Accomplishing One of the Biggest Transformations in Human History Largely Out of Sight

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The problem with having an experienced Due Diligence lawyer figuring out what is really going on in an industry is we do tend to blow through ordinary barriers. It is just reflex to figure out who really owns what and where the funding is coming from and who else is connected. Which may make me a pain sometimes in casual conversation but it was darn useful to clients. Now since I have chosen to use writing to explain the connections and why they matter in education and how it relates to planned social, political, and economic transformations globally, let’s get going again. Because with this story, the real question becomes who isn’t affected, not who is.

A book that is probably not on your radar screen that should be came out in 2009 in the UK and 2010 in the US. Called The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger it lays out a vision to “inspire us to create a better society.” It argues that the developed rich countries have “material success and social failure” and that “the broken society and broken economy resulted from the growth of inequality.” Now I would argue that what has broken the rich countries is too much government intervention, like in the mortgage markets, that creates perverse incentives and loads of unintended consequences.

We have discussed before that many economists like Joseph Schumpeter realized that if you keep blaming the ill effects of interventionism on capitalism instead of the reality of cronyism coupled to government coercion, you will steadily get socialism quietly and invisibly. That is precisely what appears to be happening and The Spirit Level is intended to be a key component in creating the desired mindsets and political will for change. Blind, ignorant, but effective change.

Because of its thesis on what is broken and why, the book wants to “shift attention from material standards and economic growth to ways of improving the psychological and social wellbeing of whole societies.” Now that dovetails perfectly with both the UN and OECD’s current global emphasis even though the authors do not say so. As we will see though the dovetailing does have a lot to do with who gets published and why these days and who gets a fat nonfiction advance. And with the merger of Penguin and Random House as of July 1, 2013 that will become even more true. That one entity controls fully a quarter of the world book publishing business and the two previous competitors were frequently the sole bidders on major nonfiction.

Now Penguin is wholly-owned by the largest ed company in the world, Pearson PLC, which is a lot of influence in virtually every area of the information that gets out. If you remember, Pearson’s Chief Ed Advisor is Sir Michael  “Irreversible Change” Barber who thought Global Citizenship would make a nice substitute ideology to guide daily behavior since, he said basically, the Christian religion was no longer compelling and Marx had a bad rep in the 90s. He has his own tag detailing some of these pushes and his links via public meetings to Irina Bokova, head of UNESCO, who currently wants to use Media Education, including digital learning, to drive the planet to Marxist Humanism in the 21st century. Yes, she has said so. See those tags as well. Does she have any connections then to media? Yes, I would say so especially as German media conglomerate Bertelsmann controls 53% of the new publishing company to Penguin’s 47%.

If we quit thinking of socialism and the rest of Uncle Karl’s visions as being about the Kremlin or Mao and begin thinking of it as government led control by connected insiders of the economy and everyone else, what is really going on makes a whole lot more sense. Accurate perception also means we can strategize over both effective defense and offense in the coming years. At the end of the Spirit Level book, the authors remark that “creating the political will to make society more equal is more important than pinning our colours to a particular set of policies to reduce inequality. Political will is dependent on the development of a vision of a better society which is both achievable and inspiring.”

Now creating such political will and vision is Oh So Much easier if the largest ed company in the world owns Penguin which can simply publish such a book and many more.  Then that ed company can have its employees write reports and Forewords like this one just released  http://www.nesta.org.uk/library/documents/Alive_in_the_Swamp.pdf that push to have digital learning “irresistably engage” students. Software and gaming and assessments “personalized with the goal of unlocking the passion of the learner.” We have discussed before that digital learning can provide expert systems that teach but that is NOT the vision of digital learning actually being pushed. This is to be about behavioral change and the role of the teacher is to be a change agent “trained to focus on the personal experience of the individual student and to help uncover values and motivations.” Which again is darn useful since everyone involved about two levels up from the classroom, if not less, is intent on using education to obtain that political will and impose that social vision and create new values.

