Stealth Prescriptive Reframing Installs the Progressive Collectivist Vision Masked as Deferring to ‘Experts’

In the same way I could look at the vision laid out in the 1991 Learning Society paper from the last post and see the fundamental corners of what Marx and his followers called the Human Development Society, even before the writers mentioned that term without Uncle Karl’s name attached, this week there has been a series of connected reports taking us in the US and globally in the same direction. Education reform and the aims of social, economic, and political transformations always attached to it through the decades, turn out to be an awful lot like learning another language. Once we can speak it, no one needs to translate for us when we are looking at models or aims that seek to get to the same place. Different words or phrases for the same fundamental ideas simply get added to our glossary of understanding.

How many times have we heard that the schools must change in this or that manner because the ‘experts’ say so or in order to make our country ‘internationally competitive’. Going back to the 1991 paper, policymakers needed to address and redo the “evolving relationship between individual and collective needs” in order for us to be that Learning Society. In turn becoming a Learning Society was sold as necessary “in order to attain (or retain) their ability to participate successfully in the global economy.” That’s lots of fundamental shifting towards collectivism coming in and being sold surreptitiously as necessary steps to be competitive in a global economy. At least if the commands from the policymakers were to strip naked and parade in the public square as a group or stand on our head on the baseball field when our number is called, we could better notice where this is going and the utter loss of individual control.

See the Frameworks Institute is not the only one who can come up with a compelling metaphor and at least mine are more apt than blatantly manipulative. is the link of where we are going but we need to pick up more confirmations first. A 1967 John Dewey lecture kindly laid out the definition of desired ‘learning’ to be malleable to the desired transformations. (This was before the 60s efforts described in Chapter 6 of my book ran aground). It remained the relevant definition of learning for the 1991 vision as well and it is still pertinent today. Now it tends to be sold as students having a Growth Mindset with Carol Dweck being cited as the ‘expert’ to defer to. Learning will “enable an adult to change his thought and action in response to the changes occurring around him.”

I hate to frame that desired mindset as being as spineless as a jellyfish and as flexible as an Olympic gymnast, but basically those are good metaphors for the kind of attitudes, values, and dispositions amenable to all these planned ‘progressive’ transformations. No need to inflame the public by mentioning Uncle Karl, the Deweyans call themselves progressive in their intentions and so does the Frameworks Institute. Repeatedly. Same for this recent global call to arms on making sharing and meeting human needs the new basis for the global economy. Must be focus groups somewhere saying ‘progressive’ is almost as cool as having a sleek sports car.

I want to go back to the dangers of this belief that we can simply use education and the ever compliant media to reframe how people perceive the world in order to make wholesale transformations palatable. Reframing allows radical changes to be invisibly put in place without most people being the wiser in time. This is from another famous progressivist education professor and psychologist, Jerome Bruner, who is famous enough to be the ‘expert’ to be deferred to as the reason changes in instruction, curriculum, and assessment must be made. This came from a 1962 book (my bolding so I can duly express appropriate outrage):

“Knowledge is a model we construct to give meaning and structure to regularities in experience. The organizing ideas of any body of knowledge are inventions for rendering experience economical and connected. We invent concepts such as force in physics, the bond in chemistry, motives in psychology, and style in literature as means to the end of comprehension.”

Professor Bruner, we did not invent the concepts of force in physics or bond in chemistry. We simply came up with an agreed upon term in English to describe an observed phenomenon. That phenomenon, and its cause and effect relationships, existed before we knew about them and regardless of what we named it. There is something objective going on that is not in fact ‘socially constructed’. It is a bit Lysenkoesque (see Chapter 3 of my book) and consistent with a desire for ideological thinking to pretend otherwise. Aptly illustrated and adequately explained all these terms do aid in comprehension, but where Professor Bruner wanted to go, and where the Frameworks Institute does go, is a push into using metaphors to enable false perceptions, incorrect interpretations, and inapt analogies. All without a body of facts to correct what is wrong with what is being provided.

“Reframing Education Using a Core Story Approach” with its tremendous support from cited well-known charitable foundations is worthy of Pravda in its declared intent to manipulate adult “internalized narratives” to create support for the type of education reforms that fit Dewey’s template or those laid out in the Learning Society report. “The goal is to produce a powerful story of education with built-in strategic subplots that can reorient and restructure how Americans think” certainly meets my personal definition of an explicit confession. Who gets to determine what Americans are to think beyond the personnel of all those foundations that pay no taxes while they advocate for collectivism for the rest of us? The report says it is “progressive educators and experts.” Like those educated by Professor Bruner or those seeking the next public or foundation grant, promotion, or consulting contract, and shilling as needed?

It’s not just education, climate change is another area where there is a conflict-ridden insistence that the public accept blindly the ‘framing’ that the ‘experts’ put forward. In both areas we find well-funded think tanks trying to determine how to alter “the dominant patterns of reasoning employed by the public” as if the US were now the Soviet Union and the think tanks had the role of Pravda. There is nothing quite like reading about a bolded “Gaps in Understanding between experts and ordinary Americans [those without Ed.D’s or degrees in public policy, sociology or anthropology, for example]–features that bring into relief the specific locations where translation is needed if expert knowledge is to become accessible to the public in understanding and reasoning about assessment, learning spaces and times, disparities, and the goal of education.”

