Greed as the Driver to Force Education to Create Socially Engineered Human Beings under Federal Law

Posted on December 4, 2015 by Robin

The only good thing about the huge Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) dropped on Monday, November 30 that sailed through the House Wednesday evening, December 2, to move on to the Senate is that we finally have a truly fixed body of language to analyze. After writing my book Credentialed to Destroy: How and Why Education Became a Weapon back in 2012 examining the actual implementation and what its true effects would be, and now this blog dealing with real time subsequent confessions, I have joked that ESSA read to me as smoothly as if it were written in Latin and I was Cicero.

Before anyone jumps to the conclusion that my reference to greed is merely the Pay for Success language that is unmistakably there, let me say the Greed I am talking about is not just for Success or Social Impact Bonds. It is Greed for Compliance that permeates ESSA. What local school districts and governments as well as states must agree to do, in schools and to children, in return for those luscious federal dollars. First though here is a news release from a well-connected organization bragging that just the Pay for Success components of ESSA add up to $2 billion a year. http://results4america.org/press-room/press-release-michele-jolin-evidence-based-policy-provisions-essa-game-changer-federal-education-funding/

Results for America with its ties to President Obama’s Office of Social Innovation and Civic Engagement and Cass Sunstein’s Nudging initiatives along with the UK Behavioural Sciences Unit and its interest in cities (Remember my Learning Regions post November 11, 2015) http://www.bloomberg.org/press/releases/bloomberg-philanthropies-announces-first-cities-selected-to-join-what-works-cities-initiative/ . They also created a relevant vision back in March with Atlas Network member AEI. http://www.results4america.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/2015-3-18-Moneyball-for-Education-Report.pdf

The co-author of that report, Bethany Little, is a partner at the same Education Counsel that is tied to Clinton’s Ed Secretary Richard Riley. It was hired by the Common Core’s sponsor, CCSSO, to create the competency-based education successor for the Next Generation States pushing innovative practices. Not a surprise then to see that paying for Success or just Compliance with the same reading, civics, or math constructivism that political radicals who call themselves Social Reconstructionists have fought for decades to impose on K-12 (Chapters 2-4 of my book, which is how I recognized what ESSA described) features so prominently in what ESSA really forces. The local school district, charter school or any eligible entity, wanting those luscious federal dollars to flow to their local economy (think of students as just the excuse), agree to do whatever is specified. Is that really returning ‘control’ to the states and local schools with just federal ‘guardrails’?

The answer of course is it depends on what those requirements are. In addition to the insights only my book covers that are now more pertinent than ever because of what is in ESSA, I think the best summary of what schools must do in return for federal dollars is contained in Title IV–21st Century Schools. Of course every state and school wants those funds so let’s see what they must agree to do. First, provide “access to, and opportunities for, a well-rounded education for all students.” Secondly, create “school conditions for student learning in order to create a healthy and safe school environment.” Lastly, provide “access to personalized learning experiences supported by technology and professional development for the effective use of data and technology.”

Anyone out there saying, “what’s wrong with that? Next thing she’ll be complaining about apple pie.” Here’s the problem. ESSA was trying very hard not to have any damnable sound bytes that might have stopped passage. Most of the egregious language in what passed the House or Senate originally is gone. Instead we get euphemisms. Fortunately for us Tyranny Busters with Axemaker Minds my research is like a glossary of euphemisms. Part 1 on well-rounded education is the UNESCO term used all over the world now to denote non-transmissive or examination type education. Instead education must now be geared to develop the human personality as a harmonious integrated being. (Tarbiyah calls this education for shakhsiyah (personality/identity) for anyone craving an explicit link to the previous post.)

Maybe not such a good euphemism then to fend off scrutiny from what is really being promised in return for federal dollars. Part 2’s promises also sound glorious and vague. Apart from implicating all the Positive School Climate and that nesting a la Matrushka doll model from the previous post, what do I really have against Part 2? Well, in researching that last post I spent time researching what is going on the UK. The madrassas there are terribly pleased about legislation adopted since 2000 imposing obligations of social cohesion and racial equality on every school and community. Ofsted is the inspector to check for school compliance in the UK and in 2009 they defined the legally required community cohesion that schools must also demonstrate as follows:

“…working towards a society in which there is a common vision and sense of belonging in all communities; a society in which the diversity of people’s backgrounds and circumstances is appreciated and valued; a society in which similar life opportunities are available for all; and a society in which strong and positive relationships exist and continue to be developed in the workplace, in schools, and the wider community.”

I know everyone reading will be shocked that this also fits with Intercultural obligations UNESCO adopted in 2004 and has now moved to force globally as part of its Rapprochement of Cultures decade and the initiatives from the last post. There goes the supposed ambiguity attached to complying with Part II’s obligations. How about Personalized Learning and that data obligation? That of course is where the true manipulation and reengineering of each student at a neurological level comes into play. I have written about this some and it is what my second book’s research covers in depth.

Luckily for us this http://www.educationdive.com/news/new-measurements-promote-efficacy-of-personalized-learning/409798/ states Gates has spent $5 billion promoting personalized learning. Part 3 is not terribly ambiguous either in its intentions. This is especially true when the chosen evaluator Rand is also who the White House chose to create the Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Competencies it wishes to make the new focus of education. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/confessions-of-a-coordinated-cabal-intent-on-psychological-rape-with-impunity/

Rand was also the chosen evaluator for the federally-financed Change Agent Study in the 70s that was used to create strategies for effective implementations of the behavioral sciences in schools going forward. I am sure none of their Effective Schools template is embodied in ESSA.That would be why the new chosen statutory phrase is ‘evidence-based.’ It is how the compliance of the local schools is to be judged. Literally as in “is the school or district providing programs, activities, and experiences that comply with these listed objectives for 21st Century Schools?” Compliance and greed is how the Social Reengineering gets forced with hardly anyone, I suppose, truly aware of what Congress is mandating.

The real problem is the total reimagining of economies in the 21st Century by think tanks supposedly on the Right and Left, by governments at every level, and on a Bipartisan and Bicameral basis (as Congress is describing its support for both ESSA and 2014’s related WIOA (see tag)). In a 2014 report called “Impact Investment: the Invisible Heart of Markets” the true vision of the 21st century global economy is laid out. This is what both WIOA and ESSA (as well as other legislation and programs) intend to quietly force on the US. It is to be quite lucrative as well for the insiders, foundations, and investment banks cited in the report. Would anyone be shocked to know Gates and Soros are both involved and all the UN entities and the OECD?

As former Obama Treasury Secretary Larry Summers is quoted as saying “This is ground zero of a big deal.” Under Paying for Outcomes, we learn that “impact-driven organizations need access to markets in order to generate income from the products and services they offer.” Me too, please. It’s thus not people creating a market for things they want. It is governments creating markets by mandating that every person in the world has a right to have their needs met. Think of impact investing as trying to monetize poverty for the benefit of politicians wanting political and social control and high-net worth individuals looking for a certain return. To quote:

“the largest markets, however, could be provided by governments paying for impact. There is an urgent need for a revolution in government purchasing, with paying for the successful delivery of specific outcomes at its core.”

Precisely what Ofsted looks for or Rand. What impact investing or as it is now called in the US–Moneyball for Government–needs is specific standards or measures of ‘success’ or when objectives have been ‘achieved.’ Can anyone say Common Core or Competencies? In fact, it was the constant recurrence of words used in both the House and Senate ESEA Reauthorization drafts that first caught my eye. This is also how charters, and whether they get renewed or the lucrative ability to expand at taxpayer expense, really work. Fascinatingly enough though the well-connected KnowledgeWorks that is tied to Education Counsel and thus Moneyball issued a frightening Forecast 4.0 this week. It not only made reference to Impact Investing as the “New Civic Funding,” it also mentioned under ‘Educating for Impact’ that “What if School Social Impact Scores became critical metrics for attracting funding, partnerships, and community engagement?”

It would also go well with a forced community cohesion mandate a la UK or all the communitarian obligations in Positive School Climate and Democratic Education too. There is a lot of information in this post so let me close with another document that came out today as the UN announced a “Global Alliance to Monitor Learning.” Interesting timing, huh? With ESSA just passing the House, but there is a mention of A4L. Not a lot of new acronyms in my world at this point, but that was one. When I looked it up http://www.uis.unesco.org/Education/Documents/assessment-for-learning.pdf , it showed me a Theory of Change that fits completely with what ESSA has just set up to send money to local communities in return for compliance with the UNESCO vision. The one no one locally has to even now about.

Quality Learning for all children and youth turns out to be first about Activities, then Intermediate Outcomes, Outcomes, and finally Impact. All in a document tied to the Brookings Institute and its sunsetting Learning Metrics Task Force. I wrote about LMTF and its use of Competencies and the nice Rockefeller Foundation letting them use its Bellagio retreat. That would be the same foundation that coined the very term ‘impact investment’ back in 2007.

How coincidental, huh? Behind a push globally along with others about using tax dollars to force “measurable social outcomes” including reengineered human personalities. Each to be primed and motivated for fundamentally transforming existing social, political, and economic structures.

Perhaps to a motto of Not Serfs Yet, we should add “And No Ambiguity Left as to True Intentions.”

Quoting Che Guevara and Importing Personalizedategic from Russia Seems Odd for a Cold War Victor

Posted on October 19, 2015 by Robin

Buckle Up. Once again we are being played now in a way that fits the Blueprints from decades ago. Let’s look together so we can shield ourselves and our children from the deliberate assaults on our very Consciousness. In the last post, when I chose the “Incarcerated by their Minds” quote, I knew it fit with the expressed goals for what a Whole Child emphasis and Student-Centered learning were really designed to do. What I did not know yet was that ‘Consciousness as a Prison’ that needs to be broken out of was a favorite metaphor of many of the New Age writers and Systems Thinkers we have encountered. The 1968 SRI study we began looking at in the last post recommended a 1978 book New Age Politics: Healing Self and Society. In a Chapter on how to see through to the prison, it laid out what needs to change and why as follows (my bolding and comments in brackets):

“inner structures, to deep-seated changes in states of mind, points of view, custom and routine, personality and consciousness…this is the level where the Six-Sided Prison can be found.

This third level of history isn’t impossible to change; but it is the hardest to change. It is…a ‘transformation of culture so large that it isn’t an event any more.’ No wonder most political activists have chosen to ignore it! [but not education, sociology, psych, or poli sci profs].

