Is fraud too strong a word for organized deceit that seeks to override constitutional rights and evade public outcry every time School to Work has reared its unpopular head in the past? Do we have massive, actual, repeated deceit? Check. Are we giving up something of value? Yes, our children’s minds, our tax dollars, plus the foreseeable carnage of all this economic and social planning. Now how many of us upon hearing the now ubiquitous phrase “high standards for all students” understand that this phrase is intended to quietly prescribe project-based learning for all high school students? To marry vocational with academic for all students? To insist that schools be linked with the “adult world of work and learning” and that it is that mandated nexus that constitutes “high standards”?
Before I talk further about the federally-financed, 1998 New Urban High School Project that spun out the High Tech High that is now held up as the exemplar of world-class learning http://zhaolearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/WorldClass.pdf or its 2008 Update called “Seeing the Future: A Planning Guide for High Schools” that made it clear that this vision would be applicable to all high schools and every student in each and every community, I want to go back to explaining what is wrong with such a Project-based Learning mandate in the first place. Imagine that we were invited to visit the lovely island of Tortola in the BVI as part of the Social Science Research Council meeting held there in 1989 with so many of the education professors interested in using education for transformational change of the West and its institutions at what was known to be a pivotal time in the world.
Well, we weren’t invited, were we? We will simply have to rely on the book created by participants in that meeting (many of whom already had tags on this blog because of their promotion of Vygotsky and Cultural-Historical Activity Theory) called Distributed cognitions: Psychological and educational considerations. When I was preparing to write this post I discovered an article by an Alex Kozulin called “The Concept of Activity in Soviet Psychology: Vygotsky versus His Disciples” which revealed just how active the deceit has been about the real purpose for pushing these instructional changes. Kozulin tells us that when the first major work of Vygotsky, Thought and Language, was translated into English it eliminated virtually all of the references to Marx, Engels, or Hegel and the philosophical and methodological discussions.
In other words, we in the English speaking world were to get the practices without a heads-up on the purposes. That, of course, would be known to anyone who spoke Russian and many of the behavioral scientists pushing the work. American taxpayers and parents though, if they were even aware of Vygotsky, got referred to the cleansed and much-shrunken (318 pages in Russian to 153 in English with fewer words on each page). Since this blog does not do sound effects I cannot say “we wuz robbed” in an irksome, high-pitched voice, but we were being lied to systematically from the get-go about what was sought for education just like with the “critical thinking” and outcomes-based education we have been covering.
Two of our Tortola-invited profs well-known to ISC readers, Michael Cole and Yrjo Engestrom, were kind enough to tell us what cultural-historical activity theory and its better-known sibling in our curriculum now–project-based learning–was intended to disrupt. They quoted an anthropologist from 1942, Leslie White, describing the capacity that makes human special animals and it is the capacity that transformational education or what I call Radical Ed Reform in my book MUST disrupt, impede, erect an insuperable barrier in front of, etc.:
“man differs from the apes, and indeed all other living creatures so far as we know, in that he is capable of symbolic behavior. With words man creates a new world, a world of ideas and philosophies. In this world man lives just as truly as in the physical world of his senses…This world comes to have a continuity and a permanence that the external world of the senses can never have. It is not made up of the present only but of a past and future as well. Temporally, it is not a succession of disconnected episodes, but a continuum extending to infinity in both directions, from eternity to eternity.”
That capacity reenforces building up from the world as it currently exists in light of what has worked well or poorly in the past. In other words, that capacity is in the way of political power whenever and where ever it seeks to usurp decision-making power away from the individual and bestow it to public officials at the local, state, federal, or UN/OECD global level. As my book made clear those goals had begun in earnest by 1989 in the West, especially the United States. As this blog has repeatedly made clear with cite after cite, similar goals of social, economic, and political transformation are occurring now.
The public sector at every level wants to be in charge of us and what we can become. Rather than be honest with us that they now insist on Overlord Status with no ability to escape, they are using a reimagined type of K-12 education especially to invisibly create the desired barriers. At its core that is what Project-based learning, cooperative learning, required Critical Thinking, mandated assessment of Higher Order Thinking, mental health assessments, social and emotional learning apps for students http://about.att.com/content/csr/home/blog/2015/05/momentous_institute.html , and constructivism generally are all about: creating minds and personalities amenable to subjugation by the public sector.
And no, subjugation is not too strong a word. I am not sure slavery is either, except this time the chains are to be imposed via formative assessments and classroom activities at a neurobiological level. Cole and Engestrom tell us that the unification of the social and physical sciences like that by changing culture and then locking those changes into place at a neural level was what both John Dewey and the Soviet psychologists always wanted. Why what a wonderful reason to lock those instructional practices into place for all students in every state and then hide those mandates. Cole and Engestrom admit one more time in their own words what must be disrupted if transformational schemes of a different sort of future are to be realized. (my bolding for emphasis)
“only a culture-using human being can ‘reach into’ the cultural past, project it into the future, and then ‘carry’ that (purely conceptual) future ‘back’ into the present in the shape of beliefs that then constrain and organize the present sociocultural environment ..
The public sector, politicians of both parties at every level, think tanks of every label along the spectrum, foundations, business cronies, self-confessed radicals are all desirous now of using K-12 education to sever that “assumption that the cultural future will be more or less like the cultural past.” Rather than saying so to our faces and dealing with our ire, we get lied to repeatedly. I believe that is why the New Standards Project simply rolled forward in 1998 in many states and six urban districts. That’s why this New Urban High School Project began at the same time and then became updated in 2008 ready to have its covert influence on all US secondary schools without anyone bothering to confess what was up.
I think this is why no one wants to talk about WIOA and its clear determination to force a planned economy in every state. This playbook released recently http://www.nationalskillscoalition.org/resources/publications/file/2015-04-22-WIOA-playbook_updated-4.pdf makes it quite clear that plans for the entire state’s economy and all the K-12 system should be rolled into each state’s strategies going forward.
All the active deceit involving the NCLB Rewrite and misportraying its actual language and the clear purposes has the same ultimate goal. Public sector power without confessing as much. This post is running too long to cover all of the stated purposes of the New Urban High School Project. Let’s just call attention for now to the admission that “the great power of School-to-Work is that it situates students in the adult world of work and learning, confronting them with unpredictable situations, new perspectives that cut across subject matters, and invaluable lessons in dealing with people in the world.”