Now I have mentioned the omission of cites to Uncle Karl in these particular reports even though the Learning Society report does admit to using the concepts of sociology, anthropology, and work with primates as metaphors for what it seeks to experiment with. Theory in Practice and let’s see what happens. My point is that the social science concepts there and the repeated mentions of deferring to experts in these other reports bring in all the tenets of these notorious collectivist political theories and the psychological and cultural research that was carried on in the Soviet Union into our children’s classrooms.Without openly admitting that crucial fact.

What’s the real support? Deferring to expert ‘knowledge’ that is actually nothing but desired theories created to enable social, political, and economic transformations in the future. If our degreed experts do not know that, the creators of the theories trying to gain implementation as ‘expert knowledge to be deferred to’ were more than explicit about what they had in mind. How does that Deferral work beyond school boards being trained to lay down to the whims of the ‘professionals’ in charge of the school districts as schools? We get Frameworks providing “Redirections, research-based recommendations that comprise the Core Story of Education, and represent promising routes for improving public understanding of learning, education and education reform.”

Prevailing cultural models and patterns really are explicitly laid out as the “challenges that the prescriptive reframing research must address.” At least when you put on glasses or put in contacts, you know they are there and how and why your vision is being prescriptively reframed. That kind of open reframing is not what is being ‘prescribed.’ Hence my hauling out the terms stealth, surreptitious, and, honestly, outright deceit, as so many connected insiders (just read the list of who support the Frameworks Institute) seek to alter how “most American make sense of new information.” They could use the motto that Reframing is not just for students or the new AP History courses anymore. It’s apparently been deemed to be a matter of 21st Century citizenship.

I want to close with a couple of the ideological doozies sold as Gaps in Understanding that are non-compliant with what experts know. “Experts understand disparities [among individuals] as a collective concern–because equal opportunity is a moral imperative.” That’s not a matter of ‘knowledge’. It’s a matter of political preference pretending to be knowledge and ignoring the realities that created those disparities. Likewise, “for experts, learning is a process of interaction” is a euphemistic way to describe education under Uncle Karl’s political and social theories and the cultural models they have inspired. Being accurate would require admitting that under the theory of dialectical materialism, education needs to be a process of personal interaction with other people and the environment. That interaction, in turn, creates the desired changes, both internally within the mind and externally within the surrounding physical world, that may enable the desired broader transformations.

Being honest as usual would impede any chance of experimenting with the future on a massive scale involving most of our collective existence. So instead we are told deceitfully we must defer to the ‘experts’.

Who frequently know far less about what is actually meaningful than we ordinary Americans.



60 thoughts on “Stealth Prescriptive Reframing Installs the Progressive Collectivist Vision Masked as Deferring to ‘Experts’

  1. Even if one finds a school that is not bending to common core pressures, aren’t college entrance exams now testing based on these standards and wont our kids be hindered in some way?

    • Absolutely Elizabeth. The way out is for this to be properly understood as the political coup it is. The ACT and SAT need to be recognized as looking to see what strategies and concepts your child uses when there is no right answer and scored on whether the kid is thinking ideologically, not rationally.

      This country is not David Coleman’s to divvy up or ETS’ or any of those foundations or your local overpaid and undereducated school district super and his or her band of tricksters intent on being well paid for practicing theories on human minds. Honestly this is nothing short of a psychological Auschwitz experiment and it needs to be understood that way.

        • Thanks Nimbus. College and Career Readiness–the ultimate goal of the Common Core Standards–could also be described as Adult Competencies for life, the workplace, and a fulfilling personal life. That fits with the intentions I have going back decades and when I read what is desired I have often thought CCR is just a more illustrious phrasing of what is actually a low behavioral bar. What Pimental creates there for the federal DoED marries into the Perkins Act takeover of high school I have warned about and fits with the adult education obligations of WIOA.

          That is an excellent document marrying and acting as a bridge of all the things I have been warning about. Thanks for that direct link. There used to be videos of Sue on the Hunt Institute site describing how close reading is to work under the Common Core. Watching those videos years ago left me with the creeps about where this was all going and the lucrative smugness surrounding it all.

  2. I have a general question. I read your book twice. It is very good. I don’t doubt the history of these ideas or what they are as they are advocated for in print by their advocates all over the place, especially the Internet.

    How do you answer the following kinda hostile question?

    You say X is in common core. Show me where in the CC official document it is. Or show me where in some regs implementing CC it is. If this exists in the head of someone with an Ed.D. degree and the education schools then you can’t blame the common core.

    I don’t expect a detailed specific answer. I just wonder how much of this ed BS is in black letter ‘law’ and how much is just in the mushy heads of its true believers.

