I have spent the last several days since President Obama signed the “bicameral and bipartisan” Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) on December 9 reading the false and misleading statements from various think tanks and reporters, supposedly representing a wide spectrum of political visions. Probably the most intrusive and impactful federal legislation ever and hardly anyone writing about it seems to feel compelled to actually read the legislation before explaining what it will do. In school a false Cliff Notes explanation of a book is likely to get a failing grade and an inquiry into cheating. In public policy and journalism now, creating false beliefs about transformative legislation seems to be all the rage. I guess it is to be expected that legislation seeking to physically reengineer the human psyche using behavioral science research would also use a bit of that research to create these false, or simply incomplete, talking points being used to describe the legislation.
If that other “bicameral and bipartisan,” fundamentally transformative legislation from summer 2014-WIOA-was the federal legislation that no one who enacted it wanted to even speak of, its partner-ESSA-is the transformative statute that no one intends to describe accurately. Unfortunately though, the actual statutory language and its real purpose control what must now occur in P-12 classrooms. It lays out what has really been authorized for meaningful change at the level of our children’s minds and personalities. Remember that. Talking points and articles may influence how ESSA is regarded by parents and the voting public, but it has nothing to do with the actual required implementation. Because the points raised and language ignored have so much commonality article to article, I shifted the actual quote I pilfered for the title from ‘scientizing politics’, which is what I believe ESSA was designed to do, to ‘scientizing public policy.’
The reference to Orwell is not me being a clever wordsmith and trying to hype attention. There really was a conference in August 1984 (like his book title) in Cambridge, UK on George Orwell and the “potential for tyranny if the enterprise of politics is interpreted as being analogous to that of science.” I believe that is precisely what ESSA is designed to do. A huge number of reports I have read from the US as well as from all over the globe back that up. Recognizing that makes me want to at call attention to what is at risk and why it matters. This, I believe, is the true reason politicians of both parties and public policy types across the spectrum refuse to accurately describe ESSA. No one seems to want anyone to have much of a chance to recognize the purpose of all those euphemisms used in its language or the Red Herrings designed to be a cited focus.
What does it mean if politics is being falsely analogized to science? Instead of politics being about competing interests within a set of rules that values the individual, scientizing politics uses education and the law as its primary tools. These allow coercive implementation without consent from those actually bound and treat politics as a truth-discovery process. What’s the truth to be compelled for belief? I have warned before that there really is such a thing in political science as the Human Development Society. Karl Marx wrote about it and all its tenets are being put into place now legislatively via all those unread, except by me, provisions of WIOA and ESSA. That is not an ideological smear, but a factual recognition of the background of these ideas.
Whether widely known or not http://buildinitiative.org/Portals/0/Uploads/Documents/Four_Ovals_paper.pdf lays out the federal/states framework of using federal money to intervene in meeting ‘needs’ from birth on. The two think tanks, AEI and Brookings, have recently published definitive plans called “Opportunity, Responsibility, and Security: A Consensus Plan for Reducing Poverty and Restoring the American Dream” that would also please Uncle Karl immensely. Notice that as much as certain groups have capitalized on criticizing that video of Congressman Tim Ryan saying social and emotional learning is to be the primary focus now of education, that cited paper calls for the same focus. Since I have already read that paper, I know that it makes it clear that the primary reason to have funding follow the student and vary in amounts based on categories of ‘needs’ at federal and state levels is a desire to force socioeconomic integration on all public schools.
I mentioned that goal last week at a program on Student-Based Budgeting and having it be portable like a backpack that was being put on by two Atlas Network members–the Reason Foundation and the Georgia Public Policy Foundation. Both acknowledged that was the goal, but it was a long way away. I pointed out that parents and taxpayers were not being told that was even the long-term goal in all the public programs around changing the nature of student funding. Following up on that discussion, I discovered that both Reason and the Cato Institute had published papers urging a shift in welfare policy to Universal Basic Income. In other words, the so-called Left and Right public policy makers seem to have agreed on implementing Uncle Karl’s vision with the only question marks being how much should be publicly provided vs merely publicly funded and provided under stipulated standards.
Since that apparent reality would probably not be politically popular in a world where a majority of Americans do want to close the borders and not work as a beast of burden for everyone who can physically make it here and then start having children, we get the very lies and misstatements about WIOA and ESSA and what they are really intended to accomplish that I have been noticing. As always when confronted with any attempt to politically install a false picture of reality in the minds of boys and girls and the adults around them, I turned to a 1988 French book by Jean-Francois Revel that was translated into English in 1991 as The Flight from Truth.