School-to-Work as it is envisioned as part of this Project-based learning remake of US secondary schools severs that historic constraint that linked the cultural future with the cultural past because that cultural past ceases to be the classroom focus. There goes the constraint and no one need be the wiser. Just lots of hype about engagement and the Whole Child and how “exemplary School-to-Work practice puts students—their observations, their actions, their reflections—at the center of learning.” The hype continues without anyone admitting how well the barrier to the cultural past is being created at the level of each student’s mind. Instead we get this salesmanship, “inclusive and democratic [STW] invites students to participate in the creation of new designs for learning.”
The fascinating part for me is that both the 1998 and 2008 reports talk about each student being able to meet their district or school’s “common core goals” such as listed Habits of Mind, Student Learning Objectives, or the skills laid out in the notorious SCANS report of 1991. All of these are examples of listed “common core goals.” That means that the list of desired generic personality traits and skills your school or district is mailing out or creating as a poster on school walls is the real ‘common core’, whatever your state decides to rename its poorly appreciated state ‘standards’.
Anyone else feeling lied to and the object of social engineering to create a new kind of citizen for the future?
See why what is going on in K-12 matters to everyone even if they have no children?
Every word is true. The proof of the pudding is in a YouTube presentation by Georgia’s Lt. Governor Casey Cagle. I will attempt to include it here, but if my techno-illiteracy doesn’t work, I’ll post it in another comment square. But rest assured that he tells the story we were not supposed to understand.
Here’s the link http://caseycagle.com/education/
CP- I have the column from the May 6, 2015 Northside Neighbor and also noticed that Cagle is clearly been in meetings where this vision has been touted. My experience in hearing him speak multiple times is he tends to repeat what he has been told without pondering the implications. Almost like having a tape recording of a meeting we were not invited to.
He spoke at the December cle program where I got the Ga legislators to confirm that they area ware that the Common Core is actually tied to workforce and economic development with plans across the state under way. He aslo introduced Joel Klein at the MACO luncheon I wrote about in the Cui Bono? post.
We have a school like that in a town near me.
http://www.nclack.k12.or.us/Page/13322
The link between the Beck polytech discussions in my book and the New Urban High School reports is a July 1991 paper with Norton Grubb as the lead author called “The Cunning Hand, the Cultured Mind” Models for Integrating Vocational and Academic Education.” I came across this after Bob Riordan mentioned that High Tech High had developed from the NUHS vision. This may also be why Knowledge Works has spun out the New Tech Network to make it harder to tie all this together. You would need to already know of ties to Richard Riley, KW, Innovation Lab Network, Strive’s Cradle to Career etc.
Remember the 2 time Broad Prize winning district super, Alvin Wilbanks, said that the purpose of the Common Core was remaking high school. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/listening-in-on-the-confessional-drumbeat-of-the-common-cores-true-purpose-jettisoning-traditional-high-school/ We just did not know about NUHS or how tightly its edicts fit both with what we are being lied to about and the planned state economy vision. That is really evident in the 2008 paper, which was clearly written with the NGA’s Sector Strategies push in place. Some thing like WIOA was always needed, which was why it was falsely trumpeted as being about disabilities for the most part.
The point of where this is all going is that this is the required model for every high school in the country. Lots of Oregon high schools listed in the Cunning Hand, Cultured Mind report from 1991.
This post is obviously Part 1. The listed Learner outcomes that are an example of common core learning goals remind me a great deal of the IB Learner Profile and what I saw at the Aurora theatre shooter’s new type of high school in San Diego. That one opened in 2006 so it’s not Hoover. San Diego though is where Cole and Engestrom are with the Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition.
The school I linked to was financed by a gates grant.
This data privacy law Georgia has adopted http://www.peachpundit.com/2015/05/12/governor-deal-signs-the-student-data-privacy-accessibility-and-transparency-act/#more-75074 that is supposed to be a model for other states actually makes the cybernetic and personality manipulation uses of data authorized by law.
And to think Buzz Brockway is patting himself on the back about this travesty that authorizes every bit of the psychologically abusive practices the Soviets ever researched. Whoever drafted that knew what they were doing. Just look aT Section 20-2-666(d)(3) on the authorization of adaptive learning or customized student learning purposes. Elsewhere it is authorized for ‘legitimate research purposes’ and everything is permitted for ‘educational purposes’. http://www.legis.ga.gov/legislation/en-US/Display/20152016/HB/414
In the name of student privacy, the Georgia legislature unanimously authorized wholesale abuse. Perhaps Georgia needed an NCLB waiver that allows promotion even if someone cannot read so that they could eventually move into the Ga legislature. Apparently no one there bothers to think about what they enact as we saw with HB 186 several years ago.
Macey found this. Education to job, school to work… meh… same same?
http://www.merkley.senate.gov/news/press-releases/merkley-introduces-education-to-jobs-package
Tomorrow I am set to be at the Gigabit Cities national conference. I suspect I am about to hear a lot of “if we build it after issuing bonds, we will prosper: discussions. Downside as always to the taxpayer.
I am also frightened by these statutes like ECAA or WIOA or that stupid Ga statute that actually authorizes turning the state into a psychological Auschwitz in K-12 while hyping Student Privacy. No one voting seems to actually know what is in the bills.
This is a perfect example https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/rsa-blogs/2015/05/the-challenge-of-public-governance/ of why it is so dangerous to simply regard ‘the local’ as the conservative approach. Progressives globally are making it quite clear that the local is where they can effectively get control over people, things, and places so they are disabled from making decisions themselves.
In the UK they brag about Devolution as the key yet so many ‘think tanks’ act like they are unaware of all these efforts. Maybe they just hope we are and will send financial support naively believing they represent a conservative approach instead of the right pincer guiding public acceptance of a dominant public sector in the 21st century. No wonder they want weak minds.
Our data “transparency” bill in Colorado passed both houses but has not been signed by the governor. It was a pretty good bill until lobbyists from Microsoft and Google managed to neutralize it. It seems to have been a centrally orchestrated campaign of Big Data to fan out to all states considering such legislation. I recently received an email from our very sharp point person on this issue who said the following: “Please be aware that nearly identical amendments have appeared in other states who have introduced privacy bills this session. Almost exact wording appears in privacy amendments for OR, CO, WA, MD, AZ and they all bear striking resemblance to this model legislation from Jeb Bush’s ExcelinEd.” Now I guess we can add GA to the list. I chuckled sardonically when I opened Robin’s link above and noted the approving press release sent out from Excellence in Education. They ought to approve — they wrote the template!
http://static.excelined.org/wp-content/uploads/Student-Data-Privacy-Accessibility-and-Transparency-Act-Model-Legislation-03.2015.pdf
Deborah-take a look at this and everything it brings together. http://www.coloradoedinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/CEI-Annual-Report-2013.pdf
It came out as I was looking into all the links among the National Center for Time and Learning, Mass2020, and the ESEA Rewrite Our Public Sector Grandee Lamar is pushing.
