Hoping to escape Competency-Based Education? Looks like Wyoming is your only option.

from Wrench in the Gears
May 2, 2017

Last week Susan Patrick of iNACOL (International Association of K12 Online Learning) and Chris Sturgis of CompetencyWorks presented “An Overview of K12 Competency-Based Education for Education Leaders and Teachers.” The webinar and slides can be accessed here. Compare the slides below and consider the gravity of our situation.

The first (above) shows the reach of Competency-Based Education policies today. Only Wyoming remains untouched.

The second shows the reach of those policies in 2012.

The Carnegie Corporation has signed on as a sponsor of iNACOL’s 2017 National Summit on Competency Based Education to the tune of $50,000. A list of 2016 sponsors can be found here.

Last September the Gates Foundation awarded iNACOL a grant “to develop an evidence-based report that identifies how personalized learning is emerging in the United States, what the drivers for moving to personalized learning are, and identification of patterns of why and how personalized learning is taking hold.”

In 2014 the Nellie Mae Education Foundation awarded a grant to “support iNACOL in the development of an integrated learning system that provides a platform for a school’s learning environment by enabling the management, delivery and tracking of student-centered learning and includes robust reporting and analytics capabilities.”

This week the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education and Digital Promise are bringing hundreds of researchers, teachers, entrepreneurs, professors, administrators, and philanthropists to Washington, DC to collaborate on EdTech Efficacy Research. Click here for bios of working group members who will be finessing data analytics that will set the stage for widespread adoption of impact investing in public education.

With the Ed Reform 2.0 transition well underway, it is imperative that education activists familiarize themselves iNACOL’s operations. The organization’s 2014 tax filing states their mission is to “Ensure all students have access to a world-class education and quality blended and online learning opportunities that prepare them for a lifetime of success.” Susan Patrick, President and CEO, left her position as Director of the US Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology in 2005 to launch iNACOL. While at the US DOE, she was the primary architect of the 2004 National Educational Technology Plan. Her LinkedIn profile notes she earned degrees in English and Communications and was employed as a legislative liaison and administrator of educational technology programs, but never taught or worked in a K-12 school setting.

Click here to read the rest of the article.

Dear Rhode Island: That April Fools Day Blended Learning Conference is no Joke!

by Alson McDowell
Posted on Wrench in the Gears
April 4, 2017

Competency-based education’s march through New England continues. In the fall it was Massachusetts with its fanfare around MAPLE (Massachusetts Personalized Learning Ed-Tech Consortium), and now on April Fools Day the joke appears to be on Rhode Island. This weekend hundreds of educators gathered in Providence for the sixth annual “Blended and Personalized Learning Conference” hosted by the Highlander Institute, the Christensen Institute, and the Learning Accelerator. Event sponsors included the Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, Nellie Mae Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the Overdeck Family Foundation.

The intent of this post is to describe the players and follow the money behind the shift to digital education in Rhode Island. If you’re new to the blog and not yet familiar with concerns about this shift please refer to this recent talk (it’s an hour, but I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback) or posts on learning ecosystems and “Future Ready” schools. Short on time? My 4-minute overview of the end game cuts to the chase.

The Highlander Institute based in Providence, RI began in 1990 as Children of Promise to serve students with diagnosed learning differences. In 2005 a partnership was established with the Highlander Charter School, and in recent years the organization has been become an incubator and cheerleader for ed-tech and blended learning in the state. A query of Gates Foundation grants shows that the Institute has received nearly $2.5 million in support of these efforts since 2015, including a recent grant of $1.7 million. EdTechRI, run by the Institute, is part of a national network of test beds funded by Gates that pairs ed-tech entrepreneurs with teachers and classrooms. Their FUSE RI program has trained 59 teacher fellows since 2014. These educators and administrators are coached in blended learning “best practices” (data, data, data) and sent out to assess readiness and implement these blended learning programs in LEAs throughout the state, 29 and counting. FUSE fellows have access to “flex funds” to supplement their learning and subsidize program development.

Woonsocket provides a useful case study in how Highlander’s programs influence school districts, guiding them to adopt policies friendly to ed-tech implementation. In 2014 Heather Neil, an elementary technology integration specialist, participated in the first FUSE RI fellows cohort. As part of the program she designed district-wide professional development for teachers, implemented district PLC around blended learning and supported the superintendent in becoming “more tech savvy.” Her profile page notes she “is an active member of EdUnderground, a PLC of education technology pioneers and early adopters from across Rhode Island.” Following her participation, the district entered into a two-year partnership with Highlander, piloting blended learning in select classrooms throughout the district and had one 8^th-grade cohort using Summit Basecamp, a program developed by Summit Charter Schools. The Institute then recognized the Woonsocket Education Department with their 2016 FUSE RI Blended Learning District Leadership Award. By the way there is a regional Summit Learning Convening in Warwick, RI on April 24-25.

Click here to read the rest of the post.

