Tag Archives: Anthony Carnevale

Disguising the Rise of the Oligarchs Via Competencies, New Values, a Thinking Curriculum and Other False Narratives

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Unapproved personal knowledge is a meme-buster. If you are not sure why I say that think of the images of the South Carolina flooding and then attach the descriptions of “freak weather-related” vs “caused by climate change.” One affects us emotionally and makes us want to do something. Known, unassigned stores of fact can destroy a given narrative. Let’s use two examples from just this past week. Has anyone seen a picture of the Oregon shooter’s mother? If we simply got our news from the evening networks, we would not know the mass murderer was mixed-race, just like our first Black President. Facts in the way of the narrative.

Part of the research into the sequel to my first book Credentialed to Destroy means that I have had to become an expert on Big Data. Let’s just say I have a lot of unapproved, demonstrably true facts at my command. So when this video  https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/haunted-by-data came to my attention as a touted solution, I immediately knew it was a tactical keynote. The speaker misstated the nature of the problem to get a solution authorized that would actually make the problem of personalized data even worse. Words to the Wise: with behavioral data, it is the ongoing flow that is crucial to insights that allow neurological rearranging. Remember we have Learning Progressions to stipulated outcomes or Competencies. Once there and locked into place at a psychophysiological level to prompt and guide future behavior, the Oligarchs do not need to keep monitoring.

After that Big Data works just fine for social and economic planning purposes. That last one comes from a report on Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy that just came out from Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. http://www.rewritetherules.org/ Once again actual knowledge of what has transpired in the last several decades and what impairs and helps create prosperity is a tremendous obstacle to accepting the prescribed actions by the politically influential. Finally, the US is embarking on adopting Qualifications Frameworks just as I warned about in my book. Only the names are changing to create a better narrative I suppose. On Monday the first ever National Credentials Summit was held in DC. http://connectingcredentials.org/summit-recording/

Like Stiglitz, this is a group of people interested in redesigning and planning a ‘fragmented system’–this time in the name of those who want a credential that will guarantee them a good job. Once again factual knowledge impedes the panacea being spun, but it is a chance to see Anthony Carnevale [see tag] as more than just the author of those Workplace Manuals for the Bush 41 Labor Department that still guide the admitted to vision now of K-12 education as workforce training. We get to see how much former governors just love to go to work for trade groups pushing a politically planned economy or education reforms. Even former Prime Ministers like Gordon Brown find post-office full employment via the Rise of the planning Oligarchs.

Last week the GEFF connected advisor Tom VanderArk linked to the final version of the Bipartisan Convergence Center’s vision for us.  http://education-reimagined.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/A-Transformational-Vision-for-Education-in-the-US-2015.09.pdf It is just full of both false narratives justifying the need for transformation, as well as true declarations of intentions to change the children so that they are adaptable to the kind of changed social and economic systems Stiglitz and the Lumina Foundation (that called for the Credentials Convening linked to above) had in mind. In that planned, collectivist economy and society that still intends to use nonprofits and private companies to fulfill “the needs” of the people, unauthorized knowledge is in the way.

That report explains how the “learner-centered paradigm for learning functions like a pair of lenses that offers a new way to look at, think about, talk about, and act on education.” I bolded that part of the phrase because the ‘pair of lenses’ analogy is what the last post said was a means of framing an individual’s orientation at an unconscious level. Unapproved, personal facts get in the way of our simply putting on the prescribed ‘pair of lenses’. That report confesses the intention to use K-12 education to prescribe the specific core knowledge, skills, and personal dispositions ALL students are to internalize. Did any dictator in history ever aspire to more intrusion, unless we count keeping everyone but a designated elite (the oligarchs) completely illiterate?