This announcement from this morning has Colorado Education Initiative as one of 6 entities getting $25 million to create breakthrough schools for next generation learning. https://www.edsurge.com/n/2015-06-17-nglc-funding-hits-25m-for-49-breakthrough-schools
Notice also the mention of a new Hewlett/Gates funded entity to push assessment for personalized learning. It dovetails with the language if Ever Child Achieves Act even before it makes it to the Senate floor. This also fits with Senator Isakson’s confession yesterday to Politico that ‘conservatives’ need only look at the pages with the cited concerns-like opt out or the Common Core and need not consider contradictory language or more concerning mandates elsewhere in the legislation when deciding whether to vote on it. Of course in a future dispute over opt out, the school districts can fight with access to public coffers and the poor parents cannot.
At least that’s how I took Isakson’s language. It reminded me of the Senators and Congressmen who voted for his WIOA based on the summary as if that was the relevant document.
Look at what else is financed with Gates Foundation money. http://cnx.io/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/CNX-Industry-Brief-w-Services-Overview-20141015.pdf
Then think about the Rockefeller Foundation backing Metropolitanism so strongly, Carnegie and competency-based education, and Lumina with its 75 metro areas working with the Strive Network on top of all the ed initiatives. I cannot tell you how fully the Human Development Model was described fully today. I realized I was feeling ill. Did you know Seattle commenced a Race and Social Justice Initiative in 2006?
Well this just gets more clarifying. http://www.mountainconnect.org/?page_id=839 Love the link to former sreb director as in Gene Bottoms’ High Schools that Work. The Cunning Hand, Cultured Mind paper specifically referenced them and all their ‘help’.
As I said http://www.connectednation.org/broadband-partnerships . And now this. http://www.connectednation.org/attaspire/info Connected Ed. Broadband to Title 1 schools with federal dollars.
I think I need to stop and concentrate on getting middle child ready for her WW2 trip. At least those bombings and mortars were visible and people knew who to fight.
Quite the collection of books here. Incredible high Prices. Must be important info.
http://www.igi-global.com/journal/international-journal-game-based-learning/41019
Boy, that is expensive. Yesterday I was looking at a book on “learning how to learn” and what “meaningful learning” was really all about that was originally published in the 70s. It was reprinted all through the 80s and 90s. I kept thinking as I was reading it how much easier game-based learning and adaptive platforms like Knewton make the gathering of the kind of internalized info desired.
I always come back to that Harman Willis quote that the body physically does not recognize the scenarios it is looking at in a virtual reality contrived situation are not physically real. The point is always to manipulate how we regard ourselves, others, things, and events. The point is never about what is real now, but what might be. Like I said things are far more graphic when they are written before ideas get exposed and become controversial.
Have you heard of this nsf-funded whole-body immersion to create intuitive ‘understandings’ of science concepts? http://svad.cah.ucf.edu/medialearninglab/meteor/
The good news is it is ‘research’ so come on to Georgia. The legislature and governor have declared open season on data collection on the innermost aspects of our children’s psyches since it’s for ‘research’. No need to cut anyone open. Just embed them in the desired virtual reality and assess and collect data away.
UCF is really a hotbed. I had a hard time getting to that media learning lab link (I finally nailed it via a back door), but in the process I found this:
Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd Program
for Strategic Research and Studies
located at UCF. This brought to mind an anecdote told to me by a friend. Their family was in Florida for some reason and they went to the library, I assume public, but at least located close to the campus. One of the family members was seated at a computer looking something up. Guess who was seated at the next computer? Mohammed Atta.
Funny how the post-moderns and the Sharia-lovers make common cause so easily. Cliff Kincaid actually held a conference on the Leninist-Sharia axis a few years ago.
But I digress…
Now you see why I am more likely to describe the link than make it a hot link. It makes it much harder for someone to take it off the relevant server. Once when I was researching UNESCO’s takeover of the direction of higher ed globally, the relevant doc was on a server in Europe. I guess someone realized it was being read and tracked the IP back to Atlanta area and figured it was not someone authorized. Screen went blank while I was reading it.
It was already on my hard drive and I finished reading that copy.
Sharia and Leninism are both all-encompassing Worldviews that want to cover the religious and political spheres and control behavior. Truly totalitarian. We are headed in the same direction with where HOTS/cybernetics takes us. It’s why it matters so much that it is a requirement in ECAA. The crucial difference is that because th control is less visible, the hope is that there will be no overt resistance.
Sharia and Lenin were willing to be brutal. Cybernetics wants control over behavior without people rebelling. It makes it the perfect political tool for politicians and a public sector that simply wants control over people and the economy without admitting it.
Now this is a highly useful confession. http://edr.sagepub.com/content/44/4/237.full
I had to leave the Gigabit Cities conference because the communitarianism, human development model, Turchenko vision, and the Seattle insistence that broadband was just as much a human need as power or water made me feel ill.
I was wondering if I was the only one in audience who had read Marshall McLuhan’s vision of what telecom could be used for. Sigh. I knew they were connected, but the trumpeting is hard to take.
More confessing on the use of psych research in the classroom to change who the child is. http://www.apa.org/ed/schools/cpse/top-twenty-principles.pdf Also from this week. Look especially at what’s in red on page 26. Must be shared. No right apparently except if we still revere the First Amendment to retain our own values, beliefs, points of view, etc. That’s not be a satisfactory member of the school community. Gag.
” … it is critical that the teacher
facilitate a “classroom culture” that ensures shared meanings, values, beliefs …”
What are they smoking? They conclude with the word (shared) expectations, which everyone (especially right-wingers like us) will agree with, and hope we don’t see the demand for shared values and beliefs.
That emphasis on shared is close to omnipresent once we keep focusing on the real implementation. It’s one reason why this education vision, at the level of detail I have put together, clearly abrogates the protections of the First Amendment. Clearly we have people who work for governmental entities and who get their authority to do this from governments declaring that it’s not OK to keep existing values, attitudes, and beliefs. In fact, altering that is the whole point.
