Standardized education is a leveling tool of the liberal left

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Posted on 30th June 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Obamaschool | Politics | Testing and assessment

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The setting of the same median goal for all students levels individuals into masses. Sure, you can say you hope many students will do more than pass the minimum standard. Will they? Do they?

Their is an illuminating bit of trivia about all this in an obituary today in the New York Times. The quote that follows begins with the obit’s headline and lede, then a sample of the deceased’s liberal stripes, and concludes with a paragraph (in red) noting the fact that he supported George W. Bush’s education initiative.

William Taylor, Vigorous Rights Defender, Dies at 78

William L. Taylor, who as a lawyer, lobbyist and government official for more than a half century had significant roles in pressing important civil rights cases and in drafting and defending civil rights legislation, died Monday in Bethesda, Md. He was 78 and lived in Washington.

Mr. Taylor is also credited with helping to devise a strategy by liberals to defeat President Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987, partly by recruiting well-known law professors to criticize him.

Mr. Taylor could sometimes be unpredictable, as when he openly supported President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law to overhaul education. Liberal critics called the measure punitive, poorly financed and too oriented toward standardized tests.

Yet Taylor was not convinced. As he probably foresaw, standardized educational tests do not lift all students to an equal and meaningful level of excellence. Instead the forced sameness of learning to the tests tends to settled more and more kids into the same level of mediocrity. Senator Ted Kennedy, who was a visceral and relentless liberal and leveler, is another example, like Taylor, who pushed the Bush vision called No Child Left Behind.

Showing his deep leftist core, Obama has not abandoned No Child Left Behind. Instead he is spending billions of dollars on what he calls Race to the Top. The name of that program belies its actual structure and goal. This, Obama’s major education initiative so far, is trying only to boost “failing schools.” He is building a welfare state of public education where youngsters are promoted with low grades, while billions are spent to push children’ scores a bit higher at the worst schools. The effect is not only to lock in a median mass — but to almost ignore education policy that would reward individual achievement. Assessment is made equal for all, while opportunity to learn settles into a media that gets lower and lower.

Beware of the educator with a level in his hand.

Save a teacher and some trees with virtual resources

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Posted on 10th June 2010 by Judy Breck in Mobiles | Next | Obamaschool | Politics

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As failing socialized education once more is cutting teachers and looking to pour federal tax paid money to save salaries of some of them, why not do something different: cut textbook costs by delivering learning content using mobiles. Roughly speaking, one teacher’s salary of $100,000 could provide 100 students with a smart phone for each and an access plan for each lasting many months.

But why fire the teacher? Why spend more at the federal level, increasing the deficit? Why cut down more trees to create paper to print resources that are out-of-date before ink is rolled?

Instead, we can chop down the local textbook/analog budget, then use the money saved to equip students with mobiles. That way, we keep the teachers out of the budget cutting morass. By saving billions through virtual resources, money remains for human teachers.

There is a picture of Congressional Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey in an article today in Politico: Dems eye stimulus to pay teachers. There is no suggestion in the Politico report of any answer to school money woes except to fire teachers or pay them by sending federal dollars to states. Obey, a chastened liberal is quitting Congress — yet another sign that the socialist solutions he has long supported are not working.

Education needs something new, and we have it! In fact pivotal positive innovation is not only possible, but unstoppable. Wrongheaded actions like perpetuating the status quo through federal money dumps slow innovation down, especially for the failing schools that are perpetuating a dependent class. But as the Obeys fade from the failing big government era, we will enter a global golden age of learning.

Handschooling is a major driver toward that golden age. As it delivers the global knowledge commons online, handschooling is moving learning back to the local level and into the hands of individual learners.

Let’s use the money crunch that is worrying Obey’s brow. It is an opportunity to speed up the switch to virtual resources and save some teachers — and quite a few trees while we are at it.

Chaos crisis pushes Obamaschool, not kids, over a slippery slope

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Posted on 30th May 2010 by Judy Breck in Obamaschool | Politics

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We have arrived at a fork in the road for education caused because states and local governments do not have enough money for schools.  There are those who think that the Obama administration is intentionally forcing change by creating economic chaos. (See Control Through Chaos Theory below).

The Obamaschool fork in the education road is toward federalizing. They have already poured billions to supplement state education. A showy lure they have contrived is the billions of dollars of stimulus money being dangled before the states in the Race to the Top competition. In this “feds to the rescue” scheme, the states compete for Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s approval of plans submitted to improve failing schools. These Obama education maneuvers attempt to push education toward the fork in the road that leads directly to the slippery slope of state loss of decision-making for education. A national curriculum lurks in the chaos.

The second fork in the education road in 2010, handschooling, goes in the opposite direction: away from top down control. As this website explains, in several important ways individual mobile connection to the open internet places the control of education into the hands of the student. Many advantages result. The global knowledge commons dwarfs any level of pipsqueak standardized curriculum.

But here is the huge irony for Obamaschool and control through economic chaos:  The feds would grab education by pouring in money, but handschooling is down right cheap. Comically — in the wonderful irony of serendipity — the economic chaos of Obama and Cloward-Piven, running out of money for education is going to force the education establishment and federal over-reach to disintegrate because the welfare state is going broke.

Handschooling is very cheap and will soon be essentially free. The device required is a mobile web browser, which already costs less than a textbook or two. Textbooks will be obsolete as mobile web browsers become ubiquitous. The learning content students use their mobile browsers to connect to in the global knowledge commons is free. With no textbooks to buy or ship, billions will be freed up from state and local coffers for the teaching and nurturing aspects of education.

In the orchestrated crisis we are experiencing now, the feds will lose — not gain —   collective control of the young generation, and that is a beautiful thing.

