Don’t we just love it when we can locate the real rationales for what we have indisputedly uncovered? All of this deliberate Mind Arson via our K-12 schools and repeated disdain for a logical Axemaker Mind is too pervasive not to be an essential component of the plans, but an explicit, fully integrated confession of intentions can be hard to find. Pieced together works, but it’s neither as satisfying or as damning. Luckily for us, my footnote mining recently pulled up a reference to a 1993 book published in the UK by Michael Fullan, still one of the world’s premier drivers of Radical Ed Reform. We covered his cutting-edge transdisciplinary global education vision here. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/opting-out-as-the-remedy-may-mean-accidentally-accelerating-nonconsensual-transformations/
The equity and excellence that are the shorthand phrase to describe the goals of the Quality Education for Minorities Project we met in the last post are essential for all students Fullan asserted, but the “ultimate aim of education is to produce a learning society.” That requires students and teachers with a “combination of moral purpose and change agentry–caring and competence.” If that sounds like Fullan was already pushing for wholesale social change in a collective direction with education as the driver more than 20 years ago, he was. Quoting what he wanted: “Put another way, the ability to cope with change, learning as much as possible with each encounter is the generic capacity needed for the twenty-first century.”
Luckily for us, Fullan confessed that (with italics) that we “are talking about a learning society not just a learning school system. The commitment and practice of learning must find itself in all kinds of organizations and institutions if it is to achieve any kind of force in society as a whole.” (Remember two posts ago, Peter Drucker also saw organizations as key to his government-steered, planned economy and society with education as the transition vehicle). The 1992 program for the “human development project” for Canada and the United States is cited by name and is laid out in a document euphemistically called The Learning Society (because citing to Uncle Karl at that time was considered unwise and his blueprint needed name laundering) and published by CIAR–the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
Before we cover those aims, we have another global radical (with a blog tag and a perch at Harvard Law), Roberto Mangabeira Unger, who has also laid out the global transformation vision, including the necessary role of education. He also wants to limit education to “the development of generic capacities by contrast to both training in specialized skills and the passive transmittal of information.” Those latter two traditional purposes of education were thought to impede “wholehearted engagement and action” towards the kind of democratic experimentalism Unger laid out in his 1998 book Democracy Realized: the progressive alternative. I bought that book after a mention of it because I recognized Unger’s influence (he was a professor at Harvard when both the Obamas were in law school there) and all the references we have encountered in the education reforms to democracy as the goal and progressive, polyphonic federalism (Jan 28, 2015 post) as the means to get around the US Constitution.
Reading the book I can recognize how closely what Unger wants ties with the actual pushes I am seeing now at the state and local levels in the US. At one point Unger stated specifically that US states were already pursuing his vision of democratic experimentalism by transforming institutions. Unger made it crystal clear he wanted the obstructions of the US political system’s “checks and balances” that impede social transformations aimed at restructuring property and social relations to be disregarded and overriden. That is something we should all keep in mind as the federal government sends money to states and cities and governors, legislators, mayors, and city councils all pursue comparable reforms to what Unger laid out at the necessary, “decentralized”, local level.
With the formal sponsors of the Common Core and several federal agencies all now pushing Competency as the goal of both K-12 and higher ed for all students, let’s keep in mind Unger’s desire for and definition of generic capacities for all. “Such capacities may be practical as well as conceptual [think of Enduring Understandings, Understanding by Design, and core disciplinary ideas in the current implementation], and they include the core substantive tools of learning. The heart of this education in capacities is the transfiguration of the actual by the imagination of the possible. In natural science and social and historical study we come to understand how and why things work by discovering the conditions under which each thing can become something else.” Adapt. Evolve. That certainly puts the C3 Social Studies Framework, Next Generation Science Standards http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2015/03/teaching_the_next_generation_s.html , and the APUSH controversy over its new, divisive conceptual framework in the light of their true transformative mindset purposes, doesn’t it?
Actual, factual knowledge and a logical, Axemaker Mind are apparently as much an impediment to all these plans as that pesky US Constitution. By the way, the abstract for The Learning Society specifically mentioned “educating the population for new competencies” so I am not just interpreting Unger or Fullan’s “generic capacities” as fitting the definition of Competency. The basic developmental needs that are not just a floor for everyone, but also the desired ceiling so that herd-defying individuals cannot be transformation barriers in the way of social experimentation, are listed as the following outcomes: “the ability to make effective social connections with others, competence in the tools and skills of the culture and the opportunity to make productive use of them, good coping skills, healthy response patterns in the face of stress [grit? perseverence?], perceived control over one’s life, a sense of psychological well-being, and good self-esteem.”