Also see:

Peter Greene agrees that Competency-Based Education is charterization from within. http://tinyurl.com/lfajr2h

Corporate education reformers are suing those who threaten their profits in Africa. Can the role of tech for corporate education reformers be any clearer? http://tinyurl.com/mfv2yfp 

NEA and AFT among Leaders of Blended/Personalized Learning

If you have been wondering why NPE, FairTest, BATs, Diane Ravitch's Basecamp, etc. have had almost nothing negative to say about the brave new world of competency-based, personalized blended learning, then you might want to sit down for a moment and follow the links below.  

It seems the corporate unions that all the anti-reformy groups serve became signatories in 2015 to a wide-ranging blueprint for the future of schools.  It is a future based on heavy doses of computer technology for instruction, curriculum, and assessment, with less teaching by real teachers in fewer school buildings, with great wads of money going to Silicon Valley billionaires. 

In a 2016 blog post from Gisele Huff, Executive Director of the Jacquelin Hume Foundation, we find this paragraph:

Personalized learning is an idea whose time has come. The Foundation was an early supporter of Education Reimagined and I participated as one of 28 strange bedfellows in the production of its vision document (http://ow.ly/ZmPpn). That document has become the North Star for the transformation of a 100-year old educational system which no longer serves America’s children. Among the other signatories of document are the two leaders of the NEA and AFT, evidence that there is a consensus for an entirely different approach to the learning experience.

Here's the Advisory Board for Education Reimagined.  And here are the principal corporate donors:

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,  Chan Zuckerberg Initiative,  Jaquelin Hume Foundation,  Nellie Mae Education Foundation,  Oak Foundation.

Breathe deeply.  Now if you are a K-12 educator still sending money to any of the organizations named in the first paragraph of this post, you are contributing to your own burial fund each time you do it.

How exactly did the Department of Defense end up in my child's classroom?

 

from Wrench in the Gears

You cannot fully understand what is happening with Future Ready school redesign, 1:1 device programs, embedded assessments, gamification, classroom management apps, and the push for students in neighborhood schools to supplement instruction with online courses until you grasp the role the federal government and the Department of Defense more specifically have played in bringing us to where we are today.

In 1999, just as cloud-based computing was coming onto the scene, President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 13111 and created the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative or ADL.

Section 5 of that order set up “The Advisory Committee on Expanding Training Opportunities” to advise the president on what should be done to make technology-based education a reality for the ENTIRE country. The intent was not only to prioritize technology for “lifelong learning,” but also shift the focus to developing human capital and in doing so bind education to the needs of industry and the economy.

Representatives of Cisco Systems and Jobs for the Future co-chaired the committee. Others around the table included the e-learning industry, student loan financiers, educational testing companies, human resource managers, labor market analysts, universities, community colleges, chambers of commerce, city government, and a futurist. George Bush incorporated Clinton’s work into Executive Order 13218, the 21st Century Work Force Initiative, the following year giving the effort a bipartisan stamp of approval. The Obama administration continued this push for online learning in the National Broadband Plan, which contained an entire chapter on digital education, as well as through a variety of 21st century school redesign efforts like ConnectEd, Future Ready Schools, and Digital Promise.

ADL began as an electronic classroom for the National Guard and later expanded to serve the entire Defense Department. In 1998 the government decided to use it for ALL federal employee training. And by leveraging its influence over federal contracting the government successfully pushed for standards that enabled wide adoption of cloud-based instructional technology.

Click here to read the entire article.

 

Research on CBE and Personalized Learning

Competence-based education and educational effectiveness:  A critical review of the research literature on outcome-oriented policy making in education

The paper assesses the empirical evidence for outcomes of competence-based education which are envisaged by policy-makers, and gives some interpretations of how the topic is handled in the political processes. This is achieved by a review of the research literature as documented in bibliographical databases which cover academic publications and in more practical material. The searches were generic, and included not only specific competence- expressions, but also terms as ‘outcomes’ and ‘learning’. The staggering conclusion of this exercise is that there is hardly any evidence for the effectiveness of competence-based education despite the long period since the 1970s when the approach came up in the US. Whether this is an artefact of the operationalization of the outcomes of competence-based education or not, it seems that there is only very little attention to testing the policy- assumptions that competence-based education is a worthy educational innovation. As this is quite disturbing, it is recommended that more efforts are being made to prove (or falsify) the putative added value of competence-based education initiatives.

https://www.ihs.ac.at/fileadmin/public/soziologie/rs111.pdf

New Interest, Old Rhetoric, Limited Results, and the Need for a New Direction for Computer-Mediated Learning

The pace of technological advancement, combined with improvements technology has brought to other sectors, is leading policymakers and educators alike to take another look at computers in the classroom, and even at computers instead of classrooms. In particular, advances in computational power, memory storage, and artificial intelligence are breathing new life into the promise that instruction can be tailored to the needs of each individual student, much like a one-on-one tutor. The term most often used by advocates for this approach is “Personalized Instruction.” Despite the advances in both hardware and software, recent studies show little evidence for the effectiveness of this model of integrating technology into the learning process. 

http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/personalized-instruction

Ed Deform 2.0 in Less than Five Minutes

by Alison McDowell:

Published on Jan 5, 2017.  This is a summary for the one-hour talk "Ed Reform 2.0-Personalized Learning in Orwellian Times" available for viewing here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0quQS.... For additional information visit Wrench in the Gears at https://wordpress.com/stats/day/wrenc....

