Educational CyberPlayGround ®

K12 Department of Education story is a political narrative that defines our culture.

Actually It's all about the Story You Tell Yourself

K12 Education Redesign

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American Mythologies: Creating, Recreating, and Resisting National Narratives.

Myths and narratives are constructed, reconstructed, and resisted not only through written texts but in every form of media and within every kind of community.

America has been and still is consistently defined and constituted through national myths and narratives.

It wasn't until 1918 that nationwide compulsory education was in place. The bureaucratic imperative is to turn education into a factory itself.

STEM

 

Google finds STEM skills aren't the most important skills By Lou Glazer Michigan Future Inc. January 5, 2018
This, of course, is consistent with the findings of the employer-led Partnership for 21st Century Learning who describe the foundation skills for worker success as the 4Cs: collaboration, communication, critical thinking and creativity. And the book Becoming Brilliant which adds to those four content and confidence for the 6Cs. And consistent with the work on the value of a liberal arts degree of journalist George Anders laid out in his book You Can Do Anything and in a Forbes article entitled That Useless Liberal Arts Degree Has Become Tech's Hottest Ticket.

The challenge of preparing students for college and, once they are there, finish June 8th, 2011

We talk with two experts in the field — THOMAS BAILEY of Columbia University's Teachers College and
JOSEPH MERLINO
, president of the 21st Century Partnership for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics)
The 21st Century Partnership for STEM Education
101 West Elm Street Suite 350 Conshohocken, PA 19428
Phone: 610.825.5644 info@21pstem.org

This is different P21 Partnership For 21st Century Learning www.p21.org

150 years ago, adults were incensed about child labor.

NATIONAL MYTHS:

IDENTIFY THE LIES
AND LIARS

The Educrats from Wall Street, University, Government NARRATIVE Story

Federal Department of Education NARRATIVE STORY SOUNDS LIKE THIS:

"public schools are dominated by self-interested unions, desperately in need of free-market shock treatment. If only enlightened capitalists could wrest control of the schools from the hidebound, unionized teachers, the schools' problems could be solved."

1918 The bureaucratic imperative is to turn education into a factory itself.

2011 If you do a job where someone tells you exactly what to do, they will find someone cheaper than you to do it.

Educrats Want Compliant Factory Workers Story

It wasn't until 1918 that nationwide compulsory education was in place.
Their plan was to trade short-term child labor wages for longer-term productivity by giving kids a head start in doing what they're told. Part of the rationale that sold this major transformation to industrialists was that educated kids would actually become more compliant and productive workers.
Low-wage kids were taking jobs away from hard-working adults. Our current system of teaching kids to sit in straight rows and obey instructions isn't a coincidence - it was an investment in our economic future. Large-scale education was never about teaching kids or creating scholars. It was invented to churn out adults who worked well within the system. As we get ready for the 93rd year of universal public education, are we going to continue the safe but ultimately doomed strategy of churning out predictable, testable and mediocre factory-workers?

1955 Milton Friedman made the case for school choice:
[School choice] would bring a healthy increase in the variety of educational institutions available and in competition among them. Private initiative and enterprise would quicken the pace of progress in this area as it has in so many others. Government would serve its proper function of improving the operation of the invisible hand without substituting the dead hand of bureaucracy.

1989 Charter Schools Appear
Charter schools are run by nonprofit organizations rather than the government; they are free of many state regulations; and they are usually not subject to collective bargaining agreements. Yet charters can claim that they are in fact public schools. Big-city school districts must spend a large share of their budget for employee health-care benefits and pensions, a problem charters have escaped thus far.

1990 Vouchers Programs appear and include:
tax credits, education savings accounts, or other intervention that provides government aid to students attending private schools.

The Assessment Folks say that
NCLB throttled invention and imagination!

From 1990 to 2008, the US economy added only 600,000 tradable jobs. Nobel-prize winning economist Michael Spence - ... there are tradable jobs (making things that could be made somewhere else, like building cars, designing chairs and answering the phone) and non-tradable jobs (like mowing the lawn or cooking burgers). And yet our schools are churning out kids who are stuck looking for jobs where the boss tells them exactly what to do.