I have previously pointed out that the Inclusive Prosperity vision (Feb 22, 2015 post) fits Marx’s Human Development Model perfectly and that it is alarming that in December 2013 the UK and US made achieving “subjective well-being” the new purpose of governments (Dec 23, 2013 post). The year after the dissolution of the USSR and 3 years after the Berlin Wall fell, we got a vision of wholesale social and economic, nonconsensual transformation, that stated that “reconceptualizing the nature of learning and the relationship between collective and individual development” provides the “knowledge base for moving our own society forward.” It just so happens that that reconceptualized “learning” fits with the parameters laid out by the QEM Project from the last post so that Uncle Karl’s vision can be shrouded and compelled by interpretations of federal civil rights laws.
The Learning Society foresaw this convenient cover and mentioned the “overdue recognition that as a society, we need to include previously excluded groups on an equitable basis, particularly indigenous peoples and those from minority cultures.” The previous paragraph had discussed the need for a Learning Society to deal with “the problems associated with large scale immigration, with poverty, and with unemployment are increasing.” Collectivism is thus the answer for the very problems governments created in the first place with previous bad policies. Since the Learning Society has little use for what an individual wants, why do governments want prosperity and economic growth? “To ensure that they create sufficient wealth to support a broad range of social, medical, and human services.” No mention of the added bonus of funding lots of public sector pensions for the dispensers of those services.
The return of a surreptitious School to Work emphasis now at the state level after the controversies when it was pushed at the federal level in the 90s makes perfect sense when we read this vision from the 1992 blueprint. “The creation of new ideas and applications is in turn dependent on the availability of a highly skilled and motivated workforce and its orchestrated deployment across a broad array of scientific and industrial tasks.” No wonder those generic capacities are all about “tasks and executions” in Unger’s vision of the needed progressive education and the emancipatory school. Serfs had to stay where they were commanded and we Americans now get to be deployed as “orchestrated” to meet everyone’s “needs.”
So add to the reams of source materials I lay out in my book Credentialed to Destroy: How and Why Education Became a Weapon on how the Cold War did not end quite as advertised, this Learning Society vision. Who precisely did win if the “main objectives of a CIAR program in human development” to be implemented starting in 1992 in Canada and the US is to “reconceptualize the dynamics of collective and individual human development”?
If governments at all levels, and the organizations they are creating and funding, are dedicated to creating an “ability to motivate and organize all members of a society, in an innovative fashion,” did we escape from the Cold War still, factually, a free people?
Especially if taxpayer-funded education and a new definition of Learning binding all of us at the level of our minds and personalities is the declared, intended vehicle.
Perhaps “Not Serfs Yet” as our motto was a premature boast?
Very good question, particularly since just prior to that one of “Uncle Karl’s nephews,” Paulo Friere of Brazil and other points south, published his “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” and went about setting up education systems that matched revolutionary movements. In a New York Times article in 1986 he argued that it is not education which shapes society, but rather society which molds education to fit the ends and interests of those in control and that learning “can become an instrument of social transformation by making those at the bottom of society aware of their plight and the reasons for it.” Friere is using some of our tax money to operate charter schools, particularly in New Jersey, to teach his revolutionary Marxist viewpoints. A “learning society” is part of his toolkit.
Sonia Nieto from the previous post cites that Freire book, but also a 1985 book The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation.
The timing of Oppressed with that 1970 publication and its vision actually fits well with Drucker’s vision for education laid out in the 68 book from two posts ago, March 1. The justification changes, but not the education vision.
By the way, Howard Gardner of Harvard Project Zero and Learning Styles fame (whose earlier books are quoted a lot in my book) was a member of the CIAR Human Development Program Advisory Committee. So was the former director of Family Health for WHO, which would create the term “life skills” the next year to shroud these generic capacities. Robbie Case from Stanford and Thomas Rohlen from their Anthropology dept are HDP ‘members’.
This is a concern also as immigration from mexican borders includes lots of people educated in this vein.
All getting potential amnesty and voting rights.