So the development of modern technology according to the book “will help us rein in consumerism and ease the introduction of policies to tackle global warming.” It believes “profit-making institutions” will “appear increasingly anti-social” which is highly likely given such media control over education and what gets published as nonfiction in the future. Who needs censorship when so few control so much of what will make it to most human minds as available information? We will likely get more of  http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/resources/park-avenue-how-much-inequality-too-much types of documentaries. Notice that just came out too and is classified as an educational material. Also  notice Equality Trust is preparing curriculum materials for 16-19 year olds and has a June 17, 2013 blog post explaining that we all have a flawed understanding of liberty.

The graduate student writer seems to have the life comprehension skills of someone who has always been supported by someone else as as he wants to define “liberty as the absence of relations of domination and dependence between persons” so “equality and liberty are not in conflict, but are in fact compatible and self-reinforcing concepts.” Honestly, if the government and connected insiders are in charge of making equality for all a fact as they are under all these visions, there will be a whole lot of domination and dependence and it will be hard to escape from. All in the Gutter Together with no ladder up or out. We will be back in the kind of status society referred to previously as feudalism. And we are not being assigned to the Castle with Moat class either. Someone has spent too much time in poli sci and cultural studies classes or reading the Howard Zinn view of history.

The authors are now turning The Spirit Level into a documentary for a planned release in Summer 2014 which will give emotionally compelling visuals for students going into US midterm elections. http://thespiritleveldocumentary.com/blog . The Foreword of the US version of the book was written by former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich and the co-sponsor of that Nesta Digital Learning Innovations report is the hugely influential and connected California-based New Schools Venture Fund in case anyone thinks this is only a UK invisible coup. I explained the Marxist Humanist theory of changing attitudes and values here http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/naming-educators-as-the-levers-shifting-the-human-personality-to-marxs-moral-revolution/ and that post fits with what is being explained in this post as well.

The Spirit Level ends with this rephrasing of Uncle Karl’s vision, still being sought so many years later:

“To sustain the necessary political will, we must remember that it falls to our generation to make one of the biggest transformations in human history. We have seen the rich countries have got to the end of the really important contributions which economic growth can make to the quality of life [they have gone through the requisite technology stage to supposedly make redistribution possible believed Uncle Karl] and also that our future lies in improving the quality of the social environment in our societies.[me again, that’s why there is so much emphasis in ed reform on the common good and community] The role of this book is to point out that greater equality is the material foundation on which better social relations are built.”

That certainly is the role of that book and isn’t it helpful Pearson is in a position to publish that book and use digital learning and its role as provider of so much of the curriculum and so many of the assessments to be used with the Common Core and for Texas’ STAAR? In a unique global position to prepare tasks and projects and questions that push that vision and create that political will? That it has a foundation pushing Global Learning in the US with the Asia Society mostly out of sight?

And is there any question whose vision we are about to use education to experiment as to whether better social relations can be built if nobody knows much and education becomes about engaging the passions through activity and visual stimulation?

Should we start a pool on how these transformations are really likely to turn out?

42 thoughts on “Accomplishing One of the Biggest Transformations in Human History Largely Out of Sight”

  1. The problem with a pool idea is that you need people to take both sides. We’re all going to be predicting “mass murder and genocide”.

    and hoping we’re wrong…

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    • I read Pacepa’s new book Disinformation the other day and was taken by his comment about how it starts with lying because the lies have been such a huge part of education reforms for so long. I believe plenty of people involved are inadvertent change agents but there is also a tremendous amount of knowledge that should earn some of these supers, consultants, and even principals in some instances a “I hurt children for personal profit” t-shirt.

      So few people understand history which is why I do always try to weave it in. We are really not guessing on where this is going and that Park Avenue film is both effective propaganda and false in pernicious ways a typical person would have a hard time refuting. People need to appreciate how many books now are just loaded with falsehoods or are a theory hoping to be put into action. With taxpayer money.

