Multiple Recent Proclamations Laying Out Commitment To Revolutionary Transformation of Our Entire Society

Posted on November 20, 2013 by Robin

By recent I mean within the last week. Either as an early Christmas present or to give us cause for giving thanks at the complete lack of any ambiguity whatsoever we have explicit cites, open proclamations, overt coordination with federal agencies, a veritable cornucopia of intentions that should eliminate any dispute as to what is going on. Only an electronic color billboard in Times Square could be more explicit. It is indeed slam dunk time in our effort to show that the education reforms known as Common Core or 21st Century Skills or social and emotional learning are actually a means of gaining much broader transformations.

And to show that this is truly a bipartisan attempt to make political power the harness for anyone seeking economic power in the 21st century, the first paper I am going to cite came from a blog run by Jay P. Greene tied to a number of what are considered to be Republican think tanks. Not exactly where you think you would encounter a recommendation that would lead to a “truly democratic consciousness to guide the process of socialist development itself.”

On Monday Jay posted a cite to a new NBER Working Paper called “Fostering and Measuring Skills: Interventions that Improve Character and Cognition” from U-Chicago Profs James Heckman and Tim Kautz with a blurb about state achievement tests not getting at these types of important skills. Pulling up the actual paper since I knew what can lurk under such euphemistic names I discovered lots of troubling sponsors but especially the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Founded and funded by George Soros among others including Drummond Pike from the Tides Foundation and Amartya Sen of capability as a human right and other famous names who decidedly do wish to move economic thinking away from anything other than Statism and economic planning. Bad enough connections to be troubling when cited as guidance on what should be going on in the K-12 classroom.

But that’s actually not the big reveal. In footnote #6 if you pull up a copy you will see the cited authority backing up the statements about skills to now be cultivated in classroom and measured via new assessments. The second sentence says “the modern literature traces back to Bowles and Gintis (1976)…” Now I am familiar with that book and I first wrote about it back in February http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/promoting-alternative-thinking-strategies-is-this-really-mental-health-first-aid/ so I immediately recognized the significance of saying that the Grit Perseverance push (yes that Glenn Beck program on the DoEd report last March that raised such a ruckus), Growth Mindset, non-cognitive skills, positive behavior, character education–all the various names these mandates hide under including College and Career Ready go back to a book written by two self-proclaimed Marxist profs of their future vision of education to transform the US away from capitalism. That’s the cite and that’s the purpose of all this and the book again is Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life.

So all these programs are ultimately grounded in gaining that new consciousness that will promote Gintis and Bowles’ belief that “Capitalism is an irrational system, standing in the way of further social progress. It must be replaced.” G & B also hope that via education the sought revolution can be mostly without blood shed. So of course these intentions now get pursued stealthily with excuses like an anti-bullying agenda and Positive School Climate. How ironic.

Last Wednesday Harvard Law Prof and Brazilian Leftist politician Roberto Mangabiera Unger gave a most alarming lecture at the Royal Science Academy in London. It sent me scurrying for his 2007 book The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound which sure enough laid out his determination to use education to:

“accelerate and direct the permanent invention of the new that we are able to overthrow the dictatorship of the dead over the living and to turn our minds more freely and fully toward the people and the phenomena around us.”

Oh I hope Unger is not the professor who taught US Constitutional Law to President Obama or the First Lady when they were all at Harvard Law together. Not with his expressed intentions “of ambitions for the transformation of humanity” or “direction for the development of the moral experience of mankind under the reign of democracy and experimentalism.” Although that kind of experimentation does rather fit in with a HUD presentation two days ago, November 18, by Gar Alperovitz’s Democracy Collaborative. Now don’t worry. The Annie E. Casey Foundation provided the funding for the actual Anchor Institution reports. Don’t pay any attention to the fact that the Anchor Mission Dashboard lays out a Womb to Tomb Transformative economic Vision that keeps mentioning the words “equitable” and “minority.” Nor that it fits with the Regional 21 or the new Promise Zones 2nd term initiatives. Purely coincidental.

Just like it’s entirely coincidental Unger describes his education vision like this:

“Education, beginning in childhood and continuing throughout the working life, must nourish a core of generic conceptual and practical capacities to make the new out of the old. It must also equip the mind with the means with which to resist the present. For this very reason, the school should not remain under the control of the community of local families, who tell the child: become like us.”