Ok this comment was response to CPW @ paolo freire… Got shuffled
The link was interesting. The first sentence quote, “a shift from learning about something to figuring out something.” got to me. If students now must teach themselves how all things work at basic levels, how much slower and incomplete must the learning process be? No longer are we viewing science as “standing on the shoulders of giants”. If we now must figure out the basics of where these past giants started just to reach their final comprehension, we’re standing on kneecaps or big toes. With this as a starting place, how can our vision exceed theirs?
That is why I put it up along with the C3 and APUSH tags. I gave enough info to locate the CIAR document, but it is not a stable link and not giving a hot link maximizes the time it will stay up.
Remember how the understanding is to be phronetic and arational?
It is no accident that the same Harvard ed prof with an AI degree from MIT David Perkins has been involved with both Understandings of Consequence with nsf funding and CORE–Cognitive Reorganization. That’s why I found the generic conceptual capacity admission so important. Another term for the same idea is the Soviet Ascending from the Abstract to the Concrete. The supplied concept guides perception of what is noticed or disregarded and how experiences are interpreted.
Our collective vision cannot exceed theirs naturally!
Perhaps a select few will be taught to stand on the shoulders of giants. But the rest of us, we who are invited to engage in reinventing the wheel, will arrive at appropriate generic shared understandings of “the way things are” and will have mastered competent capacities but nothing more.
Perhaps our collective doe eyed wonder at the magic which is all around us, as well as, our meaningful relationships and our capacity to arrive at consensual community values will keep us focused on the present, as we evolve forward into our Gloriously Transformed Future.
I’m angling for a job in Kommunity Speech Writing for Region 5, district 47 under the guidance of Ombudsman #86. I hear Region 5 grows the best beets.
My inner contrarian is becoming more absurdist by the minute.
Oh My Robin.
I just found it and read it. The Rhesus Macaques reference.
Modeling Human Development Society and Centrally Planning for collective capacities based off the study of monkeys.
Charming.
Really lovely.
How do these brilliant, Nay! truly breathtaking, minds bear the burden of their intellectual magnificence when confronted with the dullards they must benevolently manage?
Mari-I want you to read this post to appreciate just how truly the classroom is to be changed. http://www.charterconfidential.com/what-data-collection-can-miss/
Oh Boo Hoo. She did not get a star. Her Crew system is not “approved” and she sees no need to wreck her students innocence by informing them of the actual definition of Bullying. Its sweeter and more innocent to have them in agreement in all things and frowning upon any peer who might utter a disagreeable opinion.
But even lock step Crew type programs are not in line enough for the planners I see. No we must not have any deviation from any defined and devised blanket program. For the common good naturally.
Wow. When robots start arguing robotics we are in deep doo doo.
Somehow I missed this http://frameworksinstitute.org/pubs/mm/ecs/pdf/ecs_mm_nov2014_final.pdf
So the whole point in education reform is to move beyond individualism.
Now I made that point repeatedly in the book, but this is a well-funded open confession from within the last 6 months. Good grief.
Wow. Glad you notice this one.
*noticed–
Good grief indeed. What a mishmash of an incomplete picture of what the public supposedly believes, followed by a comparison with “expert” understandings which are just Marxist stuff. Some countermeasures occur to me.
A lot of the reason the public has the views they are said to have, is that the public wants those particular “experts” to go away and die in a hole; our real views about all these issues is more like that big organizations and the federal government have no business telling us about them.
This could point the way to the right response to their line of argument, becuase it seems they are not prepared to answer it.
Also a plain appeal to Individualism as a traditional American value would seem to be in order.
And the middle class should be reminded that (as confessed there) the meat of reform proposals coming from the whole process advocated is to benefit some other people, not their kids, even though their kid’s education will be changed. A reasonable counter-argument is “if inner city schools need this, I support their right to modify their schools and curriculum. But we don’t need it here (our kids do learn the 3 R’s so they don’t need to compensate for not learning them), so go away and leave us alone.”
David-I agree and if you noticed the term ‘progressive’ is always used as a descriptor just as in the Sharing as Our Common Cause, never Marxist Humanism, which is what this really is. That’s not an insult. It goes back to Robert Tucker’s original explanation that I also covered in the book.
I worked on the Frameworks paper yesterday in depth and reacted much the same. The experts are merely degreed grant, tenure, or next promotion seekers and no one to defer to or be allowed to steer. Secondly, later in the report they simply start using the term ‘progressive educators’. The metaphors being offered were something any first rate mind would make mincemeat of, which is why first or second rate minds and their ammo of facts and logic need to be paralyzed starting in preschool.