The Next Generation of Corporate Miseducation

Great work by Alison McDowell.  This was shared yesterday in Philadelphia.

Ed Reform 2.0: Personalized Learning in Orwellian Times

This video requires two browser windows: one for the video, one for the slide show. The slide show is at http://tinyurl.com/zko83q4

Mass Customized Learning Comes to Central Pennsylvania

This post was originally written this past fall as a FB note, but I am posting it here now so that it can be more widely available.

“Inevitable: Mass Customized Learning” is a book and an educational program developed by education theorists Charles Schwahn and Bea McGarvey. Is is one of a number of “personalized” digital education programs popping up in schools across the country. The program, implemented in several communities in Maine, has been widely criticized and resulted in large numbers of teachers leaving those districts. Concerns included the fact that there are no traditional grade levels or letter grades, students could advance only upon “mastery” of the standards, and that instruction was highly-fragmented as teachers were meant to be “guides on the side.” Ultimately it was impossible to provide the level of differentiation required by the program.

I have known for some time that CBE or “personalized” hybrid-blended learning is being incubated in south central PA. It first popped up in the Johnstown/Bedford area and now seems to be creeping over into Lancaster, York, and Harrisburg. It is being pushed by Appalachian Intermediate Unit 8. The Intermediate Unit is working in concert with the Pennsylvania Leadership Development Council. PLDC has close ties to Dusquene University via Pat Crawford (professor of education emeritus and now Director of Professional Development for the Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators) and Franny Serenka Associate Professor and Director of the School Administration & Supervision Program in the School of Education. Crawford presented at Mass Customized Learning conferences in South Dakota in 2013 and in Maine in 2014.

Besides the fact that that area is a bit out of the way and less high profile than other districts, I could not figure out why south-central PA was being targeted. Now I think I have now found the link. The push for mass digital learning came when Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 13111 that created the Advanced Distributed Learning program. ADL jump started technology-based education for the Department of Defense and the Federal Government, but the plan was always to scale it for general use in K12 education. One of the first tasks was to create a coding system to manage the “learning objects” and that would support the “learning management systems.” That first program was called SCORM. It took until the mid 2000s to be widely adopted. Later, they wanted to expand the types of data that could be aggregated, so they transitioned to a more sophisticated and flexible software called Tin Can or xAPI. It was created by Rustici Software out of Tennessee. This slideshare goes into detail about how educational data is tracked across learning environments.

The thing that made everything “click” tonight is Aaron Silvers. Silvers now works for ADL and does a lot of training for xAPI. According to his LinkedIn Profile, before coming to ADL, he was Chief Learning Officer for Problem Solutions, which is (BINGO!) based in JOHNSTOWN, PA. Problem Solutions is a MAJOR contractor to ADL and they are very much involved with the transition to “learning eco-systems.”  This is how Problem Solutions describes what they do:

Click here to read the entire article.

FairTest Fumes and Obfuscates

There was much disgust expressed when Diane Ravitch promoted FairTest's NEA-supported report, Assessment Matters: Constructing Model State Systems to Replace Testing Overkill.  In the report, FairTest managed to do some major league pimping for the New Hampshire competency-based child plug-in learning model and competency-based assessment pilot.  

Here is heart of Monty Neill's response, with my comments interspersed in italics.

First, there is no doubt that corporations backed by some foundations and politicians are promoting a version of schooling that is built around computerized packaged programs that combine curriculum, curricular materials, instruction and testing. The tests are in most cases multiple-choice and short-answer with occasional write-to-a-prompt items, to be machine graded. They seriously narrow and diminish education and should be exposed and stopped.

. . . . not one of the examples in FairTest’s report rely on these kinds of computerized packages. Each one is teacher controlled and very much teacher controlled. We clearly support and praise those that allow significant student voice and control over the learning and assessment processes. New Hampshire fought for a deal that has opened doors that have been nailed shut since the start of NCLB and thus deserve serious credit. As we point out, we can learn from and improve on what they have thus far done, and that ESSA makes it easier for that to happen.. . .

The New Hampshire example that FairTest studies is Rollinsford Grade School, which DOES NOT participate in the frenetic attempts in the other dozen or so NH assessment pilot venues, where Gates Foundation know-nothings are supervising the construction of a Rube Goldberg assessment system that tries to standardize the unique and to quantify the unquantifiable.  Why, pray tell, does Monty not examine a system that is plugged in to the NH pilot project, which is meant to look like this:

Monty Neill continues: "People can choose to believe the fight is over because corporations are trying to seize control of terms such as personalized and competency-based. We believe that is a mistake. It is not over, and one part of the battle is the fight to own the terms. The more important fight is the one to determine the shape of education, whether it is built on human relations among teachers and students, with parents and other community people also engaged; or it is based on computer algorithms and subordinating human relations to the computer packages.

FairTest fights for the former. We think that is clear in what we call for and the programs we highlight. If people have questions about that, they should read what we actually write and then follow it up, looking at the programs themselves."