Complete illiteracy is easy to notice. Prescribed ignorance, tied to useful false beliefs and regularly manipulated emotions, and then all coupled to doled out allowed core knowledge and practiced, approved behaviors, is what we are really looking at here. Unapproved knowledge impedes the Rise of the Oligarchs in our Vision 2030 UN-led world and it must not be allowed. http://www.iclei.org/details/article/advancing-sdgs-at-the-local-and-subnational-level-input-to-un-negotiations-on-post2015-development.html is a confession that the UN, mayors, city councils, and school administrators all know that most of the 2030 vision will be carried out globally at a local level. They have even coined the term ‘localization’ for this deliberate disguise for planned global control via local administrators and politicians.

http://landing.deloitte.com.au/rs/761-IBL-328/images/deloitte-au-ps-education-redefined-040815.pdf from Australia is a reminder that this planned ignorance and the ties to workforce development are not limited to the US. We can also go back in time to the report UNESCO created in 1968 to commemorate the 20th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Called “The Right to Education: From Proclamation to Achievement (1948-1968),” it made “the full development of the human personality” the new purpose of education globally just like Uncle Karl envisioned as a necessary component of his sought Human Development Society or little ‘c’ communism.  http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/who-knew-karl-marx-had-a-human-development-model-or-that-it-fit-our-facts-so-well/

Not to be paranoid, but when that Re-Imagined Education Project mentions its “vision of all children learning and thriving to their full potential,” it certainly sounds like a rephrasing of the ‘full development of the human personality’, doesn’t it? When it calls for a “Coordinated Network of Institutions, Organizations, Agencies, Associations and Federations, and Businesses” it is using the word ‘network’ to replace the word ‘system’ used in all these other cites. The intention to fundamentally redesign, plan and direct is the same. This Network “offers open-walled, relevant, and contextualized learning resources and opportunities to learners and creates avenues for learners to be involved in and engage with the community.”

Sounds like what the Credentialing Summit is calling for as Seamless Pathways in a no longer ‘fragmented’ employment system. It would also fit with the communitarian, promote the Good of Others in daily behaviors, requirement that we found in the definition of Career Ready Practices. Let’s stay in the present for one more quote: “Additionally, this network promotes collaboration and communication amongst entities working to support learners’ health, nutrition, safety, and wellbeing.” Since those needs can only be met if the learners’ entire family also has their ‘needs’ met (see http://www.communityschools.org/assets/1/AssetManager/Better-Learning-through-Community-School-Partnerships.pdf ) , we are back to an obligation to meet such needs for all families with children. Just like Marx laid out, as well as the UN in that 2030 Vision all of our elected leaders signed on to about a week ago.

The UDHR is already showing up in much of the curricula coming in under the banner of the Common Core and Global Competency. Does everyone appreciate that it called for “economic and social equality” back in 1948 and empowered UNESCO to achieve it via education and planned changes to prevailing culture? That communitarianism was always at the center of the imagined future global vision and that only politically connected Oligarchs thrive in such a society? Essentially everyone thriving becomes a means of ensuring there will be no unauthorized breakouts of individuality or genius innovations. Here is the Oligarch plan via the UN and now ‘localization’ from 1968:

“When liberty, equality and fraternity are achieved, so too will be achieved the free, full development of man’s personality within the community; and thus man will be considered as an end and not a means. [BS narrative alert]…Duties toward the Community (Art. 29 of UDHR) For man may claim his rights, in the name of freedom and justice, only in so far as he consents to assume his duties, and becomes aware that the members of every human community are all interdependent.”

That’s why the focus keeps coming back to personality, even if the excuse is bullying, a Positive School Climate, Workforce Competencies and Soft Skills, Grit and Perseverance, or Character Education. Again to 1968: “the permanent task of education remains: to form the personality of every human being–the personality that will allow him to resist the loss of his individuality in his work and his leisure-time occupations, and to set forth, be it modestly, upon the conquest of the good things of the world. And these are not material goods only, but also intelligence, beauty and goodness.”

I guess the last three are what is hiding in the present as those to-be-stipulated Dispositions. It will not be the individual student or any of the rest of us picking them out and, once again individual, unapproved stores of knowledge impede the plans. That is why UNESCO in 1968 called for “not a well-stocked but a well-organized mind.” Organized around the designated core knowledge, approved themes and concepts, and supplied principles and values–“it presupposes a certain limited sum of basic knowledge, deeply rooted and constantly available.” Basic knowledge that creates a “capacity for action.” That would be action though along approved pathways of course.

Education then, in 1968 and now, in the US and in every other developed country, “forms men and women who will become the active agents of progress, ready to face what has never been faced before. Culture forms a close link between the concepts of education and the future…Culture, no longer the privilege of an aristocracy, is becoming the leaven of democracy. Every worker is a citizen. Specialization must on no account be an obstacle to the grasp of broader problems.”