We saw this with the Rockefeller-funded CFSC-Communication for Social Change and then again with the Courtney Cazden vision of the Discourse Classroom (remember she traveled to the USSR with the same Michael Cole from this post) and the Ann Brown who created the model for Fostering Communities of Learners that is to be the measure of an effective principal per ASCD. The book Assessing Science Understanding that I wrote about here http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/harnessing-the-meaning-making-capacities-of-the-human-mind-and-then-assessing-for-the-tightness-of-the-fit/ ends the book with a theoretical framework of what ‘understanding’ actually means. In fact it italicized it as offering windows on the mind. Now we know the UN insists that we must have emis data detailing and altering what is revealed. There’s the First Amendment foul once we trace this through.
The framework has Axiom 2 thaT the “Goal of Education is the construction of shared meanings.”
They are not kidding as it also says “Understanding is a dynamic epistemological status conferred on individuals by a consensually recognized referent group.” I am not sure we would regard being in a classroom as such consent but that is clearly what is going on.
Then Axiom 2 has the “teacher’s role is to facilitate and negotiate meanings among diverse groups of learners with the aim of establishing ‘shared’ meanings.”
Then Axiom 3: “Shared Meanings May be Facilitated by the Active Intervention of Well-prepared Teachers.”
No wonder the federal government in the NCLB waivers insisted on mandating that all teachers must be effective and that effectiveness be measured by the effect on “Cognitive Growth” in the student. Under these definitions of ‘Understand’, which is a term used throughout the Common Core, getting students to a shared meaning or value or belief or all of the above would constitute ‘cognitive growth’ in the student. None of this is an accident. What is somewhat of an accident is that I understand all this to such a documentable degree at this point in the implementation process. That has taken a great deal of footnote harvesting and lots of used book purchases.
All of it is now confirming that sharing is key. Of course it is also dialectical. Off to deliver middle child to the airport. This seems surreal not to be going with her.
At least it’s voluntary. If this stuff is offered for kids who may not handle academics well, it may be a good alternative to failure. But don’t take away the academics for those who are suited for it.
That’s the problem with coercion, it’s looking like we’re all supposed to be upgraded to remedial schools.
Oh, David. Wait until I start quoting in earnest from these reports and showing how it marries with WIOA.
Look at what this district super in Wyoming and Emerging International Leader actually admits to in this featured article being pushed by the ed labs. http://www.learningfirst.org/common-core-starts-all-right-conversations#sthash.ngOHOeNc.dpuf
Since we all now speak ed to varying degrees it’s fascinating, what she is really saying about the intentional sculpting process via data and behavioral shaping per the ‘standards’.
She also comes across as a self-important dolt.
You have the engineering background. Read this vision http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gerhard-schmitt/sustainable-cities-future_b_7236992.html and tell me the consequences of “As a result, future societies must concentrate on the growth of knowledge, rather than on the growth of material production. Knowledge consists of information, which in turn is made of data. Information becomes the raw material of the future society and the future city. ”
Not material production, just managing what currently exists. These urban planners have no idea that they are describing a totalitarian existence where data is used to control who gets what of a finite world. Meanwhile Summer in that PDK link below is hyping about how the Common Core will help children grow to the desired ‘standards’. Yes, the standards for this vision where material production is not the point. Managing people is. People cultivated by these common core learning goals (always small c in these docs) and this new vision of high school intimately tied to the ‘needs’ of the community and ‘youth development’.
Gag. All of this is the antithesis of sustainable.
Government has been the enemy of good engineering practice for some time now. “You can’t drain that swamp, it’s federally protected wetland!”
I still remember the snail darter. They raise some stupid objection to building things and prevent anything being built. These restrictions are always for social control.
Knowledge has developed in pursuit of some achievement. The space race, or especially winning a war. The internet started as a project of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (no apologies to Al Gore.)
I am committed to the pursuit of knowledge, but I guess it’s not just any knowledge. The knowledge being discussed in the things you link is often stupid and, in a critical sense, unrepresentative of greater truth. In engineering, we are constrained to be truthful by the facts of nature. If we lie to ourselves, our stuff won’t work. This is a characteristic of great projects, that is not found in the sort of makework that seems to pass for project based learning or many other things discussed here.
By the way, I’ve been in Shenzhen many times because I used to live in Hong Kong. Shenzhen is a fun place, full of wretched excess and delicious affordable restaurants, a relief from uptight Hong Kong. Once I walked past a brothel and three of the hookers standing in front of the place grabbed me and tried to pull me inside; I actually had to fight them off (not too hard).
To have a dateline of Shenzhen on an article abuot sustainability is pretty humorous to me.
OMG! My son went to HTH for 7th & 8th grade! They’re ALL about their ‘project-based learning,’ wanting to create a ‘community’ and have integrated math with science and English with history/social studies. His 8th grade English teacher had Howard Zinn on her list of recommended authors. His math suffered while here as have other students.
They make it all sound so wonderful when you go for the school presentation….I didn’t know back then what I know now!
Thanks for all your great work Robin!
Your son’s math suffered at High Tech High. I’d call that false advertising.
Do you remember looking into Project Lead the Way and not liking what it meant by ‘applied learning’? Now the AP courses are actively coordinating with PLTW. http://www.wtrf.com/story/29062722/project-lead-the-way-college-board-partner-to-make-students-more-college-and-career-ready
I guess knowledge in the textbook sense truly is unacceptable in our Brave New World.
Well here’s a confession that PLTW is for the non-academically inclined
“PLTW courses that introduce all students to the field. ”
But not all students can stand these courses. Students who can stand a tremendous amount of attention to detail will do best. That doesn’t describe my older son who bailed out in the middle of his “Engineering” course, after receiving a grade of 23/100 for a completely correct assignment where he had put the labels in not exactly the right places. (It wasn’t engineering, it was actually mechanical drawing. And no I am not exaggerating, it was well done, neat and correct, but those labels didn’t comply with standards!)
As long as the PLTW courses aren’t required as prerequisites to AP courses this could be OK. But it could create pressure to pass “all students” in AP classes who came through the PLTW pathway, and it could cause some new question types on AP exams.
With David Coleman in charge, there may be more and worse shoes to drop after this one.
We have talked about how much of the hyping of ‘standardized testing’ , which is a deceitful description of a performance assessment intended to deliberately shift to formative assessments and CEPAs–curriculum-embedded performance assessments like projects and tasks. This video is making the rounds. http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/videos/watch-john-oliver-explore-insanity-of-standardized-testing-20150504
The problem is it is now being pushed out by central office administrators in EdLeader 21 school districts. They want people to find ‘testing’ abhorrent without ever actually acknowledging to parents what they are really doing. At least the vomiting kid recognizes the manipulation. Not so much the gaming kid embedded in a virtual reality deliberately constructed by its software designers to reconfigure how students view themselves and the world.