The resistance to corporate education does not believe the fight is over, despite FairTest's surrender to the ESSA charter and CBE stimulus package passed last year.  If FairTest were fighting, why do we not see any outlined strategy to expose the hazardous and reckless advances of the child plug-in model for poor schools that is being advanced by Gates and Silicon Valley?  

While FairTest promotes its progressive boutique alternatives to the unhealthy and intrusive plug-in competency-based model, neither FairTest nor NEA/AFT has one word of warning or concern for parents, educators, or students who will be the victims of this miseducative money-making scheme if it goes forward.


FairTest is fighting for FairTest and the NEA agenda, which is the corporate agenda and the Clinton agenda and the Wall Street agenda.  Nothing will block their train until the tracks are removed.

Who's Behind the K-12 Online Learning Bonanza?

The International Association for Online Learning (iNACOL) is meeting in San Antonio in late October for a big symposium to advance all sorts of competency based personalized outcomes based blended online digital bullshit notions that have re-charged the dying batteries of the corporate education reformers.  

Who's behind these fads from the previous century now repackaged for another generation of back-to-basics mossback antiquarians?   

All the big paternalists, social efficiency zealots, and profiteers, along with a couple of new ones that have product lines ready to sell.  This is where the action is, and this where the resistance must focus:

How Opt Out Could Remain Legitimate, But Won't

The last national conference held by United Opt Out in February featured Green presidential candidate, Jill Stein, long-time radical educator, Bill Ayers, and radical intellectual, Chris Hedges.  The line-up for the conference scheduled for next month in Houston is quite different.

The October UOO conference at the Hilton will be be co-sponsored by an AFT affiliate, the Houston Federation of Teachers, and the headliners will contain no radicals, free or otherwise.  Featured will be education economist and KIPP sympathizer, Samuel Abrams, along with Diane Ravitch's lieutenant at NPE, Julian Heilig.  In short, UOO has become the latest casualty of cooptation by the corporate unions, and just in time, it seems, for AFT/NEA/NPE to, perhaps, claim a victory of sorts for the opt out movement that they now control.

Even though the annual testing requirement for public schools remains a part of the ESSA federal statute going forward, the ominous plan for future testing accountability would impose test data gathering, storage, and sharing every day, rather than just once a year.  Assessment, under the new scheme that will receive federal millions under ESSA, will be as ubitiquous as getting on and off the bus.  So even as Randi and Lily are already leading testing victory laps for a false win not yet won, such a "victory" would come at an expense that no parent, student, or teacher can afford to pay.

You see, the new personalized testing paradigm on the horizon, if implemented, will not only change the face of school as we know it, but it will jeopardize the physical and mental health of children, as well as abridge their rights to privacy and the integrity of children's future goals.  The dystopian dream by the dangerous crackpots who are advancing the new "competency based" business model for schools will be realized when graduating teens have electronic dossiers that include longitudinal testing data, behavior data, attitude data, and character data, all of which will be available for steering young adults into the most appropriate cell to serve the global economic hive.

So, you see, if the marriage of Opt Out and AFT yields its best possible result, which would be the end of annual testing, the real challenge of the next corporate education horror show will be left entirely unaddressed and, thus, with viral dimensions surging.

Why, then, you may ask, will not the new union-partnering UOO move to urge parents to opt out of all digital student data gathering, storage, and sharing, which would bring down this new most hazardous scheme?  In short, it is because of the deal with the Devil that the corporate unions made with the corporate reformers a long time ago.  It involves survival of a union bureaucracy that the corporate state allows to exist as long as union misleaders remain complicit in the corporate reform agenda.  It involves national politics at the highest levels, and the choosing of a predictable corporate presidential candidate over one that is not.  It involves an elite pay-to-play scheme that required, most recently, the AFT/NEA support for the reauthorization of ESEA in 2015, which we know as ESSA.

The implicit support by rank and file teachers for ESSA's passage was assured by propaganda from NEA, AFT, NPE, and other second and third tier corporate union hangers-on who comprise the liberal group-think blogger group, Basecamp (think permanently ensconced with no summit in sight).  One of NPE's board members, Julian Heilig (the same Julian who is headlining at UOO in October) bragged on FB of knowing the details of ESSA's awfulness prior to passage, but he, like others who "felt" like they could not affect the outcome, kept their mouths shut about how truly dangerous ESSA really was.

NPE/AFT/NEA's insider strategy of going along to get along, while preserving that proverbial "place at the table," required that the ostensible protectors of public education like Diane Ravitch to effectively dissemble and obfuscate enough to keep opposition to ESSA at a minimum.  The rest of the pack kept their mouths shut.

Both national parties wanted ESSA to provide for the next generational serving of corporate welfare charter schools and high tech gadgetry built on archaic learning models, this time lavishly garnished with big dollops of "blended" classroom bullshit, de-personalized "learning," and computer-assisted everything, topped off with every data hoarder's dream of never forgetting a student mistake or teacher screw-up.

This is what NEA/AFT/NPE did for the movement to stop the corporate onslaught.  And these are the same folks now calling the shots at Opt Out.  Do you think they will urge parents to opt out of the new omnipresent "personalized" testing coming to a school near you?  To boycott all digital testing stored on corporate government servers? To refuse to send kids to school where blended bullshit is being served?  All these miseducative notions are in full swing, by the way, in Houston, where HFT President, Zeph Capo, pleads ignorance about what has been going on for the past four years.