    • eclectic-this is all in the required implementation or in the theory behind the planned assessments or the rationale for the changed practices or the purpose of adaptive learning. If the measurements of effective teaching for example that are issued in conjunction with the common core by a coordinating group insist there must be a certain type of interaction in the classroom or a teacher’s contract will not be renewed, that is a common core requirement. Especially when the federal government in its NCLB waivers insists that teachers must be rated on effectiveness and that effectiveness is determined by Student Growth. And Growth must be something accessible to all children like social and emotional learning or using applied concepts.

      I wish this was just in the heads of mushy believers, but it is in the adaptive software and the accreditation standards and the Learning Standards and the “in the cloud” prescribed activities. If the authorities that can bind the classroom require it and Common Core is the excuse obscuring the true nature of the shift, it is a mistake to insist that it’s not part of CC because neither the CCSSO nor the NGA issued the standards. They did not issue the 21st Century skills either, but they sure have actively coordinated with P21 and GELP and others.

      I have a lot of sources. Far more than I mnetion in the blog or book because I am researching my second book. What arrived yesterday has to do with assessments and is from the late 90s when what is now being required was still just an admitted learning theory that would create measurements that were more fair and satisfied goals of Equity. On board it turns out were people from Harvard Law and the Kennedy school of Govt to work with new kinds of assessments. Only makes sense if this time the public policies will be legally required. Remember Goodwin Liu from this alarming post?

      The lawyer too radical to get confirmed by a Democratic Senate who has now gone back to California where he serves on their Supreme Court turns out to be listed in the Preface thanks as having been at the US Department of Ed in 2000 and is involved with the creation of new kinds of assessments. Doesn’t that fact put an even more troubling spin on his call in that 2005 Yale Law Journal article on national education standards to get to the desired socially just, affirmative rights polity. He was also involved in the progressive federalism, new kind of Constitution by 2020 conference in 2005.

      And he was a lawyer involved with alternative assessments of internal mental processes prior to that. Chilling to me. Progressive polyphonic federalism comes in under the banner of the Common Core. It’s what Liu advocated for. Why wouldn’t his proclaimed purposes be relevant?

      Or Lauren Resnick’s or Linda Darling -Hammond when they are abroad and doing work in 2012 for the OECD. Hint: East Europeans are truly terrible about honoring Do Not Copy even if it is on every page for 200 pages.

      I really do have an astonishing collection of corroboration at this point, especially on how CC fits with what is going on globally and past reforms across countries.


    I would really like to see how these two fit together in OR. Who is following the agenda and heading it up here. They want to use equity as the excuse for transformation. Friday’s hearing had someone quoting Yong Zhao that America has the better education system because we teach social skills before academics and not the other way around. I needed a walk after that hearing.

    • That Mead quote is so stupid since you can only teach students how to think via providing them with the concepts and underlying principles with which to think. How is that not telling them what to think? Especially when assessment is looking for the strategies and concepts used.

      Margaret knew that well. She and Gregory Bateson were involved going back to the 60s in cybernetics research globally, working with the Soviets and Eastern Europeans and profs in the West as if there was no Cold War. IIRC she was also part of the Commission on the Year 2000.

      Interestingly around 2000, the US profs and Willam & Black who coined the term formative assessments in those papers for the OECD linked to in the book were still describing the same concept as classroom assessments. Basically that is what that brochure describes as well. Texas in their High Performance Schools Consortium are doing something quite similar. The most sel and constructivist peering into the minds is getting done at the local level, but the tasks and analysis are parameters agreed to far beyond any classroom or individual school. The local simply masks the level of intended manipulation. Teachers of course have no choice unless they are willing to find another profession. Hence the stripping of tenure.

        • It’s not just Ga. It’s Fulton County Schools, that illustrious conversion charter district that is part of the League of Innovative Schools and EdLeader 21. Remember in the book my comment that I know so much because the mafia from Charlotte- Meck, Green Dot, and Fla Virtual Schools with grants from the Spencer Foundation and this one from the state on top of the state paying for competency piloting have all descended on this district?

          Yes, your link is about where I live. Fulton’s school board is doing at least two presentations at the NSBA convention in Nashville so other districts can model laying in a prone position muttering “robert would never lie to us” while children’s futures are compromised. The model board. After all, how dare children benefit from having well-educated parents who bought what the Super called ‘extravagant homes’ in a newspaper interview.

          Yes, every suburb should emulate Fulton and if we become the next Columbine, the deceitful dolts will moan about how no one could have foreseen how using the same practices, with a similar population, might have comparable results.

          • So I would be correct in assuming that nwea measuring student growth has nothing to do with academics and everything to do with conforming attitudes and behaviors.?

          • I replied to you last night, but it got lost. If concepts understood experientially and emotionally count, then yes there is academics, but it’s not in the traditional textbook sense at all. Another reason to go digital ASAP and then pretend the textbook online is what is being used. To build on your question as well as eclectic’s, the Whole Child component is being incorporated into the Common Core implementation through Response to Intervention under IDEA, bullying initiatives, and the Positive School Climate mandates.