And yet–and yet–if it’s true that governments and economic systems determine the nature of events, as the Marxists say, then it’s also true that the third level of history determines the nature of the governments and economic systems, and the context, the atmosphere, the quality of events. [Remember the omnipresent PBIS and Positive School Climate with only the rationales varying].

If we simply ignore the third level of analysis until ‘later’ we’ll end up with no social evolution at all, in any deep sense. And we may end up with a stronger Prison.”

I mentioned the Cold War, a theme I developed extensively in my book, but Mark Satin in 1978 cited that Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the other Russian dissidents were actually pushing a “material limits to growth” and “calls for political and economic decentralization” that sounds much like what the UN is now calling Localization per the last post. Turns out someone has planned a Local/Global spin for a while because Chapter 16 of Satin’s book was called “Localization: Celebration of Diversity” with a vision for community-based decision-making that could be something Amitai Etzioni, the Ford Foundation, or the Brookings Metropolitanism vision would call for today (because they are). The Russian component of the New Age Politics book ended with this vision–

“Once understood and adopted, this principle diverts us–as individuals, in all forms of human association, societies and nations–from outward to inward development…”

There’s a rather constant drumbeat for this now apart from all the social and emotional learning and restorative justice practices in schools and classrooms we have looked at. This is bigger and from every direction as adults and all institutions get targeted. Last Thursday I was at the “Wisdom, Moderation and Opportunity” put on by an Atlas Network affiliate, the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, with speeches with ties to other Network members. The Luncheon Keynote Speaker, Arthur Brooks, president of AEI, insisted that to be a Conservative required having the Heart of a Servant. A true, little c conservative, would probably know from history that telling people what must motivate them is authoritarian, not conservative. Those systems thinkers we met in the September 28 Menticide post pushing how to force Creative Altruism into future human personalities would have loved that speech.

Call it Conservative and then describe a long-pushed Progressive, Internationalist, or Communitarian Idea seems to have been a common theme among speakers. From citing constantly an obligation to meet people’s needs and aid their well-being to the audience hissing when a questioner asked Nevada legislator Scott Hammond, about the actual student choice in his touted “near-universal Education Savings Account legislation,” there was a decided emphasis on a vision of the future that fits perfectly with what Uncle Karl called the Human Development Society. Which is fascinating timing as Friday, the Great Transition Initiative (has a tag as I have previously tied this to the OECD and what the PISA assessment is really driving) released this jaw-dropping paper. http://www.greattransition.org/images/GTI_publications/Foster-Marxism-and-Ecology.pdf

If I covered everything in that confession that tied to these various programs and education initiatives I have been describing, it would turn this post into a book. Instead, let’s go to the section called “The Great Convergence” and remember the Re-Imagining Education link from two posts ago from the Bipartisan Convergence Center. In the GTI link we are told:

“Development, particularly in the rich economies, must assume a new form: qualitative, collective, and cultural–emphasizing sustainable human development in harmony with Marx’s original view of socialism. As Lewis Mumford argued, a stationary state promoting ecological ends, requires for its fulfillment the egalitarian conditions of ‘basic communism,’ with production determined ‘according to need, not according to ability or productive contribution.’ [Footnote is to Marx and his Gotha Programme book].

Such a shift away from capital accumulation and towards a system of meeting collective needs based on a principle of enough is obviously impossible under the regime of capital accumulation. What is required, then, is an ecological and social revolution that will facilitate a society of ecological sustainability and substantive equality.”

That agenda is the UN’s Vision 2030 and Sustainable Development Goals that our political leaders have already signed us up for. They are not citing Marx or basic communism, at least to us, but this is the grounding nevertheless. As Foster admits “In this Great Transition, I believe socialists will play the leading role, even as the meaning of socialism evolves” [Required Heart of a Servant, perhaps?] as we all are shoved, with deceitful definitions and government programs no one tells us about, for “establishing more egalitarian conditions and processes for governing global society, including the requisite ecological, social, and economic planning.”

Existing inequalities and hype over Climate Change then are just excuses to plan and tell most of us what we can be and what we must do. When the Frameworks Institute last week put out a report “Talking Human Services” http://frameworksinstitute.org/assets/files/humanservices/nhsa_mm_final_2015.pdf , they intended to reframe prevailing perceptions in ways that fit with this desired communistic Human Development Society. They simply left that part out of why something is ‘desirable’ or not. The Notorious Che Guevara comes into this vision because of a 2008 speech John Bellamy Foster gave in Australia that was published as http://monthlyreview.org/2008/11/01/ecology-and-the-transition-from-capitalism-to-socialism/

Foster made it clear that the emphasis, per Che, would not be economic development but on the “need to develop socialist humanity.” That’s the part the UN leaves out when they tout Human Development as a goal. It means “a revolutionizing practice that revolutionizes human beings themselves.” When the Georgia DoED speaker stated that PBIS and Positive School Climate were not going away, he meant that the entire emphasis of school, starting in preschool, has changed. Social and emotional learning are not add-ons. The mandated shift is this revolutionizing process that targets ‘inner development,’ internalized images of how the world works, and appropriate future goals.

The obnoxious audience response to a heartfelt attempt to bring pertinent facts to the sales pitch of School Choice was a reminder to me that the current head of the cited ESA designer–the Friedman Foundation, Robert Enlow, is just one of a myriad of figures who keep popping up with ties to Seattle Pacific University. Others were Richard J Spady and Richard Kirby. (Civilization Building Leadership and the UNESCO-tied ed vision Nurturing Civilization Builders) That latter book cited a Tatyana Tsyrlina who is now Tsyrlina-Spady and an adjunct at SPU. In 2009 she started the Russian-American Education Forum, an online journal that first came up when I was looking at Arizona charter schools. It can be read in English or Russian, which means odd words come up like Personalizedategic.

I am quoting in particular from the November 1, 2010 Newsletter http://www.rus-ameeduforum.com/ but any of the newsletters describe a supposedly Russian vision for education that is being implemented in US schools. It explains the reasons for the task emphasis that figures so prominently in the actual Common Core implementation (Chapter 7 of my book) and also the real rationale behind “student-centered learning.” As students master each task, it “has some personal meaning for each of them.” Remember inner development? Well, the Russians do because they give us the reason for Rigor and assessments where there is no single correct answer.

Under “Personality-developing model,” we finally learn that “Personality development is possible only when a student’s level of knowledge and skills cannot meet the requirements of a given educational situation.” This gap then pulls a student’s “needs and motives” into play and forces the student to “exercise introspection and stimulates their self-reflection.” The “self-reflection is a primary contributor to personal development” and gets at the inner dimension–“the inner learning process, and its interconnected structural elements” consisting of “students’ activities, personal experience, and self-reflections.”

This Personality-Development model “helps students accumulate necessary skills and experience related to self-realization, self-organization, self-regulation, self-control, and self-management.” It sounds just like what the CCSSO is calling Competency-Based education in the US and what UNESCO calls the same thing globally in English-speaking countries.

It also “forms and develops personal values and has a strong effect on both intellect and motivation.” Sounds like everything our transformational social engineers need, so what’s Personalizedategic? That’s the final model that relates to the real world and remembers that “one of the main objectives of education is to prepare students for future adult life.” Sound familiar? It also explains all the various Redesign of High School initiatives. How about “the teaching process should include a system of interconnected, complementary situations that stimulate students’ personal development and challenge them to design key life strategies.” Now remember, this is translated from Russian into English in what could hardly be a better vision for mental disarmament of a once, and maybe future, foe.

Examples of life strategies are “choosing future profession, choosing a college, or realizing personal plans. Strategies are most likely successful when students know how to identify and utilize their personal traits, I-concepts, and real life situations, for the promotion of their success in the real world.”

Big shifts in the nature of education. Revolutionary shifts. Every one of these shifts targeting inner development gets hidden by terms like College and Career Ready, Student Growth, Every Child Achieves, and Success for All.

Now look at everything the UN is pushing and the events in Iran and Syria and think about what Putin knows about the true nature of the Cold War and how to invisibly overwhelm a population without firing a shot.

No wonder he is so cocky and chose to come to New York City in September for the final rollout of what has been building up for so long.

Federal Reserve, Texas, and the UN System Usurp Our Children’s Precious Prerogatives Via P-12 Education

Posted on September 23, 2015 by Robin

So much going on as the cards have to now be laid down. The End Game we saw in the UN’s Ban Ki-Moon’s “Dignity For All by 2030” global program commences in earnest in our children’s classrooms and in their very ‘desired mental states’. That latter graphic phrase was used at the March 8-13, 2015 59th Annual CIES Conference held at the Hilton in DC and called “Imagining a Humanist Education Globally Ubuntu!” Take a look at it and keep that phrase in mind as we move through today’s tsunami of disclosures.

Anyone wanting a link between today’s disclosures, GEFF, the UN System, the Common Core, and School Choice can look at all the links laid out in this bio of former Intel Chairman, Craig Barrett, on the Board link of an expanding chain of Arizona-based Charter Schools. http://bsischools.org/about-us/board-of-directors Most links should ring a bell, but it is the co-chairing of the Skolkovo Foundation Council that is behind GEFF and the Re-Imagining Futures Agenda by 2030 with MIT, Russia, and Silicon Valley that brings so much into the same circle with what I have been covering in recent posts.

Plans for Us and our Children is one way to put it. David Coleman, confessed Common Core Main Architect and now President of the College Board, just spoke at the NYT Schools of Tomorrow Conference about changes to the SAT. He said that there would be no more “SAT-type words” that few children recognized and only showed up in a high-stakes arena. Instead, everyday important words like “analyze” and “synthesis” would be looked at to see if prospective members of the Ideological Elite were interpreting concepts and themes correctly, and showing proper use of the Dialectic, after their years of carefully selected Learning Experiences. This would of course give a final glimpse into the Desired Mental States to see if the youngster merited a slot in one of the higher ed institutions creating the Planners of Tomorrow prepping us all for the 2030 Agenda.

OK, Coleman did not phrase it quite like that but those were the example new SAT words he gave. They do resonate with whether students have developed the desired Worldviews, don’t they? Will they apply the desired strategies and techniques in everyday practice just reeks of something Moscow State or U of Belgrade would have pushed in the 70s to join the Party Elite. The vocabulary word I did not know when I took the PSAT decades ago was ‘usurp’. I came home and looked it up promptly. It means “to take or hold in possession without force or without right.”