Because broader problems should only be understood through the lenses of approved core knowledge. This ignorance and manipulated narratives of course greases the path for the Rise of the Oligarchs.

Genuine, Unapproved Knowledge–the ultimate 21st Century Rebellion of the would-be serfs.

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

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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.

Shift Facts into Values and Change Values into Facts So That a New Consciousness will Emerge

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Since we all just adore an explicit declaration of intent, how’s this for a doozy? “For purposes of organizing [a modern participatory democracy grounded in the common good] it is not important whether there is an objective or subjective reality to this belief since the belief is the basis upon which people act.” That statement certainly gives a reason for all the current focus on skill development for a variety of offered reasons. I have warned that most of the planned assessments should not be described as tests so maybe this description of what is sought will help–“performance assessments are those in which the ‘answer’ is the behavior itself.” Training to act as desired also fits with another quote that gives us the rationale for all these Enduring Understandings, Core Concepts and Disciplinary Ideas we keep encountering as the Knowledge component to go along with all those Skills:

“It is crucial, however, to analyze for people what goes on in areas where they do not have direct experience. Once such analysis comes within their grasp, they will come to see that they can change social reality.”

That would be the same social reality that may not actually exist in the form believed, or be a result of the causes believed, but students, and the adults they will become, will be trained to act anyway. Let’s give one more quote that gives a reason for all the stress on activities and Project-Based Learning and Whole Child SEL Initiatives: “Obviously, one’s capacity to care must be integrated with rationality just because common good requires the reattachment of ‘head to heart’ in our public activities.” To the discussion in my book of everything that started in earnest in the mid-80s with the goal of transforming the political, economic, and social systems of the West, especially in the US, Australia, Canada, and the UK, we need to add another book from 1986–The Common Good: Its Politics, Policies and Philosophy by Marcus Raskin put out by the Institute for Policy Studies (Robert Chandler’s 2008 book Shadow World gives the background on IPS and Raskin as part of the global New Left).

The quote in the title comes from the IPS book as well although I did not know IPS was behind that book when I ordered it. I just recognized the vision desired from the 2001 Learning Society paper and the assumptions being used by that Frameworks Institute from the last post. http://www.ssireview.org/images/articles/2011_WI_Feature_Kania.pdf links to a “Collective Impact” essay hyping Strive in Cincinnati (and other listed cities as well like Houston, Texas and Portland, Oregon) “as an example of collective impact, the commitment of a group of important actors from different sectors to a common agenda for solving a specific social problem.” On the second page is a picture of people bringing together pieces from a jigsaw puzzle so that there can be a collective organized effort around meeting people’s needs without having to confess the total agenda.

This is a long quote but important to appreciating no one is going to run up the flagpole a banner stating: “Our new education agenda is actually tied to these radical transformation descriptions where people actually do mention ‘Marxist thought’ without even a hiccup or a cleared throat.” It’s up to us to find those confessions and put the pieces together:

“complex problems can be solved only by cross-sector coalitions that engage those outside the nonprofit sector…Adaptive problems, by contrast, are complex, the answer is not known, and even if it were, no single entity has the resources or authority to bring about the needed change. Reforming public education, restoring wetland environments, and improving community health are all adaptive problems. In these cases, reaching an effective solution requires learning by the stakeholders involved in the problem, who must then change their own behavior in order to create a solution.”

Good thing the students will have practiced doing that on all those performance assessments and a new definition of learning that now means changes in values, attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors. It does not mean having a solid base of accurate factual knowledge lest we refuse to defer to the Experts or the ‘important actors’ of those coalitions. Or even worse, develop an innovative product that displaces an established business with a superior idea. Think of how handy practice in a Discourse classroom at creating shared beliefs as the 21st century skill of Communication will be in a world where: “collective impact requires all participants to have a shared vision for change, one that includes a common understanding of the problem and a joint approach to solving it through agreed upon actions.”

