Using
the Common Cores Performance Assessments to
Create a New Kind of Person
any other countrys similar UNESCO
inspired shift to skills and attitudes
and desired personal dispositions were
to be accurately described as being
about shaping a kind or person or:
about creating a kind of person, with
kinds of dispositions and orientations
to the world, rather than simply
commanding a body of knowledge. These
persons will be able to navigate change
and diversity, learn-as-they-go, solve
problems, collaborate, and be flexible
and creative.
Such a future capacity general focus
for all students instead of fixed
content knowledge would not be
politically popular. Parents and
taxpayers and non-politically connected
future employers would likely rebel from
such Mind Arson via taxation and
tuition.
So of course the Parasitical Class of
too many professors and education
administrators and vendors who want both
their inflated salaries and pensions AND
political, social, and economic
Transformation simply lie to us about
what is really going on. Once a
controversy develops, we get new names
and severed parts but usually not real
changes in practices. So when the Future
Empowerment Paradigm associated with
Transformational Outcomes Based
Education and William Spady in the 90s
(described here http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/future-empowerment-paradigm-or-educentric-tradition-guess-which-began-its-reign-20-years-ago/
) became controversial, the critical
End Game of Life Role Performances got
severed. Keep the function. Change the
Name. Hire someone other than Spady.
Now it is very difficult for the
public to get their arms around just how
much scheming and looting and
psychological manipulation is going on
in this Change the Student Future
Capacity Template. When they hear terms
like Performance Standards they
automatically think solid academics at a
high level of expected expertise. When
they hear Performance Assessment, they
think testing that expects solid
academic achievement. They certainly do
not think of an education model doing
everything it can to take mental
activity out of the classroom. They
would be horrified to know performance
standards are all about creating desired
behaviors and attitudes in each student
at a reflexive level. No conscious
thought required.
When the school talks about ability
to access information or interpret or
produce or communicate, parents and
taxpayers assume these are desired
abilities within the context of a body
of knowledge. Not generic abilities with
real world value that are ALL that is
desired in the student. Just
life-functioning performance
abilities. That assessments are actually
all about:
Great care should be taken to
identify the exact action
that will be taught and assessed.
Action, not knowledge. Project or
activity, not tests. When we read
references to problem solving most of us
assume a math or science word problem.
Not necessarily easy but useful. Very
bolstering to both a verbal ability to
conceptualize mentally and a logical
ability to reach a step-by-step,
methodical solution. No. No. No. In
performance assessment world:
the problem needs to be
ill-structured. [By the way that is also
what rigorous means in Ed World]. The
problem should not have a single
approach or responsein fact, the route
taken and the determined solution should
be almost unpredictable.
John Dewey called that type of
problem the Indeterminate Situation and
valued it greatly because it required
emotion and frustration instead of
intellectual skill and knowledge. He
believed such problems were conducive to
striving for a different kind of society
instead of accepting the capitalist,
individualistic society he abhored.
Todays assessment developers still have
a similar intent even if the Principals
or teachers themselves are unaware of
the history of this peculiar notion of
rigor to drive revolution via mental and
emotional transformation over time.
So Transformational OBE and Spady
became too controversial in most places
to acknowledge when that was what was
going on in a school or district. So
those Life Role Performances got renamed
as Performance Assessments and less
well-known OBE players like Spence
Rogers or Willard Daggett pursued the
OBE implementation via their focus on
actual classroom activities. All of the
activities quoted came from the Third
Edition of Spence Rogers book The
High Performance Toolbox:Succeeding with
Performance Tasks, Projects, &
Assessments.
Those tasks, projects, and
performance assessments are what drives
the actual classroom implementation of
every Common Core curriculum I have
seen. The Schemers know that what is
measured is what gets taught. So the
Future Capacity/Empowerment/New Kind of
Focus comes in under the poorly
understood Performance assessments.