Usurp is still a useful word in the 21st Century, but only if accurately describing and conveying to others what is being planned for us and our children, remains a desired goal. It does not fit though with what the Planners want to allow. As we will see, Workforce Readiness is the Euphemism-du-Jour to cover up a prescribed state of deliberate ignorance, coupled to cultivated false beliefs, and overlaid with new communitarian values.

To explain why there is a global call for Competency, let’s look to a 1978 book originally written in Polish by Leszek Kolakowski and translated as Main Currents of Marxism: The Breakdown . Frustrated, his words tell us precisely why ignorance is now needed.

“Human thought developed and produced science by enlarging the area of knowledge that was not subject to arbitrary judgement, thanks to the Platonic distinction between knowledge and opinion, episteme and doxa. This distinction, of course, leaves no room for an ultimate, all-embracing synthesis [bolded by me as a reminder of Coleman’s desired new SAT concept of knowledge] in which thoughts, feelings, and desires are merged in a higher ‘unity’. [Alert readers recognize the whole purpose of a Whole Child emphasis and what goes by the euphemism ‘Excellence’ in education].

Such an aspiration is only possible when a totalitarian myth claims supremacy over thought–a myth based on ‘deeper’ intuition [Deeper Learning–a 21st Century Core Skill], so that it does not have to justify itself, but assumes command over the whole of spiritual and intellectual life. For this to be possible, of course, all logical and empirical rules have to be declared irrelevant…”

Relevance, one of the New 3 Rs. Perhaps instead of declaring facts ‘irrelevant’ they can just be asserted as Inequitable and Not Accessible to All Students, especially given our more diverse 21st Century population. Maybe those logical and empirical rules can be asserted to be inappropriate for a “culturally-responsive curricula and pedagogy” and inconsistent with a Real-Life problem-solving emphasis where a single, unambiguous answer is supposedly highly unlikely. Yes, I am listing many of the explanations for all these shifts we keep hearing, but Kolakowski grasped what is still going on because he lived in such a police state.

“The object [striven for] is a unified body of knowledge which despises such trivial aims as technological progress, and whose merit is to be one and all-embracing. But there can only be such knowledge if thought is allowed to shake off the external compulsion of logic; moreover, since each person’s ‘essential’ intuition may be different from that of others, the spiritual unity of society must be based on other foundations than logic and facts.

There must be some compulsion other than rules of thought, and that must take the form of social repression. In other words, [this 21st Century Learning as I update this 1978 language beyond Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School] system depends on replacing the tyranny of logic by a police tyranny. This is corroborated by all historical experience: there is only way of making a whole society accept a particular world-view…”

P-12 education reforms globally have been created around a hope that there can be two ways to force the acceptance of a particular world-view. That is the reason for the deliberate insistence on ignorance that gets covered up with a variety of explanations. Yet the insistence students arrive at a ‘shared meaning’ and without complaint become merely members of Communities of Learners makes it clear teachers and administrators are expected to have an iron fist within the velvet glove of ‘meaningful learning experiences.’ Now to three exceedingly influential plans driving this underlying tyranny in the classroom.

In 2014 the Texas Association of Workforce Boards created the vision for all P-12 in that state, once again showing why they did not need to participate in the Common Core formally–“The Workforce in Texas: Aligning education to meet the needs of Texas employers.” Is that really why people have children in Texas or choose to move there–to be molded to the desired mental states that meet current employers’ needs? Not the desires of the family or personal hopes and dreams based on a lively, logical mind that recognizes when their autonomy is being usurped and can say so?

I appreciate the explicit nature of that Texas declaration and the reason I know about it is that the US Federal Reserve System, the world’s most influential public-private partnership, whose product we all carry in our wallets and hit the ATMs to use, just published Transforming US Workforce Development Policies for the 21st Century.

https://www.kansascityfed.org/~/media/files/publicat/community/workforce/transformingworkforcedevelopment/book/transformingworkforcedevelopmentpolicies.pdf is the link to the 670 page Warcry to officials and politicians at every level of government to restructure the nature of the political and economic structure in the US, with an emphasis on Public-Private Partnerships. They touted the Texas Statement and especially the vision of economic and community development created by Project Quest in San Antonio, Texas. When the people in charge of a nation’s money supply proclaim Saul Alinsky’s community organizing tactics to be a national model, maybe we have turned quietly into a Police state still hiding behind Euphemisms. Chapter 4 in particular covers the “Connecting Education to Careers in the 21st Century,” which has become the sales pitch, as we have seen, for an education grounded in ignorance and manipulation.

Anthony Carnevale, the lead chapter author, and cited throughout the book, was actually the author of this same vision of education grounded in ignorance, which he laid out in the New Workforce Training Manuals created for the Department of Labor, during the same Bush 41 years when Lamar Alexander was the Education Secretary. The emphasis of those manuals and Carnevale’s various degrees in ‘cultural history,’ ‘social science and public administration,’ and a Public Affairs PhD are detailed in this post. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/anesthetizing-any-ability-to-blow-up-or-contaminate-a-chosen-politically-useful-narrative/

Obviously I cannot cover that entire book in a post although I did read it over the weekend, just like I have read Carnevale’s Workplace Manuals. I wish there was speculation about what is going on or that the Kolakowski quotes were not so entirely apt. Over and over again the book acclaims Congress passing WIOA–the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act I have been warning about since it passed (July 10, 2014 post). It gets praised regularly as a “Bipartisan and Bicameral Agreement,” making me wonder what legislation that Congress passes is not Bicameral. Alliteration though bolsters the overall giddiness at the nature of the fundamental transformation mandate. It also makes it appear that politicians at every level wanted WIOA because this is the vision the private Federal Reserve already had for the American people, society, the economy, and the future generally.

Finally we have a video created to be a part of “the World’s Largest Lesson” to be held globally in classrooms this Friday, September 25. In honor of the launch of the UN’s Post 2015 Sustainable Development Agenda to shift us all towards Dignity for All by 2030, https://vimeo.com/137728737 is the video. http://www.globalgoals.org/pt/2015/09/17/welcome-to-the-worlds-largest-lesson-materials/ is the link to lesson materials already available in ten languages. The video makes it clear that there is ‘plenty’ for all of us and that the world and its ‘systems’ and institutions can and should be redesigned so there is ‘enough’ for all of us going forward. We can ‘share.’

That’s where I want to end because that video and this UN vision can only be attempted in a world of profoundly ignorant or misguided people. As Kolakowski noted, even trying necessitates a police state of power usurping at all levels of government. This is largely hidden though because already prevailing ignorance, false media hype, and these confounding, ubiquitous euphemisms. All obscure the reality lining the Road to 2030 that we keep coming across from every direction.

Ubiquitous-another one of those useful descriptions of reality that the College Board no longer wants students to have access to or practice with.

Liberating the Sought Generalized Ears Primed in Advance for Plannified Collectivist Societies

Posted on July 19, 2015 by Robin

Generalized Ears have nothing whatsoever to do with Dumbo and they will not allow us to fly. In fact, I would argue that the phrase ‘generalized ears’, like the hyped Competency or K-12 education built around Equity and Essential Skills for All, is designed to make sure NONE of us is likely to go off the provided script for our future predictable behavior. Maybe instead of the ‘script’ metaphor we should use ‘prescribed path’ since the current K-12 rhetoric is all about Career Pathways and Multiple Pathways to a Degree. Before we get to the whats and whys again, I want to give everyone reading this hope despite these dark designs. Even though Pols refuse to listen as enabling legislation at every level comes up for a vote, as has happened this past week in Congress on the ESEA Rewrites.

Congress has made the fundamental blueprint and points and implementation detailed in my book Credentialed to Destroy an even more crucial set of revelations than it was when I published it in 2013. That remains the foundation. Serendipitously it seems, but not really because of the actual connections of cybernetics to constructivism, I happened to be researching a sequel when I saw the language of these intended federal mandates. I have been able to call on some of that research and my Axemaker clear understanding of what is being sought to sound the alarm. It did not prevent passage, but we know for sure what we are dealing with. In light of my revelation in the last post of the alarming machines a gouverner , I want to first add more confirmation that the minds of men and their underlying personalities have long been viewed as the way to invisible social control over the masses of voters in Western countries. Quoting Karl Mannheim summing up Fascist Ideology:

“The superior person, the leader, knows that all political and social ideas are myths. He himself is entirely emancipated from them, but he values them…because they…stimulate enthusiastic feelings…and are the only forces that lead to (the desired) political activity.”

If you want to fundamentally transform and have a database in place to do just that http://nypost.com/2015/07/18/obama-has-been-collecting-personal-data-for-a-secret-race-database/ and you have been using federal grants and contracts to lure state and local politicians of both parties into supporting the various needed component parts, you also need the K-12 and higher ed systems on the same page. That’s what these ESEA Rewrites were designed to do and it’s why the outrage of We the People is being ignored. Let me tell a little secret all the Social Control advocates know that they do not want us to know. It’s why I write this blog sounding the alarm and determinedly wrote the first book. To quote E.A. Ross from a 1953 essay by Professor Roger Nett published in Ethics with the Orwellian title “Conformity-Deviation and the Social Control Concept”:

“[E. A. Ross] concluded that ‘one who learns why society is urging him into the straight and narrow will resist its pressure. One who sees clearly how he is controlled will thenceforth be emancipated. To betray the secrets of ascendancy is to forearm the individual in his struggle with society.”

I would add politicians at every level to that struggle given what we are now seeing. To the progressive polyphonic federalism and Metropolitanism this blog has already laid out, this week came http://www.spatialcomplexity.info/files/2015/07/Making-Sense-of-the-New-Science-of-Cities-FINAL-2015.7.7.pdf . Won’t that go nicely with the above database and required federal education policy that is all about social and emotional learning, internalizing desired Generalized Ears, and then monitoring to check on action in the real world (Mastery)? http://gettingsmart.com/2015/07/personalization-new-frame/ shows how dramatic the confessions are now that there will be desired federal legislation.