Revel noted just how unusual it is to find people “who possess a taste for facts and an interest in truth.” He called it the “anomaly of intellectual curiosity” and since I have definitely been driven by that curiosity all my life, his descriptions seemed like a good way to describe what ESSA, its required Higher Order Thinking Skills and Understandings (HOTS), the embedded Competency-based education, the required behaviorally-oriented performance standards and assessments, etc. are all hoping to foster in the minds and personalities of the students who will be tomorrow’s voters.
“The power of ideology is rooted in a human lack of curiosity about facts. When a new piece of information reaches us, we react first by wondering if it is going to reinforce or weaken our habitual mode of thought…The ideas that interest us the most are not new ideas, they are ideas we are accustomed to. [or which preschool through higher ed intends to make us used to as Relevant, Engaging, and Culturally Responsive]. The prodigious progress of science since the seventeenth century prompts us to invest human nature with a congenital appetite for knowledge and an insatiable appetite for facts.
But what history teaches us is that if Man does indeed display an intense intellectual activity, it is above all to construct vast explanatory systems as verbose as they are ingenious-systems that induce mental calm by providing an illusion of global comprehension, rather than by encouraging us humbly to explore reality and to expose ourselves to unknown information. To grow and develop, science has always had to struggle against this primordial human tendency which surrounds it and combats it from within: indifference to knowledge.”
The refusal to describe WIOA and the deliberate inaccuracies surrounding ESSA build on that recognized general indifference to knowledge most people possess. As Revel recognized and so does every behavioral scientist and educator seeking to ‘scientize politics’ in the 21st Century: “Man’s major foe is deep within him. But the enemy is no longer the same. Formerly it was ignorance; today it is falsehood.” Those mental systems that can induce calm or motivate action from a deep, emotional level must be created by education under ESSA in each and every student.
Looking for that presence, and manipulating what is found as needed to create the desired dispositions and generalized knowledge and skills to be the future citizen a Human Development Society needs, is precisely what ESSA prescribes. It is what assessing for HOTS, personalized learning based on data, and ‘well-rounded learning experiences’ are all about. The entire concept of 21st Century Schools required to receive all that funding under ESSA goes back to another reason why education and the law are being used now to Scientize Politics without permission and with organized, active deceit from the public sector and its public policy advocates. We are being forcibly shifted from our historic emphasis in the West of a community organized around moral order to a moral community organized around shared common purposes.
ESSA, WIOA, and those reports I provided as examples above, all assume a shift to an “overriding community interest” where everyone’s designated needs must be met. Individual rights to pursue our own interests and, apparently, our own knowledge of actual facts, get trumped by the desire to plan people, places, the economy, and supposedly ensure economic justice for all, regardless of background or personal productivity. Again, since being honest about this shift and a widespread recognition of what the consequences are likely to be is simply not good for a political career or even fundraising prospects for the typical think tank, we get lies and descriptions of legislation based on talking points with no actual curiosity for the facts.
Education necessarily has to be altered at all levels to support this clear, but unheralded shift, because a society that locates its sources of social cohesion in moral community is “necessarily more vulnerable to shifts in attitudes and behavior patterns that might reflect individual departures from the shared purposes of the community.” At least we know now why a communitarian ethos and shared understandings just keep popping up in the required implementation of a Positive and Safe School Climate.
Everything from the Career Pathways requirements to the new descriptions of K-12 as Workforce Development to the mandate that all educational practices promote Equity and meet needs actually trace back to this shift to a moral community where:
“Persons are tied, one to another, by their common identification to the collective, with their shared sense of nationhood, race, class, or ideology.”
As an anomalous seeker of facts with an insatiable curiosity about the likely effects in the reality where we all dwell, let me be the first to point out that this has historically been a tragic path for any society to actively cultivate.
Just because our elected public officials have arrogantly voted to impose this vision on us using education and the law, with an assist on the falsehoods part from the media, doesn’t mean we have to acquiesce.
The way out, as usual, is the recognition of what is really going on.
Even is it is not a politically approved pathway anymore under federal law.
Robin,
Jo Nova has an excellent post with an example of some of the mind games you’ve discussed here and earlier: http://joannenova.com.au/2015/12/australian-academy-of-science-trains-school-children-to-be-lobbyists-and-teachers-dont-mind/#comment-1771146
Thanks Mike.
Mike-here is further proof that the real legally binding work will be done by cities and MPOs and Development Districts under federal law who will likely issue bonds etc. http://www.greenbiz.com/article/4-city-initiatives-out-cop21-and-what-they-mean-business
Robin,
I found another interesting link: https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/dear-parents-everything-you-need-to-know-about-your-son-and-daughters-university-but-dont
This is from a Canadian college professor and gives his view of what is happening to the kids and schools. It’s long, but a good read.