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  3. I’ve been meaning to ask a WordPress question for just about since I started reading this blog, so now I’ll go ahead …

    Is there a way to auto-subscribe to each post, so that I automatically get all the comments? As it is now, I get a notice when there’s a post, and if I comment I receive an email allowing me to subscribe to comments for that post. If I don’t make a comment, I don’t get others’ comments on that post either. I can’t even opt to receive comments on a post unless I made a comment first. This assumes that I love to hear myself talk and have an urge to debate, which is generally true, but still I would like to be alerted to comments even if they cannot be responding to me.

    I’d rather get all the comments on all the posts automatically, even if I do nothing and write no comments of my own. Is that possible?

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    • Good question and I have no idea. I will look into it but my family refers to me as techno challenged and there’s a reason I don’t post pictures.

      But we always like your comments. Your state school super John King was one of the speakers by the way at the 2013 New Schools Venture Fund annual conference. David Coleman chaired it. It’s about an hour video but well worth the time of anyone in NY to really appreciate what is coming. I took notes.

      Will try to get you an answer tomorrow. I am afraid in real life I remain a hunt and peck typist which makes my kids laugh.

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    • On the Invisible Serf’s Collar homepage there are a series of links that run down the right side of the page. One of these links is “Comments RSS” where you can subscribe to the comments. You’re not alerted of comments via an email but they come in a chronologically in a bookmark. I keep it in my toolbar so I can get to it without searching around.

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      • Thanks Desuetude. So I’m going to try that. Seems that on my browser (Chrome) it says the page lacks style information so I get a bunch of html code around the comments. I’m guessing that problem is Chrome specific though. This looks like the solution I asked for.

        On the poll — if this thing is allowed to go through the way David Coleman wants, we’re all in a world of hurt. But I have some optimism still.

        Robin thanks for that reference to the newschools.org talk “The Common Core is Coming!” John King says he can’t wait for this to get implemented, but in our district we’re only going to pilot tablet computers in one grade, either next year or the year after. And we’ve actually cut back on Professional Development.

        The moment I liked best from that talk was when the teacher (yes one of the panelists was an actual high school teacher) said that with these new standards, there had to be some expectation of failure. Some kids would not meet standards. That’s the most realistic, normal sounding thing I have heard from any of these people.

        One of the things I liked least was when John King said that some of the problems of differentiated learning would be solved by computerized assessments. I wanted to think that meant assessments where you get easier or harder questions depending on how you do, but Robin has shown that is probably not what it means, instead it means more like experiential or values-based assessments.

        Also I noticed David Coleman’s quick reference to Ed Briceno who is associated with Mindset. Recall that Carol Dweck is also associated with Mindset. Well, my district employs individuals with those same last names (different first names), one as a consultant, the other as a middle school administrator. So I’m guessing we are going to get some Mindset stuff showing up.

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        • David-

          one of the local high schools with an IB program had the 9th grade Honors English class reading excerpts from Mindset last year. Because I work at home and can shuffle the timing of meetings and research and writing, I am frequently the designated driver for a group of school kids going somewhere. You can just imagine me driving in traffic and overhearing the discussion about how they are now supposed to have Growth Mindsets instead of Fixed ones. I gasped that was was Carol Dweck and the kids said How did you know. We are reading her book.

          If you read the Up from the Swamp link it talks about the desired assessments and hopefully making it so student will not know they are being assessed. Like the gaming.

          Do you remember Coleman making a big deal about ETS backing up the College Board’s work in this area in that New Schools talk? ETS sponsored the Gordon Commission which of course brings in Gee’s work and Lauren Resnick and her Higher Order Thinking Skills and Kenneth Gergen’s Appreciative Inquiry and the race and urban equity focus of the Chair. All of that is still guiding where this is all going. The gaming focus is consistent with irresistably compelling to the passions. Also at the AERA annual conference a few months ago, equity was the focus and the Gordon Commission did a formal presentation.