If you do think UOO will lead the boycott against big data, then I urge you to keep reading from the Ravitch script.  Closely.  While you are doing that, I hope you will form new reading habits, too, with people who know what the hell is going down here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Mis-Educative Technology and Human Capital Management: Part 1

by Jim Horn

Those who are predicting the coming demise of high-stakes testing should be extremely concerned that the potential replacement of standardized tests, which are awful enough and have been used to demonize and sort underprivileged students for over a hundred years, may bring more ominous kinds of assessments that are ongoing, unending, and much more intrusive and damaging.  The new assessments will happening every day, rather than once a year, and they are intended to amass tons of data on individual students that may be used for human profiling and more effective societal placement far down the road after students leave school.

Parents and teachers, alike, should be particularly alert for what is labeled "personalized learning" initiatives, sometimes referred to as "competency based" or "proficiency-based," which really represent the most alienating and depersonalized kinds of computerized instructional tutoring, the kind that collects, collates, and stores academic, social-emotional, and other personal data on children.

Based on the ostensible goal of individualizing instruction, computer software loaded onto laptops can now monitor every click that children make on these computers and offer up custom problems based on past performance and individual preferences. Sounds great, doesn't it?

It could be, I guess, if these "smart" tutors knew that children have figured out that they can get easier assignments from their virtual teachers by pretending to be stupid.  The ever-present data nets on these computers are, nonetheless, storing massive amounts student data that may be shared across platforms and stored on commercial servers. 

Some of the economic efficiency zealots who see public schools as a waste of money have even come to view this kind of intrusive computerization as the cheapest way to teacher proof education and to replace expensive brick and mortar schools. Other elite paternalists see the corporate potential to track students from pre-K to adulthood, thus producing individual dossiers or digital dashboards that may be used to determine fitness for further educational opportunities or careers.

Accompanying the new frenzy to digitize learning, there is new impetus among elite paternalist social engineers, both in and out of corporate government offices, to introduce more social-emotional learning and assessment and to gather "social-emotional learning" (SEL) data, which may form individual profiles that include psychological, political, sexual, or moral (values) data that was/is gathered without a student even knowing about it.

But aren't childen's or adult's private data protected by the federal government, you may ask. Well, they once were, but that was changed with Gates and his pals got Team Obama to water down FERPA regulations to make corporate tech exploitation of children possible.  

In April 2011, the U.S. Department of Education(ED) issued a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM), inviting public comments on its proposed regulations amending the Family and Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA). The proposed regulations removed limitations prohibiting educational institutions and agencies from disclosing student personally identifiable information, without first obtaining student or parental consent. For example, the proposed FERPA regulations reinterpreted FERPA statutory terms "authorized representative," "education program," and "directory information." This reinterpretation gives non-governmental actors increased access to student personal data.

This change opened the floodgates of cash to set up new databases for the collection of massive amounts of student data.  Gates, alone, sunk $100 million during the next two years in one effort.  Gates hired inBloom, Inc. to run it.  Fortunately, monitoring by activists, the ACLU, and outrage by parents brought this effort down in 2014.  The NYTimes posted this still from an inBloom video that presented this possibility for using data:

So you see this kind of dystopian capitalism can be countered, as it was with the shutdown of inBloom.  But, and it's a big but, Gates and others are back with a new corporate incentive package known as ESSA, which has the support, too, from the Clinton Global Initiative and soon-to-be President Hillary Clinton, to spread the same bad plans into schools around the nation.  

Part 2 will look an example or two.

The Basics of the Competency-Based [sic] Scam

Emily Talmage and Alison Hawser McDowell have done major sleuthing into the dark world of "competency-based" education (CBE), which is now the next big thing in corporate education reform.  Sure, charter schools will continue to drain public systems for as long as the public remains uninformed about the greed, racism, and elitist paternalism driving these Wall Street missionaries, but as the public wakes up to the charter scam, the competency-based, "personalized" isolation of online or hybrid schooling will be ready to gain ascendancy, from elementary school through college.  That is why it is so important now to know what is going on in pilot programs across the country and large scale in some states like Maine and New Hampshire.  Alison McDowell wrote this insightful piece last fall.  I have provided some links to Alison's piece for those who find this all new.

by Alison Hawser McDowell
Emily Talmage noticed a connection between ed reformers, those funding CBE, and student loan financing. I was thinking about it today, and I think I see how it will play out. Follow the money. Who stands to gain?