Thanks Mike. I just finished crawling around my 17.5 year old suv getting it ready to sell. No sense to pay someone to detail it but I do need to get the best price possible. So many memories of my children and their younger selves and classmates in that vehicle. Weird not to need a Mommymobile anymore.
They often say what a difference just teaching them how to read well and love books has made in their lives. I never would let any of them have Gameboys and we listened to story tapes when we traveled.
The ISC readers with college age kids tell me that the insights from my book have been very valuable in helping them look for the right college. Have a great new years eve and don’t forget your blackeyed peas and greens. I want all ISC readers to have luck and prosperity in 2016, unless, of course, it is at my expense.
Mike-this was in a mailing I just got and involves a student at my alma mater–Davidson. https://www.edsurge.com/news/2015-12-24-personal-statements-2016-escaping-the-token-student-experience?mc_uid=8e418eabace01562056a64b868f50021&utm_source=EdsurgeLive&utm_campaign=53ab82ae13-Innovate+255&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0f1ec25b60-53ab82ae13-292067965
Notice all the references to progressive pedagogies and reimagining cultural spaces. Thank goodness I recognized the direction the new, first female Pres, intended to go and told my then high school senior not to even apply. People thought I was crazy, especially as she had 5 high school classmates who did go there.
I don’t think enough alums know that Worldview Alteration has become the specialty. Rickard’s statements indicate he is doing a bang-up job. I anxiously await the alumni office linking to that essay to enlighten alums. Not. Might affect giving campaigns.
Here is yet another frightening overview of what Growth Mindset is getting at. http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2015/12/29/beyond-working-hard-what-growth-mindset-teaches-us-about-our-brains/
These neurological effects count as ‘evidence-based’ policies and practices under ESSA.
Have a safe and fun New Years everyone.
Robin’s essay provides operational details that bring Solzhenitsyn’s 1976 warning into sharper focus: “I would like to call upon America to be more careful with its trust to prevent those pundits who are attempting to establish even fine degrees of justice and even finer legal shades of equality (some because of their distorted outlook, others because short-sightedness, still others out of self-interest), to prevent them from using the struggle for peace and for social justice to lead you down a false road. They are trying to weaken you; they are trying to disarm your strong and magnificent country in the face of this fearful threat — one that has never been seen before in the history of the world. Not only in the history of your country, but in the history of the world.
“I call upon you: ordinary working men of America … do not let yourselves become weak.”
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. 1976. Warning to the West. New York: Farrar, Strasus, and Giroux, pp. 49-50.
Thank you for that. The essays I was drawing from apart from Revel’s insightful book were by James Buchanan. He pointed out in what he contributed to that Orwell conference (my bolding though for emphasis) that “Because values are relative, and because the individual recognizes that his values are indeed his own, it becomes possible for man to model an existence in social interactions with other persons that does not involve acquiescence in a single-value norm. This essential vision of the great eighteenth-century social philosophers was somehow lost to the mind of this century. Without this vision, and in the face of earlier moral absolutes, it was perhaps natural that scholars should have promoted ‘salvation by science,’ even in extension to the political enterprise itself.”
Just imagine what Big Data does to scientizing politics, especially given that David Coleman ands the College Board hired the data gurus who successfully identified just the right issue voters in President Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign. No student in this vision of what constitutes ‘Learning’ and with a classroom obligation to get to a shared meaning has a right to their own values anymore. What is Fostering Communities of Learners, that Ann Brown created after a trip to the USSR, than an insistence that each student define themselves by reference to their being part of a group. Yet Fostering CoLs is the measure of what constitutes being an effective principal,
As Buchanan said in conclusion, when the social engineer uses politics to install ‘truth’, that recognition then “carries its own moral justification. Those who do not ‘see’ must be ‘shown the light,’ perhaps preferably by persuasion but, if necessary, by coercion.” I read that essay and realized just how many of the things were are now dealing with as undisclosed juggernauts via education have been contemplated by those with political power for a very long time.
Solzhenitsyn knew it as did Revel, Buchanan, Kenneth Minogue, Von Mises, and Buchanan. What seems unimaginable to us in 2015 has apparently been imagined quite a bit it turns out. Thanks for that on point quote.
Talk about timely. This report https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/reports/basic-income/ came out today. “Creative citizen, creative state: the principled and pragmatic case for a Universal Basic Income.” It’s from our Roberto Unger/Robert Kegan loving friends at the RSA but it cites how this is being pushed by think tanks on the Right and Left in the UK and US just as this post noted. It adds a link though to how Silicon Valley is pushing this as well.