2016 $100 billion for K-12 education.
The new money was to be spent over a two-year period, with some of it devoted to compensatory education or special education, the rest to district priorities. Federal aid to K-12 and preschool education jumped from $39 billion in 2008 to a high of $73 billion in fiscal year 2010 (0.49 percent of GDP). The following year, $66 billion in federal funding continued to flow. Much of the aid targeted urban districts with heavy concentrations of low-income and special-education populations. For two years, local school districts enjoyed a generous flow of federal cash.
Narrative - Federal regulation is dead.
Deregulation of "the commons" public schools that serve the common good of all the citizens is now a for profit business.
"In 2001, Bush persuaded Congress to pass a new law, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which created the nation's first reform-minded federal regulatory regime in education. When NCLB ran into trouble, Obama invented new ways of extending the top-down approach. Unfortunately, neither president came close to closing racial gaps or lifting student achievement to international levels. A new federal law, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), has unraveled most of the federal red tape. Although the mandate for student testing continues, the use of the tests is now a state and local matter."



The Federal Department of Education needs to be Redesigned and stop churning out millions of of workers who are trained to do 1925 labor.

DON'T LIVE SOMEONE ELSE'S LIFE ~ Steve Jobs college dropout

 

 


 

Story- Center on Education Policy


Center on Education Policy President Jack Jennings, doesn't think No Child Left Behind policy works either.
The four turnaround models, had not yielded much success among the schools, districts, and states. States have had a good deal of flexibility in trying to improve their lowest-performing schools, and have not delivered the results the Education Department would have liked to see even when they Cheat!

John Holt: "We teachers like to think that we can transplant our own mental models into the minds of children by means of explanations. It can't be done." - How Children Learn, Pitman, 1967

Is Congress smarter than a 5th-grader?
"How will our future get better if we educate kids about how to remember random facts, and how will No Child Left Behind help America's future?" asks Julia Skinner-Grant, a fifth-grader at Chevy Chase Elementary School in Montgomery County, Maryland. In a guest piece on the Answer Sheet blog in The Washington Post, Skinner-Grant, a special ed student, points out that had it been around, standardized testing would not have provided Benjamin Franklin with the information to save lives, or to experiment with, predict, and discover things and concepts we still use today. Moreover, he dropped out of school at 10. "No Child Left Behind takes the stress of testing and assumes that the more students are prepared for testing, the less anxious they will be. But what this actually does is lead students to believe that this test is far more important to their future than it actually is," Skinner-Grant says. Teachers, principals, and parents spend huge amounts of time prepping students, with the result that "the student feels as if they will let all these people down if they don't do well on the test and eventually this stress for everybody leads to the student becoming so emotional and anxious that they don't even have the ability to function properly for the test that they have been worrying about."

[ CEO Arne Duncan, now U.S. secretary of education says it doesn't work ]
Esther Wojcicki Take a look at the Chicago Public Schools, where former CEO Arne Duncan, now U.S. secretary of education, closed many schools. There's been little change in scores because students are being transferred to other low-performing schools. It hasn't worked because the community's attitude and level of support hasn't changed.

Sam Dillon education reporter for the NYT has been a cheerleader for Arne Duncan. He writes Race to the top propaganda ignoring race to the top bottom controversial ways in which Duncan's RTTT funds were awarded to a handful of states, to the push for privatization through charter schools, through the completely bankrupt attempt to foist merit pay on public school classrooms, or to the policies of "turnaround" which have succeeded in scapegoating inner city, mostly minority, teachers in the name of corporate "school reform."
$3.4 billion in Race to the Top (RTTT) funds. The District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio and Rhode Island have been named winners of second round RTTT awards. However, ED did not announce how much funding each winner would receive. Second round applicants that did not receive awards were: California, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Jersey and South Carolina.