Where the task or project is the
evaluation. And the task or project is
not checking content knowledge but
looking for action and generic abilities
like the ones described above. This
would all be hard to spot unless you
were monitoring curricula all over the
world and over decades. Which I have.
The future capacity orientation gets
hidden also in the US under the lovely
euphemism College and Career Ready.
Sounds like knowledge but avoids the
entrenched subject matter orientation
of traditional education that bolsters
those undesirable (if you want state
control of society and the economy)
Axemaker Minds.
Why you say? You know if ten years
from now we continue on our present
trajectory I will likely be forced to
write a book explaining that the US and
the West lost prosperity because too
many of the beneficiaries of capitalism
never understood how much individual and
cultural attitudes and values mattered
to economic prosperity. And ALL the
anti-capitalism schemers knew precisely
how much these mattered. And they used
education, K-12 and higher ed, to get at
and change the attitudes and values of
independence and self-reliance.
And they used education to force out
every aspect of the curriculum known to
nurture the rational, logical,
conceptual mind. Which is the real
reason for the math and reading wars.
Its not about how to teach. Its about
limiting the oxygen that ignites the
fires of individual mental cognition.
That useful ability to spin your own
mental scenarios within the privacy of
your own mind. Scenarios that can
sometimes turn into innovative
inventions that alter the known world.
Like the Axe did or the computer.
Throughout history and even today in
most countries in the world the
political sovereignwhether king,
dictator, or legislative body and
state-employed bureaucratscontrols the
economy. Thats the historic norm. What
is going on in education in the US now
and globally is simply a stealth
reversion to that norm. Ironically the
changes are frequently being done under
the banner of becoming or remaining
Internationally Competitive. Yes in the
sought Dirigiste, Mercantilist economies
of the 21st Century where Education is
the Method of Personal
Subjugation. And Catastrophic Manmade
Global Warming and the spectre of other
planet-wide environmental disasters is
the Excuse for such
planning and control over economies and
peoples personal behaviors. And
politically connected businesses hope to
benefit as well.
If the Statist Schemers living at our
expense were honest about what is going
on most of us would say No. Freedom may
be a burden but it is a burden most of
us desire if given the choice.
So we are not being given the choice.
And education seeks to become a
walled-off profession where no one but
the Properly Credentialled may have a
say. And the Credentials are grounded in
the Marxist political theories that
caused so much destruction in the 20th
century. And yes I am quite sure about
that as well.
Its also why CAGW, like Marxism in
its heyday, must be treated as the
unexamined Theory never to be
contradicted with reality. Like Marxism
or Deweys Social Reconstruction, its
an aspirational theory for changing the
future not a scientific theory based on
facts. None of these political theories
for social control can bear the scrutiny
of reality because that is not what they
are grounded in.
But reality is still the world every
one of us inhabit. And it thus has to
govern how we respond to all these
sought changes. Its the reality behind
the current Grab the Guns, Gut the
Mind, and Ignore the Temps that too
many are still treating as unrelated.
http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/mandating-global-citizenship-mindsets-by-assessing-whether-students-adopt-social-altruism/
Mandating Global Citizenship Mindsets by
Assessing Whether Students Adopt Social
Altruism
———————-
Who Knew Karl Marx had a Human Development
Model? Or that It Fit Our Facts So Well?
http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/who-knew-karl-marx-had-a-human-development-model-or-that-it-fit-our-facts-so-well/
Reorienting World
Order Values Via the Intervention of Activist Education and
Progressive Politics
financed by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie
Endowment for Peace in the early 70s. At least we now
know why education just keeps coming up as the vehicle
of choice to initiate social change without that
fundamental fact being particularly noticeable. Even if
caught, we just get told to defer to the professionals
so that the political coup can continue at a slower
pace. Drastic Gradualism is actually the term used to
get the West to a radically different social, economic,
and political system. Hopefully by the year 2000 was the
Plan. The 70s were to have been the years to use
education to change the prevailing Consciousness before
initiating the mobilization for change in the 80s. The
precise language used was to:
supplant the outmoded
values/ belief system associated with the state system
[they mean nation-state, not those pesky political units
the US has 50 of] in a pre-ecological age. [in other
words, before Paul Ehrlich started writing about
impending disaster]. The emergence and diffusion of a
new value/belief consensus [helpfully
provided as a Conceptual Understanding so ALL students
will know it] is a vital precondition
for the kind of active politics that
would accomplish the transformation of
the structures of power and authority in subsequent
period of time.