          Glad you got the comments problem fixed and hopefully that explanation will help others. I am getting offline thanks over the calibre of the comments here. A national and international and public and private discussion of what is happening and what is coming is helping many people who prefer to lurk. Current teachers in the classroom really are frightened. The book should take away some pf the planned leverage simply by describing what it is and how it works. So will having high school students read what is planned and the explanations for why there teachers have changed the nature of the classroom and what goes on there.

          The backdoor and windows really were supposed to remain unlocked.

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          • Those 2013-14 requirements look pretty bothersome. Can’t you just … teach? No I guess not, you have to have the principal watching you frequently and be sure to do all the required “instructional shifts”. They want to make damn sure you change what you’re doing. Maybe it doesn’t matter whether it’s better or worse, but it’s change. That’s what Obama promised after all.

            OK I am still looking for a bright spot … and here’s my last try to find one. I recall reading NY State’s contract (or a summary thereof) for RTTT. Our projects are designed to end this year, with the stated purpose that we do not need to stay in the program longer if we don’t want to. We won’t “owe” the Feds anything after this year. Maybe we’ll drop out.

            But with Cuomo as governor, I suspect that won’t be allowed either. Still, we don’t know that for sure yet.

        • David, I haven’t watched the video, but I wouldn’t take too much comfort in the teacher’s remark about expecting some level of failure. This has been a marketing piece of Common Core for some time. They know that the assessments are going to be a disaster, and they have been conditioning the public to expect this, putting it on the grounds of “increased rigor.” Actually it will be as a result of the complications introduced by the computer (for young students especially, for whom it will be as though they are being asked to respond in Chinese) and because the students will not initially have been indoctrinated sufficiently to respond “accurately.” Sorry to be the skunk at the party.

          Deborah

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          • The reason for the known failure is that these are assessments where there is no right answer and the material is deliberately untaught. That’s what Higher Order Thinking Skills and rigor means. What concepts does student apply and what strategies to a nonlinear, nonalgorithmic, ambiguous question or task. Preferably also this is group work. The assessments are really a compliance tool and a means of monitoring that behavioral change is taking place.

            But no one but me will say that and I only can because I have been reading all these books and reports and papers going back decades. There is virtually no variance in what is being sought but it was not easy to piece together. So no one is being honest that the purpose of the assessments is to mess with the mind and then see how they did.

            Deborah-years ago we had taken the kids up to the Bay of Fundy to see the tides and the whales and we were coming back from the Hopewell Rocks area and it was close to sundown. All of a sudden we see a moving small black object in road and then the worst smell imaginable. For all of us who had only seen skunks in cartoons it was funny because all of us immediately thought indpendently “So that’s what a skunk smells like.”

          • Robin, I’m responding before your comment because there’s no Reply option afterward. Quite in the spirit of Common Core, don’t you think? Anyway, I came across this interesting definition of Assessment provided in the National Council for Education Statistics glossary: “any systematic procedure for obtaining information from tests and other sources that can be used to draw inferences about characteristics of people, objects or programs.” As I commented in an analysis I have written for use by our charter school, this definition makes it clear that the purpose of the Common Core assessments is not to measure academic achievement but to “characterize” and therefore label individuals according to categories. It turns the entire student population and their families into specimens for social scientific clinical analysis, along with the “objects” and “programs” referred to in the definition, and it therefore constitutes a violation of their right to privacy and an assault on their human dignity as subjects rather than objects.

            Just sayin’.