            Long time readers probably remember this early post but this recognition was why I put the book manuscript aside and started this blog. My concern over all the aspects that were binding, invisible, and coming into schools and classrooms under the obscuring label of the Common Core. ILN and CCSSO have confirmed that the documents explained in Chapter 7 as I compared what was coming vs what was expected are to guide the Competency push as well. CC is fulfilling its purpose of switching the nature of all assessments and making content about student performance goals and not a body of knowledge.

            As Jane describes below and you have experienced, parents can subvert this in large part if they understand this. Not wanting to understand it is dangerous given the mental and personality social engineering involved. If we read Growth and Achievement as change in values, attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors, just like learning, we will have the accurate sense of the switch.

          • This is the program for the NASBE/CCSSO policy meeting in DC starting today.

            Page 3 has the 2 co-sponsors of WIOA–Dem Patty Murray of Wash State and Rep Johnny Isakson of GA speaking on Strengthening the State-Federal Partnership to Promote Equity. Told you it impacted K-12 and was about creating a concept of economic justice citizenship.

            Also there is a rep there from the Ga State Bd and from California and from the New America Foundation speaking on on how to assess Career Readiness. It continues our concern on the extent to which Ga truly is cutting edge in piloting bad education ideas as long as it brings grant money into public coffers.

  4. Excellent article that particularly showcases the troublesome rejection of parents’ goals for their children’s education. In professional development classes I take the general consensus of other teachers is that parents are morons and need the schools and their “experts” to tell them what their children need. Screw that. I am a public school teacher, but thanks to you, Robin I am becoming the most subversive educator ever. I have just started down this road, but it is going well. My students were discussing the book “The Moffats “, and were wondering how an ice cream cone was only a dime. I gave them a brief overview of the federal reserve and its effect on pricing. A student spontaneously called out: ” Yeah….and income tax!”. Yay!

    • Welcome to ISC Jane. I remember that book from my middle child. She loved it. So glad your students have you during this difficult time as parents have no idea what is really going on and still believe assessments are tests.

      I love it when an educator parrots the argument that we parents just want everything done as it was when we were kids. No, but we do have some idea what it takes to cross the finish line of having an Axemaker Mind. I have always made my living as an adult understanding aspects of industries and companies no one actually confessed to me. I know it takes a large arsenal of facts to do that. Not concepts or strategies or supplied underlying principles. I figured those out from the facts.

      Your comments and knowing that my research is helping in actual classrooms made my morning. Your students are quite lucky. I hope the parents appreciate you too.

      • Jane:
        Oops. Left something out.

        From 1965 to 2011 US food prices rose around 5x. I don’t have current data for 2014. In terms of current food buying power I guess you could argue the currency has only been debased by a factor of 5??? So, a 1964 dollar is now worth 20 cents based on food or maybe 7 cents based on silver.

        If you bought 1000 dimes in 1964 for $100 and sold them today for $1,400 the IRS would say the value increased 14x or 1,400 % and you made a profit of 1,400 – 100 = $1,300 and tax you on that.

        If you bought $100 worth of food in 1964 and sold it for $500 today the IRS would say the value increased by 5X or 500% and you made a profit of 500 – 100 = $400 and tax you on that.

        • And if you’d bought Twinkies you could still eat them.

          I’ve been monitoring Pringles for the last three years. (Don’t ask, but it’s what I use) Prince used to be $1 a can at WalMart. Now going for about 1.75 (price varies per week). Just like unemployment, if you don’t like where the number is going, change how it’s calculated.

    • Jane:
      I like the ice cream story. Here is a ‘story problem.’
      Before 1965 US dimes contained silver and were worth $0.10 at the time.
      After 1965 US dimes contained copper and nickel but no silver. Let’s say you find a 1964 dime behind the seat of an old car. It is old, beat up and is not a collectible coin. It is called “junk silver” for those reasons. This dime is now worth $1.40.

      How much has the US debased the currency from 1964 until now?

      David Stockman’s _The Great Deformation_ was hard to put down. It is full of contrarian and sharp tongued US history.

      • LL-I have mentioned how Fulton only uses the terms Humanities and STEM. Schoolwork that guides perception of how you see yourself and others (Humanities) and how you see the world (STEM). This is also what was really going on with integrated math, but parents were lied to to obscure the nature of the shift.

        I still do not have a lot of energy, which means I read even more than is typical. There was a 1962 book cited in the 1967 Columbia Dean’s book I mentioned and quoted from in this post. I read it yesterday and one of the interesting things it built on was the intended use of subjects. I also discovered that what we call systems thinking now was also to be prescribed, but in the early 60s it was being called ‘natural history’. Also described Carnegie funding a Citizenship Education Project based at Columbia Teachers College in the 50s. Sounds just like the view of citizenship in that recent ECS/State Farm framework I wrote about.

        The early 60s stuff is always fascinating because they do not yet know it will not work out as desired so they are not being subtle at all. It’s also not yet resentful that the plans did not come to fruition.