Now how many of you have heard that Common Core
cannot be incremental? It MUST be comprehensive. Reforms
in teacher evals, curricula, assessment, instructional
practices, etc. ALL at once. The kind of social
engineering that even a weak student of history would
know better than attempt. Even if everything about the
Common Core was actually about academic content. Which
it most decidedly is not.
Well our new World Order planners as they honestly
appear to be proud of being [again from then Princeton
prof Richard Falk’s book] said it was because (their
italics) mechanical penetration of
existing curricula was not enough. No,
organic reorientation of the educational
program, which is what would enable students to develop
an understanding of what is needed, what is
desirable, and what can be done. By organic
reorientation we mean more than new materials for
old courses, or even curriculum revision; we mean, in
essence, changing the implicit
symbol and belief systems that underlie the
whole way citizenship, national
goals, and even personal fulfillment
are approached in the educational system.
Thats what Outcomes Based Education was trying to
achieve in the 90s and why it really set off what were
misleadingly called the Math and Reading Wars. Thats
what the laundry list of actual changes coming in under
the heading of the Common Core are actually up to now.
So your question is why? Which honestly calls for a
vocabulary alert. Ding. Ding. Courtesy of a different
Ivy League professor who originally published his book
in Germany in 1970.
The phrase is Humanist Marxism and as you might
gather the M word gets dropped from most discussions of
its elements. At least in public and especially in the
United States even though the book by Wolfgang Leonhard
did get translated and published for English consumption
in 1974. The same year as Falks book. Think of it as
game plans and rationales. Not really for my consumption
but footnote tracking is a superb researching tool.
Especially if you are willing to make musty old used
books your Mothers Day present.
It turns out, according to Professor Leonhard, that
the Russians and the Chinese broke Uncle Karls and
Engels well-laid out rules for revolution when they
launched their plans on agricultural societies. To get a
classless society that will stick you
supposedly need a certain high level stage of economic
development: without it only want is made
general, and with want the struggle for
necessities and all the old filthy business would
necessarily be reproduced. So obviously Humanist
Marxism is a strategy for a redo. This time targeting
the wealth of Europe, the US, Canada, Australia and
basically any place where a respect for the individual
and the rule of law and industrialization had allowed
wealth to accumulate. Those were and are the places that
met the real ground rules for Revolution and if the
proper Framework were followed, the idea is that the
transformation can be peaceful.
Of course that is premised on using education to
change those prevailing values and beliefs and that has
just never gone as planned. Which is really annoying to
lots of NGOs and public sector employees and
multinational companies wanting to just deal with the
appropriate Ministry in every country where they do
business. Otherwise consumers can be fickle to deal with
and satisfy consistently. Bureaucrats can be satisfied
with good pensions and gourmet meals and regular
conferences at luxury locations. Much easier way to do
business as long as you already have a seat at the table
and lobbyists at the ready.
So theres good reason we keep encountering the
phrase about using education to transform the economic,
social, and political system. Except the M word gets
left off now and the actual idea is that after gaining
the support of a majority of voters, the laws and
institutions obstructing the advancement of [the
redistribution vision] will be abolished. Use the rope
ladder to gain control and then change the rules. No
wonder the US IRS targeted the Tea Party with these very
real contemporary plans for change using democratic
methods and education and the federal printing press to
lure compliance with the HM vision.