          • Robin, the ultimate objectives are certainly as you state. But at the end of the day, these assessments must be scored. The consortia or their satraps in the states (I don’t know the exact hierarchy here) can’t come out after the assessments are administered and say to the public, “The students will not be receiving scores for these assessments. There is no such thing as a higher score or a lower score, a right answer or a wrong answer. It slipped our mind to mention this. We simply administered them as an experiment on your children to fish around in their heads.” No, scores must be given, and on some parts of the assessments there will be “right” or “wrong” answers. The problem is that from the samples I have seen, the questions are so badly presented and the visual design so confusing that the format (and the seductive impulse to do graphic “doodling” by younger students when they should be plugging away) will undermine the results. This is what I think the Common Core spokesmen are trying to discount beforehand to the public.

          • Deborah-the scoring is by rubric. And it is not based on right or wrong but how much support was introduced. It is also group work generally with an agreed upon meaning after negotiation among participants. It’s not collaboration because it is joint activity but rather because each student’s perspectives are taken and then an overall understanding gets negotiated.

            The only knowledge being looked for is familiarity with desired concepts and topics. Plus let’s face it, the scoring has been fudged for years with few parents appreciating how it works.

            On the blog I tend to synthesize a tremendous amount of material but there is real consistency here. I am mentally off in Scandinavia at the moment and the writers have just verified what I thought was going on. I was going off of multiple sources but internationally it is Lauren Resnick’s 1987 definition of Higher Order Thinking Skills that I have written about being used. With an overlay of Bakhtin who I have also written about.

          • Our 6-8 middle school uses letter grades, but our 9-12 high school uses numerical grades, no letters.

            I hope this provides some insulation against nonsense assessments based on group work outcomes. Can you get an 83 or a 68 based on your alignment to Enduring Understandings? So far we’ve received no warnings about any changes in the upcoming school year.

          • How can the work be “collaborative” and at the same time entered on individual computers in the computer lab? I’m not questioning the accuracy of what you’re saying, I’m just trying visualize how these requirements can all be met. I can see teacher as data collector, dutifully filling out the electronic check sheet containing 50-odd data points for our kindergartners as mandated under the School Readiness Act, things like “Responds to an adult’s tone of voice and expression”; “Comforts self by seeking out special object or person”; I can see students sitting around and brainstorming about how to write their congressman about the extinction of the polar bears, under the watchful eye of the Commissar — I mean teacher — who scores the kids accordingly. I can’t, however, square those scenarios with kids keyboarding at their individual computers in the lab, moving along from level to level with their personalized assessment.

          • Because that is what you are supposed to visualize not to grasp the extent of the paradigm shift away from the individual mind. Individual grades but not individual work.

            I have known this for a while and even raised with the Deputy Super in Ga in a public meeting (well kind of, I was invited) just after Ga got its NCLB waiver. She is in charge of the implementation in GA. I said how do you get to individual achievement when the Common Core assessments are group tasks and projects. She basically hissed at me for correctly knowing that (I was invited for a reason which is that I do have unapproved knowledge) and then she said “we have told people they are performance assessments.” Parents and taxpayers who have a real life and do not read reports and books all day were supposed to recognize that performance meant group.

            What is individual online is adaptive software or skills that are assessing essential knowledge and skills. There is a great deal of duplicity surrounding the implementation precisely because it is unprecedented radical change based on untested learning theories that are actually political and psychological theories.

            I don’t mind you doubting me and questioning me but I am quite sure. Remember I also have Pearson docs laying out what they are assessing and all the insider reports and all that CRESST work and that report Peter Senge and Robert Kegan did for Hewlett about deep learning that was dated July 4, 2012.

            This is morally treasonous even if it is not legally treason. Many of the people pushing this have an unappreciated political agenda or they are just pushing what will get the next promotion without further thought. When it comes to ed administration mediocrity of the mind is unfortunately considered an asset since the office holders push what they are told to do.

            Also we are in what is being called the twilight zone before the state tests go away. That’s why Randi Weingarten and AFT wanted to hold off on the teacher evals lest the CHAT classroom emphasis now bite a teacher still answerable to somewhat objective tests. But acknowledging need for delay would call attention to how very radical the shift is. And insiders call this a radical, unprecedented shift.