Hope to get this written up today. Still having coughing fits from trying to clear my lungs. My brain is still clicking though.
AH! The glorious world of next tuesday! To quote the Peoples Cube.com…
Since you mention Michael Fullan, i must update all on his partner and colleague, suspended pedo prof Ben Levin of OISE ( home of pro pedo teacher conference) at U of Toronto.
Ben Levin has pled guilty to several counts of child pornography/pedophia, but not all.
Makes one wonder…..and worry…
http://m.torontosun.com/2015/03/02/liberals-cant-deny-levins-role-with-sex-ed-curriculum
http://m.thestar.com/#/article/news/gta/2015/03/03/there-is-a-great-deal-for-ben-levin-to-be-shame-faced-about-dimanno.html
Noting the aformentioned document is of Canadian origin i would like to point out another Canadian outfit out of univ of Toronto called OISE has a professor named Ben Levin, a partner and colleague of Michael Fullan who has admitted guilt in crimes against children and has had major influence in the radical sex ed of Toronto premier Katleen Wynn, while globetrotting with his colleagues selling the above mentioned snake oil as well.
Something is very wrong with this picture.
http://m.thestar.com/#/article/news/gta/2015/03/03/there-is-a-great-deal-for-ben-levin-to-be-shame-faced-about-dimanno.html
http://m.torontosun.com/2015/03/02/liberals-cant-deny-levins-role-with-sex-ed-curriculum
Not about Ben Levin, but on OISE, it was actively a huge part of this project. One of the Task Force members from OISE, Carl Bereiter, is now involved with the Gordon Commission. http://www.gordoncommission.org/rsc/pdf/bereiter_scardamalia_educated_person_mid21st_century.pdf
So the future of assessment involving the initiative now known as the Common Core and 21st century learning tracks back to the HDP Task Force.
Houston, we not only have a problem, it’s about to explode.
Sorry for repitition my comments are seriosly lagging in suspended limbo before they show up.
A thousand Pardons!
I am coming into this particular conversation for the first time this evening, but my bent is for a look at every government run enterprise, and think about how long it has been in their purview.
In many small towns and suburban areas, the goverment sanctioned tax supported CENTRAL SCHOOL DISTRICTS are the largest industru. Where local farmers and working people are scraping by on thirty or forty thousand dollar incomes, teachers starting out make more at start of their careers indoctrinating the children of the great unwashed. As they hang in or mature into administrators, $150K & UP is not unheard of. If the budget is rejected, it is repeatedly broughy for a vote and continuing expense until some version is adopted. NEVER is the criminal method of extorting money from every land owner to support this criminal conspiracy to educate another persons children questioned.
I advocate for a return to an idealized past:local one room schools, that children walk to. A teacher hired by the parents of the children the teacher teaches. No buses. No centralized Stalinesque and grotesque centrallized school districts run by professionals.
And no government run confiscation of private property to pay for it all.
Welcome to ISC. I pointed out to someone a few years ago that in many places the school district and the local hospital are the major employers. There actually is not much of a private enterprise economy to speak of. It is very hard for me to look at a place like Georgia, for example, with so many of its 35 USG institutions without an SAT minimum and not see a desire to maximize the adult employment that “getting an education” can bring to areas for years. That was even before I began to hear stories of profs being pressured to give English credit for tweeting. Person has a degree, lots of people have jobs on campuses, but there is little actual knowledge that would merit more than a minimum wage.
Yet the same people who want Equity with minorities also tend to be on record wanting the rural students to be as successful as the kids with two professional parents in the suburbs. Soon only the social and emotional learning and generic capacity education will fit the bill for all students.
There is a document from that Lumina Dallas convening of 75 metro regions that shows only private schools and charter schools in the reimagined future. I suspect though the property taxes still fund the money following the child. I know the edicts will follow the child.
I don’t know if you’ve read Cuddy’s articles, but he indicates that all of this really goes back to the 1800’s, up through the Carnegie and Rockefeller business that you’ve alluded to:
http://www.newswithviews.com/Cuddy/dennis306.htm
http://www.cisco.com/web/about/citizenship/socio-economic/docs/LearningSociety_WhitePaper.pdf
And cisco is a primary partner, with ms and intel, in atc21s–assessing and teaching of 21st century skills that is also tied to gelp–global education learning programme.