Politicians and Policy makers have concluded that if teachers owe their jobs to professional performance, then tenure protections are obsolete. The state will phase out tenure. “It's practically impossible to remove an underperforming teacher under the system we have now”
Tenure laws were originally passed — New Jersey was first in 1909 — to protect teachers from being fired because of race, sex, political views or cronyism. Tenure laws “fair dismissal laws” that protect from arbitrary firing. What is to stop someone getting fired who is getting paid at the top of the scale first? Without a fair dismissal law, a principal can any teacher fired arbitrarily, without citing any reason.

Republicans are weakening public-sector unions. Republicans are proposing bills that would limit collective bargaining to wages and benefits, excluding education policy issues in several states. They are challenging the foundation of teacher unionism, collective bargaining and are pushing state legislatures to lift their caps on charters. Republican governors in Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Nevada and New Jersey have called for the elimination or dismantling of tenure. Anti-tenure bills are being written in those states and others.

A study by Mass Insight Education: Over 5,000 schools nationwide were designated to enter some form of restructuring by 2009-2010. Duncan's Charter Management Organizations (CMOs) don't turn schools around they don't handle failing schools or improvement programs, at or underperforming schools. According to New Schools Venture Fund, at the time of Duncan's speech, there were less than ten organizations engaged in turnaround work and there were no organizations. Their business model is start ups and operating at scale. They are not helping public schools. Clearly there is a significant gap between the industry's supply and the government's demand. Unqualified and ill-equipped companies clamoring to position themselves in the windfall of the 3.5 billion turnaround dollars.

Our schools are failing.
The only way to save them is to expand charters, remove due process for teachers so they can be fired, and further raise the stakes on standardized test scores. The Race To The Top Assessment Program is our moment to race into the 21st century with an updated understanding of how we learn, with data that matter, and with technologies that are poised to deliver fundamental changes in teaching, learning, and assessing. “the 50 hour rule”
procurement law

The Race To The Top and the states who will lead it are seeking to buy something that does not yet exist, something that has yet to be designed. We may therefore need a new kind of procurement that creates a space in which this kind of design can happen.
Collaboration between

  • private sector
  • public sector
  • research sector
  • and technology sector

Expand the boundaries of educational design. “the 50 hour rule,” which asserts that you need a team (of teachers, principals, scholars, administrators, designers, engineers, statisticians and user interface experts) to put in at least 50 hours shoulder-to-shoulder at the whiteboard defining the needs, shaping a vision, and prototyping solutions before you really understand the top toward which you could be racing and the path you want to take there. Collaborative design runs up against the procurement problem I raised during an earlier public meeting and that hangs over this whole process. The work one might do to generate ideas with a state might preclude one from doing further work should the state obtain federal funding and solicit bids.

Colbert v. Stewart: The Celebrity Death Match Over School Reform - Money is one of the equations of equality. Stewart, who hails from union-friendly New Jersey and whose mother was a public school teacher, has hosted Diane Ravitch, one of the teachers unions' most outspoken defenders and a staunch critic of charter schools.

Andrew J. Coulson:
"free and competitive markets are superior to state-run school systems in meeting the public's goals."

SHEEPLE ALERT:
these are just some of the stories that the EducRATS and Politicians tell to sell product - transfer money
from the common wealth to the private corporation.

