Remember the classic expression to explain when something is really done of “three strikes and you’re out?” How about a new version that three insider confessions of the same real purpose constitutes an indisputable revelation that we are being lied to. Let’s face it, a PR campaign for so-called academic standards, new types of assessments, and overarching K-12 mission repurposing promoted as an effort to remake the nature of high school for all students would have led to a lot more questions and scrutiny and open public rebellion. So that has not been the pitch, but it is the real purpose. Let me tell you how I was able to ferret this out. Then we will talk about the real purpose for limiting what students know and this attempt to reliably guide future behavior without the consent or awareness of these soon-to-be adults and voters.
In last Wednesday’s hearing at the Georgia State Capitol the well-connected, long-time Super of the largest school system in the state and one of the largest in the country, Alvin Wilbanks, made a rather startling point in his attempt to minimize the federal role in education and highlight the state-led initiatives that led to the creation of the Common Core. He stated that CCSS grew out of the 2005 National Governors Association decision to remake the nature of high school. Now, in some ways this was not news to me since I was familiar from writing my book of the central role polytechism was supposed to play in the 90s version of Radical Ed Reform, but I had never heard anyone who was always at the table and behind the relevant closed doors saying high school transformation was the foundation for the Common Core.
Sure enough a bit of research now that I had the tip-off led to the role of the new 3 R’s of rigor, relevance and relationships and the new type of ‘engaging’ career-oriented high school for all to Jeb Bush’s ed reforms in Florida in 2006 http://www.floridatrend.com/article/10686/splendor-in-the-class and the same confession in Illinois by Willard Daggett in 2007. http://archives.iasb.com/journal/j050607_02.htm Daggett has been providing a great deal of the very expensive professional development training for school districts getting ready to implement the Common Core. His professional background before catching a ride on the taxpayer-funded Midas consulting express was as a Vocational Ed specialist in New York State.
Now I located that additional proof AFTER I found confirming clue number 2 in a presentation I read as I was following up on Innovative Lab Network states piloting competency-based learning as the post-CCSS vision for K-12. Remember that stealth ILN initiative that lines up with the global vision being advocated for by the Global Education Leaders Program? GELP was two posts ago, but it has its own tag now. So I was not really looking for a high school reform confession, but I found one anyway and the GELP ties mean this is part of the international template for the countries in the Anglosphere especially. The places that have historically reverenced the individual and put personal liberty ahead of government druthers of coercion.
One more link to previous posts, the #2 confessor, a Paul Leathers from New Hampshire, was also a speaker at the Rethinking Accountability conference this title came from and covered. www.invisibleserfscollar.com/not-going-to-let-the-us-constitution-stop-us-from-using-schools-to-enshrine-global-social-justice-and-human-rights/
Leather, in a 2012 Colorado Summit on Blended Learning in a presentation titled “The New Hampshire Story,” laid out that all the cutting-edge reforms now being advanced under the banner of Competency to be a beacon for other states and districts, stemmed from the desire to ‘revitalize’ New Hampshire high schools. He revealed that these efforts went back tellingly to 1995 and that “focus groups showed students and educators want schooling to be more relevant and more rigorous.” As a side note, many of the participants must have since moved to the Atlanta area because that is the precise same sales pitch Fulton County is using to sell its current remake of high school around technology and ‘problem-based learning.'”
Even more confirmation that this same vision being sold as ‘locally-inspired’ is actually a global vision is the name of New Hampshire’s 2007 Vision for Redesign–Moving from High Schools to Learning Communities . Precisely the term that ties to what is planned now for Fulton and your community as well in the near future. Crystal Ball Alert! In this redesign, the “primary acquisition of knowledge and skills” will occur “outside the traditional classroom” or using a different, non-traditional means of instruction. Explanation for the shift? To eliminate high school dropouts by 2012 per the NH Governor’s Top Priority. Most places now are selling this as a means to increase the graduation rate.
Third confirmation was at a 2013 Grantmakers in Education conference telling the big donors that “what was really driving Common Core and the Competency agenda is the determination to change the nature of high school.” The report fascinatingly also cited to Fordham’s Chester Finn as saying in 2012 that this effort had been going on a long time, and everyone was surprised with the resilience of the traditional high school model. Funny how Fordham has left that part of the story out of its exuberant advocacy work for the Common Core.
Now I could stop this post now and we would have lots of useful facts to now drill public officials with, but as regular readers know, I like to give insights into the why. This is from a 1980 book by physicist David Bohm, a man whose views of education and what was needed were greatly influenced by his desire for radical political transformations. Bohm recognized that traditional education prevented students from having a mindset or worldview that would “seriously think of mankind as the basic reality, whose claims come first.” Here Bohm laid out the rationale that still guides so much education reform today when we chase down the real reason for the shifts. No it really is NOT about reducing dropouts. That’s merely the excuse that sounds good and just.
“man’s general way of thinking of the totality, i.e, his general world view, is crucial for overall order of the human mind itself. If he thinks of the totality as constituted of independent fragments, then that is how his mind will tend to operate, but if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border (for every border is a division or break) then his mind will tend to move in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole.”
‘Rigorous’ curriculum, ‘Higher Order Thinking Skills,’ ‘high-quality’ assessments, and the definition now of College and Career Ready used by the National PTA ALL tie back to looking for indications of that kind of holistic world view from grades 6 to 12. Charming, huh? Let’s just say I have really deep learning in this area in the traditional sense of both of those words. To give one more illustration of the same basic point and why ‘performance standards’ in the sense of actual physical activity and behavior are so essential to this vision of how to use education and the social sciences generally to reprogram the human brain to act at an unconscious level, let’s return to Professor Flyv from the last post. This is what competent or proficient behavior in the future is supposed to be patterned on.
“Logically based action is replaced by experientially based action.” Behavior becomes “intuitive, holistic, and synchronic, understood in the way that a given situation releases a picture of problem, goal, plan, decision, and action in one instant and with no division. This is the level of true human expertise. Experts are characterized by a flowing, effortless performance, unhindered by analytical deliberations.”
Not capable of them either under this new definition of ‘expert’ or competent performance to be practiced at for years in K-12 education. Now I told you precisely where Bohm’s vision was hiding today in the real Common Core implementation. The one that turns out to be all about high school and middle school transformation to get the needed Worldview that at least tolerates collectivism. Perhaps it will not even notice the difference.
Where’s Flyv’s vision lurking? That would be in the actual definition of the ubiquitous term Excellence. As In Equity and Excellence, supposedly a federal mandate under a rather grasping interpretation of the civil rights laws. But what school or district can afford to run the chance of being sued?
So this is how very radical visions of the personal world view needed for fundamental transformations make it all the way to our children’s classrooms and so-called ‘tests’ while we are still being told it is all about making Algebra the same state to state in case families want to move.
Common Core: grounded in deceit from the get-go because otherwise who would submit to the very real desire of our political class to insist that we are to now be Governed?
Hopefully the numbed mind will be trained not to recognize that crucial fact and fundamental shift in the State vs Individual dynamics of the 21st Century.
Anyone else want to join me in the Not Going Quietly into Submission Brigade? We do not have a lot of time to get the word out.