Did any of us get an invite to go to Dallas in January 2015 to be part of the 75 Metro Area Convening put on by the Lumina Foundation to move forward with these transformations with no need to ask the parents or taxpayers? That’s where I found that Stanford Social Innovation paper cited. It covers our communities, our schools, and our children, but no one is telling us about it openly or giving us a piece of the puzzle to start fitting together. Me? At this point I just gate crash, download the issued reports and presentations, and then notice that it is essentially Raskin’s, Marx’s, and the Learning Society vision all being imposed on us quietly. Negotiated at ‘convenings’ we pay for, but don’t get invited to.

This recent report is from another related ‘convening’–this time in May 2014–http://www.competencyworks.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/CompetencyWorks-Maximizing-Competency-Education-and-Blended-Learning.pdf . That’s a long title so they left off the very end that is designed to gain both automatic implementation and little objective scrutiny–“Insights from Experts.” Should we kneel or curtsey then? And if the tenets in that paper and all the emphasis on Equity mean that only a Marxian or IPS/Raskin vision of education to gain the necessary consciousness for economic democracy to work, are we still obligated to defer? Does an education, urban planning, sociology, or public policy degree come now with a license to lie to the public while everything they value and that works gets jettisoned if a Stakeholder Engagement Process decides to put a theory into practice to see what happens?

http://results4america.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/2015-3-18-Moneyball-for-Education-Report.pdf is yet another attempt to put Theory into Practice sold as “informed by thinking from a select group of seasoned experts from the left and right who have much experience with federal education policy.” Given the tragic history of what those federal policies have done to schools and students, we would prefer that be a disqualifier. Has anyone else noticed that expertise in general is constantly dismissed in all these visions of education in the future? Meantime we are supposed to defer to every social science graduate degree as the only reverenced expertise. Again, that’s the way to get Theory into Practice and false beliefs and new values in place to guide future behavior.

Anyone else ever heard of Dane Linn? Now there’s an expert. He was at the NGA when it co-sponsored Common Core. Then he moved on to the College Board to help David Coleman with his current platform for well-funded mischief, before joining the Business Roundtable. http://www.careertechnj.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Georgetown.BR_.CB-CTE-report-11.2013.pdf is called “The Promise of High-Quality Career and Technical Education:Improving Outcomes for Students, Firms, and the Economy.” It forces the kind of “contextualized learning, in which even academic material is presented in the context of projects or workplaces” that Uncle Karl and his 20th Century social reconstruction supporters like Robert Beck (Chapter 4 of my book) have always dreamed of. This is to be for ALL students, including the most academically gifted, because, just as Beck worried about, CTE must no longer be stigmatized.

That paper advocates “states and local districts can adopt/adapt/develop standards and curricula in collaboration with local businesses. Students must demonstrate competency in these skills.” What skills? Oh, the ones laid out in that Competency Works paper that just came out that provides “Insights from Experts” without really specifying which theories those experts’ opinions are really grounded in. Anybody else finding all the stress on needed skills development as awfully useful as we switch to a vision of education that is no longer really about accurate facts in someone’s personal, private possession? When the ‘answer’ is desired behavior, hyping Skills Development to be globally competitive as the rationale is quite the invisibility cloak.

One of the nice things about being where I am in my research on what is really going on is being able to recognize when we are dealing with pieces of a common puzzle created to be function together. We have every right to examine them as the consolidated whole they are intended to become, even if no one invites us to these ‘convenings’. Sometimes these reports and sources are not created to be pieced together though. Sometimes the linkage is the common destination that allows traveling on unconnected tracks. That’s why I mentioned that Robert Beck called himself a social reconstructionist as he pushed the federally funded polytech vision that also fits with this current CTE vision back in the late 1980s. Beck’s work also fits with Anthony Carnevale’s Workplace Basics vision that we found so troubling in this post  http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/ballad-of-the-long-sought-shift-to-being-educable-not-educated-adaptation-via-dissolving-the-logical-mind/

Fascinating, huh, since the Georgetown Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Public Policy issued that CTE report in conjunction with the College Board and the Business Roundtable. Do you know who else calls himself and his vision a social reconstruction philosophy? Andrew Raskin in The Common Good.

This story gets much easier to track when we look for common destinations and then Backward Map to the pathways being used to get there. The blueprint is also discernable when the jigsaw pieces are so clearly designed to fit together.