CONTROL THROUGH CHAOS STRATEGY
There is a method to the madness, and the method even has a name: the Cloward-Piven Strategy. It was first elucidated in the 1960s by a pair of radical leftist Columbia University professors, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven:

The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis…. …the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

Watching top down messaging disempowered by network laws

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Posted on 10th May 2010 by Judy Breck in Next | Obamaschool | Politics

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Controlling the message from the top down used to work very well, giving great power to tyrants who were good at message control. Times, though, have changed: the internet releases unlimited messages to flow freely outward from individuals, creating patterns of ideas, discourse, debate, and dissent.

The youth singing in the video above are indoctrinated by a song imposed upon them by Adolf Hitler — responding to ideas delivered top-down from The Furher. Today’s youth download personal preferences from thousands of songs online — listening to them individually, not singing them in groups. Against this background it is a jolt to read these words by Barack Obama from a speech yesterday:

“You’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t always rank all that high on the truth meter,” Obama said at Hampton University, Virginia.

“With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, — none of which I know how to work — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation,” Obama said.

He bemoaned the fact that “some of the craziest claims can quickly claim traction,” in the clamor of certain blogs and talk radio outlets. . . .

“Education… can fortify you, as it did earlier generations, to meet the tests of your own time,” he said.

Is Obama telling the graduates that education somehow provides the right amount of information — instead of too much? Does he say educators should decide what information ranks high on the “truth meter”? — what song kids should sing? The fact of the matter is that these questions will answer themselves, following network laws.

The devices kids now have in their hands are the greatest deterrent ever known to propaganda [known in the 21st century as message managing].

Information — managed by network laws — will continue to flow from many, many individual sources. Much of it will be junk; a lot of it will be untrue. But the flow will also contain the all of the kernels of accurate facts — the truth will freely flow.

Top down tyranny of thought is becoming impossible because what is accurate and true finds itself bubbling on its own the the top of the truth meter. Google proves that network laws themselves move the best stuff to the top.

One of the most fascinating aspects of upcoming elections is watching the increasingly ineffective efforts of team Obama  and other politicians to control the message by sending it down from the top against the upward flow of everybody’s ideas. The same phenomenon is gaining momentum in education as top down standards and centralized curricula and textbooks lose their relevancy to kids who are learning from browsing the internet with their handheld devices.

Open educational resources (OER) and the FedEd Tar Baby

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Posted on 13th April 2010 by Judy Breck in Next | Obamaschool | Politics

A Chronicle of Higher Education article reported yesterday the latest indications of what the Obama federal educators are doing in what they call the “open” online area. The great old Uncle Remus story Br’er Rabbit and the Tar-Baby* describes what is happening perfectly, as here, from Wikipedia:

The Tar-Baby was a doll made [by Br'er Fox] of tar and turpentine, used to entrap Br’er Rabbit in the second of the Uncle Remus stories. The more that Br’er Rabbit fought the Tar-Baby, the more entangled he became. In modern usage, “tar baby” refers to any “sticky situation” that is only aggravated by additional contact. The only way to solve such a situation is by separation.

The Chronicle article describes OER pioneer institutions and people getting deeper into the FedEd tar. Even the Hewlett Foundation, visionary OER innovator in underwriting MIT’s free placement of their courseware online, is actually giving money to the federal Department of Education to consult about online courses funded by taxpayers.

OER needs to get itself tossed into the brier-patch where it can disentangle from creating courses under federal oversight. OER means educational institutions opening their resources — remember, Mr. Rabbit?

And wisdom like Uncle Remus’ will warn the institutions that the Tar Baby delay may keep them out of open education until it is too late. Already, there is a great deal of OER not near the tar — really open, like excellent resources on Br’er Rabbit.

*No racial implications from me in using this analogy. It is a shame the Uncle Remus stories have been locked away in the era of political correctness. Uncle Remus would have caught on to the FedEd Br’er Fox quicker than anybody.

Obamaschool federal grab update from the New York Times

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Posted on 5th April 2010 by Judy Breck in Obamaschool | Politics

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“States Skeptical About ‘Race to Top’ School Aid Contest” is a New York Times front page headline today. The Times, which has been generally supportive of the Obama administration, captures the sense of federal power moves in this quote from Colorado Governor Bill Ritter, Jr. describing how his state lost in the contest for Race to the Top funds:  “It was like the Olympic Games, and we were an American skater with a Soviet judge from the 1980s,” Mr. Ritter said.

The Times article — which is worth reading in full — explains that Obama plans are far-reaching overhauls of American education that will take many years to achieved — but do include some political goodies for the administration coming in September:

Administration officials say they consider last week’s outcome a splendid success. By awarding only $100 million to Delaware and $500 million to Tennessee, Mr. Duncan retained $3.4 billion to dole out to up to 15 winning states in September, weeks before the midterm elections — a political bonus that officials insist is mere serendipity.

Mr. Duncan says the administration won victories months before the results were announced, when a dozen states rewrote education laws in ways the administration had recommended. Michigan, for instance, passed laws permitting state takeovers of failing schools and tying teacher evaluations to students’ test scores.

Such legislative changes laid only the groundwork for states to undertake more far-reaching overhauls of educator evaluation systems and low-performing schools that are the heart of the administration’s school reform strategy.

Frederick Hess, a director at the American Enterprise Institute, said that the changes would require years of work and that the administration would need broad cooperation from a majority of states.“This administration has had billions in stimulus dollars to buy support,” Mr. Hess said. “After that money is spent, further success with reform will depend on good working relationships with states. That is why all this grumbling matters.

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