Preschool, K-12, higher ed are all being reenvisioned by statutes such as ESSA and WIOA and comparable legislation in the UK under its Every Child Matters framework yet the end game of a far more intrusive relationship between the citizen and the state is getting left out of the descriptions of the legislation’s purpose and actual restructurings.
No wonder Lamar did not want anyone to have time to read it. No wonder there is so much language in ESSA about combinations of federal education dollars with other streams of revenue–both other statutes and state and local.
No I didn’t know that report was coming out, but I was looking at this yesterday https://www.atlasnetwork.org/news/article/entrepreneurship-center-of-easterlys-hayek-lecture-on-poverty-alleviation and wondering if Easterly was referring to a universal basic income as well. I even ordered Tyranny of Experts yesterday to find out. Used of course.
A little off topic but applies to odd use of funding. Received a letter from parks board yesterday announcing the city has intent to purchase a school using urban renewal funds. The city will remodel the building into a new community center. The school district will use the funds from sale to remodel the old high school that was supposedly a danger for students to occupy for blended learning space.
Using government funds to purchase a government building? We are robbing Peter to pay Paul.
I was just at a cle program on the Second Amendment that had the American Constitution Society as one of the sponsors. One of the State Senator panelists kept referring to herself and fellow legislators as ‘policy makers’ in need of data. What an upfront affirmation that election=overlordship.
Here is an overview from the OECD of Scotland’s Curriculum of Excellence. http://www.oecd.org/education/school/Improving-Schools-in-Scotland-An-OECD-Perspective.pdf
Next best thing to a crystal ball for seeing the future coming at us is to look at UK nd sometimes Australia.
Right on time we have a call for federal housing vouchers to end socioeconomic segregation. https://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/15121624/LowIncomeRenters-report2.pdf
Probsbly tucked into that omnibus no one gets to read either that Paul Ryan is patting himself over. I understand ed research is going up dramatically. I downloaded dome work on the neuroscience aspects being openly confessed to. It also aligns with the use of the term ‘brain health’ by Linda Degutis yesterday on one of the panels. Made me wonder if she was part of that Interagency Working Group on Neuroscience the White House quietly created in June 2012. Would have aligned with her stint at the CDC.
Reading that housing vouchers bit I am struck also by how much money is to be made by connected Developers using our tax monies to gentrify some neighborhoods that they want to keep intact for Community School Hubs etc.. Think Trump commercial real estate, Clinton Global Initiative real estate llc’s, Jeb Bush’s real estate co. The feeding frenzy is palpable .
Watchoo wanna bet funds for reinvigorating these neighborhoods are gonna come in part from this plan? http://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/documents/huddoc?id=FactSheet_071514.pdf
This is Georgia’s State Workforce Development Board that will be in charge of the WIOA Plan. http://www.georgia.org/competitive-advantages/workforce-division/about-office/state-workforce-development-board/
One of the co-chairs happens to be in commercial real estate. The other, Ann Cramer, is the person I describe in the book as saying P-Tech is grounded in what Georgia was setting up with HB 186 and its required Career Pathways for all students. She was the featured speaker this week at the Center for Civic Innovation https://www.eventbrite.com/e/leadership-breakfast-ann-cramer-coxe-curry-associates-tickets-19716346122 She is now with Coxe Curry and one of her fellow partners http://www.coxecurry.com/who_we_are/phil_jacobs is Chairman of the world’s largest accreditor and on the Board that oversees teacher licensing and credentials now.
Jacobs is also with the Pendleton Group http://www.pendletonatlanta.com/pjacobs.php that the Atlanta Regional Authority-ARC-used to develop its 10 county development plan. Notice another partner, Craig Lesser, is on the Board of the CIFAL Atlanta, the North American arm of the UN’s training of local government officials to implement the UN’s agenda, now called Dignity for All by 2030 and to be put into place via data. The kind of data the now required personalized learning mandates on all schools and students wanting that 21st century schools funding.
It’s all interrelated and connected, although my due diligence habits of drawing the dots were probably not supposed to happen. My guess is that there will be comparable connections in other states with being on appointed boards that can “make it so” without publicity.
Speaking of Neuroscience and brain health. Just noticed this masters program being offered by Johns Hopkins. Pretty sure Drexel has a similar program. Its all the rage. Graduates are paid well from what I am hearing. ( All Caps letters mine )
“Applied Health Sciences INFORMATICS
School of Medicine
Doctoral
Master’s
The Division of Health Sciences Informatics at the School of Medicine seeks to advance the development and use of information technology for decision-making, research, health care delivery, and individual academic growth, and to increase the awareness of these resources among the Johns Hopkins health sciences community.
Look at what is being confessed to here http://www.learningfirst.org/teachers-enable-social-action-diverse-classrooms
The Department of Education is already talking about issuing regulations soon to govern the implementation of ESSA, which is what happens when euphemisms are relied on to avoid troubling sound bytes that might have blocked approval.