Combine both and the vision and its constancy through the decades begins to feel like a supernova, blinding in its intensity.

The Frameworks Institute is not the only one who gets to create analogies and metaphors to guide analysis.

Quietly Coercing a Vassals and Fiefdoms Future for All of Us While Hyping Economic Development

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I actually am not nostalgic for the castles, moats, or medieval armor. For one thing I like to cook, but not without centralized plumbing or over an open hearth. No, I keep thinking of terms from the Middle Ages because public policies being quietly enacted in the United States as well as other countries via K-12 education remind me a great deal of the previously accepted relationships between ordinary people and political power that was the hallmark of those times. Political authorities dictated what we could be, know, and what we must do while promising to take care of us and to meet our basic needs. It’s always fascinating to me to listen to an elected politician, their advisors, or college professors laying out a ‘new’ view of 21st century ‘rights’ and responsibilities and never quite grasping this is all a reversion back to a much earlier view of citizenship and the entitled prerogatives of those who hold political and economic power.

Stated simply, throughout history, people with power will collude to keep it and expand it using the coercive power of the public sector over people, their behavior, and their property. They do it for their own personal benefit as well as the benefit of those who empowered them. Either by electing them, appointing them, or simply bankrolling them. I am actually not philosophizing here without a purpose. This was one of those rare weeks when I got a chance to ask the kind of legislators who get invited to Education Commission of the States meetings (see last post) if the Common Core was really about Workforce Readiness and didn’t various non-hyped state and federal initiatives tie K-12 as now about career preparation for all students in a politically-driven view of economic development in the future?

I got a yes answer from some rather shocked people who probably wish I had stayed home with my documents. I suspect each of you would get a similar answer if you get to quiz legislators, mayors, or representatives from the Governor’s office in your state. The difference is I had the chance, used it respectfully, but against the background of the kind of documentation of the openly-laid out vision I am going to lay out here today. Just in case any of us get a chance to buttonhole someone during the holiday parties or as legislatures or city councils reconvene after the New Year. Because I understand how all this fits into a dirigiste 21st Century economy (the French term for such political direction), I am paying attentions to sites and sources that are probably not on your radar. We are about to remedy that.

I explained that Congress had nationalized the K-12 education vision back in July 2014 and tied it tight to a Workforce vision for all students and states in this post http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/priority-economic-citizenship-for-some-officially-sanctioned-status-as-prey-for-most-of-us/ . On November 20, 2014 a webinar on “Realizing Innovation and Opportunity in WIOA: A Playbook for Creating Effective State National Skills Coalition Plans” went over this detailed report. http://www.nationalskillscoalition.org/resources/publications/file/2014-11-NSC-WIOA-state-report.pdf WIOA remains news to most people because an announcement that Congress has laid out a detailed plan to “improve the nation’s workforce development system” would have poor PR value, especially with the open embrace and advocacy for cronyistic “sector partnerships” of industry and the related Career Pathways in a given state.

I have a lot more to lay out and we need to keep moving. This past week, CCSSO, one of the formal sponsors of the Common Core so it can tout itself as the more politically palatable “state-led initiative” released its Opportunities and Options: Making Career Preparation Work for Students. The Task Force made 3 recommendations in this detailed report. First, “Enlist the employer community as a lead partner in defining the pathways and skills most essential in today’s economy.” In my book, I explained the 1976 Turchenko vision of how to take control of Western economies while still appearing capitalistic and this CCSSO document fits right in. Secondly, “Set a higher bar for the quality of career preparation programs, enabling all students to earn a meaningful postsecondary degree or credential.”

I am the last person who thinks college is appropriate for all people, but politicians skip over the part of this vision that now sees a 6th grade level of math and literacy skills as all anyone will need in the 21st Century. The third recommendation is to “Make career readiness matter to schools and students by prioritizing it in accountability systems.” Accountability is much like accreditation. It is a largely invisible means to make something mandatory in the classroom without adequately disclosing the changed reality to students, parents, or taxpayers. Now in reading that report, there is no inkling that any of these ideas are anything other than state employees trying to meet industry needs and satisfy that much-hyped skills gap.