1. Move to the idea of online credentialing. Call it standards-based skills mastery, etc. Get everyone on board with CBE.
2. Break down old-fashioned notion of "seat time." Everything is student-centered and self paced. You don't really need true distinctions between high school (even middle school) and community college and four-year college and professional certifications. It's all just one process of gathering up the "bits" of education required.
3. Collecting badges is seamless and you just transition without any real breaks. If they get rid of physical school buildings and campuses and move learning into an online virtual world that will be easy.
4. Accept that a four-year liberal arts education will be beyond the financial reach of most people. Provide federal funding for community college.
5. Take over the boards of the community colleges to ensure they only offer coursework that is pre-professional and serves industry's needs. 
6. Have the government underwrite or subsidize Associates degrees to boost college completion for more students. But at the end, the students will still need more training.
7. Online for profit [and non-profit] companies (Florida Virtual School and Western Governor's University models) will offer students the chance to get their needed credentials for a price much lower than a liberal arts college, but still at a level that it will need to be financed-say $10,000 or so.
8. Accept the fact that companies will no longer pay to train you for their jobs. They don't want thinkers with raw potential. They want a set of credentials to do the job they have right now.
9. The robot algorithms will sift online resume submissions for those jobs demanding the right set of credentials in the online portfolio.
10. When industry outsources your job or makes it obsolete, they lay you off and put up another online ad for a job with different competencies.
11. People throughout their life (lifelong learning) will chase the newest set of in-demand credentials. Rather than paying for a four-year college, plus some higher degree maybe, you just have a baseline pre-professional education and chase competency/credentials so you can keep chasing the changing job market.
12. A liberal arts education is less and less valued unless you have a job at the highest levels of a company, and those jobs will go to the grads of elite universities. [A third of all Fortune 500 CEOs have liberal arts degrees.]
13. Companies will no longer do on the job training in a real sense. You will need to be serviced by these online companies to get them.
14. There will be a big new market for student loan financing that will be repeated throughout your life. That's where Lumina and Nellie Mae [and Sallie Mae] come in.
15. Redefining education as a largely online process will also benefit technology companies as well as Internet providers (but not human teachers or those whose job it is to support school operations and facilities).
16. There will be zero quality control. People pay online education providers up front to try and get the credential for mastery, but if they don't ever attain mastery, they don't get their money back. But the debt stays with them.

Read this story given what I have just said and imagine the money to be made, the players who stand to gain, and what will happen if we don't change course.

More Screen Time = More Radiation for Kids

The Silicon Valley elites, the paternalistic politicians, and the corporate education parasites comprise an axis of influence that threatens the public space, educational integrity, and the health of children.  ESSA's funding for competency-based personalized learning, which amounts to constant prepping and testing via wi-fi networks, is the latest example of wired education going haywire.  

Already, the charter school industry has discovered that children forced onto screens half the day can save millions in personnel costs by reducing the number of required teachers.  Without oversight or regulation, KIPP, Rocketship, Uncommon Schools, and other brutal charter chains have used the most vulnerable children as guinea pigs without any monitoring of the health effects of hooking children to screens for half the school day. The visual below is from KIPP Empower in Los Angeles, where up to 30 kindergartners have been warehoused in a single classroom.

Now with federal support guaranteed under ESSA, the competency-based education scheme will assure the spread of these potentially dangerous practices into public schools as well.  

The lack of concern among Silicon valley profiteers is evident with Google's latest eye candy that could be damaging children's brains.  

Does Google know if their free virtual Mars journey has deep health costs?  Should children be holding cell phones to their eyeballs, thus directly exposing their frontal cortex to more radiation?

Environmental Health Trust (EHT) scientists are calling on Google to stop the spread into schools of wireless virtual reality system Global Expeditions Pioneer Program where middle-school children hold a cell phone encased in a cardboard box in front of their eyes to take virtual expeditions to Mars, the moon, and other special places.

“Two-way microwave radiation transceivers, in the form of Smartphones, should not be used directly in front of children’s eyes and brains,” cautions University of Utah Distinguished Prof. Om Gandhi, who is one of the original developers of testing to evaluate wireless radiation from cellphones and is a Senior Advisor to EHT.

Prof. Gandhi added, “We have never tested microwave radiating devices directly in front of the young developing eye. The absence of proof of harm at this point does not mean that we have evidence of safety.”

“We want to know why is Google encouraging young children to employ a technology that has never been tested for their use when Samsung has a similar system that explicitly advises that no child under the age of 13 should be using it,” asks Devra Davis, President of EHT, and Visiting Professor of Ondokuz Mayis University Medical School and The Hebrew University Hadassah Medical Center.

EHT collaborating scientist, Professor Claudio Fernandez from the federal university of Canoas, Brazil, used cutting-edge modeling and found that radiation from the virtual reality applied wireless phones could easily exceed levels tested on adults.

The same known and unknown hazards exist for the other wireless experiments now underway or in the planning stages for children in your community.  This will continue until parents demand a halt while health questions are settled.

Competency-Based, Proficiency-Based, Personalized Bullshit

Neil Postman delivered an address at the 1969 NCTE Conference entitled "Bullshit and the Art of Crap-Detection." He advocated for an education that prepared citizens with keen "crap-detectors," or the ability to discern the bogus from the legitimate, the inane from the meaningful, the delusional from the real.