          • Robin, I absolutely do not doubt you; you’ve demonstrated your bona fides too long and too consistently for that. The deficiency is my own; I just can’t visualize the scenario. Do the students do their group thing and then go into the computer lab and write their impressions of the exercise? Do they sit together figuring out five different ways to add 7 and 8 and then go into the lab and write up their recollections? Sorry to be so slow-witted about it, but I’m like a dog with a bone when I don’t understand something. Just ask my college physics professor. And I apologize for continuing to consume your valuable time.

          • The shift is for the project to be the assessment and online portfolios. Assessments are just the experiences or activities themselves. Remember no one much cares if anyone is learning anything in the traditional sense so point no 1 is a model that tries to keep that from happening without it being obvious.

            Secondly you have to doublecheck to make sure that students are becoming aware of what is desired and have the right attitudes and values and then that they apply the concepts desired into untaught ambiguous situations. There is a great interest with the new assessments in getting at grit and motivations and perseverance. Glenn Beck had that report and was right to be concerned but lacked the planned context. He won’t after the next post if anyone knows him. I have known for a while where that fit and now I can prove it without resorting to how I got there. Numerous books and extrapolating. That works poorly in a blog where people have ever right to say are you sure? No one else is where you are at. True but the evidence is here. You have to really get the theory though as it is staying quite consistent. Of course as I am about to explain we are playing guinea pigs with our young people’s minds and personalities and deliberately so.

            Some days like at the moment all this makes my brain hurt. One of my cats though thinks it is time to sit in my lap and prevent me from typing well.

          • Robin, one other thing: I went to your Contact Us link because I wanted to communicate something sensitive that it would be imprudent to post on the blog. But I saw “5 comments on Contact Us,” and that gave me pause. Are communications through that medium also posted?

          • No.

            I get comments through comment us all the time.

            I will be looking for it but it is also my first name at reformforgrowth and then the dot com. That should let you use it without it being accessible to the bots.

    • Hi Gerry–

      the March through the Institutions that Law Professor Stephen Diamond has described as a hallmark of Stalinism in the West is precisely what the last several posts have quoted insiders as saying they are doing.

      I write because I know history and we are playing with great danger here precisely because this mind arson and psychological emphasis is likely to shove us toward expectations that cannot be met. You might appreciate this old post. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/comparing-the-real-common-core-to-notorious-authoritarian-social-engineering-disasters/

      As you can see I do try to tell this story through history. Welcome to the blog.

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    • Right. Mindful of Godwin’s Law, I try to avoid Nazi references — and there is plenty of other apropos history such as the forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and the Killing Fields of Cambodia.

      My other favorite explanation are the Underwear Gnomes from South Park. Whenever I try to explain this stuff to my husband he rolls his eyes and says “conspiracy theory” and thinks that “well that will certainly not work that way” is a counterargument. And it’s easy to get sidetracked by that argument. But the Underwear Gnomes gets across the idea that a) yes it is a conspiracy, and b) it simply can’t work out the way the conspirators expect it to. Because failure is the best-case scenario, and returning the planet to pre-historic {nasty, brutish, short} is far more likely.

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      • Cathy-

        It is a coordinated effort around political and economic power that would be stopped if it openly acknowledged in the daylight what was up. And people have been working together and hiding what they were doing for quite a few millenia for power. Also because this is a systematic plan fulfilling the theory you were taught or just doing as you are told has the effect of one of the gears in a massive engrenage. Which is why that visual of interlocking gears gets used so much.

        That’s why I came up with the Inadvertent Change Agent term. Participation can be highly effective while ignorant of broader intentions and work just fine.

        As I say, you can alter the future with education policy but you cannot dictate it and mind arson sets in motion people with no capacity to notice or defy a bad idea. And Godwin’s law or not, Germany is proof that turning your education system in the 19th century into a zone trying to create an unconscious impulse to act on behalf of the collective good will not turn out well.

