone on to finance both School Choice initiatives and the experimental economics/Neuroeconomics work we covered in the last post.

If this convergence of what is clearly a project of the admitted Left and purported Right seems confusing, let me quote from one of the book’s footnotes since I just love to tiptoe through the cited support.

“The classic argument for vouchers is developed in Milton and Rose Friedman Free to Choose (1981)…The Friedmans’ argument is of course associated by educators with political conservatism. But vouchers have also been proposed by social democrats on the left, who seek to enlist markets in the cause of justice and equal opportunity for the poor. Perhaps the most influential of these proposals has come from Christopher Jencks, who, along with like-minded colleagues, urged administrators within the Office of Economic Opportunity (within the late Johnson and early Nixon presidencies) to take vouchers seriously and encourage experimentation by states and districts.”

I bolded ‘states and districts’ there because as we will see when I get back to Time for Results, this trumpeted shift away from the feds to making the local, with the states in charge, the focus has ALWAYS been the vision for how to achieve a fundamentally different vision of American education. To quote another admitted leftist, President Obama’s education advisor who was deemed too radical to be confirmed as an Ed Secretary, Linda Darling-Hammond, from 1990 as well, when she was still a prof at Columbia, on the need for a ‘bottom-up’ approach to reform instead of top-down:

“rather than viewing the disciplines as embodying information to be transmitted by teachers and acquired by students, the frameworks seek to present subject areas as providing ways of thinking that will foster knowledge and understandings to be constructed by students themselves. More than any other state curriculum effort to date, California’s experiment aims explicitly at the goals urged by many recent reform reports: instruction that helps students think critically, express themselves proficiently, construct and solve problems, synthesize information, invent, and create.”

Sound familiar? Even for those who have not yet read my book Credentialed to Destroy, there is nothing new about what is now being called the Common Core or the active coordination of fed ED, the think tanks of every purported allegiance, and the NGA. To anyone who has not guessed it yet, ed reforms for results will become better known and then notorious as Outcomes-Based Education. Education reforms for results embodying actual changes in the students at an internalized level in how they think, feel, and ultimately act needed a new conception of schools and how they operate. That’s what School Choice has always been about. This is from the Foreword to the 1990 book, written by the Brookings’ President (my bolding):

“the nation’s education problem, then, is an institutional problem. To overcome it, the authors recommend a new system of public education based on fundamentally new institutions. They propose a shift away from a system of schools controlled directly by the government–through politics and bureaucracy–to a system of indirect control that relies on markets and parental choice.”

That again was Brookings and it fits with the Rockefeller Foundation’s recognition in the 80s that only “systemic school reform” would allow the kind of change in American schools toward holistic human development for ALL students that it sought. So School Choice became seen as the means for ensuring that ALL schools will offer “a high-quality learning experience” and a “rigorous curriculum in which students actively participate.” Envisioned as a theory in 1990 then, but that same pursuit of active and experiential is what accreditors now require and what the December 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) wrote into federal law for the states and districts to all implement. There is another useful confession in this book that no one seems willing to concede anymore now that School Choice is not just a theory.

“Any private schools that do participate will thereby become public schools, as such schools are defined under the new system.”

That same logic also is how homeschoolers are now poised to become ensnared via School Choice’s newest Vehicle for its Theory–Education Savings Accounts. Anyone using an ESA may be forced to submit to “high quality assessments” measuring and monitoring precisely what they have internalized and what guides their “sense of self”( as Reschool Colorado recently termed it in its Framework for the Future of Learning).

Again, let’s go back to the beginning of the confessions about what Choice might do and who was involved.

“Choice is being embraced by liberals and conservatives alike as a powerful means of transforming the structure and performance of public education…At the federal level, Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush have been enthusiastic supporters of educational choice, although there is not a great deal the federal government can do on it own. More consequentially, given the primary role of the states in public education, the National Governors’ Association has come out strongly for choice in its recent report [1986] on education, Time for Results–and reformist governors, Democrats and Republicans alike, have typically been in the forefront in pressing for real change.”

Karl Marx and John Dewey turn out to not be the only ones committed to social transformation via putting theories into practice. Public policy think tanks and their political allies love to as well. Authors Chubb and Moe again: “more important [a full-blown choice system] allows us to suggest in specific terms what our institutional theory of the schools actually entails for educational reform–and to emphasize, once again, how essential it is that reforms be founded in theory.” Now, if you are beginning to feel like a theory guinea pig, or at least a funder of such experiments, hold on for this stunning admission:

“Our guiding principle in the design of a choice system is this: public authority must be put to use in creating a system that is almost entirely beyond the reach of public authority.” If that sounds like nowhere to effectively appeal for any parent or student who grasps that School Choice and the law are to be used to impose the consciousness needed for the Human Development Society, the related footnote confirmed it:

“A good way of mitigating it [state legislatures or governors trying to control schools or their new mission in the future], however, would be to design institutions around fully decentralized authority and then install them through constitutional amendment. The legal foundation of the new system would then be very difficult to change or violate once put in place.”

Now I am just getting started on what has poured out in the last month as I sought to discern why no one was being honest about the history of either School Choice or the Common Core’s ancestry and who has been involved.

I guess we can just call this the Briar Patch Trilogy enlightening us all on why there has been such an insistence on false narratives.

I have been warning that the law and education are viewed as the ways to alter culture and the prevailing individual consciousness to something deemed appropriate for the ‘cooperative commonwealth’–another term frequently used.

If President-elect Trump is going to get us out of the Paris-climate accords (thank goodness!), can we please also cancel the attendant cultivation of a Comrade Consciousness via education reforms?