Also involved with atc21s for anyone who has not read the book is the us, unesco, the world bank, the oecd (think pisa), pearson.
Yes, Cisco is deeply involved in this transformation and is a key player, who used the 2009 PISA results (a test based on competencies) to push for assessment reform in the U.S. Remember we are upending content based education because business leaders insist our schools are churning out unqualified applicants. Really what they want–as mentioned in Robin’s book–is to prevent creative destruction and thereby produce a sustainable society. The reformers at the helm are unequivocal about the end game–sure hope more people wake up…soon. http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2009/prod_011309.html
And Texans still pleased about not participating in the Common Core should be quite chagrined that their state ed commissioner was meeting with GlassLab. http://www.educationdive.com/news/9-ed-tech-developments-to-note-from-sxswedu-2015/375183/
JT-you probably remember I warned about GlassLab when I spoke in California. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/new-mindsets-and-changed-values-tied-to-ict-as-the-long-sought-marxian-mode-of-production/ is the GlassLab post from June 2013.
For those wondering why cisco would care so much about sustainability. They manufacture the smart meters that monitor and can control electrical power use. Their product assumes an intrusive government meddling and planning what individuals do within their residences.
JT-this walmart funded initiative involving Jobs for the Future has Long Beach as one of the 10 regions. http://www.jff.org/initiatives/delivering-tdl-workforce/funders-partners
http://www.jff.org/news-media/press-release-delivering-tdl-workforce-initiative-launches-10-regional-partnership-grants is the press release link.
Rather interesting how many times UDL is mentioned.
http://www.smarterbalanced.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/TaskItemSpecifications/ItemSpecifications/SmarterBalancedBibliography.pdf
Not once the importance of these provided conceptual understandings and essential questions is properly appreciated. Grant Wiggins was the alternative assessment coordinator for Ted Sizer’s Coalition of Essential Schools back before the 90s attempt at all this. To me the actual implementation of the Common Core has always tracked closely to the ATLAS vision that combined Sizer’s, James Comer’s School Improvement model based on his Yale work, and Howard Garner’s work. It cannot be accidental that Gardner was involved with this Learning Society HD Project either.
Did you see this webinar tomorrow on the Child Opportunity Index? https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/4054465985027356674
Equity is the excuse for wholesale transformation.
Oregon’s First Annual Equity and Innovation in Education dinner featured guest speakers Gloria Romero, former Senate Democratic Majority Leader of the California State Senate, and Patrick Dobard, school superintendent of the New Orleans Recovery School District. Moderated by Hillary Lake from KATU.
https://youtu.be/yL4AFDZQRUc
Hope your health is on the mend.
I am at the coughing constantly stage so it is best to keep to myself. There have been 3 related reports that have come out within the last 48 hours that relate to an update of this Learning Society vision. I will incorporate them in to the next post.
My youngest wants to do a college tour the week after Easter so I have got to get this all behind me.
http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEFUSA_NewVisionforEducation_Report2015.pdf shows this is a global vision. The closed loop gives me the creeps as do the repeated references to desired character qualities.
Notice that Boston Consulting Group was hired to help with the report.
Interesting–the report names Bridge International Schools as a model. This Starbucks-like chain is funded by Gates & Zuckerberg and it says they are opening a new school every three days!!!
Btw, the closed learning circuit image shows up on the SBAC as well to explain formative assessments. Schools who don’t perform well on these assessments will eventually be closed and reopened as public private charters….gee wonder whose idea this was?
Whitney Tilson’s newsletter just mentioned he had gone on the Board of Bridge.
http://results4america.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/2015-3-18-Moneyball-for-Education-Report.pdf came out yesterday and mentions that there was $75 million in some funding measure that has passed for 2015 for high quality charters. I have seen that agreement out of Colorado and it was full of sel measures, computerized tasks, and data collection.
Also notice that the Moneyball report ties to CCSSO and Competency advocacy through Education Counsel as involved with both. Did not know Betheny was part of Bill Clinton’s Domestic Council. She is thus tied to the 90s version of all this. Good background for figuring out how to use states and localities to get to same place as what was attempted from mostly the federal level before. I also do not like all the references to Bipartisan.
Make sure you look at that Frameworks link. It is so overtly manipulative.
I am now drinking water with fresh ginger and am off to mix chicken broth and a thinly sliced onion to create an expectorant broth. It’s time to get me fully functional again. Of course I am eager to try all the remedies at once.