We know better though. We are not just aware of WIOA, but also all the federal programs at Labor and Education mandating this shift to a reenvisioned Career Technical Education for all students. I laid out all the federal mandates here.   http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/banishing-any-distinction-between-academic-technical-and-lifeemployability-skills-active-deceit-everywhere/ Even more fascinating in all the calculated deceit going on to prevent a widespread accurate perception of the true nature of the shifts involved is a mention that the Southern Regional Education Board had a Commission on Career and Technical Education also pursuing this agenda. Now that got my attention since I have been following Gene Bottoms’ work since he first developed his K-12 vision of Techademics while working for the Georgia Department of Education in the 70s.

I knew from my research of the background for Everyday Math that the Soviet Union had adopted the same general idea for its typical student at the same time in the 70s. (The story and cite are in Chapter 3 of my book in the interview with Isaak Wirszup). Now we have a CCSSO document wanting to “align education and the economy” in precisely the treatment of people as “human capital” that governments have the power to dictate to and manipulate as what the USSR envisioned. Needless to say, the phrase “gotta find that” aptly described my thought process. Sure enough, I found “Career Pathways Connecting High School, Work-Based Learning and Postsecondary Education.” Here’s a link, complete with a futile command “Do Not Disseminate.” I can see why given who is listed as involved. http://publications.sreb.org/2014/FINAL_CTEReportExecSumSREBBd061914.pdf

Why, there’s Texas, confirming it did not need the Common Core. June Atkinson from North Carolina is also on board, which would rather explain why she chose to protect the College Board this week over APUSH. That makes more sense if you have a document connecting the revised AP courses to this CTE vision. http://www.careertech.org/sites/default/files/CTE-AP_FINAL.pdf From my state of Georgia, there is the head of the State Board of Education, which is fascinating since a legislative committee after months of hearings decided recently that K-12 curriculum supervision should be the jurisdiction of that Board, not the elected legislature. No effective recourse for rebellion is one way to put it. Also, two-time Broad Foundation winning school district Super, Alvin Wilbanks, who was the first to tell us that the Common Core was really about remaking the nature of the traditional high school. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/listening-in-on-the-confessional-drumbeat-of-the-common-cores-true-purpose-jettisoning-traditional-high-school/

If you live in a southern state from Texas to Virginia, including Oklahoma, you will want to check that list for the officials listed. I want to make sure though that the presence as consultants of people like Marc Tucker, who headed the controversial national standards/ School to Work attempt in the 90s and Anthony Carnevale, who were both with the Carnegie-created National Center on Education and the Economy to align the US to the Soviet vision of education, are not missed. Before his current perch at Georgetown, Carnevale has been pursuing this vision for decades as I laid out here. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/anesthetizing-any-ability-to-blow-up-or-contaminate-a-chosen-politically-useful-narrative/ The listed David Stern is a subsequent director of the same center polytech visionary Robert Beck (Chapter 4 in the book) previously led.

We have also met Aneesh Chopra before in his previous capacity as this country’s first Chief Technology Officer. Remember I explained his alarming new book Innovative State: How New Technologies Can Transform Government? http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/journey-to-the-center-of-the-core-yields-the-yoke-of-citizen-centric-governance-to-force-a-shared-vision/ All of this hyping of STEM learning and using computers as an essential component of classwork makes more sense once we appreciate that STEM is simply a more politically palatable description to obscure the shift away from subject content to CTE embedded in group academic tasks for all. http://www.careertech.org/sites/default/files/CTEYourSTEMStrategy-FINAL.pdf is the federally sanctioned revelation from a year ago.

In case someone really wants one more smoking gun firmly linking the Common Core to this CTE vision, here’s a 2 page solid confession for us. http://www.careertech.org/sites/default/files/IntegratingCTE-CCSS-Mar2012.pdf

This was a link heavy post because all of this is quite documentable. Most of the people involved in all these reforms have no incentive to connect these dots. We parents and taxpayers though have no choice if we want to escape a future of us and our children functioning as vassals living in a dirigiste fiefdom. All planned around an illusory utopian vision of changing people’s personalities and mental models to voluntarily accept a far more collectivist vision where we each exist to meet other people’s needs.