        I have studied 19th century Germany pretty hard and the quote on the blog’s header is from the 1927 book The Treason of the Intellectuals making much the same point. It is by Julien Benda.

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  5. As far as the poll is concerned I see it playing out as Revelation chapter 13—with good ultimately triumphing over evil (by Chapter 22).

    “The dragon stood on the shore of the sea. And I saw a beast coming out of the sea … The whole world was filled with wonder and followed the beast. People worshiped the dragon because he had given authority to the beast, and they also worshiped the beast and asked, “Who is like the beast? Who can wage war against it?” . . . Because of the signs it was given power to perform on behalf of the first beast, it deceived the inhabitants of the earth . . . “

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  6. also, a thought about the built in failure aspect of common core et al…. as we know the Psycho social underpinnings and the absence of traditiional classical learning it makes sense that the failure allows for further differentiating and further data malreporting of the ” acheivement gap ” and its widening or narrowing to fit the desired state dialectic propaganda narrative. this further differentiating is to designate those with the particular character traits to acheive certain totalitarian positions in the new age globalist futurist age of aquarius/ neostalinst communitiarian society. such as those to fill the necessary role of Kapo, or Capo.
    a certain personal knowledge of each student ( ethnic, political, nickname, address, parents) begotten from longitudinal data collection we know of RTTT combined with differentiated instruction and computer instruction and ” deep engagement” with Deep narrow text…..
    well you can imagine. research the role of KAPO in WWII.

    Do not forget that parents have little opportunity to view curriculum let alone tests.

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    • madmommy-

      My morning march through the newsletters and announcements yielded something very juicy that is going into effect this fall. Should illustrate the point well on the level of access and what is being pulled together. It would be bad enough alone but I have two books that lay out what the small print actually means and the docs say flat out it is experimenting on kids to see what happens. Will try to come up with a suitably provocative title. I don’t think I have started a blog post with Experimenting…yet?

      It’s pretty bad when school board members find out what the Supers have committed the district to by reading this blog. Or what their counsel failed to explain. Or what those words in a charter really mean

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      • they really love ” DEEP ENGAGEMENT ” don’t they… I think now that DEEP is doublespeak for :

        empty the mind ( eastern new age psych)
        fill it with repetative progressive garbage ( you are bad, fringe groups and behavior are good)
        create attachment as would jim jones or a pedo ( candy, self esteem, brownie points, good grades, kudos, suggestions, approval))
        enflame the emotion ( tradition is bad, families bad, americans bad, unfair, unequal, haters, killers, greedy, stupid)

        then comes the ASSESSMENT!!! WHO IS ON BOARD??
        Who needs remediation? differentiated round 2? a visit to the guidance councilor? reassessment?
        using methods of peer pressure, bandwagon, consensus survey groups, guided reading, constructivist acting, games, even bullying and intimidation ( i have experienced this first hand with my daughters best friend)……

        deep engagement with our kids, WHAT PARENT WANTS THIS??? This is how I equate it….
        C”mon, we’re buddies, just take one hit….
        So unpopular if you don’t take a hit….
        you will belong to our cool gang…..
        try it, it won’t hurt….
        I care about you…..
        trust me….

        old story new playing field..

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  7. http://remakelearning.org/blog/2013/07/30/game-on-teachers-learn-to-bring-gaming-and-play-into-the-classroom/

    I wonder how long it will be before someone finally sues people, teachers, and school systems such as this for educational and taxpayer fraud?

    You know, a really revolutionary movement for ed reform just may be the next great civil rights struggle. An educational tea party. But its going to have to be very assertive and have intellectually and politically strong leadership. It will have to draw out the Left and thrash it soundly in public debate and use the courts to hold real people with names and faces accountable.

    I’m not waiting up with the light on for this, but I think that’s what its going to take.

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  9. I was looking through The Spirit Level. Was the author British? He should go fix Britain. Oh, and the nonsense about Katrina never ends. It’s completely absurd.

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