Now I am not going to dwell on the Personal Identity
and Development of the Full Personality aspects of this
vision because we have addressed it repeatedly. But it
is why there is so much emphasis in the actual mandated
implementation of the Common Core on social and
emotional learning. And why Karl Marxs Human
Development Model fits our facts so well as I explained
in an earlier post.
My readers interested in Agenda 21 and the
restrictions on land development and equitable regional
development will be fascinated to know this is straight
out of Marx and a big part of what Humanist Marxism
planned to pursue in the West. Yes it was news to me
too. Cant imagine why the typical poli sci prof forgets
to mention that Marx and Engels wanted:
measures designed to overcome the differences
between town and country and aimed at combining the
advantages of urban and rural life without the citizens
having to suffer from the one-sidedness and the
disadvantages of either.
And the HM economic vision is about co-operative
enterprise that meets needs, not wants. Planned to meet
the needs of the community and each individual. Which
would explain why we keep encountering that very
economic vision in so many places now and so many
previous posts. M&E as interpreted via HM also plans to
liberate the human personality from the division of
labor which does rather explain the rise of the
Competency movement since it is assumed that nobody has
one exclusive sphere of activity. Someone wrongly
believes it is better to have a fully developed surgeon
than an able one.
Combined with everyones comprehensively developed
abilities and aptitudes we get education that demands
first of all that intellectual and physical work should
be fused, and that schooling should be combined with
practical work through polytechnical education. For
ALL. Which is precisely where high school reforms are
quietly going in state after state as a stealth
component of the Common Core.
Now I think you are getting a feel for Humanist
Marxism whatever it is calling itself for PR purposes.
Even when it is wisely broken into parts in an effort to
avoid detection. And I promised in the last post we
would talk a bit about Gorbachev and the so-called New
Thinking he embraced in the mid-80s. A book published in
2000 seems to have had everyones cooperation to be the
definitive story of what happened. Called Russia
and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals & the
End of the Cold War it tells us the New Thinking
was
To be sure, many reformist intellectuals retained a
broadly Marxist outlook. But theirs was less the Marx of
class struggle and revolution and more the Marx of
broader humanistic interest and concern for mankinds
alienation. It was a Marxism that led back to a European
tradition of social-democratic reformism. And, given the
Stalinist legacy, it led to a search for socialism with
a human face,
For most liberal, these goals were
embodied in the model of the Prague Spring.
All three of these books used that phrase socialism
with a human face as the aspiration. Its the
aspiration for the related education reforms as well. It
also means whether known or understood by the average
person or not, these remain the intentions for the
Common Core. Now the purpose of Englishs book is to
give a palatable story of why the USSR ended peacefully.
Changed ideas. Except English has the New Thinking as
coming from Evald Ilyenkov and his philosophies of a
revised dialectics based on social problems generally,
not just issues of class. And Gorbachev would have known
of the Humanist Marxism movements going on in the West,
especially in higher ed. And the related movements in
the UN and OECD . And all those trips of educators to
the USSR and providing Soviet psuchology and philosophy
for English translations. What led to the
Cultural-Historical Activity Theory school now being
pushed all over the World.
Thats where the New Thinking fits. Lots of people
have known that. It is we parents and taxpayers who have
not been in the knowledge loop. Who were not told these
plans for education. Who did not attend the conferences
laying out how to mobilize action to get the desired
transformation.
We are the ones who were and are supposed to remain
ignorant for long enough for this to be a done deal. Now
the question will be can enough people find out in time
to avert these visions of where we are to be taken in
the 21st Century. Without permission.
Muzzling Minds All
Over the Globe While Trumpeting Higher Order Skills
grown up in free countries, especially the United
States, is to grasp what it is like to live in a society
committed to having its citizens think ideologically.
Through the prisms of political theory. With the lens
of models supplied and practiced with until the
filtering becomes quite unconscious. Reflexive. Habits
of mind common to almost everyone that are at the core
of perceptions and daily behavior.