    • Oh. My Word. is just out from UNESCO on Global Citizenship. It’s about 4 minutes. “Some people had more than they needed.”

      “What caused the Great Shift?” ask the African youths of the elder in 2030. Starts with bombing footage from WW2 and then a most alarming woman as UNESCO is being founded. Should have shown Julius Huxley instead so we could talk about this vision along with brother Aldous’ Brave New World.

      I need a drink after that. Guess I will make Ginger Tea instead.

        • Between that voice and that hat pin, it plays right into the quotes from Julian Huxley and Brameld I have in my book.

          Funny how in 2030 no one is worried about ISIS or all the other things currently threatening peace in the world. It’s the West that needs new mindsets and different values.

          • This Pearson statement on efficacy is so alarming when you really understand what is meant by learner outcomes.

            By the way, I can now tie these new types of assessments and the desired restructuring of the mind and why Finland has dropped subject content and gone directly to topics instead to the 1991 Learning Society vision and the desired social, economic, and political transformations towards collectivism that I covered in the previous post. Serendipitously as I was working on the new types of assessment and moving a post it note in the bibliography as I looked up citations I discovered that in 1991 Howard Gardner was the last name cited on creating the new types of assessment. I had already nailed him down as involved with the Human Development Project that created that Learning Society report at the same time.

            I have also discovered that the always radical Institute for Policy Studies produced a 1986 book laying out a very similar post capitalism and state socialism vision to what I described in the book as what Harlan Cleveland was involved with at the same time. As I keep warning, the evidence for what I warn about in the book just keeps increasing. That’s to be expected since I was and am on the correct track, but all this evidence also makes me sad as I read it.

          • UNESCO has used the term Learning Society pretty consistently for its vision going back to the Faure report from 1972.

            Swede Torsten Husen, who founded IEA (TIMSS and PIRLS) with Benjamin Bloom to use international assessments to drive global ed reforms in the desired direction, named his 1974 book with that same title. I have that too as well as his 87 book The Learning Society Revisited and then there is the 91 CIAR report from 91 I wrote about. They are all consistent with getting rid of subject matter transmission of knowledge. Fits also with the Goodlad vision described in the book, which makes sense given his involvement with UNESCO in the 70s as well.

            Whether Finland is currently using the term, everything they are doing fits with the LS model, which means it is also the Human Devt Model.

        • L.L.-

          That Womb to Tomb report by Anita Hoge is solid. She has been on the front lines of this coup via assessments/data collection, since the early 90’s. She chooses to fight against this take over via political channels. Most recently in PA she confronted the Governor about the illegal data collection of PA students non- cognitive, affective domaine ( SEL ) information. The data bases were subsequently ( illegally? ) wiped clean. The collection via testing remains in place however. I believe she has reached the Federal level of appeals at this point.

          She details her own process here.

          • is about Strive in particular but if you look at second page you will see among the jigsaw pieces to be joined school on the left side and health on the Right. Both are regarded as essential components of making subjective well-being the purpose of governments at all levels in the 21st century.

            Plan is to cover it in today’s post as long as my energy holds out. No wonder they want collaboration and working as teams as an essential skill and communication as in agreeing to a common vision and resolution as another one of 21st century learning 4 C’s.

          • From the kink above
            “Over the next several years, California’s roughly 1,000 school districts will transition to the NGSS, tossing out standards from 1998 that focused more on textbook learning.”

            Isn’t that special. How are the students going to pass the Chemistry AP class? Even if they dumbed down the Chemistry AP how can they pass college chemistry classes requiring a knowledge of chemistry? I realize only higher achieving students take the Chemistry AP (and others) but they/their parents will find some way to actually learn chemistry.

            I wonder if students of high achieving parents in Silicon Valley will be taught this way? I can see lots of parents, especially new Chinese and Indian immigrants going batshit crazy if their kids are taught this way.

          • I just finished the raskin book and in the concluding chapter he is aligning himself with the point that Babeuf made so long ago that I described in my book. Raskin says we must “formulate a lived political practice that begins from circumscribing the limits of what is known. (my bolding).”

            On the next page he mentions devising “a scientific method linked to ethics.” Quite a reason to make education about “lived experience” centered around the Whole Child. It also explains the constant determination to force the desired social and emotional learning as part of a required Positive School Climate. It also fits with judging the effectiveness of principals by whether they create Communities of Learners where students and teachers learn to collaborate and learn to see themselves primarily in terms of belonging to groups.

            As Raskin winds toward the last page he states that “each step of the way there will be a great struggle to bring the purpose of equity into lived reality”. Think of how often Equity is being pushed now in education. In Georgia Excellence and Equity are now the point of all schools per a joint edict of the Ga School Bd Association in tandem with the State School Superintendants Assoc.

            Obama and Arne Duncan created a federal commission with same name trying to make this all an obligation in education under civil rights laws without either amending the statute or asking a judge to interpret it that way. Executive action.