The references to Culturally Responsive teaching is what the vague references to Equity and engaging all students and using evidenced-based practices to close achievement gaps are actually what collateral documents I have make clear are now required. I have been very busy since ESSA was adopted since for me it amounts to klieg lights. Not an accident this and other documents have come out so quickly in ESSA’s wake.
So glad I got my official hard bound copy yesterday from Capitol Hill. Imagine what I will be able to right in those physical margins now.
You might want an adult beverage with this https://www.heartmath.org/about-us/videos/the-hearts-intuitive-intelligence/
Notice all the references to flow. That’s Csik’s Excellence as in what is required for Equity. This is actually consistent with where all the social and emotional emphasis really takes students.
It’d why mindfulness keeps coming in and everyone talks about changing how people think. For governments to now be legislatively requiring this explains some of the giddiness I noticed yesterday. It explains why the State Senator kept referring to herself as a policymaker in need of data to create ‘good policy’. All that absurd talk of a balacing of interests and rights is this social coherence within an assumed moral communitarianism no one plans to alert us to yet. It must be so frustrating when lawyers who went to school in the 70s or 80s recognize when they are being subjected to propaganda. What teenager has the factual knowledge anymore to even recognie they are being fed a manufactured narrative?
Re; Heartmath:
Personal Coherence->Social Coherence->Global Coherence = Whirled Peas. ( matryoshka doll image??? )
Ya sure..like totally… dudes..like no…problem. Namaste y’all .
So they will mindfully instill fact free wee noggins beginning at age 3 with appropriate attitudes and limited aptitudes amenable to the whims of their loving leaders.
These people are mad as hatters and greedier then midas. Im afraid some of them have been imbibing from the kettle of Kool Aid they want the rest of us chugging.
Somebody ought to alert Ken Wilber and Peter Senge and Doc Childre that they may be pitchin’ but a fair amount of us who still retain our marbles are definitely not catchin’.
Culturally Responsive Teaching….
First sentence:
“Learning to read, write, speak, listen, and count were nice goals
for a time that has passed. No more.”
WHA?? Well, 3 privilege points for not pretending. I’ll hand that much to them.
and
“In too many schools, culturally diverse students are seen as dilemmas to be dealt with rather than as
opportunities to simulate and stimulate innovative and diverse perspectives around real world topics and
authentic curriculum within the classroom as a global microcosm. A diverse classroom makes an ideal
laboratory for students to engage in explorations of their own and others’ cultures, global issues, multiple
perspectives on history, and the use of relevant and available technology that helps them span the globe
and connect with others also seeking solutions to relevant world issues”
Oh brother .
Bruce Deitrick Price’s piece at American Thinker (http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/12/only_you_can_prevent_bad_public_schools.html) reads as if it were a partial preface for “Credentialed to Destroy” — and this blog is cited in one of the comments. While Price’s short piece lacks the scope, depth, historical context, and documentation in Robin’s book, it may be useful to those searching for the proverbial “elevator speech.”
I want to share this video demonstrating the public’s view of “science” is engineered in itself. This video is of a lecture titled “The Lucifer Effect” given by Philip Zimbardo, author and past President of the Presidents of all the various science fields. Here, Zimbardo goes over his famous “Prision experiment at Stanford”. Most people are lead to believe most scientist are Atheists but those are just the lower level we come in contact with in acadamia, et al. I read, and Zimbardo here domonstrates, that the scientists at the higher levels, (think peer review), are not Atheists (note Freemason entry require belief in “a god”). This video is an excellent example from a top level horses-own-mouth: http://classsessions.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-neutrality-of-sciences-and-acadamia.html. There is plenty of commentary between the clips that will give you enough of the gist if you don’t have time for a video.
Interesting that Ga. Has many education connections on the workforce board, along with UN. OR lead board is riddled with AFL-CIO members. Of notice were the connections to community college boards, chamber boards, blue green alliance, stem councils, social justice boards, regional solution centers, major hospital union leaders, a county commissioner, employment department heads , CTE leaders.
The focus seemed to be on building jobsin the NW economy around green growth.
http://www.bluegreenalliance.org/members.
http://www.oregon.gov/gov/admin/regional-solutions/Pages/about.aspx
I had to laugh out loud yesterday at the sheer stupidity of Portland residents. Portland city council drafted a resolution against Trumps middle eastern immigrant halt statement . They welcome any immigrants and are ready to assist. One protester held a sign that said ‘Jews for Muslim immigrants ‘. Oh.my.
Speechless.