Heidi Sampson is one of those individuals who obviously was educated by parents and teachers who believed as Postman believed; she has a keen crap-detector, and she is using it for good purposes.  Here's an excerpt from a 2015 letter on her experiences detecting some awful crap being sold as education solutions--I hope you will read the entire letter:

Maine’s Education and Cultural Affair Committee commissioned a 2 year study to be conducted on this issue.  David Silvernail and the USM Center for Education Policy, Applied Research, and Evaluation posted their work April 30, 2014 titled Implementation of a Proficiency-Based Diploma System: Early Experiences in Maine. Although this work was funded by the Nellie Mae Foundation, which strongly advocated for proficiency based education this report is not a glowing report. There evidence of success is lacking:  “After an extensive review of the literature, it became evident that, while there are many conceptual pieces describing what a standards-based or proficiency-based education system should look like, there are few existing conceptual models that envelop all of the requisite elements for successful implementation. Furthermore, there is limited empirical evidence of the effectiveness of these systems, which has resulted in school districts having little historical information and no clear evidence to guide them in developing the new diploma systems.” (pgs. 16-17).

The 10 Page Common Core Report Card

Introducing the latest pile of bullshit from the Common Core technotwits--a report card that parents can't understand and that tells children nothing they need to know--all in a forest-devastating 10 pages of itemized, um, standards.  If you believe that everything children need to learn in school can be reduced to mountain of discrete infobits, then you are soon to be the winner of an schooling system based on children becoming "competent" in those infobits long enough to click the correct  screen item, thus demonstrating as much. 

Education based on an sea of sequential competencies that students can push through individually as if they were mowing an endless prairie?  Sounds enticing, doesn't it.  No teachers, no buildings, no worry: Phoenix Elementary, Phoenix Middle, Phoenix High, and of course, the University of Phoenix.

But privileged parents should not worry.  Real schools with real human teachers and assessments will always be available for the "top income tenth" who will be the required designers of our brave new education future.

By Kathy Boccella, Staff Writer
POSTED: May 23, 2016

As a lawyer, Dennis Weldon has to make sense of tortuous legal papers. But a year ago, the Plumstead Township resident opened a nine-page document that left him flummoxed.

It was his child's report card from Gayman Elementary School in the Central Bucks School District.

Gone was the traditional A-B-C-D-F report from the teacher. Instead, parents were sent to their computers to click open a nine-page digital document with row after row of learning standards and success indicators for specific reading or math skills. Grades ranged from a high of E (exceeding standards), through M (meeting standards) and A (approaching standards), down to LP (limited progress).

Weldon said his wife, also a lawyer, struggled to comprehend the new "standards-based" report card, too. Another Central Bucks parent, a lawyer as well, told Weldon: "I don't even open it. . . . It's information overload."

The district has posted a 10-page handbook and seven videos on its website on how to interpret the evaluations, introduced in 2014 and used only in the elementary schools.

Many parents give the leading-edge system an F in the most important subject: telling them how their children are doing.. . . .

. . . . Along with arguing that the new report cards are what internet users might call "tl; dr" - "too long; didn't read" - many Central Bucks parents say they worry that the grading system rewards mediocrity by lumping too many students in the middle, as M's, and takes up too much teacher time.

"It works equally horribly for the student who wants to do better and the student who doesn't want to try too hard," said Dana Hunter of Doylestown, who sends two of her three children to Cold Spring Elementary. "I've had kids say: 'This is great. It doesn't matter how many I get wrong, I just get an M on everything.' "

Her kids agree. "They're too vague," said Sam, 8, a third grader who doesn't like to ace his tests and get an M while his lower-achieving classmates also get M's. . . . .

Who is subsidizing the Save Our Schools March in Washington D.C. on July 8th and 9th?

by Jim Horn and Ken Derstine

June 11, 2016

This article is also posted at Defend Public Education!

Scholarships for 100 people are being offered for the Save Our Schools March in Washington DC on July 8th and 9th.

The scholarships include transportation costs; hotel rooms starting at $129 in a high cost area of DC; and breakfast/lunch on Saturday. All for a $25 registration per person.

Who is paying for these costs? At $200 per person that is $20,000. Is this an independent march as it portrays itself or is this an AFT/NEA event (and, therefore, a backdoor get out the vote for Hillary Clinton event).

Bob George is the national director.

Only in the last line of his SOS biography does it say: "Senior Vice President Education Company committed to equal access quality education.”

Shouldn’t it be known to participants that the National Director of SOS is a former Senior Vice President of a software company involved in CBE? Will there be any discussion of the danger to public education of Competency-Based Education (CBE) at this march?

George's previous company, Catapult Learning,  is heavily into software for student assessment.

On the Facebook page of his current company, Empathy Educates, it says the company is a (bold face added):

Cyber-community for Educators; Moms, Dads, Grandparents, Pupils, Principals, Professors, people who care in all professions. Each is a teacher, today and tomorrow. We invite you to ponder, peruse, participate…EmpathyAndEducation.org

Collectively, we, at EmpathyEducates.org join in a more expansive forum. EmpathyEducates is yours, my, our cyberspace classroom. Here, whether we think ourselves a teacher or a student, we learn so that we might grow and glow.

EmpathyEducates.org is a world of cooperation experienced through cyberspace collaborations. The net neighborhood is a place where Parents, pupils, Principals, Administrators, Corporate Presidents, Professors, Producers, people, from every walk of life come together to discuss concerns that they think vital. Empathy and Education are evident and explored in every aspect of life.
  