            No wonder since Raskin goes on to say “and no matter if we think otherwise–or wish otherwise–the fears and interests of many hold to the comforts of class. People are not prepared to surrender their present comforts or those knowledges which helped them achieve such comforts either for the protection of humanity, the building of a world civilization–let alone egalitarian interdependence.”

            There’s your admission that the Mind Arson is regarded as necessary. Also the deep resentment that some live better than others because they no more of what the world has traditionally valued. No wonder their children are considered fair game for psychological manipulation by the school. It’s not equitable that the parents read to them regularly or that mom has a huge vocabulary. If we cannot get at mom, we can at least get rid of tracking so that the student’s large vocabulary from all that reading and personal contact becomes available to everyone else in the classroom.

            eclectic-the parents have to know there is a problem and that AP is largely group projects now. I was talking to a high school teacher about a week ago and she said many parents just see the grades and have no idea that a few students do most of the work. They become insanely strong, but others ride on their work and share the grade. Parents do not get the tip-off that their child may actually be a very weak writer or may be only learning chemistry ‘concepts’ now and not a traditional body of knowledge. There is an idea being pushed that physicians, for example. in the future can just query a Watson type computer database instead of actually knowing chemistry as in the past.


            Let me rewrite this:
            People are not prepared to surrender those knowledges which helped us achieve such comforts.

            Two titles from memory come to mind: The New Left:The Anti-Industrial Revolution, and The Return of the Primitive.

            I thought AP classes just prepared you for the AP test which got you college credit in some places if you passed it. I know nothing of the AP stuff frankly. If some kids learn nothing but can’t pass the test then what happens?

          • Nothing. The scores come back after grading period has already closed, usually late June.

            All of my kids actually like AP classes and greatly prefer AP to IB. The AP courses are being reworked. If I remember right the first science to be redone was biology to make it more concept oriented. These were being shifted before David Coleman got there. I know that most of the classmates are not getting the 4s or 5s necessary to earn college credit.

            My college kid is more aware of the shifts from comparing her experiences to her sister’s. She has also seen others’ written work before it was rewritten by others. In an email world it will become apparent who cannot write well and opportunities will be lost. Parents may never know their children’s inability to communicate well in print is keeping them down because all the group work and multimedia projects mean you can have good grades, degrees, and still be unable to write well.

            There are doors that close more or less permanently and right now with an attempt being made to obscure the consequences of being a weak reader or a poor writer, those doors can close.

            My college kid is the one who has said the parents would be quite upset if they had any idea how weak there kids’ writing is. She has also said the weak readers and writers migrate to certain coursework in college so they do not get stronger and they avoid the pernicious effects for a while. Then they will be the young adults wondering why they are a barista.

        • They sure did. It was a doozy. I would have thought it was more stable, but UNESCO must not like people who can accurately interpret what is planned.

          • Just wanted to add my two cents re AP. My 17 year old is in AP bio now which is all concepts, all climate change brainwashing. Its pretty bad. Group projects abound. And she has told me that she is one of the students who does the work for the group so that they get an an A. And yes she writes Everything because the other students either cannot write well, organize their work well, or don’t care because they know someone else will do it all for them.

            AP US history will be a wild card as far as testing is concerned. My daughter has an old school history teacher who loves the subject and teaches them facts and reality. I know the teacher is worried about the AP test because it is brand new this spring and no one has seen it.

            I hope my kid does well but frankly I’m not holding my breath. She knows facts and reality not expected attitudes.

  5. “Global citizenship”????
    ‘Citizens’ of an entity are ruled by it and have taxes collected by it. Who wants a world govt where you can’t escape to another jurisdiction that is different?

    Does a ‘just’ society mean we have to invade the Middle East again and force our form of justice on them or the other way around? What if the Russians and Chinese have other ideas? What size burka do you want to wear?

    I wonder how much industry was even consulted on what they want to hire in the future in Finland? Not much I’ll bet. How come the people in the US touting Science, Technology, Engineering, (Arts) and Math never seem to know much about these subjects or come from these backgrounds?

    If the SAT and ACT are changed to test for X I always assume that the best and the brightest, the new ruling class, will always figure out how to do well on the test.

    I am still skeptical that the Russians, Chinese, and others will destroy their math, engineering and science teaching.

    • I too am suspicious of that and always remember that both countries make extensive use of boarding schools for that very purpose. The 1980 special edition of Educational Leadership that contained the US-Soviet comparison and the Isaac Wirszup interview on the creation of Everyday Math based on Soviet ideas they were using with the typical, non-brilliant students (in Chapter 3 of my book) laid out that they were still creaming those students. In the US, which must change its political, social, and economic structures away from individualism to what IPS calls the mandate of caring for the Other based on Equity, those strong students must be stopped because they can perceive when they are being lied to or when the analogy provided is a false one.

      This is a paper from 2000 back when Richard Riley was still Ed Sec asking the troubling question “How much Literacy is Enough?”. It’s also a useful discussion of performance standards.

  6. Cannot reply to that thread any longer. There is certainly something there with NWEA. Guess a search of their roots is in order, unless you have gotten there already.