We could make that a goal for all students and call it a common core. Excellent means to invisibly and gradually transform the present to alter the future. And I know just the overpaid consultant who will use the School Governance Council concept and a school district conversion charter to make that vision so. While the high-achieving suburban communities with high taxes to benefit the schools remain entirely ignorant of the real aims. Perhaps if more parents and taxpayers read this Unger quote they would better appreciate the last word they may want to hear is “innovation” in connection with schools. This is certainly innovative:

“democracy grants to ordinary men and women the power to reimagine and to remake the social order. That is why under democracy prophecy speaks louder than memory. That is why democrats discover that the roots of a human being lie in the future rather than in the past.

In a democracy, the school should speak for the future, not for the state or for the family, giving the child the instruments with which to rescue itself from the biases of its family, the interests of its class, and the illusions of its epoch.”

Honestly I think Professor Unger should be the last person criticizing people led by illusions.

Can’t you see now why it is so important to create no effective recourse to a local school board or politician from all the initiatives coming in as education reform?

I don’t go looking for these things. Just monitoring the actually required classroom changes keeps turning up all these self-proclaimed radicals hollering the whys behind their policies and practices to anyone who will listen or read their words.

May enough parents and taxpayers recognize all this in time.

Second Part: Empowering Millenials to Create Change & Youth Organizing Low Income Students of Color

Posted on July 10, 2013 by Robin

Are you starting to feel that 2013 reality seems like something George Orwell or Aldous Huxley or HG Wells would have dreamed up in fiction? Or satire? One of the key tools for confusing perceptions in politically useful ways, and bringing those always reliable emotions into play, is to skew what language really means. Notorious theories get warm, appealing names for a third bite at the apple of the student’s mind and her “full personality.” The Whole Child. Likewise, the historic purpose of school and university to transmit culturally and economically valuable knowledge? The transmission curriculum gets quietly dropped as “inequitable”and referred to disparagingly as “deficit-based orientations toward youth of color.” Have you ever noticed everyone not being equally good at something is not wiping out football or basketball as acceptable activities?

In 2012 the SRCD journal Child Development Perspectives published “Youth Organizing as a Developmental Context for African American and Latino Adolescents.” It advocated using schools to focus “attention to the political context of young people’s lives, both in how youth interpret their sociopolitical world and how they participate in changing it.” If you, like me, are wondering what the likelihood is of students getting accurate info of what the actual causes are and target the real predators, don’t hold your breath. I am willing to bet it will look similar to what the influential New Economics Institute envisions for its Campus Connect initiatives–http://neweconomicsinstitute.org/content/campus-network . Whatever these students are being told and however they are guided, there is no dispute that education is the place where they are compelled to gather together for many years. That long duration access is seen to be politically useful. For fundamental change.

How’s this? “Organizing enables young people growing up in working-class and poor communities to identify the social origins of problems and take action to address these problems.” In fact here’s a link to the Funder’s Collaborative Report laying out “An Emerging Model for Working with Youth: Community Organizing+Youth Development=Youth Organizing.” http://www.fcyo.org/media/docs/8141_Papers_no1_v4.qxd.pdf . Don’t miss the Tides Foundation support just as with the restructuring the inner-cities around Green Energy Initiatives I wrote about. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/well-no-wonder-no-o ne-listens-to-common-core-complaints-if-it-is-tied-to-federal-revenue-sharing/ Also appreciate that this becomes an acceptable focus of the classroom and a formal measure of school success since political action to “work collectively to address quality-of-life and human rights issues” gets classified as engaging and relevant.

It’s the real reason the Common Core was needed to take out objective tests of knowledge since that is no longer to be the focus. Anywhere. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/keep-urban-schools-weak-to-force-economic-and-social-justice-then-make-the-suburbs-close-the-gap/ . Now we get that amorphous term Student Growth which is really convenient as “studies of youth organizing” in, of all places, the Chicago Public Schools, “provide evidence that youth participants experience growth in three developmental domains: civic development, psychological wellness, and academic engagement.” The other two are self-explanatory but psychological wellness refers to “a sense of hope, empowerment and purpose in life” that “researchers theorize” can come from “building an awareness of justice and inequality, combined with meaningful social action.”