So what are Generalized Ears? It’s the idea that what a person is likely to perceive from a given experience or provided information “depends upon anticipatory sets.” What has already been cultivated in a student’s, or anyone’s, mind and personality. In cybernetic schooling those anticipatory sets or Lenses are carefully manipulated, monitored, and rearranged when needed for desired political purposes. See Karl Mannheim again above. The same Kenneth Boulding I discussed in my book and we met here http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/reimaging-the-nature-of-the-world-in-the-minds-of-students-alters-future-behavior-and-social-events/ is the one who said that “one of the main objectives of General Systems Theory is to develop these generalized ears.” Boulding wanted a theory that would reliably predict “the dynamics of action and interaction” and Axemaker Minds get in the way.

To quote Ervin Laszlo again on how to shift away from Individualism to Collectivism, planners and politicians must NOT leave the “individual free to think of general reality as he pleases.” He further noted, echoing Mannheim and predicting what we now are calling Understanding By Design or Core Disciplinary Ideas or Cross-Cutting Themes, in 1963 that “unlike previous ages, plain force is [not] the most effective means of winning people today; ideas prove to be the most efficient tools for that end.” Is the bias in the new AP US History conceptual framework making more sense now? It’s not about facts, but criteria to guide what is noticed and ignored. This brain-based instruction article even admits to using a “perception-action” emphasis in the classroom to physically rewire the brain. http://www.districtadministration.com/article/neuroscience-builds-students-brain-power The motto this week after ECAA passage in the Senate seems to be Go Ahead and Admit It Now, no one can stop us.

Back to Boulding because his view of Knowledge is everywhere in the Common Core and any subsequent state learning standards that will fit the ESEA Rewrite’s mandates.

“Knowledge is not something that exists and grows in the abstract. It is a function of human organisms and social organization…Knowledge however grows by the receipt of meaningful information–that is, by the intake of messages by a knower which are capable of reorganizing his knowledge.” That would be what the ESEA Rewrite and Tom VanderArk above called personalized learning and what gets hyped also as a Growth Mindset. It is why Ervin Laszlo in Essential Society knew a social philosophy stressing the fulfillment of individual needs was necessary to push a more collectivist orientation and that “ideas act on individual minds.” His italics–remember that italization for emphasis every time you hear ‘student-centered learning’ being hyped.

What’s wrong with the use of the words Success or Achieve in the ESEA Rewrite or in the Parent Checklist the federal DoED issued Friday, July 17, which talked about ‘development’ and Success in Life as the purpose of K-12? They all reek of the behavioral scientist and system science social engineering goal with its “strongly felt need to get inside the ‘black box'” of the human mind of young people. They treat students as “homeostatic biological organisms with purposive, adaptive psychological properties.” Now when the school or teacher manipulates those properties, they get acclaimed as ‘effective’ and Growth, Achievement, Learning, or Success are all proclaimed. The actual result of psychological manipulation for collectivist, fundamental transformation purposes is obscured.

Laszlo openly laid out how the needed all-encompassing belief and value system needed for a transition to collectivism would work. He saw the desired model as what “reigned in the Middle Ages, during the prime of Christian influence on thought. The individual had only to believe in a doctrine which was offered everywhere, among the learned as among the simple [a precursor to Equity for All], to obtain what was held to be the full truth. He then received a fully comprehensible, satisfactory picture of the world, with God as the supreme ruler and source of all things, and man as the centre and finest example of his creation. As we are dealing here with social, and not with absolute values, we are not interested in the analytical truth of any statement, but merely in its effect if taken at face value.”

Axemaker Minds, clear and rational, well-stocked with their own personally selected store of facts, specialist minds instead of Generalized Ears, are notorious at not taking the Narrative as provided or the Sound Bytes on offer. If an individual’s perception of reality must be controlled so must curriculum and the concepts to be used to make “intuited experience” comprehensible. If all this seems still too far away in time or too abstract in principle, let’s once again bring this down to the classroom in the here and now. This week an article called “Geocaching is Catching Students’ Attention in the Classroom” was being hyped to illustrate the new need for “active learning as when students engage in developing projects in a more meaningful way than when concepts were simply presented using traditional methods by teachers.” The old way stressed the mental and the rational instead of activity and may not have involved emotionally charged content, triggering that all-important subjective mode of comprehension.

Building on the discussions of constructivism in reading and math and science in Chapters 2 and 3 of my book, we learn that engaging instruction and teacher professional development focus now on “ways that constructivist learning environments can help create active, reflective, student-centered learning that is socially relevant and personally meaningful to learners.” Triggering Laszlo’s sought subjective mode of comprehension that cannot see reality clearly and now to be mandated by Congress AND the states AND the school districts AND the accreditors AND generally in a charter school’s agreement for renewal that nobody but me seems to bother to read.

I will close with the best example of the now to be required Higher Order Thinking Skills and Understanding once again from Laszlo. Keep in mind its acknowledged purpose too.

“Consequently he will attempt to know his experience by an emotionally determined concept, provided by the aesthetic experience.[ Visual and grounded in activity]. He will still comprehend through concepts, but on a subjective, instinctive level and not through conscious reason.”

And after years of practicing this, the student will now be declared to be College and Career Ready.

Because with these aims of collectivism and social engineering, the planners know that euphemisms and odd, little known, real definitions, are their friends.

Fodder for Political Exploitation: When ECAA Removes All Barriers and Adds Required Intrusions

Posted on June 17, 2015 by Robin

Miss me? ECAA (Every Child Achieves Act of 2015) is the acronym for the latest update to federal K-12 legislation and it is scheduled to come to the Senate floor for debate any day now. Yesterday, as I was getting ready to start trumpeting the truth of the tsunami coming at us again, I read a quote from Georgia Senator Johnny Isakson, the Republican sponsor of last summer’s WIOA legislation that I am so horrified by, http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/priority-economic-citizenship-for-some-officially-sanctioned-status-as-prey-for-most-of-us/ . Politico quoted him as hoping for votes from ‘conservatives’ on ECAA because of the provisions allowing parents to Opt Out of testing requirements and also not requiring states to use the Common Core. Having read all 792 pages of that leviathan piece of legislation, a suggestion implying that those voting on it need only look at one or two provisions seemed to me like an excuse to ignore the reality of what the legislation shifts.

Now I have mentioned in previous posts that the practices mandated and theories used track back to Soviet psych research and their 1930s views of the type of citizens they wanted education to create. That’s troubling, but lets leave the S word and its close cousin the M word (as in Uncle Karl) out of today’s concerns. Isakson’s points reminded me that there was language in ECAA that appears to override that Opt Out language since the required ECAA annual assessments are to be “administered to all public elementary school and secondary school students in the state.” I am pretty sure that will be the provision waved in parents faces after the legislation is adopted. Plus the school district can fight parents with litigation expenses funded by the taxpayers. No warm and fuzzy comfort from that page 617 prohibition against federal mandates, direction, and control.

Again what good is that or referencing the Common Core when only certain types of ‘performance standards’ as in desired actions or conduct to be demonstrated by students can meet the criteria already mandated by ECAA under that already noted squirrelly definition of “Challenging State Academic Standards” language. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/congressionally-mandating-dialectical-thinking-and-then-forcing-states-to-annually-measure-and-manipulate-it/ Now to elaborate on the true essence of what is being targeted by ECAA that ought to be Out of Bounds in a free society I am going to quote from a 2014 UN/ILO report book called Transforming Economies–Making Industrial Policy Work for Growth, Jobs and Development . That report talks about the US so we get to pay attention to what is sought since as the song goes “This is My Country, Land that I Love…”

The UN excitedly said that “Industrial Policies shape opportunities for economy-wide learning” not to mention lots of exploitation opportunities for Senators, legislators, mayors, and local council members. And what do future citizens need to learn for this future of the kind of Industrial Policy that WIOA just happens to have foisted on all 50 states? Probably making the UN Oh So Happy and definitely constituting a shift for the US to more of a CME–Coordinated Market Economy like the cited Japan and Germany? Well, we need generic skills, but more importantly what must be controlled are the Concepts that “allow individuals to categorize and structure information and data, to analyze and interpret empirically observed phenomena, to gain understanding and meaning and make choices.”

That target never varies and looking to make sure those desired Concepts are taking hold and are likely to prompt and guide future actions is PRECISELY what the ECAA required annual HOTS (Higher Order Thinking Skills) assessments that cannot be opted out of are looking for. Now we have come across other names for this focus on Concepts before and I have tagged some of them to this post. Showing just how crucial getting into and manipulating how each student’s mind works and how they are likely to behave in the future is to the global vision of K-12 education ‘reform’ that ECAA is a component of, the Next Generation Science Standards last month, in a draft of its “Primary Evaluation of Essential Criteria for Alignment” in the classroom assessments, created three new acronyms for us.

SEPs–Science and Engineering Practices to make sure the concepts are tied to ongoing actual student activities and behaviors and are not just the subject of a dreaded test of knowledge, or, Horrors!, Rote Learning. We also have DCIs, which can be used in any area and stand for Disciplinary Core Ideas. Then we also have our last new acronym–CCCs or Cross-Cutting Concepts to provoke some genuine interdisciplinary insights and perceptions that apply across all subject areas. Cool, huh? Just think of what Joe Stalin or Fidel Castro could have done with an education system that pushes everyone to have the same perceptual filters embedded unconsciously within the mind and integrated into practiced behaviors until they are reflexes.

Cannot linger because something else came out this past week–the Remake Learning Playbook that is expanding beyond Pittsburgh and working with the White House and Congressional initiative–Digital Promise and getting funding from the MacArthur Foundation. There is so much of the vision of where we are actually going in that Playbook, but relevant to today’s post in particular, was a mention of adhering to the Economic and Sector strategies created by a Harvard Business School prof by the name of Michael Porter. That got my attention since WIOA is full of Sector Strategies and the National Governors Association has cited it as a reason for needing the Common Core to reform the nature of American high school. (August 4 & 10, 2014 posts).

So that name Michael Porter rang a bell from some connections at Harvard from witnesses Lamar Alexander called to testify at the original hearings on the reauthorization. Ignoring his connection to the Monitor Consulting Group bankruptcy since that should have no bearing on the validity of public policy recommendations, I discover http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/Clusters_and_Economic_Policy_White_Paper_8e844243-aa23-449d-a7c1-5ef76c74236f.pdf that Clusters are to be the new form of approved American Industrial Policy. As a bonus it allows the federal government and its agencies to coordinate with states and localities, which sounds a great deal like progressive polyphonic federalism (Jan 28, 2015 post) to me. Also goes well again with WIOA and those soon to be filed required state plans. Truly, my bliss at the public sector exploitation potentials knows no bounds.