And as I went through my morning reading, more confirmation that all the Opt Out hype and this Oliver video are intended to change the nature of assessment, which was of course the point all along. http://us4.campaign-archive1.com/?u=052672a467e4a0d16c48b9bef&id=560bc396a6&e=2829340054 Emulating Finland once again. That should make Engestrom pleased since that is where he is from just like Pasi Sahlberg.
HTH really got on my radar in earnest when Tony Wagner, Mr New 3 Rs of Rigor, Relevance, and Relationships and Camp Snowball Key Noter, was hyping it in earnest at (co)lab. I would also consider all the hyping about the Maker Movement the same purpose. All the focus is on the future and doing things without the context of how we got the world as it currently exists ever being passed on.
I was fighting over 20 years ago every bit of what you are describing regarding what is happening to our public education system now. Back when I was on watch in 1994, we were hit with The Next Generation School Project and Goals 2000. ESEA and HR6, along with HEADSTART, were perculating on the side with their issues. Grants and foundations, (Carnagie and Ford) were filling in the money gaps to keep all these nefarious plans on track. Their plans continued with the transformational, higher order thinking skills, outcome based education, NAEP testing for preferred attitudes rather than academicprogress, TQM, Total Quality Management, School to Work. Some programs changed names and have kept on going, a few are the same.
What about the exchange agreements our country made in 1996 with the USSR to collaborate and research teaching methodologies with them? As you have already observed, they have infiltrated our educational system with their Marxist, socialist, humanist goals through our curricula. Wonder if our country had any advice to share with the Soviets about teaching content and methodologies?
We need to take all this to court, Robin, with your evidence of our government’s lying, stealing, deceiving and manipulating our people and throw the book at them for educational fraud, malpractice and abuse of children and their families. Your research, observations and documentations are invaluable and will be just the evidence we need. Already, we have seen the tragedy of the cheating scandal carried out by the teachers and administrators in Atlanta, which is a drop in the bucket. There are so many scandals afloat in education and everyone needs to be sunk and drowned out of existence. Maybe you have been born for such a time as this to accomplish the task, Robin. Keep up the good posts and I will be praying for the wisdom necessary to rid us of this educational pestilence that is trying to destroy our country and her people. God bless! Priscilla Carroll
Total abuse. No normal human would take such interest in children without an agenda. Should collect all the times i have used creepy or creepers in these comments. Linda darling hammond tops my list with skinner gates ayers spady, all seriously diabolical for peace equity sure they clearly have some serious issues. Perhaps parents need to draft assessments for all these educrat creepers to perform, see what skills other than bs lying they have to qualify them to tell anybody anything. Lies and doublespeak with a sinister agenda of harm.
These new draft standards for Education Leadership are just chockful with references to responsibility for the “personal wellbeing” of each child. http://www.ccsso.org/Documents/2015/RevisedDraftISLLCStandards2015.pdf
Fits unfortunately with declaring that the schools are responsible for the “mental health and wellbeing” of each student in ECAA. Worth the trouble to read to fully appreciate the behavioral sculpting going on. Chasing after those lifelong pensions is tremendous incentive not to ask questions and to deceive parents and taxpayers who are paying attention.
Also look especially at Standard 4 on page 16.
The last one on p.16:
“Monitor changes in norms, values and beliefs among students, families, staff and constituents and make adjustments as appropriate.”
This is leadership? What about teaching the great unchanging truths, no matter what anyone thinks of them? Oh that’s a ridiculous comment, we know they are acting on about 10 simultaneous tracks to forbid that.
Do you know any parents who send their kids to school to be inclusive?
I hear there are “homeschools” in at least some places that are so organized they are about like regular schools, but under the control of the parents.
This will also send you in to orbit. http://www.educationdive.com/news/mindfulness-training-replacing-traditional-health-classes/396729/
Notice that the healthy habits explicitly includes lessons on social justice.
Will the independent schools involved tell the parents paying tuition that their money will enable a less academic education than they would get in public school?
“Schools are not just about academic growth — they are meant to teach young people how to be good, productive members of society. These classes and the focus on “emotional, intellectual and social well-being,” are an amazing start in making this a reality. Of course, independent schools tend to have more agency and funds to make this sort of learning a reality.”
I remember having this discussion a year or two ago here, where someone had a link to a speech by an admin from St. George’s School (it was a video with St. George’s crest in the background) saying he was going to devalue the excessive academic focus of some parents by forcing projects over traditional tests, and he didn’t think much of those parents.
Yet One More Layer For Assured Transformation — Education Adjusters
Thanks, Robin, for the link to the CCSSO Revised. What sent me into “orbit” was the visual imagery that popped into my head about “adjustments” — screws tightening !
The yet-to-be trained “leaders” will “make adjustments as necessary” or appropriate for the “well-adjusted” student. I had to respond to a Canadian story on Huff Post and wove in this link — hope you don’t mind my long comment below:
BIOLOGY Trumps Everything: Teacher Unions, Marxists, Academics, Passionate Education Leaders, Textbook Publishers, Snake-oil Salesmen, Education Gurus & Charlatans, Misled Politicians, Unemployed PhDs, Social Engineers, Totalitarians, Teacher Trainers, Political Junkies, etc., etc.
Watch this video from Ontario showing the mixed ethnicity of parents protesting the new, untested, soon-to-be imposed without consent or consultation, SEX EDUCATION — http://on.aol.ca/video/thousands-protest-ontarios-new-sex-education-curriculum-518766302
The Parent Veto is an awesome thing and is constantly under attack by usurpers of parental primacy in education. In 2011 when a surge of votes propelled Alison Redford to instant Premiership of Alberta it was claimed that promises to the teacher establishment was the key to her success. It was easy for her to quickly find $107Million in extra education funding and to scrap Gr 3 & 6 standardized tests. The third demand, abolish the parent veto, was never accomplished due to parent backlash.
The parent veto doesn’t have to be written into law or legislation. It is there as a biological right in the Free Western World.
As the American 2016 Presidential election machine gears up watch for the family rights backlash against the views of the leading Democratic contender, Hillary Clinton. Her statement that education is a “non-family enterprise” encapsulates the welfare state mentality perfectly and will “enjoy” a well deserved backlash from all stripes on the political spectrum.