And if this all sounds alarming and intriguing there’s the Free Minds, Free People conference starting July 11 in Chicago that Ed Week is trumpeting. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/parentsandthepublic/2013/07/conference_aims_to_promote_education_as_a_tool_for_justice.html?cmp=ENL-EU-NEWS2 Note that K-12 students AND parents are invited so they can “understand the root causes of inequality” and “learn to take action to dismantle those inequalities.”

Now I am going to pivot for a moment to remind you that the Common Core is usually referred to by the politicos as “college and career ready standards” so changing the nature of most college work to be about creating a “robust democracy” is rather pertinent to what can then go on in high school and middle school. We have met Harry Boyte before (he has his own tag and is said by Stanley Kurtz to have been a major influence on President Obama’s choice to be a community organizer). The White House and the federal DoED have committed to the American Commonwealth project involving changing the nature of higher ed. http://www.nifi.org/stream_document.aspx?rID=21022&catID=19164&itemID=21020&typeID=8 . Readers with a good memory will remember that the “cooperative commonwealth” was Boyte’s name for a reimagined US society that functioned like small C you know what. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/viewing-education-as-the-prime-lever-for-international-social-change-community-organizing-everywhere/ That post was an alarming enough vision before we knew about this formal relationship to DC power and money and AASCU.

AASCU stands for American Association of State Colleges and Universities which would make this trade group VERY influential about what is to constitute “college” and “coursework” in the 21st Century. And last month in Denver AASCU had a conference with the now ubiquitous goal for K-12 AND college students. “21st Century Citizens: Building Bridges, Solving Problems.” Here’s the program http://www.aascu.org/meetings/adptdc13/FullProgram.pdf .If you go to page 2 you will find the Opening Speech with a blurb that perfectly explains where K-12 and higher ed are actually going. Without telling most of us and with taxpayer money and mounds of student debt. All that debt simply fuels a demand for political and economic change. I am going to quote at link since, for once, no one is speaking in Orwellian Doublespeak. And the intentions for ed are graphic.

” This is both the best of times and worst of times. The worst is the unprecedented level of global change and the uncertainty and insecurity that come with change. Our environment, our economy, our civil society are in a tailspin. The tools for mediating these new and turbulent terrains are evolving slower than the change itself. The good news is that a generation of idealists–the Millenials–are coming of age to navigate these murky waters.

But this is only if we effectively prepare them for this brave new world. We cannot use old methods for addressing this new world; we need to redesign our educational system for major social and economic transformation. Millenials need skills to tackle tomorrow’s key challenges, including sustainability, civility and global citizenship, and above all, ambiguity. These challenges are best addressed through experiential learning focused less on service-learning (learning how to do what is already being done) and more on innovating social change experiences for Millenials, so that they may deliver in these new times.”

How? Boyte’s cooperative commonwealth or Peter Senge’s Regenerative Society? You can vote it in. You can teach about a vision for a new world but you cannot make it so. You can though break everything that works now and end up with a generation with expectations of the future that are unmeetable. Or they are meetable but only with an old-fashioned vision of education that tolerates differences among people and seeks to make everyone as mentally strong and accurately informed and as autonomous as possible.

Off the high horse for one more phrase you will recognize from K-12, the goal of “Educating Globally Competent Citizens.” AASCU has even come up with a Global Challenges framework for colleges to use in building curricula and coursework for our young scholars/Change Agents To Be. Conveniently it aligns with the UN’s priorities for change in the West and a shift to the Primacy of the East as well. We get population, resources, technology, information, economic integration, conflict/security and governance.

As you can see from preschool through K-12 and higher ed, no one will have much accurate knowledge unless they get it from home. Or are stealthily a voracious and fluent reader. But we are to be overwhelmed by students completely indoctrinated in the need for fundamental changes that will require a Government-directed economy and society at all levels. That cannot get to where these students want to go because we have completely severed knowledge from power in this vision. And genuine prosperity always requires that a knowledgeable individual have power to make their own decisions. And suffer from poor consequences.

And there are no knowledgeable individuals in this vision. It is utterly consumed with creating high school and college students primed for change and dedicated to “active citizenship” before the next 2016 US Presidential election. Actively gathering data.