See why they need K-12 policy to line up with these planned manipulations? Now just imagine the potential for all the plans for metro areas to be the economic drivers and to force Equity in Outcomes from having Professor Porter be the founder of ICIC-the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City. ICIC, by the way, works with the same Brookings that is in charge of the Rockefeller-funded Metropolitanism initiative and the UNESCO/OECD Learning Metrics Task Force. If I had a white board and we were talking in person all these connections would seem to be a game of Whack-a-Mole, but apparently we are the ones about to get whacked.

Now, not to pat myself on the back or anything, but after a book and 3 years of this blog, I really know this area so reading a 1960 book yesterday by a Harvard philosophy prof, Israel Scheffler, brought there in 1952 by the Rockefeller Foundation, I recognized that he, too, was describing the kind of behavior guided by conceptual understanding that has given us the above three new acronyms. Well, a few searches later of people who ought to be involved if my suspicions were correct pulled up a “Teaching for Understanding” initiative from Harvard in the early 90s that was originally funded by the Spencer Foundation, but later by MacArthur. http://www.exploratorium.edu/ifi/resources/workshops/teachingforunderstanding.html That would be the same MacArthur Foundation now funding the national expansion via the Remake Learning Playbook mentioned above.

That paper explains all about ‘understanding performances’ and how true understanding needs to be demonstrated by behavior and action. Just like what we now know is required under ECAA’s definition of HOTS and what will qualify as the requisite Challenging State Academic Standards. Fascinating, huh? Remember all the references in ECAA to ‘needs’ and ‘personalized learning’? Well, the Playbook talks about that as well and recommends Project-Based Learning and the Maker Movement. How active! Maybe get to practice with all three new acronyms some more and join the “global conversation about learning innovation” while staying “responsive to the real needs and priorities of local communities.” Global and local-what a nice slogan. Probably why the various UN entities keep hyping it.

I will get back to that Playbook in the next post since this one is devoted to all the initiatives ECAA pulls in that we were not supposed to know about. Some of us already know that the White House and various companies have really been hyping the Maker Movement and maker Faires. It’s not just that Playbook. Hint: it also dovetails nicely with Sector Strategy plans for us. When I was updating that Teaching for Understanding work by Harvard’s Project Zero, it pulled up a January 2015 White Paper from them called “Maker-Centered Learning and the Development of Self: Preliminary Findings of the Agency By Design Project” that builds on this desire to redesign our students from the inside-out and then let them practice until the shifts take hold at a neurological level.

I’m afraid that is where the title came from. No boundaries anymore to what the White House, Congress, ed researchers, tax-free ‘philanthropies’ and others apparently plan to do to our students unless we are supposed to be cheered that no one is trying to get authority for sexual exploitation. They want to interfere with, redesign, and then monitor annually each student with mounds of data at the very level of the Self-their Identity.

Mercy me. I think Mao Tse-Tung himself would have lusted after such authority over China’s citizens. Especially if hardly anyone would know of the level of interference and manipulation.

Why, Congress, why?

Abolishing the First Amendment’s Protections While Hyping Intellectual Freedom and Student Learning

Posted on February 9, 2015 by Robin

If we wanted to turn the current protections of the First Amendment on its head, we might argue that its new function is to “ensure the democratic legitimation of the state” and “create a new state of Mind for citizenship.” If books like The Constitution in 2020 (that the typical person will never even hear about, much less read) assert such claims, while also arguing for national standards for K-12 education to create the desired values and belief system, we would have a United States running on parallel tracks. There is the world as the typical person still believes it to be. Then the parallel, actual, purposes of the changed practices and institutions designed quietly to create:

“A democratic agenda truly concerned with human freedom, equality, and flourishing must conceive of itself in terms broader than the Constitution as law. It must be concerned with the constitution of US society, rather than with the US Constitution.”

If anyone does not believe that K-12 education policy and the new emphasis on “personalized learning” are actually about achieving the vision of the above quote that dovetails with the previous essay on “A Progressive Perspective on Freedom of Speech,” read this inviting “progressives normatively [they set the new rules but do not bother to tell us] to clarify the forms of participation that they believe are essential to a healthy public sphere.” Last week President Obama’s FCC announced its intention to regulate the Internet in the name of net neutrality. Want to guess how the progs illustrated that desire to clarify the new terms of participation and debate?

The book pointed out that “the Internet, for example, is rapidly becoming an extremely important medium for the formation of public opinion.” If that sounds like we are about to have an uh-oh confession here it goes:

“In the coming decades, issues such as net neutrality or the installation of centralized (versus decentralized) filters will hugely impact the precise ways in which the Internet will contribute to the formation of public opinion. Progressives will need a convincing normative vision [remember the experiential Right Brain that is the new focus of K-12 education adores narratives] of a healthy public sphere in order to assess the constitutional implications [little c, as in constitution of society and maybe that other little c] of potential government interventions. They will need this vision as much to shape a progressive regulatory policy as to litigate for the maintenance of progressive constitutional rights.” [No more negative liberties in other words. Look up FDR’s Scond Bill of Rights].

We get a glimmer of what is really going on in what the new Conceptual Frameworks in AP US History are actually designed to do. I covered that in depth in a trilogy starting here http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/mischievous-masquerade-apush-as-the-sought-coherent-framework-justifying-intervention-in-history/ I also address the function of critical theory and why it is also called Cultural Marxism in Chapter 5 of my book. This recent controversy http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/park-cities/headlines/20150128-highland-park-isd-parent-calls-book-socialist-marxist.ece illustrates that high school coursework across the country is now training students to apply conceptual lenses like poverty, race, gender, sexuality, etc. in how they interpret the world.

Instead of treating Marxism as an insult that only an unhinged kook would hurl, it’s important to appreciate the crucial importance that the human perception of the here and now has on a widespread willingness to act to transform society. It’s why the prog quotes above talk about “a new State of Mind” for the necessary citizenship. It’s why we keep hearing about desired Dispositions (including explicitly from the Common Core’s formal sponsor, the CCSSO) and all students having a flexible Growth Mindset. We are all assuming a world and the rule and protections of the law still functioning largely the same while influential, well-funded profs and federal regulators declare “the First Amendment does not protect speech as such, but only such speech as is necessary for democracy.”

That would again be democracy in the economic justice, positive rights, vision for all that desperately needs both K-12 and higher education policies and practices to enable its vision of the future. The progs recognize that the traditional view of the First Amendment will “undermine important and desirable forms of state regulation.” I have long recognized that where the schools intend to go is actually off limits once properly understood. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/if-the-system-seeks-to-destroy-the-ability-to-think-can-james-madison-save-us/ Apparently the progs concede that as well. They followed that concern over the current First Amendment language with this statement:

“a progressive constitutional vision for 2020 must advance a robust theory of democracy that can identify the forms of speech and association that deserve constitutional protection because they are essential to the formation of democratic public opinion.”

That’s a First Amendment that has done a 180 and intends to protect only the forms of speech and association that fit with the desired transformative vision. Anything else and the motto is gather data, resculpt, and infringe away. The parents still think this is all about the best way to transmit knowledge and many businessmen still believe they cannot find able employees despite the K-12 system trying really hard and doing its best. Neither is true and it hasn’t been for a while.

One of the many taxpayer-funded trade groups doing its part to advance the prog view of future American society and reshaping the mind of the citizen is the American Library Association. In fact, its Association of School Librarians has even created Standards for the 21st-Century Learner http://www.ala.org/aasl/standards-guidelines/learning-standards and a helpful crosswalk to the Common Core. Category 3 is that “Learners Will Use Skills, Resources, & Tools to Share Knowledge and Participate Ethically and Productively as Members of Our Democratic Society.” I do believe that is called picking a dog in the fight.

Especially given AASL’s constant focus on pushing Inquiry-Learning, which of course, MUST be experiential. It also prescribes desired student “Dispositions in Action” repeatedly as part of its Learning Standards. Students are also told to “show social responsibility by participating actively with others in learning situations” and not just turning to a book they love or refusing to volunteer the excellent vocabulary their parents diligently built up over the preschool years.

Again, creating Learning Standards that insist that students have that social responsibility or that students must “use information and knowledge in the service of democratic values” is taking sides in this mostly invisible battle for the future of what the US will ever be. We are going to pivot because the ALA was brought in as the so-called neutral authority to proclaim that somehow complaining of bias in what is taught, and the explicit prescription, and required practicing, with conceptual lenses that students are to now use (to interpret their experiences and the reality they perceive around them), is somehow a violation of the student’s Intellectual Freedom. Who is the real infringer here? This is the Have Your Cake and Eat It Too Booklet the ALA has created. http://www.ala.org/alsc/sites/ala.org.alsc/files/content/issuesadv/intellectualfreedom/kidsknowyourrights.pdf

It showed up as a defense in Highland Park. Now won’t the facts laid out in this post be useful if it shows up in your community next trying to prevent accurate criticisms? After all, these stipulated ‘lenses’ are designed to guide new kinds of student minds and beliefs about their responsibilities to others all while sculpting that needed “democratic public opinion”. The booklet is fantastically wrong in so many of its assertions, but it does still have an excellent command of the historic purpose of the Bill of Rights. “Before the Bill of Rights was written, governments usually told people what their rights and freedoms were. Our Founding Fathers did not like this, and so they flipped the idea around. Instead, the Bill of Rights said the citizens would be free to tell the government what it could or could not do.”

Not exactly consistent with those 21st Century Learning Standards is it? See what I mean about parallel tracks? At the same time that the ALA tries to portray challenges to the slant in curricula as akin to the right of citizens to “take the government to court” and “use the words from the First Amendment to prove that the government has violated their rights,” the ALA itself is actively involved in helping to resculpt the student’s internal mental structures and values, attitudes, and beliefs. In violation of that same First Amendment they claim to be a defender of. Maybe so, but the first allegiance is clearly to advancing ‘democracy’. That booklet called it the “form of government where all people are heard,” which sounds remarkably like the prog vision of the public sphere above.