JT-this came out in February http://www.clasp.org/resources-and-publications/publication-1/Career-Pathways-Funding-Toolkit-2015-8.pdf and pretty much destroys any claim that the local is anything other than the place where global or national progressive transformation policy is best effected.
First time I have seen another write about wioa.
https://commoncorediva.wordpress.com/2015/03/19/tech-thursday-ccss-workforce-pushing-labor-reform/
Or CLASP. My alma mater, Davidson, is 7 miles south of Mooresville. We used to drive to King of Pizza there to get away from campus in the late 70s when that I-77 corridor was barely developed. Somewhere in my research it says that Mooresville as district went to Transformational OBE in the 90s about the same time as Oregon began to push it at the state level. Lots more than just the Common Core going on there and has been for a long time.
Page 17 of the clasp toolkit link has a reference to Portland, Oregon’s previous wia work.
Or CLASP. My alma mater, Davidson, is 7 miles south of Mooresville. We used to drive to King of Pizza there to get away from campus in the late 70s when that I-77 corridor was barely developed. Somewhere in my research it says that Mooresville as district went to Transformational OBE in the 90s about the same time as Oregon began to push it at the state level. Lots more than just the Common Core going on there and has been for a long time.
Interesting… I read a link at this site about CCSS for higher Ed. The 5-point scale for “readiness” corresponds to both AP score levels (1-5) and NYS high school regents exams. Then D. Coleman opines that 18th, 19th, and 20th centrum literature are not important, but the documents from that time period are. Why do English teachers dismiss this madness? shouldn’t they be asking questions?
https://commoncorediva.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/common-core-after-high-school-reality-check/”“
Link doesn’t work now.
NYS Regents exams are scored on a 100 point scale with a single passing mark of, generally, 65. However that usually corresponds to less than 65% correct; there’s a conversion scale which may change every year, based on the exam’s observed difficulty I suppose, for converting raw scores to the scaled scores that are reported.
I heard there’s talk of loosening the Regents requirements for graduation. They’ve been going back and forth, generally in the direction of loosening, for years now. I think there are still people in the establishment who want a Regents diploma to mean something. But Cuomo is probably trying to undercut them in the interest of Equity.
Robin: I am sure you have written about strivetogether.org but couldn’t find a reference in the search. Sooo many KY people involved I swear I am about to lose my mind. These people LOVE data – data on US – probably not them – I swear they want to turn us into robots. Their “cradle to career” might as well be changed to “cradle to grave” because that I am sure is the true intent. And these people I am sure have good intentions – they were raised in the era of “content little” education and now we are all so distracted with our digital “toys” we haven’t even noticed our minds are gone and they moved on to “contentless.” It appears to me that education 150 years ago was all about “content” and the culture of a school (e.g. where, how, when, etc.) was set up only as a means to support the successful teaching of that content. NOW, as you say, it is clear that the 21st Century Education is about flipping that 180 degrees – education is now all about teaching (indoctrinating) “culture” and the content is only there as a means to teach that culture. That is why the curriculum is empty (Stotsky’s book) and in some cases the content is completely missing (i.e. Social Studies Next Gen – written by another KY educator). I am curious what your opinion is on those statements?
For people who haven’t seen this Strivetogether.org from their website what they are about:
“Improving and reporting on a core set of academic outcomes: kindergarten readiness, early grade reading, middle grade math, high school graduation, post-secondary enrollment and post-secondary degree completion.
• Building cross-sector partnerships with early childhood, K-12, higher education, community-based organizations, business, government and philanthropy
• Developing and sustaining cradle to career civic infrastructure by implementing a data-driven, quality approach to collective impact.”
Strive is a subsidiary of Knowledge Works and Richard Riley. We have discussed it in the comments often. Here in Oregon strive is tied with ‘all hands raised’ another subsidiary and stand for children. The search does not pull up conversation in comments although I wish it did.
Robin-
That Oregon bill with the weak language on districts opting out of ccss without penalty actually has a hearing tomorrow. I’ll be there listening to the ed committee. Meanwhile local union OEA is having forums on the new assessment for learning tests and the bats are giddy over the possibility the meaningful assessments taking over. Yuck.
Report back please. I get the college daughter going back today. She had invited friends to our house to be in ATL for St Paddy’s before I got sick. Some had plane tickets so I gamely have muddled through playing hostess and resting as I can.