Fulfilling every nightmare a Founding Father ever had about what majoritarian democracy could do. Or take.

Especially if no one with the knowledge of what constitutes irreplaceable cultural seed corn has a say. Or even a shield from the Predatory State to protect themselves.

And the children. The Millenials.

Well No Wonder No One Listens to Common Core Complaints if It is Tied to Federal Revenue Sharing

Posted on April 1, 2013 by Robin

A New Vision for Federal Revenue Sharing with state and local governments to drive future economic and workforce development being cleverly marketed as “Race to the Shop.” That’s a play on the accompanying education vision that bribed or threatened the states to adopt the Common Core in the first place under the education Race to the Top set up in the 2009 Stimulus Act. Turns out that’s not all it set up, apparently it also set up a new Regional Race to the Top for all America’s regions (bold and Italics in original to show the excitement for this vision of shared prosperity based on a clean energy economy). In fact it’s to “be a truly ‘New’ New Deal, [but] government cannot go it alone, it can only serve as a key partner and catalyst.” With your redistributed tax dollars or public debt I would add.

Now before I get further into this political and cronyism dream at all levels of American government that is explicitly tied into the 21st Century Skills agenda (it’s actually on the cover of the September 2010 working paper from the Tides Foundation project–the New Policy Institute), I want to quote a particularly juicy passage that highlights how these initiatives stifle complaints and encourage cooperation about any related aspect like the Common Core:

“Deeply engage the private sector as a critical solutions partner in addressing these systemic changes, or risk a continuing and negative narrative that these efforts are simply wasteful public sector programs.”

That’s your money going to make sure no one aware of these tie-ins has any incentive to complain. Because this Acceleration Agenda “does not simply call for more federal revenue-sharing with the states. The changes we need to accelerate private-led innovation in regions and communities do not begin, or end, there.”

Truer words were never spoken as the Acceleration Agenda lays out Multi-State regions (10 in all), Clean Economic Development Visions, and Economic Acceleration Zones. Like High Speed Rail and making the SW the Saudi Arabia of Solar. What a boondoggle. Those of you with a background in economics may recognize all this for what it is–the explicit adoption of an Industrial Policy vision by the US with its known Cronyism and benefits to political favorites or necessary adversaries. And the report acknowledges just that with the following chilling quote:

“So is the Acceleration Agenda a new “industrial policy”? Do such labels really matter? We hope not–there is too much on the line for our economy to be bogged down in over-simplified debates from the past.”

Now the historian in me would point out that’s not the subject of debates so much as lessons from the past about the sheer waste of public money that comes with an Industrial Policy. But I actually correctly pegged the education vision last May as related to Industrial Policy and a Dirigiste vision for the economy. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/didnt-adam-smith-write-a-book-explaining-why-this-is-a-bad-idea-back-in-1776/ and http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/why-the-world-makes-far-more-sense-if-you-add-dirigisiste-to-the-things-you-understand/ . What I never in a million years suspected was that I would come across a report openly declaring it while stating “Obamism at its core is largely about bottom-up change rather than top-down change.” Wow, Harry Boyte must be pleased.

Now I know this vision has been around since the 60s. It’s not an invention of this Administration but wanting to name it after the President tells us just how much potential for successful political coalitions using your money is seen here. In fact, looking at the full vision and the Go-Fast Model, it’s hard not to remember the high urban turnout in the last Presidential election. No wonder. A vision of federal money, private sector, and community foundations together using, and again I quote, the “transformational, low carbon project…serves a key project screen.”

Doesn’t that word “screen” sound like “excuse?” The reason for remaking the nature of the American economy and political structure all while engaging in Mind Arson in preschool, K-12, and higher ed? Whatever is necessary to make sure the designated providers in this 21st Century system get the workers they want while never again having to worry about a better product or invention upsetting their revenue dreams?