In fact, the 2020 book asserted that redistribution of wealth and interference with private contracts are now acceptable as long as the minority can complain in a public forum about what governments are doing. Legitimate practices as long as there is an opportunity to participate and try to sway public opinion sounds remarkably like the ALA’s assertion that democracy cannot “work if all people cannot express themselves and talk to one another to make informed choices.” Sounds like John Dewey’s participatory democracy to me that we are seeing advocated for now at the local level as a forum for binding decision-making as long as all Stakeholders are represented.

I think the ALA’s desire to advance this vision of the future probably has something to do with why it repeatedly and flagrantly misstates the tenets of the First Amendment. But the typical parent or student will likely not know that “The First Amendment guarantees you the right to think your own thoughts, speak your own opinions, and read and write what you want” is factually wrong. The Government at any level cannot infringe that. The ALA though wants that Discourse Classroom where all students bring their perspectives and share their experiences before negotiating to a common understanding. That practiced obligation is needed for this new vision of a “democratic public sphere.”

This is a self-confessed March through the Institutions that is proceeding on a Parallel Track. Let’s not take any groups’ word for what our rights and obligations are. Always look for the conflict of interest.

We really are engaged in a cultural war over the constitution of our society. The law and K-12 education are primary battlefields. None of us have to accept a claim that we are violating Intellectual Freedom by accurately pointing all this out.

Redemptive Constitutionalism, Sector Strategies, ESEA Rewrite, and a Curriculum Designed Around Caring

Posted on February 4, 2015 by Robin

Sometimes timing is everything. The last post was based on insights developed just days before I wrote it. Then I caught a plane to St Louis, Missouri to the Educational Policy Conference. Listening on Saturday morning I heard repeated references to phrases like “Power in the People,” ‘local control’ as the ubiquitous answer, and “community solutions to community problems.” I was in a position to recognize that these phrases played right into the themes I knew the Rockefeller Foundation also sees as a way to advance its views of the US Constitution via Metropolitanism, the National Center on Dialogue and Deliberation, and the work involving the Democracy Handbook we examined here. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/silently-and-seismically-shifting-sovereignty-away-from-the-individual/

I do not know if the overlap of memes between what is being pushed as progressive federalism, Rockefeller-funded Deliberative Democracy, and at the Heritage Foundation-sponsored EPC is deliberate or innocent although at some level I am darn sure I am NOT the only one aware there is an overlap. Not wanting good people hearing these themes and still feeling protected by the Constitution to be blind-sided and then sucker punched, I have taken a few days to mull over my concerns and do a bit more research. The post title should give the first clue on where I came out.

First, the book on the aims of progressive federalism The Constitution in 2020 arrived laying out a “framework for developing a political community committed to justice.” The UN and the Club of Rome are not the only institutions now formally advancing a vision for using ‘the rule of law’ as a means “to imagine our collective future.” Emphasis there on the collective. In fact, when I saw the reference to “our successes will come from new mobilizations that emphasize a new constitutional vision that better articulates enduring constitutional values,” the reimagining of K-12 education’s purposes, practices, and policies via the Common Core immediately came to mind.

Plus there are all the references we keep coming across for preparing all students for a reimagined view of Citizenship. Knowing how tied all the social and emotional learning and Positive School Climate mandates are to Nel Noddings work (see tags), I pulled her classic book The Challenge to Care in Schools: An Alternative Approach to Education and read that the subject content focus must go because:

“Neither prudential nor ethical arguments move most affluent citizens [to make the alleviation of poverty and economic justice the purpose of politics and social institutions like schools]. This state of affairs suggests strongly that there is something radically wrong with the education that produced these citizens. Both wealthy and poor experience a morally deficient schooling. Is there an alternative?”

Noddings’ curriculum themes to develop caring and pedagogy of the oppressed and of the oppressors bears a striking resemblance to what we are now seeing pushed in AP and IB English and history classes and throughout the disciplines down into elementary school. In fact, the very phrase of the “New 3 Rs” of Rigor, Relevance, and Relationships bowls down at its core to making sure students now perceive the world and its social problems in terms of responsibility to care and act and otherwise fulfill Noddings desire to make education “primarily concerned with what kind of relations we should establish.” That’s not making me feel better about what is intended by think tanks and scholars from what is commonly nicknamed, the Left and the Right, by 2020.

What about “redemptive constitutionalism”? Any hope there? http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/students/groups/oslj/files/2012/01/Schwartzberg.pdf alarmingly informs us that:

“Progressives and popular constitutionalists have two central commitments–one to political equality, one to forward-looking change…Progressives might focus on the achievement of political and social equality, popular constitutionalists on formal equality in political decision making. Both, however, are squarely focused away from the Framers’ intent, and towards the future, in their conceptions of constitutional interpretation. The progressive ambition is to interpret the Constitution in such a way that it helps us to ameliorate deprivation and suffering–i.e., to respond to the felt needs of our community today and in the future.”

Alarming overlap of themes between the Left and Right rhetoric about the Constitution and between K-12 education and the use of the law. Good things to be aware of though to avoid being sucker punched in the future. Especially as redemptive constitutionalism wants to take interpretive power away from the courts and give it to “the People” and ordinary citizens for majorities to decide. All the more reasons then to use education to change what is widely believed and valued. That law review paper called for its aims to be achieved in the future via a constitutional convention called by the states that “ought to focus on majoritarian, popular forms of amendment” which sounds remarkably like what many state ‘conservative’ think-tanks are asking for as the ConCon.

The article called for the adoption of the “progressives’ ambition as a durable alternative vision of constitutionalism, oriented at least in part towards special concern for the most vulnerable populations.” That hope is what was enacted by a bipartisan Congress in July 2014 as WIOA [see tag]. That’s precisely what the ESEA Rewrite hurdling at light speed through Congress plans to do. It’s also what the Sector Strategies, integration of CTE into academics for all students, and Career Pathways for all students that we covered here are explicitly designed to do. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/banishing-any-distinction-between-academic-technical-and-lifeemployability-skills-active-deceit-everywhere/

As this paper I pulled from Colorado makes clear https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/sites/default/files/PGL%2008-05-WIA%20Attach8%20PY08%20NGA.pdf what is being put in place in K-12 education now under the misleading banner of the Common Core and Equity is to “align its efforts in support of a workforce development system that is employer driven and locally led with those in economic development and education. This model requires the workforce development system to partner with industry to provide a trained workforce that possesses the desired skill sets business requires.”

Honestly, is there any confusion on why progressive federalism is hiding under a variety of labels but involves an alliance between Big Business, the Chambers of Commerce, and the admitted hard Left that wants economic justice as a Constitutional obligation? The third leg of the Sector Strategies/Career Pathways/Employer Partnership vision for the economy that is typically omitted until we start reading the powerpoints from their conferences is a “New Social Compact with Young People.” That’s why several of the witnesses from yesterday’s ESEA Rewrite came from federally-funded Promise Neighborhoods. That’s why this “Community-Based Learning through Community Partnerships” blueprint was recently released. http://www.communityschools.org/assets/1/AssetManager/MBLT%20Boston.pdf It’s why KnowledgeWorks Strive Together model of Cradle to Career is being cited as the exemplar of such a social compact with young people.

http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports2/2015/02/03-advanced-industries#/M10420 released yesterday is yet another example of this envisioned taxpayer-funded vision of an economy built around government direction, blurring of public and private, and providing ‘jobs’ for the least privileged members of American society. It does not appear to be sustainable at all to me once the taxpayer funded spigot runs dry. The difference though between just pointing out the connections among all these things and how they benefit the public sector at all levels, connected Big Business, and community organizers intent on managing the redistribution of existing wealth to their patrons (obvious and mostly invisible) is I have quite a library I use for appreciating the likely consequences of all these plans and mandates.

So I turned to a 1939 book written by a German, Gunter Reiman. Called The Vampire Economy: Doing Business Under Fascism it reminds us that:

“An Italian economist and editor who is familiar with present conditions in Italy was asked by the author: “What are the relations between businessmen and the State bureaucrats in Italy?’

‘I can answer in one word–corruption,’ he declared. ‘The businessmen in Italy has as much influence as he has money to bribe the bureaucrats. Without cash, you are a helpless subject of the State.’

The word ‘corruption’ is not to be taken in the sense in which we normally use it in democratic countries. Under fascism, it is not primarily the power of money that corrupts, but rather does corruption spring from the power of the State.”

From progressive federalism, Sector Strategies, seeing Equity as a Civil Right, the mind arson I have documented as planned for K-12 education, we are looking at a vision of an all-powerful State where the individual is to be nothing but a member of the collective, the subject under political power, and a workforce participant. All these plans for the US Constitution and changing the purpose of the “rule of law” are designed to ensure that this hoped for power “is not illegal but grows naturally out of the system and is organized and made legitimate by the State.” That’s what Reiman saw in Italy and Germany and wrote about without knowing the rest of the story.

We do now so there’s less ability to be blind-sided with a sucker punch than there was a week ago. Does anyone though wonder anymore why WIOA insisted that one of the required skills that all students must have to be “workforce ready” was “systems thinking”?

Just because a great deal of political and economic power is now focused on using the law and education to design and create such systems, starting at the level of the student’s mind and personality, doesn’t mean any of us are obligated to sit still and wait for that sucker punch.

Not Serfs Yet.

Progressive Polyphonic Federalism Invisibly Binds People and Places to the Just Society Vision

Posted on January 28, 2015 by Robin

That’s quite a title, isn’t it, but both alliterative adjectives matter. If you like doublechecking me, try one or the other with ‘federalism’ in your search. I joined them together because they actually work together and I hate synonyms designed to throw us off the real story, its depth, or its trail over decades. This will also remind us why the “state-led” description of the Common Core, as in not a federal initiative, is a Red Herring literally designed to throw off the scent so we look in the wrong places. Both WIOA and the ESEA Rewrite are grounded in both kinds of federalism and its No Child Left Behind predecessor is cited as the ultimate example of polyphonic federalism in this paper “Toward a Theory of Interactive Federalism” http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=734644 by the now Dean of Emory Law School. Notice that the 2006 date is the year after the famous (infamous?) Yale conference put on by the American Constitution Society proposing a new Constitution by 2020 that was followed up with a book in 2009.