The empowerment bestowed on parent protests against imposed, flawed, developmentally inappropriate, sex education is a signal that the sleeping giant of family rights in education is awakening.
Even now, sophisticated preemptive programs are being assembled by education establishments to mount “leadership training” programs to cut parents off at the pass!
http://www.ccsso.org/Documents/2015/RevisedDraftISLLCStandards2015.pdf
By careful reading between the lines we see yet another barrier, an enforcement layer (trained leaders), being mounted to continue keeping sovereign parents at bay while shifts and “transformations” are being inflicted on children.
Yes, parental priorities about their children’s reading and math and knowledge, etc. will also rise up from the general dumbing-down so presently evident in public schools. The sex education protests are a taste of future parent sovereignty asserting its own place.
And that Georgia statute embraced by jeb’s creation Excellence in Education as the link makes clear abolishes parents’ veto while pretending to protect it. Create protections against what is really not the problem while getting immunity for robbing the bank on the psychological manipulation.
I think we will see more of this. Everyone wants to use the law to create the binding terms while no one wants to actually read and digest what is being enacted. Except me. Maybe I neeed a new summer hobby.
https://efareport.wordpress.com/2015/05/13/new-proposed-indicators-to-monitor-the-post-2015-education-framework/#more-5864 makes it clear the sexuality emphasis is coming out of the UN as is Equity in results.
“Three new indicators were added to capture the need for curricula to focus on education for sustainable development: global citizenship education, HIV and sexuality education, and human rights education.”
I am really curious about how they will handle HIV. The way it’s now being handled in our sex-ed classes is that it’s just another STD. Nothing about its being incurable. Nothing about its being spread much more easily via anal sex. From what my kids tell me, the new way of “handling” HIV teaching is to be sure not to alarm anyone about it in particular.
Your dinner table conversations with your kids must make you feel like imbibing.
I wish the world was not this messed up, but I am glad for our kids’ sake we are not unawares.
Well I just gave very plain and graphic descriptions of this stuff. Probably not at dinner … The younger one especially is scientifically minded and they were clearly starving him of facts at school. How can they support certain ideologies otherwise? They’ve spun a whole interconnected story there around tolerance and behavior, from the staff to health class to two of his social studies teachers in a row, and the younger boy gets angry at being confronted with different facts and ideas.
He resents me of being a controlling caveman sort of jerk, a sort of a “bitter clinger” image I guess, and that at first did depress me. But I want him to live long enough to get to the age where such ideas start to fade, not having made unfixable mistakes in the meantime.
Recently a staff member has rebuked me for “insensitivity”. She just wants me to be scared to cross PC boundaries, but unlike most parents I am two steps ahead of her and never say anything she can actually complain about in adult-world — although surely my son would get in trouble for saying some of them. I must be doing something right.
Tunya has eloquently expressed the reason why the opt-out movement is vitally important. I understand Robin’s caution that naive parents can be persuaded to accept more “formative assessments” (stealth assessments) in exchange for a reduction in testing that had already been planned as an apparent concession, part of the longer-term strategy. Beyond this, I find myself in the trenches with plenty of anti-CC parents and teachers whose reasons for opposition I think are misplaced, marinated as they are in the progressivist assumptions about the nature of education that have plagued the English-speaking world for a century.
Nevertheless, with all these caveats, this rising tide of rebellion is a cry from parents that their children do not belong to the state. In Colorado, it is about the only weapon available for them to fight back. Courageous groups of parents have been battling an entrenched hydra in this state for going on three years. They have practically lived at the state Capitol. They have had rallied, held press conferences, run opinion pieces. They have testified. Much corruption in the CDE has been uncovered and some heads are rolling. Nevertheless, CC and its correlated testing/workforce/business/tech-and-data phalanx have deep roots here and staggering amounts of Gates money have assured that a unified legislative front has held, at least to date.
What this situation is doing to good schools that are maintaining their academic standards in the face of it all defies description. We are absolutely exhausted. This is Valley Forge. Our one hope is in the awakening realization of parents that there has been a covert hostile takeover. Opt-out is their one means of expressing their opposition and resisting it.
Well said Deborah. I do think Opt Out is a start and when my youngest did not want to be a covert operative giving me details of what was being asked, she too opted out. I even got a letter from school district telling me I had no right. Readers can just supply their own favorite expletives.
Someone asked me about a Tim Skelar who started United Opt Out and as usual his prog intentions were not the least bit difficult to uncover. http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ851031.pdf As we have discussed, formative assessments work best in instilling the critical traits and attitudes Slekar lays out there or here http://www.journalofthought.com/Issues/2010vol45issue12pdf/07slekarhaefner.pdf
I have put up lots of links to all the planned economy/sector strategies for Colorado. I want to add that Connected Nation, the Gates funded broadband initiative I discussed above, has Colorado classified as a completed state program. http://www.connectednation.org/programs
I am not sure Valley Forge is the analogy I would use because simply holding on is not enough. You are describing affirmative behavior on behalf of our children and this Statist juggernaut. Since we are battling against collectivism and with leaders who think we are all fodder for their own personal benefit, maybe Stalingrad is a better comparison. This is a battle we cannot lose and it is forging who we are and how we need to learn to regard the public sector.
Keep up the good work. I am dealing with several personal matters that have me playing the role of daughter, mom, cousin, old, dear friend respectively this week. Delayed the second part of the post more than I had planned.
Yeah, Stalingrad works. Though we have not yet been reduced to eating newspaper to stave off the pangs of hunger, as a friend of mine did during that siege.
Deborah
That’s what just killed me about the presentation I heard this week from this man. http://www.govtech.com/local/Seattles-New-CTO-Focuses-on-People-Infrastructure-Broadband-Access-for-All.html
These fools that have seemingly lived at the trough of government fiats have no concept of what this Equity fetish will extinguish and what will never arise at all.
I told someone that he has no idea that if everyone gets to get on the boat and has a right to an equal berth regardless of what or if they paid, that boat is not going anywhere and will eventually sink. Someone responded that at that point the government will try to sell “free baths for all” to mask the effects of what it did. The reality though is that at that point who can swim really matters. So this blog and my book are dedicated to hopefully preventing us from all getting wet. If that’s inevitable, we will at least have been paying attention and preparing purselves and our loved ones to swim. That’s what your school is continuing to try to do and every year matters. The behavioral scientists all know that Axemaker Mind will prevail once it exists.