All the Neuroscience work I am tracking as part of what ESSA and that Crapulus spending bill McConnell and Paul Ryan just foisted on the American people clued me in that the Pacific Northwest is developing “a vibrant neurotechnology regional cluster.” It is called the Pacific Northwest Neuroscience Neighborhood and is composed of U of Wash, the Allen Institute for Neuroscience, Oregon Health & Science U, and 50 companies based in Oregon and Washington.
Other parts of the country have similar initiatives which the Crapulus bill likely funds. Turns out the President has created an interagency working group of more that 20 federal agencies to use neuroscience research, especially involving education, to redesign the minds of the American people to make us sufficiently servile that we do not notice or mind what the political class and their think tanks intend to do to us.
That Bill Easterly book creates a false narrative around Hayek that anyone who has read my book will pick up on immediately. Apparently it is not just being 100% prescient about the actual implementation and ts purposes that earned me so much ire. Apparently I am the buster of the entire faux narrative that the Atlas Network has created around Hayek.
Perhaps they should not have given an award to a book where the author is thanking the Inclusive Prosperity Chairman Larry Summers and Joseph Stiglitz who heads up much of the comparable global work. I really do love Acknowledgemnt pages.
Georgia’s WIOA Plan, that I am reading this morning with my knowledge of wioa, essa, and the economic rights the Atlas Network members want to create for all members (what the Guaranteed Basic Income is all about and why Crapulus made the EITC permanent) is relying on data from this company in Boston http://burning-glass.com/about/ in order to create the info about sector strategies, career pathways, and ‘skills training to address employer needs.’
Notice the plan to change the nature of the labor market. I guess that fits with the intention to redesign the student. Atlas really is taking James Buchanan’s insight that a moral community would need to be grounded in reengineering the individual to heart. I have also never seen a Board member at any of their members that would not benefit from a static, dirigiste economy and society.
The way out is to recognize where this is all going and I do. I hope that doesn’t mean I need an official taster when I go out or I need to worry about Polonium-laced tea.
Avoid eggnog. Especially any offered by strangers. Anything can be hidden in that stuff.
Robin,
A couple of interesting reads here: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/01/the-new-preschool-is-crushing-kids/419139/
and http://wmbriggs.com/post/17533/, which focuses on the endpoint for “equality”.
Will holiday swap with you. http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/12/novel_engineering_project_teaches_kids_about_engineering_by_using_fiction.html
Time to take brisket out of oven.
Brisket cooled and gravy mixture added to finish cooking, Beef consomme cooked down, then ketchup, a-1, wortcershire, steak sauce, some soy, bown sugar, and honey spooned over to finish cooking.
Anyway as often as the Rockefeller Foundation comes up, having one of the family pushing a John Dewey bio he wrote and the Boddhisatva spirit just is so much in one place. http://www.greattransition.org/publication/the-earth-charter-at-15 Like Marx’s Human Development Society being luanched on us in unread legislation in a Bipartisan and Bicameral manner, there really is a related Great Transition.
The Great Transition needs the emphasis to be local too. So does the American Constitution Society per the Board member who spoke at the propagandistic Second Amendment legal program I attended this week.
Did you notice that none of the listed “solutions” to the turtle problem included just putting a bowl of water on the floor for the dog?
Oh, my. I did get a chance to read my state wioa plan between wrapping and cooking. Just as when I read wioa itself the troubling nature of the required civic education jumped out at me. The Core Knowledge blog has just done a story touting this Aspen Institute program http://www.aspeninstitute.org/policy-work/citizenship. Notice the mention of social cohesion as an obligation. Just as I warned was the intent of the 2nd requirement of 21st Century Schools funding.
Notice the obligation on the teacher to “build a sense of shared fate.” To be specific here is the purpose: “The Program was created in 2014 to explore how, in an age of increasing diversity and widening inequality, this country can cultivate a sense of shared destiny and common civic purpose.” I am not sure I want to upset anyone’s holiday by writing this week, but there has been a stunning consistency in where everything is going. I am around even if busy with family obligations.
I think we all look forward to learning what you have pieced together Robin. Holiday or no holiday. One of the many blessings of having an axe maker mind is the sort of fierce inner strength that one accesses as awareness grows regarding difficult truths. Knowledge is power. Which of course is the essence of the entire problem we are battling presently.
Yes, I now know why the Texans are so determined to take my work. Beyond the financial benefits of substituting their ‘talks’ for actually reading my book, it makes a censoring of the message so much easier.
U-Texas Austin is actively working with the White House to pilot the behavioral science aspects I recognize so clearly in the ESSA language, especially now that Santa brought me a hard copy Engrossed version to flip through and tab with all my existing notes and insights. While Texans are still being told it’s about a Type 2 way to teach the content, subject content is simply a vehicle for the psychological manipulation of the child.