The extent to which all of this comes together with a Bespoke Fit makes much more sense once we are aware that the global name for this type of K-12 education for this kind of directed economy and society has a name. Productive Learning.

Next time we will exercise our still existing privilege to deny any obligation to accept this vision with fealty, bowing, or general homage.

No wonder there is such an intense desire to limit the capacity to read fluently.

Anesthetizing Any Ability to Blow Up Or Contaminate a Chosen Politically Useful Narrative

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In both adults and children it now turns out. We all are to have our ability to accurately perceive what is going on around us, its true causes, and the likely consequences under deliberate, guided assault. We get to be inadvertent active participants in fundamental transformations we might object to if we were aware. All the coordinated lies or declarations in conferences we are not invited to and books and reports we were never to see. I have seen them though and it propels this compulsion to play Paul Revere to yell “The Bad Ideas that are a-coming” to a classroom, newsroom, or PR campaign soon. Some are already in place with unfortunate psychological effects unappreciated by parents and taxpayers lured into believing that higher graduation rates or greater levels of “student achievement” or Student Growth are necessarily a good thing. Instead, many are masking changes in personality and deliberate efforts to “shatter the rule of law and regularity in the mind.”

That last quote was from a Chapter called “Direction for Human Development” in that The Great Adventure book I mentioned in the last post. Before we discuss what is planned, I want us to remember the game of Red Rover most of us played as children. As adults if we happened upon kids arguing over a badly bruised arm or shoulder injuries from a determination to hold tight against breaking the grip and accusing the fast, aggressive runner who broke through of deliberately wanting to hurt them, we would recognize the problem. Everyone intended their respective actions, but no one gave any thought to consequences beyond their own goals. Think of all the plans for credentialing students, teachers, and administrators to be change agents. Fundamentally transforming economic, political, and social systems they have deliberately been given false understandings of.

Misapprehension of what actually works, why elements really do not, and what all the likely consequences of the sought actions will be. The creators of these theories want everyone involved playing as if they were still children in Red Rover, moving through the POWER Model and securing data as to what to do next. Totally unable to accurately perceive what is bound to occur, lest that inhibit future action. In that same chapter the authors confess:

“Our use of representation, leaving immediate experience behind, and living within the confines of our constructs [or as my own children call it when I am writing ‘mom’s been in her head all day thinking’] can be particularly limiting. If we use our capacities to build edifices of knowledge that are fundamentally static and closed, we can become trapped in limiting worldviews, strangled by our own assumptions.”

Unwilling then, of course, to be Change Agents to try to force changes in the real world that will redirect history going forward. That’s why “a reform in thinking is needed…a kind of thinking that does not reject uncertainty and ambiguity [and in fact nurturing this capacity is what the hype about Rigor and Higher Order Thinking Skills is all about], but rather feeds on [the uncertainty, ambiguity, lack of a correct answer] it for a constant process of self-eco-re-organization.”

It’s no secret that I believe there is a connection between the mass school shootings and their links to communities aggressively pushing using school to dissolve the rational mind and manipulate perception from the inside-out. Today though we are talking about how all this invisibly goes global and why. The ties to violence in the past though are a component of why I am so worried. The social radicals seeking wholesale transformations have always known that “education and learning are what chiefly drive us at all the levels of activity explored by psychology, sociology, political science, economics, and all the other fields of social science, systems science, the humanities, and what we call spirituality, as well as in every other human activity that—as it most clearly does involve evolution—calls out for a newly inclusive definition and a vastly expanded and updated theory and story.”

Our Toronto planners and friends (look here from 2011 to Common Core and 90s version architect Lauren Resnick and her involvement with the International Society for Cultural and Activity Research Scientific Committee http://www.iscar2011.org/eng/ISCAR_PROGRAM_UPDATE_01092011.pdf ) really are targeting prevailing mental maps for extinction and extensive alteration. To gain the very real transformations in the actual world that so many involved in public policy are determined to have, the necessary target is “the bottom line is the perception of large masses of people–a perception oriented by the paradigm that dominates their society.”

So that paradigm, that is nurtured by fluent reading and algebra problems and geometry proofs, has to go. Without admitting that true explanation. My thanks here to the reader who pointed out the work of the FrameWorks Institute and their Strategic Frame Analysis. It describes the lies and how a perception marketing theme is uncovered and how to make sure it is not blown up or contaminated.