Day 2 of brewed ginger tea. I am getting good at peeling fresh ginger.
I have been paying attention to the earliest references to ‘meaningful’ going back to the 80s and that 1987 Lauren Resnick Higher Order Thinking Skills paper. Some more detectiving has pulled up some real gems I have been looking at. More footnote perusing has led me to what appears to be the seminal, new kind of assessments that are clearly tied to my cybernetics research because of the language used, function, and people involved. That book is on the way. They are excited because they are structuring the ideological mind at a psychophysiological level while parents clamor for the shifts as a means for opting out of high stakes testing or believing these are just other types of tests.
Remember I quoted Urie Bronfenbrenner who was in turn quoting either Luria or Leontiev that the Soviet techniques needed to be tried in the West in a Great Experiment because the West would not recognize they were under noetic attack from an authoritarian state? That’s really the essence of meaningful assessment sponsored by adults who do not understand why everyone cannot live on OPM.
Glad you’re on the mend, Robin. Unless parents understand how technology will be used on a continuous basis, circling students through various learning (ie conditioning) activities within a closed circuit, they will not be able to stop what’s coming. We’ll go through iteration after iteration of rebranding only to discover (far too late) we’ve produced an entire generation who are wards of the state. It sounds so extreme…and yet here we are.
Thanks. I am getting good at peeling fresh ginger and other home remedies to get the lungs back in shape. Wanted you to see this http://www.nationalskillscoalition.org/news/blog/ten-states-receive-snap-et-pilot-grants because I am seeing more and more conjoining of SNAP with WIOA and who the sector strategy jobs should be helping.
I mentioned I has a group of college students here for several nights. They seem quite sure that graduate school is always the means to that right job. Degrees do not create jobs except for instuctors, but mostly for admins. What a topsy-turvy world we are in.
Yesterday Macey and I went to Salem for the hearing on a bill that allows for districts to opt out of ccss without penalty.
It was very interesting. I felt like there were two conversations going on. One in which most parents understood and one in which Macey and I understood- knowing the terms they were using.
To begin they allowed the deputy superintendent 45 minutes of bloviating. He rambled on about OR lying to students when they say they are competitive after graduation. He showed a study by NWEA telling how OR students are not as competitive as Kentucky students, Chicago Students, and Ohio students. All states that are members of the ILN Network if I am not mistaken. He took it back to 1990’s, stating that standards are not new. CCSS is just standards, and if a parent has an issue with a particular standard they can fix that. He said he thinks the SBAC is too long. He had a few advisors with him. I happened to be seated right behind one of them watching her document parent testimony and email with comment. Good thing I had my glasses. http://www.hooleynaito.com/ (Naito was present) He also had with him an assessment expert from NWEA. He referenced meaningful assessment, backward mapping, UBD without using the actual language. The conversation was steered to be about assessment and the outcome was that we needed meaningful student assessment without the pressure of the summative sbac, and education for ALL students. The concern over ‘standards’ is a waste of time. Even if the bill goes to vote it will not change a thing. So the ccss standards are not used we still have sbac, assessment for learning and everything in the ccss ‘bucket’ as you say.
People do not want what I wrote about in the book and what we have since covered on this blog to be true, but that avoidance only means they cannot translate as you did. I feel like a proud parent after a terrific recital performance.
Do you remember when I described the Learning Progression in the book? That’s the purpose of CCSS–to lay out the progression of desired behavioral goals all students are to meet in a way that shows they will apply the concepts as desired in the real world.
Meaningful simply translates to guiding how the student will interpret experiences and view (perceive) the world in the ways desired to be a worker drone and believe in the need for transformative change. I may still be too prone to naps, but I have still been covering lots of corroborating material. Meaningful is actually cited as coming from Dewey’s use of the concept back in 1899. That was in a 1967 book written by the then Dean of Columbia Ed school writing about shifting the purpose of school to be a place of inquiry. He wanted to alter curriculum, instruction, and assessments accordingly and used the phrase “individualizing instruction” instead of personalizing, but it’s still the same vision as today. It also wrote about the remarkable mergers going on between publishers as the conveyors of information and the electronics industry as the transmittors of it.
He would really have loved how Pearson operates today and how parents are misled about the function of digital content. Thanks for reporting in and I find those cited states to be proof of the role of performance tasks. Again just as book foretold since I researched it while the true confessions were still available. Even if occasionally I had to download them off of servers in other countries, like New Zealnad, where they had gone to be used but be invisible.