I also found the timing on this fascinating . http://www.publicagenda.org/blogs/to-reduce-economic-inequality-do-we-need-better-democracy I knew I recognized the author’s name. He is involved with the Rockefeller Foundation-funded National Center for Dialogue and Deliberation and the Deliberate Democracy Handbook. Neither is mentioned there though. It does though fit with that Aspen Institute new conception of citizenship I warned about yesterday that is showing up in state plans of what they agree to do.
While I read, wrap, shop, and cook, it is a good time to look back at http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/silently-and-seismically-shifting-sovereignty-away-from-the-individual/ from June 2014. What NCDD and the Rockefeller Foundation is pushing is quite relevant to this stealth imposition of the moral community template I wrote about in this post.
When I read that Easterly book Tyranny of Experts that the Atlas Network members who also seem to want dirigiste economies and socioeconomic integration via Guaranteed Minimum Incomes, no strings attached, were hyping in London, I knew from having read so many of Hayek’s books that they were misrepresenting his thoughts on the subject of positive economic rights. We Axemaker Minds do not simply read what is assigned nor do I read through cultural ‘lenses.’ It is what it is.
Yesterday I located precisely what he had to say on the subject. All these living Nobel Prize winners in economics and think tanks can try to misportray him, but not to anyone who knows he wrote an Appendix with his thoughts on the Universal declaration of Human Rights. So yesterday I still got to access that great Axemaker mind and I now know exactly where all the education initiatives globally are aimed as I have for a while. Now I also know why there has been so much deceit around ‘markets,’ liberty, free enterprise, etc, when the desired reality apparently across the board is anything but at some high level actually developing all these policies that dovetail so well that Duncan Phyfe would approve.
Knowledge is power. It’s also why I am so careful to document how everything ties together before I write anything. It’s why my book Credentialed to Destroy remains so relevant whatever a state calls its education standards. I wonder if anyone has noticed they left a reference to ‘state systemic reforms’ in the STEM funding grants. In other words, see Chapter 3 and the PME discussion for what ESSA is all about. Same for the Literacy grants.
Yikes! More lost invites and this relates to that convening by Lumina in Dallas last January of 75 metro areas. http://connectingcredentials.org/national-dialogue/
I hate it when my kids announce I have to forego my 362 day use of my dining room as a source of organizing my most recent reads in order to sit everyone on christmas eve.
This was sent out today by fed ed to the chiefs of each state making it quite clear that the Congress critters just pointing to x provision or y needed to pay attention to the whole document. Parents will not be able to block the states from monitoring whether the school’s efforts to neurologically restructure their child’s mind and personality are working as desired. The feds want Equity and appropriate Comrade Citizens to be members of the moral community.
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/ESEA%20DCL%20part%20rate_updated%2012%2020%2015%283%29.pdf I guess this is the equivalent of the Friday afternoon news dump as people get on the road.
More proof that the Atlas Network has an unappreciated interest in eliminating inequality. Roland Fryer of Harvard EdLabs lecturing on “Education, race, and Inequality” from last week. http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/12/roland-fryers-outstanding-seminar.html
In case someone just wants to listen over the next few days. That edLabs is where the Broads and Joel Klein have shifted their emphasis to. http://edlabs.harvard.edu/innovative-partners It is also what Condi Rice chairs along with being on the Board of Atlas member the Foundation for Excellence in Education. The synthesis continues apace while the web spinners try to pretend this is all still about content or corporate or union greed.
Anyone in nyc area may want to look into this. http://www.eventbrite.com/e/wisdom-20-connect-ny-raising-wise-children-in-the-digital-age-tickets-19233094704
LL-notice the blending of neuroscience and mindfulness practices. This is what Congress and state legislatures have mandated.
Lasagna and It’s a Wonderful Life here tonight. Earlier my husband asked if I was interested in watching Bear Grylls with Obama as his guest. He said the look on my face was worth asking. What a stinker. Shopping is done and baking will commence Tuesday. http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2015/12/17-research-base-improved-learning-bruer
Yes I have that and have also read all the footnotes. Found the timing fascinating. Finished the Georgia plan and there’s clearly a reason they put economic illiterates on that SWDB and so wanted a Governor who was literally fiscally bankrupt when he came into office.
Actually have a fire going and the brisket is for a gathering tomorrow. Tastes so much yummier when it sits a day in frig. First made it years ago for a dear friend’s wake and people would call his widow and ask where they could get that recipe. that’s good brisket.
Just watched Evita. Yeasr ago I spent a summer at Oxford and the last night before I flew home in 1980 I got tickets to Evita in the West End before it had even premiered on Broadway. Funny what makes us feel young again, isn’t it? For me it is “Don’t Cry for me Argentina.”