    • It fits with the vision David Conley laid out more than 20 years ago in his Roadmap to Restructuring.

      I am in one of my “How Can I turn this into English” modes to make it accessible to people who have not read all the books I have. The good news once again is how closely it all still dovetails with the way I explain Learning Progressions in the book and the role of tasks. The same search also pulled up the Shell Centre I talked about in the book.

      It also all implicates much research I did for the book involving the College Board’s 1990s pushes. There was a program they have tried to sweep under the rug called PACESetter that is in fact back in the SpringBoard curriculum CB has created. When I say sweep I mean that a 92 book states clearly that PACE stands for Performance Assessment Collaboratives for Education and describes how it should work. I located the author’s cv and she now says that PACE stood for Projects in Active Cultural Engagement. Both are interesting. This was yet another one of those used books that smelled musty when I first got it and read it, almost 4 years ago as I was researching the book. I went looking for the book this morning remembering the research and my concerns over language used that caused me to look into Dennie Palmer Wolf’s background. I was guessing the D. Wolf on the 91 paper was probably her and I remembered she had worked with Howard Gardner.

      Interestingly Wolf, at the time of the original research a few years ago, was involved with the Governing Board for NAEP.

      • Ugh… It so gross how they intermix all of their research and papers. Notice the push pull talk about equity. Does the equity thing have more to do with the class warfare or just that they want no differences in people? I get that children of affluent parents have a target on them, but what if dad works two jobs to pay for that education and the family is really middle class? I suppose it does not matter, the level must be the same for all.

        I recall a pacesetter program for Aurora Co. perhaps it is not the same thing.

        • I am still working on the IPS book. I am interspersing chapters of it with the book on assessments. Doesn’t that article give you a better idea of why Coleman went to the College Board?

        • I don’t think it s unrelated. This is from the High School New Standards Project participation list.

          It shows Dennie Palmer Wolf as involved and Harrison and Eaglecrest Highs in Aurora.

          Even more troublingly, perhaps, it shows Fort Worth ISD as heavily involved with the NSP. Plus a Victoria Young from the TEA. It appears to me also that Georgia’s Performance Standards were straight out of NSP with suburban high schools fighting to continue the transmission emphasis and the true nature of the shift obscured by all the deceit and the massive amounts of graft surrounding the integrated math component.

          Now it turns out that the NCEE, created with Carnegie funding and arising out of the 1985 agreements between the US and the Soviet Union, that Charlotte Iserbyt has covered so well at Deliberate Dumbing Down was running the NSP out of the University of Calif system, which explains why the Dana Center used to be at Berkeley. NCEE had a field office in Ft Worth and Ft Worth is also where the Applied Learning components were created and piloted. Looks just like 21st Century or Project Based Learning.

          • i am always trying to find out where the mushy thinking runs into reality.

            So, students take AP classes in their senior year with high grades and group hugs all around. They get HS credit for this I assume. Then they fail the AP tests in summer after HS and get no college credit? Or does this happen in Junior year of HS? Don’t parents AND students get upset when they do not get college credit?

            I imagine (guess?) that the next step would be to dumb down the AP tests but don’t the college subject area professors have lots of say there? i am very ignorant in this area.

  7. One more question. I assume you can get AP credit just for passing the test, right? You don’t have to take a HS class in that AP subject, right?

    • Parents do not know why the scores are so low and if you do get a 4 or 5 my recommendation would be to keep it to yourself. Yes, you do still get high school credit even though you get a 1 or 2 on test. I have noticed the high school no longer recognizes the various categories of AP Scholar so I am guessing that it is participation they like to hype. I know it is taking the class that Ga’s NCLB waiver encourages. It doesn’t care if most get no credit. Remember when I talked about distributed intelligence in the book? Having an untracked AP class gets access to the life experiences and vocabulary and reasoning processes of those strong students.

      One of the criteria of the Race to the Top app was to get the state college and university system to agree to not complain about graduates of high schools using the Common Core so any complaints of profs in the future should be kept to themselves because the admins are on board with all this.

      Lots of people will take the AP English exams just from reading the books without taking that class. Few do it successfully. You would have to pay the $85 or so yourself. College Board is a most lucrative nonprofit.

      • At a board meetings toward the start of the school year a math instructor scolded the board for sending student to local colleges and community colleges unprepared. At one point out H.S. had made Ds passing in order to not fail most of the jr. Class.
        My oldest is a jr. And in advanced trigonometry and has some A/P classes. He says there seems to be a consensus of disdain for students who excell by some teachers. Others feel they must instruct in secret. His chemistry teacher is completely disgusted.
        The boardd is incompetent and teachers will rebel soon.

  8. I was surfing the web and found this info on the AP test.
    It breaks things out by state and by subject.
    Interesting. The difference between MN and GA in the physics scores was interesting. GA better scores.

    Chemistry seem to be 35% 4s or 5s overall. Computer science 50%.

    On the subject report it tracks score numbers and distributions over time for US.