I should have had
this insight last Christmas when a friend who had grown
up behind the Iron Curtain began to tear up at hearing
some of my stories on what was being targeted and why.
She knew ideological thinking from her childhood. Maybe
it was reading that 1988 KEEP book I wrote about a week
ago on creating the dialectical growth of concepts to
be interpretive and integrative filters in each childs
mind. I was ready to really grapple with this painful
aspect of the real implementation template of these
global education reforms.
But I think the epiphany started with reading The
Devil in History by Rumanian emigrant, now Maryland
poli sci professor Vladimir Tismaneanu, and phrases like
their [the Communist regimes in the USSR and Eastern
Europe] main weakness was a failure to muzzle the human
mind. Oh. Just imagine importing their theories and
this time trying on an unsuspecting West via
unappreciated education reforms. Describing from his
experience, you can imagine my shock at reading
descriptions of conceptual frameworks that acted to
make sense of general experience for all: all real
phenomena could be judged against it and were ascribed
value, form and essence in its light. Do you know how
often I have encountered conceptual frameworks in
tracking the real Common Core? CRESST itself even told
the Hewlett Foundation reassuringly that the actual
assessments would be built around those, not the content
standards.
Tismaneanu in describing the continual assault on
the mind he associated with building new values and
beliefs and a new Identity (and yes those terms do get
used interchangeably in Ideological societies along with
Worldview) reminds us pointedly that:
However socially conditioned the individuals
thinking may be, however necessarily it may relate to
social questions, to political action, it remains the
thought of the individual which is not just the
effect of collective processes but can also
take them as its object.
I have never lived in a society where it is
considered seditious to maintain your individuality
but plenty of people have and they have written about
it. When I first wrote this alarming post on Yrjo
Engestrom and where I saw the Global Cities Education
Network taking us
http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/treating-western-society-and-its-economy-as-a-train-in-need-of-rebuilding-and-central-direction/
, I grasped that he did not sound like he was describing
a dead philosophy or theories. But I did not yet know
that in 1991 he wrote an essay called Activity theory
and individual and social transformation. Gulp. That
sounds just like the aspirations we have been
encountering. And it took some searching but this
weekend I located a copy. On the servers at Harvard
Graduate School of Education as an assigned reading.
Maybe to go with the 10 Cs I first described here?
http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/making-race-and-class-oppression-the-locomotives-driving-the-positive-school-climate-mandate/
And if you are not sure yet we are dealing with ideology
notice how often trains get used as the desired
metaphor. I am just repeating all the uses. Which begins
to make more sense once we know that (from the essay):
Activity theory has its threefold historical origins
in classical German philosophy (from Kant to Hegel), in
the writings of Marx and Engels, and in the Soviet
Russian cultural-historical psychology of Vygotsky,
Leontev, and Luria.
OK then. That also brings in Urie Bronfenbrenner and
his Ecological Systems Theory that is at the center of
the Common Core Social Studies Conceptual
Framework. And Activity Theory is now centered
at UC-San Diego and Michael Coles CHAT research which I
have mentioned several times. But the very First
International Congress on Activity Theory took place in
Berlin in 1986 with Cole and Engestrom participating.
Thats about the same time that Cole was thanking the
Carnegie Corporation for financing the importation of
psychology theories from our Soviet colleagues.
Following up on the links between the term Authentic
Pedagogy and Vygotsky and Coles work pulled up a 1987
seminal document I had never seen before. Published by
the National Academies of Science and written by Lauren
Resnick (who would co-chair the New Standards
alternative assessment project in the 90s version of
these ed reforms before serving on the Common Core
creation panel) the document is called Education and
Learning to Think.