Hi Robin, merry christmas and a happy new year to you and your family. I think the more people get interested in killing the the C.A.T., the better this saying will work! Curiosity killed the CAT, CAT being conspiracy against truth. I have just received you book this morning and look forward to reading it, and then trying to see if I can get anyone else to!! Hard work getting your message out but I love it, along with some other very good woman researchers from the USA,
All the best cliff.
Thanks. Went more than 24 hours without even turning on the computer. Of course I did manage to get some vital researching done while my house was quiet.
I think 2016 needs to be the year we start talking about the false narratives in education. Frequently they are being pushed by people who like to use the word ‘false narrative’ as if that will immunize the analysis offered from factual scrutiny. That particular train of thought and its manifestations has been on my mind recently.
http://truthinamericaneducation.com/elementary-and-secondary-education-act/u-s-department-of-education-no-student-assessment-opt-outs-allowed/
Has been making the rounds online. What’s the Ravitch, UOO crowd going to do now?
Honestly everyone involved still seems to want to call ‘assessments’ tests as if we are still talking about monitoring knowledge.
I got that letter when it came out last week and knew it was a determination to make sure the internalized desired neural changes were occurring yearly during the most malleable periods for synaptic change. Widespread optouts cannot be an option once the true nature of Higher Order Thinking Skills and Understanding is accurately appreciated. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/ESEA%20DCL%20part%20rate_updated%2012%2020%2015%283%29.pdf
Hope you had a good Christmas. I am around but also handling life housekeeping stuff. Will get up a post if life will behave.
The timing was like the equivalent of a superduper Friday news dump.
Talking of the recent Transportation bill http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/the-avenue/posts/2015/12/28-fast-act-freight-policy-kane-tomer shows all this coordination to addict local communities to federal money in return for political planning of the economy. More Bipartisan and Bicameral and quite the polyphonic federalist Fascism.
Road trip time? Easily noticeable that factual knowledge is not a goal at a national conference.
http://www.publiccharters.org/involved/conference-2016/scheduleandevents/speakers/
Wow. I wonder if that Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence became the home for James Comer’s work after the CASEL he created moved to UI-Chicago. Mitra shows how crucial the role of digital learning is in the desired innovations.
I have a sister in Nashville so I know where I could stay for free. I am finishing Amartya Sen’s 1999 book Development as Freedom and he talks about how all the institutions in society need to be on-board with the vision I readily recognize as the Marxist-Humanist Human Development Society. That would mean schools and churches, but also think tanks. Perhaps that is why we see so much explicit coordination now with think tanks that happily embrace the Left as well as members of the Atlas Network. They know they are chasing after the same vision, but do not want the public to know lest it affect their fund raising appeals. “Yes, we are for a collectivist state too and think Marx was more correct than wrong” may be accurate, but it will not open wallets. In fact, it would likely be the last many ordinary people would ever support these public policy nonprofits.
I guess if 2015 had an epiphany for me it would be the very existence of this Atlas Network and the recognition that so many determined to create a false narrative on education seem to be tied to various members of that network. The slow dawning started last year in St Louis when I recognized that the rhetoric being used by numerous speakers fit with what I had been reading in policy papers underwritten by the Rockefeller Foundation. At least they are upfront with what they aim to do.
Remember ESSA said charters are to pilot innovative practices to examine the effects on students and their behaviors. Perhaps under Truth-in-Advertising these schools should have subtitles that say “Guinea Pig Factories. Thanks for supplying your child for our research and personal profit.”
Robin,
This article had me thinking about several of the topics you bring up here: http://wmbriggs.com/post/17575/
I will swap you. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/12/27/why-education-activists-are-furious-at-exxonmobils-ceo/
Notice that both the “workforce development” vision and the “active citizens in a democratic society” envisions the students as things to be manipulated. The pertinent question being fought over is what kind of collectivist society will it be. Yet this is clearly the discussion that one of the global titans of Big Data gathering, Jeff Bezos, wants to be the vision of the future. The way forward in 2016 is to truly recognize the common agenda being foisted at us involuntarily by the so-called Left and Right.
‘Twill be a good year for False Narrative Warriors armed with bookcases and downloaded stores of facts on what is really going on in education, politics, desired economic planning, and social initiatives. If the weather is bad and you are stuck inside, find your state’s WIOA Plan and read what is in store for us. Remember all final plans from each one of the 50 states is due in DC by March 1, 2016. Georgia’s was stunning for me and I had read WIOA. Republican governors should not have state plans that paraphrase Karl Marx, especially if they are unaware that the plan does that. Someone knew though.