    If they were able to dumb down the AP tests it might show up favorably here but not show up negative until college. i am not saying the tests were ever dumbed down, just pointing out a way to game the system and where it would show up.

  9. Arrgh. This was in the Sunday paper in Mpls.
    The opinion piece by a local person took up almost an entire page including artwork.
    An of-the-moment idea: ‘Equity’
    Article by: DANE SMITH Updated: March 27, 2015 – 7:18 PM
    In the stew of terminology that describes our problems and their solutions, that one word in particular is rising to prominence.

    Also, you said:

    How does this work? How do you muzzle math profs?

    • The gag order as I always called it that the USG issued at the time of the PRISM grant when it took $33.4 million to pilot what would become the integrated math vision for the Common Core made a statement about being able to consider support in tenure, promotion, etc decisions. Basically it translated to the only profs who could speak out against the new standards would be a full tenured prof who never wanted another promotion. Otherwise you can be openly supportive or quiet.

      I have an exact copy of the language and read it as a gag order and over several years profs quietly said to me that I was correct, but their necks were on the line if they said publicly what pressure they were under. Meanwhile the Atlanta paper ed reporter and politicians and admins would tout the fact that “you don’t hear anyone from Ga Tech complaining about these new standards.”

      Very similar to the arguments now that the teachers support the Common Core and so parents should go along. No mention of the threats of taking away teaching license and not renewing contracts if teachers are vocal in their opposition.

      • Sounds eerily like the scientists who were told to either shut up or put up with the global warming phenomenon. And if they complained, they wouldn’t have their scholarly papers published, etc.

        • Well both frequently involve grants from the same federal agencies such as the National Science Foundation, which was behind the constructivist MSP–Math and Science Partnership.

          Most people are unaware just how much of the ‘science’ funding is actually coming out of the behavioral sciences research.

          Figuring out what was actually going on with the integrated math, the MSPs, the significance of the Learning Frameworks created with NSF funding back in 1995 in what was called GIMS–Ga Initiative in Math & Science (using those same frameworks was specified as a prerequisite for any local school district participating in Race to the Top) etc is what started me down the path that led to this blog and my book).

      • Sorry for all the questions but I am confused.

        What is USG? PRISM?

        So, there was some contract signed by a university receiving some govt money that said WHO could consider WHAT when granting tenure? What does ‘support’ mean?

        Race to the top is over, right? So there is language requiring use of ‘frameworks’ when being eligible race to the top money but no longer?

        If you get time sometime I would like to see the language posted for both the gag order and the race to top framework requirement. Maybe just the ‘meat’ of those parts with the background explained?

        It would be nice to see a confidential anonymous poll conducted among school teachers sometime. The official reason for opposing it would be??? If teachers unions cared more about kids they could conduct such a poll. If the union heads cared more about teachers they would as well.

        • University System of Ga manages all 35 public colleges and universities. I have a hard copy of the language, but it has been taken down since I wrote about it years ago.

          PRISM stood for Partnership to Reform Instruction in Science and Math. Lots of other states had comparable NSF partnerships among doctorate granting schools of engineering, schools of education, school districts, universities, and school districts themselves. The idea is to taint everything. In January 2009 there was an NSF conference in DC which talked about that gag order and had other state higher ed governing groups wishing they could get something comparable in their states. The PI was crowing about how it’s hard to get money for a hard science lab, but easy to get $500 K for a prof willing to advocate for inquiry-oriented, conceptual math and science.

          Something else I have a hard copy of. The ed reporter was playing her typical role of shilling for the Radical Ed Reform vision and I backed up my point with a link to the document where I had found it on a server at the KY School of Ed. The prof had been at that same meeting. It was off that KY server within the hour. I call it the smoking bazooka confession with the person still holding the gun when they are caught.

          I found it because I was tracking what the original PRISM PI, Jan Kettlewell, had been pushing within the last 6 months. Tracking people who are aggressively ideological is a good way to find troubling policies. Kettlewell has since retired, but she was an effusive John Goodlad supporter back when she was Dean of the Uof Miami Ed School. It was part of his National Network for Educational Renewal. I write about Goodlad a lot in the book

      • From what I understand:
        1. Switzerland has a weak central govt with most decisions made at the level of the cantons.

        2. Most Swiss do not even know the name of their president!!! ???

        3. They use apprenticeship in LOTS of jobs instead of college degrees. This includes banking and white collar jobs???

        4. Europe and most of the world separates students into tracks similar to university and tech schools around 8th grade. Better to graduate an auto mechanic than drop out of college track courses. I knew a Czech woman who was tracked into tech and graduated similar to an LPN from HS. If any nurses want to squawk about this remember that a college degree is not required for medical school entrance in some of the world.

        5. I don’t think the Swiss are going to destroy their successful model.

        6. I don’t think the US is going to adopt the successful Swiss model. They don’t mean career ready when they say career ready.

        7. If any US educators tout the Swiss they are likely doing bait and switch. I.e. “The Swiss have a successful model so adopt common core instead.”

Leave a Reply to Robin Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.