Another one of those things that has not been on our radars, but needs to be, because it describes what is actually happening to all of us. Let’s go back in time to the mid-80s when (as my book lays out) so much is already shifting towards intentional social transformation via education. Recognizing that the goals of the ESEA Rewrite could only be met via James Comer’s (also at Yale) views of a social interaction, psychological focus of student achievement, I discovered he had written the Foreword for a 1985 book Choosing Equality: The Case for Democratic Schooling that sought to “qualitatively change the environmental context–the school culture–that conditions the learning process.” That certainly explains why every federal regulatory power since President Obama took office has been directed to achieving a Positive School Climate with a variety of rationales.

The vision of democratic schooling, then and now in the Common Core implementation and the ESEA Rewrite language, insists that “If education were structured around the social needs of children, families, communities, and a democratic society [in the Marxian, John Dewey, participatory sense laid out in the book], the priority would be to endow all children with the basic and higher-order skills [Remember the tethering from the last post] needed to fulfill personal and citizenship roles. The mission of schools would be individual and social empowerment, which itself would promote more equitable chances of survival in the labor market.” Schools, in other words, will increase student achievement for all students by focusing now on enhancing “all children’s capacities to think critically and to acquire social knowledge.”

That was from the “Building a New Agenda” ending, but before that was the “Governance and Funding: Toward Progressive Federalism” chapter. If the basic and social ‘needs’ of all people are to be met, either in the US or anywhere in the world, “new structural mechanisms that allow popular control over resources and priorities” are needed. The book proposed the remedy as the “concept of progressive federalism, expanding the social and fiscal responsibilities of government at all levels–federal, state, and local–and defining the role of each more appropriately to its function.” We can be sure that the UN’s Global CIFAL Network I wrote about on January 6 was created from an awareness of progressive federalism. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/30/us/politics/30federal.html says that President Obama’s Open Data Initiative (see tag), which we know was such a priority that it was his first action on his first day in office, was actually grounded in progressive federalism.

Progressive federalism sees “government action as the central instrument for achieving egalitarian goals and more effective practice in public education.” The book, which described the practices and policies my book and this blog have tracked to what the actual planned implementation looks like everywhere, sought to “develop the role of local and state governance, as well, to promote more comprehensive responses to educational needs and to engage all levels of government in the struggle for progressive reform.” The book complained that progressives were not appreciating the powers over people and places held at the state and local levels. It reiterated that the “concept of progressive federalism includes the necessity of multiple levels of authority, particularly state and federal regulatory functions that safeguard standards and rights.”

Choosing Equality pointed out the reasons for what is now so clearly being foisted on us: “The federal government is the only feasible agency for the redistribution of wealth on a nationwide basis, both in its tax policies and in its priorities for public spending. The federal government is also the primary agent for promoting geographic as well as individual equity.” Equity as in whatever must be done to achieve equality of results for various previously disadvantaged groups. That’s still the impetus behind the global push surrounding Excellence and Equity for All as this recent paper shows.

http://www.yrdsb.edu.on.ca/pdfs/w/innovation/quest/journals/QuestJournal_BenLevin-AvisGlaze.pdf made it quite clear that the required Equity is obtained in the manner described in the 1985 book although its lead author Ben Levin has now become too notorious to call as a Congressional or legislative witness. The co-author, Avis Glaze, wrote yesterday in an EdWeek post entitled “Achieving Excellence with Equity: A Mandate for All Schools” timed around the second day of ESEA Rewrite hearings. Student Learning tied to the tethering view of experiential education from the last post as well as the Rewrite’s Equity focus is a crucial point so many educators are lying to the public about all over the world.

This is from a 2008 UNESCO paper called “Inclusive Education–the Way of the Future.” It laid out the shifts in what is to constitute ‘learning’ to allow the push of equality in outcomes and success for all. It’s also embodied in what is “high-quality education” and Equity and what it takes to be a “high-achieving country” on the PISA assessments created by the OECD.

“So long as learning is understood as the acquisition of bodies of knowledge presented by the teacher, schools are likely to be locked into rigidly-organized curricula and teaching practices. Commonly, therefore, inclusive curricula are based on a view of learning as something that takes place when learners are actively involved in making sense of their experience. [hence the tethering metaphor in the last post] Learners, in other words, cannot simply be told. Rather, they have to discover and understand things for themselves.”

In whatever ways suit political power as governments at all levels coordinate around forcing people and places to accept. or even not notice, the progressive visions of a just society being pursued. As the book Remaking America recently concluded:

“States have the power, and often the will, to meet the needs of citizens in progressive ways…Progressive federalism seeks to harness this potential state contribution to our national democracy without retreating from civil rights and a national affirmative state…to update and give content to the metaphor as ‘laboratories for democracy’.”

Are those kinds of efforts then really ‘state-led’ It helps if we look at why Dean Schapiro chose the “Polyphonic Alternative” to describe the new conception of federalism being constructed. Both Eric Holder, the US Attorney General, and Cass Sunstein, the President’s first-term “Regulatory Czar” are involved with the American Constitution Society’s push here as is Janet Reno, Clinton’s Attorney General. Well-connected to federal regulatory power would be an understatement of epic proportions apart from the Soros funding, polyphony has the element of coinciding authority, working in harmony, a “stew” instead of the “adjoining” layered authority symbolized by a “marble cake.” Federalism that “can combine into new melodies, without losing its individual character.”

States and localities in such a mellifluous stew of Statist coordination may still retain their ‘character’. Thus preventing easy recognition of the nature of this crucial shift. They are entirely losing their function though as a barrier to governmental power over the individual as laid out in the still existing US Constitution. The progressive label was at least a tip-off that a shift in the fundamental governing philosophy had occurred, apparently to avoid the cacophony of free enterprise and individual abilities and choices. Looking through that Interactive Federalism paper, I cannot find any protection from overbearing governments at all levels committed to trying to achieve Equality of Outcomes.

As the last several posts combined have pointed out, the “brain is a sculpture carved by experience” as the OECD Neuroscience research has pointed out, and governments at all levels are now committing to sculpting the human brains of students at a neurobiological level. They are pushing the practices and policies thought to advance a society and economy grounded literally in transferring “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Neither the UN or the OECD hides anymore their pursuit of what Marx called his Human Development Model of society. Neither do progressives, where ever they are. Historically, there has been a barrier–the language of the US Constitution, but not under these legal theories or conceptions of federalism.

Education, especially K-12, is the global vehicle, because as the OECD recognized with this quote from Wu Ting-Fang: “Education is like a double-edged sword. It may be turned to dangerous uses if it is not properly handled.”

Just like the law and the supposed checks and balances of federalism.

Authoritarian FantasyLand: A Place With Required Habits of Mind but Disdain for Facts

Posted on October 24, 2014 by Robin

Back from my jaunt this week to Orange County, California to talk about all the things coming into K-12 classrooms under the cloaking banner of the Common Core. Since I was taking notes on Monday night and the pro-CC side zealously conceded a great deal in their prepared presentations, I thought we would talk about what was admitted upfront and what the implications are for all of us. It is safe to say that California is further along than many states so this will fit with what is or will soon be going on everywhere. If authoritarian seems awfully strong, it is partly a reaction to the number of speakers who insisted that the Common Core was now “the law” and there was thus no reason for further discussion. Now no one actually uttered the phrase “resistance is futile” or “submission is mandatory,” but that was the drift of the arguments.

Gone is any concept that the United States is a country conceived on a premise that the individual is ultimately so sacrosanct that even a king needs to ask permission to cross his threshold. No, if a school board, legislature, or city or regional council adopts a law or enacts a regulation, apparently obedience is now mandatory without further discussion. That crucial shift is one reason the authoritarian description seems apt. The other is the number of times I heard speakers, especially one who was a former California 4th District PTA President and a current Huntington Beach school board member utter phrases in support of the Common Core like “its purpose is to create habits of mind” and dictate “concepts to be absorbed” by the student. Another speaker spoke of “internalizing” knowledge.

All of those references, whether the speakers know this or not, are to what Soviet psychologist Piotr Galperin called theoretical instruction to guide future behavior. We covered it here http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/transcending-the-individual-mind-as-the-analytical-unit-of-learning-while-still-guiding-how-we-will-act/ . My dictionary defines authoritarian as “unquestioning obedience to authority rather than individual freedom of judgment and action.” Now let’s face it, if concepts have been implanted in student’s psyche at an unconscious level, which all these speakers are admitting and I have been warning about, there’s not even any opportunity to question. Is there anybody out there that denies our definition is being more than met with these openly declared intentions?

One of the Board members read two passages from my book. One is that we are looking at the “Marxist theory of education.” I suppose he was trying to paint me as some kind of 21st Century McCarthy threatening to name names. As the book lays out in detail, Uncle Karl wanted education to be all about controlling consciousness. Let’s face it, the pro-CC speakers themselves admitted that aim several times. If educational theorists and professors use the M word among themselves for what they advocate, we get to use the term as well. That’s me–factual, not raving. The 2nd quote had to do with the assertion in the book that Common Core actually wants to limit knowledge. I explained quickly about how a concept-based education worked, but I have a better example to actually quote now that I am home with access to all my materials.

The term “rigor” and “cognitively demanding” both got used a lot as reasons for the shift to the Common Core. No one mentioned though that the purpose of this kind of classroom work was to foster a “tolerance for ambiguity” in the student. More psyche in the classroom crosshairs then. I mentioned in my testimony that to work the problem MUST be ambiguous, be previously untaught, or have no single correct answer. http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/oct08/vol66/num02/Rigor-Redefined.aspx is a 2008 article by Harvard prof Tony Wagner elaborating just that–“a complex, multi-step problem that is different from any they’ve seen in the past.”

The pro-side did not care for my pointing out that when they stated that CC were “learning standards” they were saying it was about “social and emotional changes in the student” and “goals” for changing a student’s values, attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors. That came out on rebuttal even though our former PTA President and Board member had cited “engaging experiences” as one of her reasons to support the CC transformation of the classroom. What precisely does she believe the “experiences” are getting at? Plus, I now have access to the standard definition of ‘rigor’ which is “the goal of helping all students develop the capacity to understand content that is complex, ambiguous, provocative, and personally or emotionally challenging.” I took that from an SREB powerpoint, but plenty of school districts use that quoted definition verbatim too.