  • "Students today can't prepare bark to calculate their problems. They depend upon their slates which are more expensive. What will they do when their slate is dropped and it breaks? They will be unable to write!" -Teachers Conference,1790
  • "Students today depend upon paper too much. They don't know how to write on slate without getting chalk dust all over themselves. They can't clean a slate properly. What will they do when they run out of paper?" -Principals Association, 1815
  • "Students today depend too much upon ink. They don't know how to use a pen knife to sharpen a pencil. Pen and ink will never replace the pencil!" -National Association of Teachers, 1907
  • "Students today depend upon store bought ink. They don't know how to make their own. When they run our of ink they will be unable to write words or ciphers until their next trip to the settlement. This is a sad commentary on modern education." -The Rural American Teacher, 1929
  • "Students today depend upon these expensive fountain pens. They can no longer write with a straight pen and nib (not to mention sharpening their own quills). We parents must not allow them to wallow in such luxury to the detriment of learning how to cope in the real business world, which is not so extravagant." -PTA Gazette,1941
  • "Ball point pens will be the ruin of education in our country. Students use these devices and then throw them away. The American virtues of thrift and frugality being discarded. Business and banks will never allow such expensive luxuries." -Federal Teacher, 1950
  • WLS radio debuted back in 1925.
    School Time
    was a groundbreaking educational program that began in 1937
    . Airing every weekday in the classroom, the program proved that radio could be used as an educational tool. Topics including current events, music appreciation, geography and business were broadcast to students in more than 1000 schools throughout the four-state area.
  • The "television revolution" and educational marvels, programs like "Sesame Street" that will would bring poor students - who had been watching at home - to school already reading ... or ready to move forward and become readers and writers. The "Electric Circus" was going to wipe out adult illiteracy. The radio and television "revolutions" failed to materialize, that those 20th century educational technologies didn't live up to the rhetoric of the revolutionaries. In the 21st century when 30 students still sit in a 600-square foot classroom that the future belongs to the new technologies?

The old factory style of education using radios, television, computers, and internet into the old buildings and trying to incorporate them into the teaching routines of the old institution are destined for the same fate.

Now that the computer, and radio and television, are here, how can we rethink the ecology of education, so that the home, the library, the neighborhood center, the school, and the new technologies might become rearranged and reassigned and more successful in the work of teaching and learning?

How to continue fostering innovation after the initial design phase of the Assessment competition closes. Continued innovation is particularly challenging in light of the fact that neither the federal government nor a State is likely to have the resources to fund it fully. Nor should government be required to carry this burden alone. Rather, the Assessment program should create sufficient incentives for the business community to partner with government in making healthy, ongoing investments in innovation.
Although the Department need not prescribe a particular intellectual property scheme or business model to foster sustained innovation, it should reward creative solutions to this challenge. And it should do so with the knowledge that different models of intellectual property ownership will likely result in different consequences.

The EducRATS from Wall Street, University, Government Stories are used to market "reform" creating a customer-driven education system to buy education vendor products.

k12 Department of Education stories are used to market Vendor Products.

The "story" told is used to market the idea that new next thing, is better when is isn't better at all. Marketing the next new thing during each decade allows a product to be sold and a way for the politically appointed friends to make more money, when in reality there is no reason for this product to exist at all.

YOU CAN HANDLE THE TRUTH!

YOU
CAN HANDLE
THE TRUTH!

3 national studies that now show no discernible benefits for children attending charter campuses relative to their peers in regular public schools.

There is a very thin line
between an
Economist and a Criminal.

IDENTIFY THE EDUCATION LOBBIESTS PUSHING THE AGENDA TAKING YOUR MONEY !!!

"Official Policy"
rules the department of education


"value added"

Center For Education Policy

  • Virginia Edwards, Chairman Editor and Publisher, Education Week
  • Robin Willner, Vice Chairman Director, Corporate Community Relations, IBM
  • Joseph Aguerreberre President, National Board for Professional Teaching
  • Angela Covert Education Consultant, New York
  • Patricia Harvey Senior Fellow-State Initiatives, National Center on Education and the Economy/America's Choice, Inc. and Carmen Starkson Campbell Endowed Chair for Urban Education University of Minnesota
  • Arturo Pacheco, Ph.D. Director, Center for Research on Education Reform
  • Marla Ucelli Director, District Redesign, Annenberg Institute for School Reform
  • Jack Jennings President and CEO, Center on Education Policy

STANFORD
STORY TELLERS

Center for Education Policy Analysis

"Policy" code word for how to spend the tax payers money


Stanford University Eric Hanushek
(hanushek@stanford.edu) pioneering analysis measuring teacher quality through student achievement forms the basis for current research into the value-added of teachers and schools. He is chairman of the Executive Committee for the Texas Schools Project at the University of Texas at Dallas, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a member of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education.