I want to add the concluding paragraph to a UN document that came out today. https://efareport.wordpress.com/2015/05/15/civil-society-priorities-at-the-world-education-forum/
“One of the biggest challenges is how the Framework for Action will link education with the broader sustainable development agenda. Here we believe that more can be done – we must go deeper in exploring the connections and must reposition education at the heart of the post-2015 agenda. We have yet to make a compelling enough case that education is not just one of 17 SDGs but rather a key facilitator for achievement of all the goals. We are pleased to see that this is an issue to be addressed in the Report out next year by the EFA GMR team. Fundamental changes are needed in the world and this requires a new generation of active global citizens with new knowledge, attitudes and behaviours – for which education is the essential catalyst.”
That goal-a new generation of active global citizens with new knowledge, attitudes and behaviours is the must have and there’s the admission that education is the essential means for Ban Ki-Moon to get his Marxian global Human Development Society by 2030.
Everything going on is pursuant to that vision, which we have covered repeatedly. This is the crucial year. And anyone reading this blog and my book knows precisely what is being sought and why. It’s just that the confessions are getting more explicit and common.
Here’s yet more proof from a different direction that government control of us, our behavior, places, and our property is what we are dealing with. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/comment/11602399/Ban-cash-end-boom-and-bust.html The assumptions in that article are astonishing, but there was a reference to this very thing at the Gigabit conference this week. This is the mentality opt out threatens and it’s not just kids at risk. It is everything that has ever created mass prosperity.
Have I mentioned that the broadband companies like AT&T this week were just full of communitarian assumptions and now we have this http://www.ssireview.org/blog/entry/what_is_community_anyway
I think the reason we’re suddenly beginning to see talk of banning cash is an economic problem more than ideological one.
Central banks normally stimulate markets by lowering (directly or indirectly though market intervention) key interest rates. We’ve been sitting at about zero for a while and people are getting the clue that rates aren’t about to go up despite all the hype.
In fact, governments want more stimulus which means lowering rates further, below zero. But then people could pull their money out of those banks paying negative interest rates, and put it under the proverbial mattress.
To stop this they want to outlaw cash. Then you can’t preserve your cash through time if the bank decides to apply negative interest (take some from you) every month. This will indeed be stimulus. Spend now, or else you’ll have less to spend later.
Yeah it’s nuts, but not more nuts than Common Core or Obamacare, and we’ve got both of them already.
I understand that opt out is the only recourse for many. Like Colorado, Oregon has no successful movement against t removing the standards. The only piece in the bucket of ccss related initiatives that has some results with the legislature is opt out. Most in the NW do not realise it is being used. The opt out has already taken Oregon where they wanted to go. The move to formative assessment and the research paper supporting it were complete before the majority of students used their right to opt out.
http://oregonsaveourschools.blogspot.com/2015/04/oregon-sos-offers-feedback-on-new-state.html?m=1
There is no dispute regarding the reasons for opt out on the progs side. The argument is not parental rights, or data privacy but that the assessment causes racial disparities and widens the achievement gap. Not to mention informing teacher evals. Oregon obtained a waiver on assessments rating schools and teachers this year. Is it coincidental that they shift to formative now? Coincidental that they have Patty Murray in their pocket on the esea rewrite funding alternative assessments?
Here it tends to be more of a “look, squirrel! ” movement. A distraction to get to the intended goal. Oregon has no plans to investigate ccss, we will not even attempt to rename to placate parents. Full steam ahead and no looking back.
I think it is telling that in this long article on whether Democracy is dead http://www.economist.com/news/essays/21596796-democracy-was-most-successful-political-idea-20th-century-why-has-it-run-trouble-and-what-can-be-do?fsrc=scn%2Ffb%2Fte%2Fpe%2Fed%2Fwhatsgonewrongwithdemocracy&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=*Democracy%20Lab&utm_campaign=Democracy%20Lab%20Weekly%20Brief%2C%20May%2011%2C%202015
the remedy is ‘localism’ just as with progressive polyphonic federalism. This matters because the Economist is owned by Pearson, the education assessment and curriculum giant. We are not supposed to understand what is really being assessed, what formative assessment really is, or how localism is the choice of progs to get collectivism. Notice how that essay sells the UN Declaration of Human Rights as an obligation that even a majority of voters cannot deny. That is a pivot that insists meeting human needs has become a global human right just as Marx wanted while pretending this is about “democracy”.
I went back yesterday and read an OECD paper from 2010 that pulled everything together. It included an essay from Wiliam who helped create formative assessment. This is what he said: “formative assessments is proposed as a process of capitalizing on ‘moments of contingency’ for the purposes of regulating learning processes.”
That’s right. At a physiological neural level the state that wants to go cashless so that people can no longer just have cash and opt out of financial controls also wants to restructure minds to dial in what is perceived and how reality is interpreted so that no one recognizes what is being done and why.
We all see and we are talking and writing about it. We just need more to wake up. I was at a funeral home last night and talking with some cousins who are teachers and they were like “thank goodness someone has figured out why we are being asked to do these things”.
And the well-connected Jeffrey Sachs https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/sustainable-development-data-by-jeffrey-d-sachs-2015-05 lays out how all these initiatives we are seeing are connected. It IS the Human Development society and needs will be assessed from data. Just like the neural pathways of the new kind of citizen that UNESCO admitted to today.
On page 23 of the actual report is the Education Management Information Systems on the key role monitoring learner outcomes and Equity makes to achieving this global vision of Marxian transformation.
This is why when someone asks how I know what I know and I say “the people in charge are telling me” is precisely what I mean.
Interesting.
http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2015/05/legislators_should_stem_anti-t.html
That is a lot of data to inform those goals? Everyone ready to report bibiometrics to the UN?
If we combine the longer report calling for Education Management Information Systems to track that students have the new characteristics laid out in that EFA confession from yesterday with JT’s excellent summation of how we know the Achievement Standards Network works and what we know the Bipartisan ECAA sets up, we really are seeing the full picture. It really is looking to develop a common core–lower case–that is consistent with this Great Transition/Inclusive Prosperity/Ban Ki-Moon Dignity for All by 2030/Marxian Human Development Society vision for all of us.
And our politicians at all levels, from both parties, are just going along. That’s why I call it the Fraud of the Century because that is precisely what it is. We are just framing it accurately instead of manipulating the framing. That of course is what Rigor really does.
I should get back to writing tomorrow. Have a college kid leaving on a big trip and she has me sitting near her while she asks repeatedly “Am I forgetting anything?”