Another reason cited in support of CC was it “promotes Equity.” As we say in the South “Yeehaw.” Dissimilar treatment of students in order to get them to the same outcomes is not likely to be a popular selling point, at least until we get a generation trained with those Anti-bias Standards from the last post. So we get Equity imposed invisibly by Supers and Civil Rights edicts and local city councils. Alarmingly, Brookings’ Metropolitanism guru, Bruce Katz (see tags) announced this week http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2014/10/22-metro-growth-uk-us-katz that “it’s time we rewrote our own federalist contract [that would be the US Constitution] and realign power and responsibility for the modern era in which cities and metropolitan areas, rather than nations and states, drive economies and progress.”

Right into a ditch in all likelihood, but this is the political vision all these education reforms embodied in the full CC implementation are relying on as the future they are preparing our students for. In that link, you will find a link to a UK report that makes it clear that geography is being used to disguise the shift to the needs-based, economic justice vision that Uncle Karl lusted about achieving at some point in the future. As the report said “the scale of metros means they are best placed to drive the strategic integration of public services and economic development.”

That’s the vision for Manchester in the UK and the greater LA area, my neck of the woods in Georgia, and everywhere else as well. Everything I have read suggests a Folly of monumental proportions is planned, but it will be quite lucrative for a while to those connected vendors who form public-private partnerships to receive taxpayer money for meeting ‘needs’ like housing, education, or healthcare.

I want to close this discussion with a Keynote Address noted Change Agent Shirley McCune gave back in 1981 called “The Future of Educational Equity.” She saw “struggles for equity” as the “whole rationale for the formation of the United States” which tells us what can happen when we let graduate degrees in social work dictate how we educate our kids. What I found fascinating since I had always seen the Reagan Block Grants to state and local governments as a ‘conservative’ shift was how A-OK she was with this plan. So someone who wanted to see comparable economic and social outcomes among groups and “groups of people represented throughout society in proportion to their representation in the population” viewed state and local governments as the place to achieve that.

Something to think about as commentators assume that the Common Core is an acceptable dictate if a local school board requires it. That the only problem with the Common Core is the federal fingerprints all over it from Arne Duncan’s actions. Really? Authoritarianism that goes so far as to dictate personality traits at an unconscious level to drive future behavior is not a problem now as long as it is not federal authorities mandating it? McCune believed that the “only way that persons would be willing to ‘buy equity concerns’ is if it is demonstrated that it is an innate part of quality education.” That of course is precisely what embedding Racial Equity Outcomes in coursework or those Anti-Bias Framework do.

It’s McCune and others view of how to use a misleading term like quality education for “building a new consensus on equity.” She also viewed quality education for equity as about equipping students with the “highest level basic verbal and mathematical skills consistent with their individual ability.” The only way to read that language is that slower students will get a variety of ways to show their skills, but able students still cannot go beyond basic. They can just go faster through the basics.

Just as we are seeing with all the current emphasis on Career Pathways, where California is one of the lead pilots http://www.clasp.org/resources-and-publications/files/aqcp-framework-version-1-0/AQCP-Framework.pdf McCune’s plan for equity relied on ALL students now receiving a combined academic and vocational education where everyone would obtain “the skills and attitudes necessary for working cooperatively with both the same sex and opposite sex in the paid workforce and in the home.”

Finally McCune’s version of quality education “would equip students with the flexibility and self-confidence that would enable them to cope with the rapidly changing society through continuing adult learning and growth.” Doesn’t that sound just like what the Common Core is touting as having a Growth Mindset? Everything old is new again apparently until total transformation is finally achieved.

Apparently the products of a “quality education” grounded in ‘rigor’ will not object to the fundamental rewrite of our “federalist contract” and in the mean time, governments at all levels seem to be pursuing this Equity vision without any genuine disclosure or consent. Leaving it to the lady who reads too much and has for a very long time to lay it all out.

Hopefully Just In Time as the slogan goes.

Backward Mapping: Bundling Human and Social Engineering While Trumpeting International Competition

Posted on October 15, 2014 by Robin

Sometimes people feel deeply shaken by the things I write about. Me too, except there is no ambiguity in what is being sought by the time I am willing to discuss it in public. If the declarations appear to be Tragic or even just a horrifically wasteful idea, someone needs to be bringing these intentions into the sunlight of public scrutiny in time. So after an admittedly needed rest to watch the sand and surf and mull over the enormity of the materials I have, here we go again.

I must say though I was relieved to learn as I pondered the implications of today’s disclosures that the late UK economist, Kenneth Minogue, had also been distressed by what was being intentionally done to the minds and personalities of people in order to force the acceptance of the welfare state and equality for all. His 2010 book The Servile Mind noted that in the 21st century “large areas of what were previously of private concern have become subject to political regulation.” Amen to that from this side of the Atlantic pond. He pointed out that “new pieties have arisen according to which individuals are able to demonstrate their decency by the political attitudes they adopt.”

Having just finished reading http://www.competencyworks.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/CW-An-International-Study-in-Competency-Education-Postcards-from-Abroad-October-2014.pdf released two days ago, I would word that much more strongly than Minogue did. Globally those desired attitudes are simply being declared a necessary Competency or disposition. Then learning experiences are created to make sure the desired changes in personal outlooks occur. Minogue noted a “coercive centralism of attitude and policy.” I agree, but how few recognize that has become the new purpose of K-12 curriculum and what is actually being assessed? Minogue reminded us that historically in the US and the elsewhere in the West individuals “constructed their own identity in terms of personally chosen commitments.”

Not in the Competency vision. It is purely grounded in a belief that in the 21st Century, all over the world, government officials at all levels get to pick out the desired “sentiment and belief [that] can be adequately entrenched in the human mind” in order to “determine conduct” in the manner desired for the new vision of society and the economy laid out. Political power is now mandating in advance what is to be acceptable individual behavior, beliefs, and values. Since that sounds unabashedly authoritarian to anyone with a modicum of history knowledge, the same goals get hidden under an invisibility cloak with terms like standards, learning, or Competency.

Or ‘entrepreneurship’ in UNESCO’s recent report called Toward an Entrepreneurial Culture for the Twenty-First Century. Backward Mapping is a term used to describe the desired quality, attribute, sentiment, or behavior to be instilled through school experiences in a student. It sounds much better than political engineering of a person’s personality and behavior, but those are the true aims if we can just be blunt and honest. Saves time and wasteful use of taxpayer dollars. Here’s a sample of what I mean from that UNESCO report:

“Across nations, what is needed [in K-12 and all approaches to economic and social development] are programmes that show young people how they can directly contribute to raising levels of well-being and prosperity in their communities. Preparation starts in the classroom where students, future workers, business owners and community members must learn how to be responsible citizens.”

That’s the vision that K-12 education must now engineer, which would certainly explain the need for a student-centered behavioral approach instead of the traditional subject-matter emphasis. It also explains why we just keep running into a required communitarian orientation that students are to demonstrate daily. Again UNESCO reminds us that “education is not only acquiring academic knowledge but the way to prepare young people for work and living in the society.” Of course that would be the new view of society so we are Backward Mapping twice. Desired Society needs a certain kind of citizen with a stipulated Outlook on what is desirable for the future. That type of citizen then gets sculpted via K-12 Whole Child focused education. No intention though to confess all this to the parents or taxpayers.

What’s important is the Goal of Equity and “a decent quality of growth for all.” Now I think all this is delusional, but this is in fact what Competency globally is tied to as well as those Common Core standards when rightfully understood in the supporters’ own words. If this social and economic vision is deranged, then we are implementing a tragic form of behavioral engineering for ridiculous ends in our schools, and nobody is supposed to have a veto power to stop the shift in time. Please read the End Game while mentally humming “To Dream the Impossible Dream” to add to the context. To give our mayors, city councils, and community organizers, not to mention district School Supers, ever more power over people and places, this is all to occur at the level of “local governments.”

“…rests on finding a balance between economic, social and environmental goals. This requires dialogue and partnerships through which different stakeholders work together for their broad range of concerns. [Won’t the new real world problem-based focus for high school come in handy?] And while this may not always be as effective as desired [that’s OK because taxpayer dollars can always be levied again since they come from a magic tree surrounded by unicorns], there are at least greater civil society inputs into strategies to maintain social cohesion to protect cultural identity and to promote environmentally friendly behaviours in local communities. Putting the future of the community in the hands of its own members reduces dependency on outside forces and rejuvenates the economic and social fabric.”

Now would be a good time to transition to the song “Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows” because, as I said, that’s a ridiculous vision. A rational mind filled with facts and attuned to making its own decisions and setting its own goals would grasp that easily, which is precisely why such minds are being disallowed all over the globe. They are in the way of the desired all-encompassing exercise of political power in the 21st Century. That reality again would never be something most people would voluntarily acquiesce to so we get namby-pamby visions for 21st century education like this from the same document:

“We learn from a young age that the development of positive, engaging and equitable relationships is critical to our success as human beings. Basic social skills enable us to interact in the community, as well as to understand the meaning of citizenship. Sound social skills allow us to understand both social rights and claims, as well as obligations and responsibilities. But imagination and emotional engagement are as important as social skills. More than ever, there is a need to engage young people in finding creative solutions to improving the welfare of their communities, while contributing to collective prosperity in ways that do not damage natural resources. Intelligence should include the ability to envisage alternative futures, to resolve open-ended problems with more than one way of doing things.”

That’s the vision of society and the economy and our new future that all the education reforms going on globally in both public and private schools are driving towards. There is absolutely no ambiguity whatsoever in what is being sought and why. The only fluctuation seems to be where in the progression a given school, district, or country is.

I am going to close this post with the open declaration of one of the insiders who brags about her access and tutoring of Fortune 100 CEOs and Pentagon officials and her desire to use education to gain new kinds of nonlinear minds to get a new kind of society. In her 2010 book Rebecca Costa wrote that “we have to challenge [the human brain] in very specific ways. And we are getting very close to understanding exactly what those ways are. Word by word, we are now constructing a user’s manual to the human brain–ground zero for everything we do, know, think, and feel–and the sustainability of human progress.”

Told you there was no ambiguity and no, we are apparently not supposed to get a copy of that user’s manual. Fortunately for all of us, I found it anyway and laid it out in my book originally. I continue to explore it on this blog.

We can only stop what we know exists. The creators of that user’s manual and these visions of the future never wanted us to link K-12 reforms to what was really the End Game in time.

Tough luck I say.

Invisible Serfs Collar

"a group which desires to be strong has no use for the man who claims to think for himself."

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