One of the biggest prevailing memes now–that everyone must go to college–is generally cited to Professor Anthony Carnevale of Georgetown. In an earlier version of his life he was the author of those New Workforce Training Manuals that so much of the real implementation guidelines appear to be lifted straight out of. I had looked into his background before since so many pernicious recommendations he or groups citing him are pushing for go back to a previous paper he wrote. In other words, a foundation of druthers, not factual research. That’s why I loved that he put his detailed CV in one of the manuals, apparently taking the equivalent of a victory lap. Not knowing 25 years later it would be damning.

Carnevale wanted us to know he was a Board member of the Carnegie-sponsored National Center on Education and the Economy that was created after those 1985 Carnegie agreements between the US State Department and the USSR. I think that is why Carnegie sponsored the Competency-Based Learning Summits in 2011 to get Next Generation Learning across the hype of the Common Core. It’s why Competency to me looks so much like the essential skills Carnevale laid out as Learning to Learn in the 1990 manual.   Carnevale also listed having been the governmental affairs director for AFSCME, the union for state, county, and municipal public employees, the only area of union membership that grew in the last half of the 20th century.

It is Carnevale’s degrees that remind us how to use education and learning changes to invisibly drive cultural changes in collectivist directions without admitting what is going on. Or gaining consent. He listed a BA in “intellectual and cultural history” from Colby College, a rather euphemistic phrase to disguise a Marxian view of history as a process of cultural change in prevailing mindsets. An MA in “social science and public administration” from Syracuse is again quite consistent with wanting social science to be able to design human [that would be people like us], social, economic, and physical environmental systems like cities going forward, just as our Toronto planners and Cultural-Historical Activity Theorists all have in mind. (Wave to Michael Cole and Engestrom too if you click on the ISCAR link). Finally, his PhD is from the Maxwell School of Public Affairs. Billing yourself as an ‘economist’ for deference to your beliefs that the public sector should control the economy seems to me to be False Advertising in order to get Theory into Action.

Everyone wants to use education and the media too to alter how we perceive the world in predictable ways.  To again get political theory into action without admitting it. Our Toronto planners in the “What Should It Look Like” chapter though gave us something else highly useful in their plans for cultural change without permission.

“In bringing the ‘active agent’ into the picture…we come to what used to be billed as the dialectical perspective. During the twentieth century the words ‘praxis’ and ‘dialectical’ became taboo within much of science and Western society because of their historical association with the ‘dialectical’ materialism’ of Marxist theory, communism, and the grim years of the Cold War…[but] “because of its enduring intellectual power…and reached its philosophical high point with Hegel, Marx, and Engels [that’s continued open admiration and reverence, folks!] has been resurrected under other names in cybernetics, chaos and complexity theory, as well as in new ways in the works of most of the authors of these chapters, as we’ll next see.”

I am going to pause here for a second. David Loye is saying that virtually all the theories guiding K-12 and higher ed ‘reforms’ are grounded in some of history’s most notorious collectivists. To mask that fact, various labels likely to be difficult to understand are being used. I guess to stop any opportunity for a blow up or contamination during the process of fundamental transformations. Now what Loye said next takes us to the very heart of the new envisioned K-12 classroom as well as what the 4 Cs of 21st Century Learning are really getting at. Here goes, with the italics as usual in the original.

“The basic dynamic for dialectics is the idea of two or more ‘forces’ and their interaction, either in conflict or working together, which shape our lives into what becomes known as history or human evolution. (Thanks to Marxism, the dialectical model is misrepresented as being solely restricted to conflict…to remedy this problem, the idea of dialogue, or the dialogical model is used to describe the alternative of two forces that complement or otherwise peacefully work together.)”

Puts a whole new spin on group projects, doesn’t it? And the omnipresent word Du Jour–collaboration.

I am going to stop here as following up on this brought me all sorts of startling real-life consequences, including the use of these Dialogic Design principles during the lead-up to the 2008 Presidential campaign and what MOOCs really intend to accomplish.

This would be easier to bear if these theories were in a sci fi novel instead of a book and blog devoted to real-time revelations.