A potato peeler works well for peeling the ginger, much easier than a knife. Sorry I am probably telling you long after you finished with the need for the ginger.
Afraid not. People getting over pneumonia and a sinus infection should not go on cold rainy hour long campus tours.
Back to tonic making. Got back this morning.
This was in my inbox and shows precisely what I saw not just on campuses, but on signs in subways and post bills on NYC streets. https://nonprofitquarterly.org/governancevoice/25772-the-culture-of-inequality.html
I think the final straw in the extent to which individualism is on trial was going to the Natural History museum yesterday and noticing in the hall with the Triceratops that some curator has taken to referring to particular dinosaurs as ‘individuals’. Not individual dinosaurs, but as if every living thing is an individual when you are not just talking about the group.
I thought of you when I located this paper. http://www4.ncsu.edu/~jlnietfe/Metacog_Articles_files/White%20%282009%29%20part2.pdf
I just knew you would appreciate all this role playing as the focus.
Martha-StriveTogether is a sub of KnowledgeWorks, which also owned the High Tech High/New Tech Network until it funded and spun it out as separate last October. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/advances-in-neuroscience-redefine-notions-of-performance-and-cognition-allowing-social-justice-in-learning/ gets into the KW, Institute for the Future, Recombinant Education 3.0, Future Work Skills 2020 visions that are tied to Strive Together.
Because Richard Riley is on the Board of KW and is a principal of Education Counsel representing CCSSO in pushing Competency as Next Generation Learning and the Innovation Lab States of which KY is one, his Nelson Mullins law firm reps so many school districts, and he is vice chair of the Carnegie Corporation, that is how so much of all this is linked.
The premise of the Human Development Model is the purpose of the economy is meeting everyone’s needs and governments at all levels are to see that that occurs. The data is tracking the extent to which needs are not being met. Without needs being met, there cannot be Equity and Equality of Opportunity and there is an attempt going on to make that both a civil right protected by US laws and a human right within the UN system triggering affirmative obligations.
We have talked also in the comments in last several posts about a Lumina ‘convening’ of 75 metro areas in Dallas in January. Those docs make repeated references to Strive Together.
These two consecutive posts from October do a nice job of showing where all this data gathering is going and the transformative declared intentions that go back to the 90s when Riley was still Clinton’s Ed Secretary. When I write about WOMOP-the World Order Models Project–remember Carnegie is a primary funder and has been from the beginning in the early 70s.
http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/equality-fraternity-democracy-social-cohesion-real-utopias-and-the-electronic-republic/ is the first.
Then http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/malleable-minds-fit-for-an-affirmative-state-designed-to-meet-needs-and-constrain-the-ruled/
http://www.sharing.org/sites/default/files/images/Common_Cause_WEB.pdf from December puts what you are seeing at the local level into the global campaign to restructure the world’s ‘ecosystem’ to making needs the focus instead of property ownership.
History tells us that means the resources intended to meet needs will not be there, but contentless education means that knowledge of likely consequences is unavailable to impede a willingness to act.
I saw this link on twitter: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2011/07/dialogue-concerning-internal-world.html It’s an old posting, but relevent to this discussion. The education establishment is attempting to “improve” our children and make them less aggressive, more malleable, and overall better world citizens. As in the link, they have these goals, but only loosely understand how everything is linked together. The main issue is there isn’t any time to really test the success for these methods, but they’re so sure of the beneficial outcome that they’re just plowing ahead.
Thanks Mike. I was looking at this conference brochure this morning and noting the reaching out to anyone involved with youth. http://media.noetic.org/uploads/files/IONS-2015-ConferenceBrochure.pdf
We have covered the Institute in connection with Willis Harman and his Global Mind Change book. I also noticed the use of Human Potential just like the Frameworks document on reframing educational reforms to make them seem acceptable.
Also notice the importance of social and emotional learning to the IONS consciousness alteration vision. All of this appears to be a means of pushing the Marxist/Deweyan desire to get Theory into Practice and then evaluate the effects. Using our nation’s and the world’s schoolchildren as guinea pigs.
Remember the post where we found the same people with the same materials calling it New Age and Mindfulness with one group on board with that agenda and then calling it positive psych and fostering nurturing school climates and combating bullying when dealing with students and educators.