That report, which I found on a server listed as a
Common Core Precursor Document, is the source for the
now ubiquitous termHigher Order Thinking. And that
document also thanks Cole and his Laboratory for
Comparative Human Cognition for related work that
Carnegie also was financing. Thanks a lot Andrew. Might
have been better to let your heirs dissipate the fortune
with too many mansions and gaudy vehicles. Since Higher
Order Thinking is such an important term to todays
actual classroom emphasis under the Common Core and
Texas version but also the ancestry of these ideas, let
me quote Laurens definition with her italics
intact. And remember this is for all
children. Concepts and expansionary thinking for
all you might say.
Higher order thinking is nonalgorithmic.
That is, the path of action is not fully specified in
advance.
Higher order thinking tends to be complex.
The total path is not visible (mentally speaking) from
any vantage point.
Higher order thinking often yields multiple
solutions, each with costs and benefits, rather
than unique solutions.
Higher order thinking involves nuanced judgment
and interpretation.
Higher order thinking involves the application of
multiple criteria, which sometimes conflict
with one another. [We have discussed in other posts how
this type of mental dissonance can force the need for
new mindsets and models.]
Higher order thinking often involves uncertainty.
Not everything that bears on the task at hand is known.
Higher order thinking involves self-regulation
of the thinking process. We do not recognize higher
order thinking in an individual when someone else calls
the plays at every step. [Here Lauren seems to be
alluding to sequential, linear mathematics or science
where you learn theories that someone else developed and
proved. AKA traditional math and science]
Higher order thinking involves imposing meaning,
finding structure in apparent disorder. [If that reminds
you of RECAST, David Perkins of Project Zero is listed
as involved with this report].
Higher order thinking is effortful. There
is considerable mental work involved in the kinds of
elaborations and judgments involved.
Well, it is my belief that all those are euphemisms
for saying higher order thinking is ideological. It is
training students to think in terms of assigned
categories and imagine different futures for everyone
one involved. Planning. Imagining a different economic
structure. Other ways to organize societies. Solutions
for alleged catastrophes. Creativity that is not impeded
by knowledge of what worked or led to catastrophe in the
past. Not your own conceptual understandings as gifted
students have developed them through the ages but
supplied concepts and models and definitions.
There were more congresses on Activity Theory and
they were absolutely chock full of Russian
psychologists. Which actually makes sense as I will show
you in the next post that CHAT and what is now called
ISCARInternational Society for Cultural and Activity
Theoryare related to the so-called New Thinking that
Mikhail Gorbachev transitioned to in the mid-80s as part
of perestroika. And why it appears that the
restructurings were not just physical but also altered
mindsets, values and beliefs, and new interpretive
theories. Global this time.
Remember Davydov and his Ascending from the Abstract
to the Concrete as the new mode of ideologically
oriented systems thinking was called? He died in 1998
and was revered at that years ISCAR Congress in
Copenhagen where his planned address was read instead.
The most recent Congress was in 2011 in Rome, Italy.
Guess which names showed up as part of the International
Scientific Committee for that ISCAR conference? Why that
would be Michael Cole, Yrjo Engestrom, and Lauren
Resnick. Just in time to make sure the US Common Core
implementation and assessments align with ISCAR
philosophy and those higher order skills criteria from
so long ago.
In case you are too busy to check, the described
foundations of ISCAR fit perfectly with what Engestrom
described above in 1991 as the source of Activity
Theory. Which is also the current basis for most
education degrees in the US. Especially the Masters and
Doctorates.
Now I am just getting started on all the links
involved. And I have read too much history not to have a
perspective on what we are looking at here.
But I want you to get used to an idea that I have
known for a while but this time approached through a new
direction.
The Cold War simply did not end quite in the manner
we believed. And the potentials of Activity Theory and a
stealth noetic assault on Western values and beliefs
appear to be the reasons we were played.
It was a good strategy but unfortunately the answers
of why lie in history and political theory books I have
now read.
Digest the above revelations and then we will talk
some more. And no I am not speculating here. This is way
too serious for conjecture. But it is fascinating too
because it also makes perfect sense. Actually more sense
than the spun stories once you get used to the idea.