You know how for sports contests we see the label “Designated Provider of X. Event? You know what I mean. This utterly reeks of being the designated cellphone provider or operating system provider or Smart Grid provider. Protecting and preserving current business. But it actually gets worse believe it or not because all of this is also tied to the renewal of our urban areas as part of creating start-ups to be the component “middleware” to “connect government and business in the 21st Century economy.” Which brings me to what pulled up this Revenue Sharing 2.0 to get to the Next Economy vision. It is called “Inclusive Competitiveness” and it was announced a few weeks ago at the SXSWedu Summit in Austin. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-green/sxswedu-launches-next-big_b_2765038.html?view=print&comm_ref=false is the story laying out the vision of how all this will Save America’s Black Boys, be part of a permanent “Black Innovation Group,” and create a Pipeline2Productivity and Urban Innovation.”

And I genuinely wish urban areas and America’s Black Boys the best possible future they can have but tying it to economic redistribution while simultaneously trying to spread the bad education policies and practices that have destroyed urban systems to the suburbs just means OPM, Other Peoples Money, will run out sooner than this plan accounts for. It would be so much better to teach those Black Boys and everyone else’s children how to read properly and provide a solid curriculum like the Core Knowledge. You just cannot get me excited about what this Project 21 vision is going to do for Cleveland which is where the affiliated Nortech is based when I know the Cleveland Schools are pushing social and emotional learning in their classrooms as the vision of how all children can learn. You cannot push PATHS–Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies–for all kids in all classrooms and then pretend that these urban kids are being left behind despite an academic focus.

But that’s the poignant cry for what is wrong with our urban areas. And Project 21, which used to be known as the Black Innovation and Competitiveness Initiative, is the supposed answer to linking Urban America to the 21st Century Economy. Does this look like reparations to anyone else? Using the “low carbon project as the screen” as the Acceleration Agenda report put it. Whatever the rationale this gushing of federal dollars to launch public-private partnerships resulted in “Five Private-Sector Initiatives Launched at First White House Tech Inclusion Summit” held on January 31, 2013. http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/02/04/five-private-sector-initiatives-launched-first-white-house-tech-inclusion-summit .

One of those, the Activate Local Communities Across America Initiative, picked Portland, Oregon to be its pilot city. That would be the same Portland that has been committed to cutting edge education pushes for decades. Discussed here http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/now-more-than-five-years-into-an-attempt-to-help-organize-a-near-total-revision-of-human-behavior/ But Portland is also considered to be the shining star of the Urban Planning, Agenda 21, Regional Equity, and what is now called Metropolitanism movements. All based on a Low-Carbon Economy of the Future centered on Producers, not Consumers, the Brookings Institute’s Bruce Katz said at a breakfast I attended and also wrote about. Curiously Katz is also the coiner of that catchy expression Race to the Shop above to fit the manufacturing and workforce development component of all this planning and redistributing.

Now ALC is also known as Accelerate Local Communities ( I guess it depends on how stagnant a region is right now as this is all ramping up). ALC is also listed as being a collaboration with Microsoft. Which is concerning since they are among the primary partners in the students only need generic 21st Century Skills like Collaboration and Creativity international movement (ATC21S). And that Tech Inclusion Summit is being sold in the inner cities as bringing STEM jobs to urban communities. http://atlantadailyworld.com/201302083703/Business/white-house-tech-inclusion-summit-unveils-private-sector-initiatives-to-bridge-gap-in-stem

Now I did not write this story because I wanted to rain on the race to the Green Gold Rush as a report called it. Although that does seem like a worthy venture. But this vision of new revenue sharing and dictates of where jobs must be, and everyone assuming that with credentials jobs will come, are all simultaneously destroying the actual knowledge and skills and freedoms and certainties that ignite real widespread prosperity. Given the percentage of the federal budget that represents borrowing, this redistributed money to build and pay off political coalitions does not really exist except as an obligation for future taxpayers. But in the meantime it really is going in someone’s pocket. Many of them campaign contributors at every level of government. Just like Solyndra.

The money WILL run out and sooner than expected. And then where will we be? After all, mind arson is not just a provocative expression I came up with to stir up antipathy for the Common Core. It really does describe what has been deliberately going on in urban schools for decades. But with the actual Common Core I keep describing, and those new, poorly understood, assessments (also financed by that 2009 Stimulus Act), mind arson is coming to the suburbs to take down every school where minds are still being nourished regularly with solid content.

Then where will we be? I keep mentioning consuming seed corn for a reason. What happens to a country when the cultivated famine is mental and widespread? Especially when the most able students were the particular targets for levelling.

We appear to be about to find out.

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

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