You realize that the Jeffrey Sachs who wants all that data is the same one who was in Rome lobbying the Pope recently for the Climate encyclical. He is also behind the UN World Happiness Reports that began in 2012. He is also behind the uNESCO/ITU Broadband as a human right commission http://www.broadbandcommission.org/commissioners/Pages/SACHS.aspx .
We know this is all related, but Sachs is literally someone we can track the tentacles through. This involves the Swedish tech giant Ericcson http://www.humanosphere.org/basics/2013/09/broadband-accelerate-the-end-of-poverty-says-sachs/ , which of course benefits like the tech companies in the US or anywhere from this agenda.
Is this on your bookshelf ?
http://www.amazon.com/Critical-Constructivism-Primer-Lang-Primers/dp/0820476161/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1431845242&sr=1-1&keywords=9780820476162
Too Pricey, but those two concepts could combine for great mischief.
What Hurts Is That We’re Succumbing To The SEDUCTION
The Winter Edition (2015) of Stanford Social Innovation Review http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_dawn_of_system_leadership lays out the formula:
“About 2,500 years ago Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu eloquently expressed the idea of individuals who catalyze collective leadership:
The wicked leader is he whom the people despise.
The good leader is he whom the people revere.
The great leader is he of whom the people say, “We did it ourselves.”
Well, it doesn’t get more explicit than that UN quote. I was reading through the Dakar Framwork from 2000 and felt like I could have been reading something from the department of education in CA in terms of our “new” Local Control Funding Formula. There is no doubt that “local,” as Robin says, is really just the ability to implement the global agenda close to home.
As someone else mentioned, the professional development models at the local level are working to re-educate teachers using outside vendors, who are not educators. I am amazed by how many teachers see this as acceptable. In CA Michael Fullan’s “New Pedagogies for Deep Learning” is all the rage. He is scaling his system across our state via seven districts (and charters) that no longer operate under a traditional local control model. And yet these districts believe they are developing their own unique systems. Another mechanism to disrupt local control while appearing to be localized are the two testing Consortia. While most–including the Opt Out movements–view them as a shoddy, problematic update of the traditional end-of-the year test, they are essentially intended to be governance bodies that manage & dictate everything from credentialing to daily curriculum. Hello, Finland! Further, because all of the learning standards were developed using machine readable formats, the Consortia can link learning materials to ensure what is taught is limited to what they intended to measure. SBACs Digital Library is part of this as is The Learning Registry. Further, all of the ed tech companies are rolling out curriculum and assessments designed to the standards. The continuous, closed circuit of learning is in place. While opting out does nothing to prevent the same goals from happening everyday in every classroom engaged in online learning, it could prove to be useful if enough of us can help others to make the connection between the tests and the shift to digitize all curriculum.
Sorry, long post. Too much coffee. One last quick question for Robin. What do you think of AIR’s founder John C. Flanagan and his “critical incident technique”? Both Consortia use AIR as their delivery platform.
Those original NAEP documents I wrote about several posts ago still used AIR’s full name-American Institutes for Research in the Behavioral Sciences. Can’t imagine why that got deleted over time. It certainly stayed in the mission.
I had not heard of Flanagan but I do recognize how that technique works. Plus this apa 1954 paper on it https://www.apa.org/pubs/databases/psycinfo/cit-article.pdf has him as also being at U of Pittsburgh. That is obviously where the creator of higher order thinking’s 1987 task force, the ISCAR 2011 board, co-head of the New Standards Project and Common Core task force member Lauren Resnick is at.
Just looking at that preliminarily and working on the cybernetic/ what “learning how to learn” really means angle this week it reminds me of the emphasis in guiding how people will interpret objects and events they encounter.
Just back from the kind of funeral we would all want to have. Funny stories shared, in’laws who will miss the family they married into, poignant pics of a life well-lived so my concentration is a bit amiss.
What you are describing with the consortia is what I am seeing. A determination to circumscribe knowledge akin to uninventing the printing press in its long term effects. Every chance to make everything mandatory and invisible. As we have discussed the story I have told in the book and now we cover on this blog is not pretty but those who make the journey see what is happening in real time and can monitor their own areas as you are doing.
JT-this is a confirmation of what we were talking about and is just out. http://www.eschoolnews.com/2015/05/13/post-lms-era-437/?
This is the emis the un wants and is Gates funded and fits with asn and all the unesco/oecd ed work that always focuses now on the learning environment. Also fits with what we know about learning tasks and progressions from the book as well as the Achievement Standards Network and the Learning Registry.
The longer report https://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eli3035.pdf confirms the links to ASN because it has Rob Abel of IMS Global listed as an advisor to this report and vision. Also tied to competency-based education and though it mentions higher ed specifically, I happen to know that this is also for K-12.
Since IMS Global is doing a conference with the local school districts as sponsors we know for sure what is really intended for everywhere but especially the Atlanta suburbs.
“While opting out does nothing to prevent the same goals from happening everyday in every classroom engaged in online learning, it could prove to be useful if enough of us can help others to make the connection between the tests and the shift to digitize all curriculum.”
Bingo, JR! The problem is that while parents are bucking against the testing overload, they have no idea of the damage being done by replacing books with digital apps, a process I think I read that Obama wants to see accomplished universally by next year. The digitization of the curriculum, is, as you say, the most serious issue — although those schools sticking to books are having an increasingly hard time finding non “Common Core-aligned” materials. Even the vaunted Saxon Math isn’t really Saxon Math anymore. But that problem is minimal compared with the replacement of content with video games.
Check this out. Ridiculous.
http://www.straight.com/life/452561/teachers-using-pens-and-paper-classroom-not-fair-students-microsoft-official-says
Quoting from the end: “Throwing out pens, paper, and chalkboards—not to mention print textbooks—doesn’t mean that schools should abandon writing all together, according to De Cicco Remu. With a stylus and a tablet, kids can still cognitively benefit from the digitized practice of “inking”, she explained.
For teachers skeptical about new technology’s place in the classroom, she has a message.
“Shift or get off the pot,” De Cicco Remu said. “Seriously, it’s not fair to the kids. It’s tough at the outset to understand and learn all these tools, but you’re doing a disservice to our students and these kids’ futures if you don’t. And that’s your job.”
Did you notice that Seattle CTO whose statements this week and attitudes I found so troubling had worked at Microsoft before becoming CTO?
Weird feeling to watch a technically adult child off with a group trip abroad. Turned around at security and waved.
That is a feeling I have not experienced yet. Will be sending one off to in a year.
Shift or get off the pot! Ha ha. Good one.