See Scam Researchers at Rice University and the University of Texas-Austin finds that Texas' public school accountability system, the model for the national No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), directly contributes to lower graduation rates. also see Lobbyist Andrea Avery and Education Industry Lobbyists 2010

THE TRUE FACTS
ABOUT TESTING AND ASSESSMENT

VS. "ADDED VALUE"

baloney

The people appointed to the Dept. of Ed are Salesmen with MBA's & PH.Ds they aren't educators. These people and the "eCONomists" make up these stories. - these stories make you believe you need these products because they claim to "add value".

Stanford University Mitchell Stevens (mitchell.stevens@stanford.edu) With funding from the |FINANCIAL LITERACY| Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Stevens is directing a project with Stanford colleague Michael Kirst to develop a more comprehensive "supply-side" social science of U.S. colleges and universities.

The Department of Education products are: race to the top, standards, assessment, tests, data, charter schools, online schools, virtual schools, teacher bonus, but they don't help anyone learn anything or teach anyone. There is no design plan to assess if it's actually working as advertised, and if it is, providing the support necessary to put it in place either locally or nationwide. It's just sales and business as usual.

DID YOU REALIZE

CHARTER SCHOOLS

SELL HOUSES

Charter legislation often stipulates that only local, non-profit groups are eligible. Developers know that most people who buy upscale like the sound of "charter school." So they create a non-profit organization to get the charter, then the organization hires a for-profit company to run the "McCharter"school with the same old standardized curriculum only to eventually sell them to the regular school system for a profit. They were in the school business not to experiment and innovate but to make money.

None of this is about good k12 educational curriculum design, it's only about the Department of Education 20th century industrial model that has to be dissolved or redesigned.

Commerce without Conscience

Lying is institutionalized.

If the President can lie, why shouldn't everyone? It's an epidemic. From Wall Street down to Main Street. The truth is for losers, and the connected ( Wall Street, University, Government ) they conspire to get away with it, and do.
Goldman Sachs Agrees to Pay More than $5 Billion in Connection with Its Sale of Residential Mortgage Backed Securities The Justice Department, along with federal and state partners, announced today a $5.06 billion settlement with Goldman Sachs related to Goldman's conduct in the packaging, securitization, marketing, sale and issuance of

|FINANCIAL LITERACY|
Years before Phil Gramm was a McCain campaign adviser and a lobbyist for the USB Swiss bank at the center of the housing credit crisis he pulled a sly maneuver in the Senate that helped create today's subprime meltdown.

President Reagan and his staff between 1981-1989 broke the unions and brought on deregulation. Law exists for two reasons, to take your money or your land. Corporations exist for one reason, to take your money. With no regulations and no oversight to protect the commons, the common wealth, or the people, the Church of Corporate Greed went wild.
Because of the swap-related provisions of Gramm's bill—which were supported by Fed chairman Alan Greenspan and Treasury secretary Larry Summers (who just left Obama in 2010 and went back to Harvard) a $62 trillion market (nearly four times the size of the entire US stock market) remained utterly unregulated, meaning no one made sure the banks and hedge funds had the assets to cover the losses they guaranteed.

2010 Mayor Richard Daley said about the Obama administration's signature education initiative, Race to the Top:
"You leave no child left behind. You race to the top. Next year, you race to the bottom. Next year, you race to the side. Everybody's racing to something. Why can't you send us money to build our schools. ... All the teachers know that these are just political slogans. We should end it."



Florida Republicans want to reduce support for college programs in Political Science and Psychology. They clearly don't want anyone analyzing what they're doing, or why.
AAA response to Rick Scott

 

THE FUTURE DESIGN of the Dept. of Ed

What do you want the future of Education to be in our lives?

What has value? What things bring meaning in your life.

" No Child Left Behind" is a scam and hurts us.