If you look at the program, where in the March is space provided to discuss strategies to push back against the post-ESSA education reform where online digital education and non-profit community partners (via credit bearing Extended Learning Opportunities (ELO's) will render neighborhood schools obsolete?

Except for opposition to standardized testing, a look at the Washington March program indicates a program that any corporate education reformer would be comfortable with. (See "The Limits of Social Justice Unionism" at Ms. Katie's Ramblings.) Where is the fight against the Pearson, Common Core, charter schools, the agandas of Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and the Walton Foundation? Where is the organizing for a fight against corporate education reform?  Against segregated schools and classrooms? Against the testing mandates, charter giveaways, and CBE incentivizing of ESSA?  Is anyone there talking about even commenting on the proposed 192 pages of ESSA implementation guidelines??

Yoga, anyone? How about martial arts as social justice?  Or a session on developing some "social justice unionism" with the head of an AFT affiliate and member of The Union Reform Network (TURN)?

But here is our favorite, with ESSA apologists from FairTest (click below to enlarge):

De-Personalized Learning Coming to Chicago

When state and city politicians generate austerity budgets that make it unlikely that schools can even open in the Fall, and when the Mayor and Police allow gun violence at a level that makes it unsafe for children to go to school anymore, here comes a solution that has been waiting for these problems for a long time: plugging the poorest schoolkids into computers for heavy doses of screen-assisted miseducation.

CPS has an opening for someone to lead this bold effort.  

Someone nominated Bob George, and I can't think of anyone better qualified.

Maybe after the big Washington march.

Job description

CPS’ founding Executive Director of Personalized Learning will lead the Nation’s first large scale implementation of this ground breaking approach.  The ED will work with a highly skilled team of internal and external stakeholders to improve the way schools deliver instruction to 21st Century learners. With framing from the Chief Executive Office and the Chief Education Office, the ED of Personalized Learning will contribute to and effectively execute the vision to increase the number of personalized learning schools within the district, and nurture relationships with diverse stakeholders to ensure long term success of the initiative.  
 
The Executive Director of Personalized Learning will be held accountable for the following responsibilities:
●    Directing the implementation of multi-year plan for district-wide personalized learning instructional practice
o     Define model to scale up Personalized Learning across all CPS schools
o     Inform district policy realignment, and lobby for State alignment to support implementation of Personalized Learning
o     Collaborate with Office of Teaching and Learning to integrate Personalized Learning as core instructional strategy across all grades and content areas.
o     Marshall and coordinate  internal and external resources in support of the execution plan
●    Effectively execute Personalized Learning vision to increase the number of personalized learning schools within the district
o     Support schools in adoption and implementation by building internal CPS infrastructure (processes and structures) needed to execute Personalized Learning
o    Identify and secure external partners to provide schools with technical expertise, consulting, and professional development required
o    Monitor progress of implementation with the goal of increasing number of schools that have school-wide rollout of Personalized Learning; and lead cross-functional efforts to address challenges.
o    Develop a Professional Learning Community for school to drive further implementation.
●   Nurture relationships with diverse stakeholders to ensure long term success of the initiative.  
○   Build partnerships and engage in fundraising to provide schools with resources (technology, services, professional development, financial support) to implement personalized learning
○   Continue stewardship of philanthropic organizations providing external Personalized Learning  opportunities to ensure schools continued access.
○  Develop strategic partners among thought leaders in Personalized Learning  nationally to ensure vision and implementation is informed by research and best practice in the field
  
In order to be successful and achieve the above responsibilities, the Director of Personalized Learning must possess the following qualifications:
  
Type of Education Required:
 
● Graduation from an accredited college or university with a MA/MEd. degree required. PhD/Ed.D in Education, Education Technology, Curriculum and Instruction, or equivalent preferred.

Desired Skills and Experience

Type of Experience and Number of Years:

 

●  Minimum of 5 years in district level administration, community/public relations, resource development and government relations.

●  5 years of  education related experience

●  Strong ability to influence others and bring people of various backgrounds and motivations together to achieve a common purpose.
●   Visionary leadership.  Creates clear, compelling vision, communicates the vision well to gain commitment, and mobilizes others to fulfill the vision.
●  Proven ability to execute in high pressure environments.
●  Keen ability to build professional relationships internally and externally, while encouraging collaboration and diplomacy.
●  Technology skills

 

WGU's Dismembered Faculty Model for Comptency Based "Learning"

Below is the intro to an ad for the online diploma mill, Western Governors University:

The Great Schools Partnership, Duke Albanese, and the Gates Foundation

Today in professional development meetings all over the country teachers are learning the virtues of "proficiency based learning," which is sometimes referred to as "competency based" education (CBE), and sometimes referred to as "personalized learning," and sometimes referred to as "self-paced computer assisted learning," and sometimes even referred to as more Gates Foundation-sponsored bullshit. 

The dream of teacher proof schools has been around for more than a hundred years, and it became an obsession after early 20th Century "reformers" took Frederick Winslow Taylor's idea of scientific management of job tasks and tried to apply those concepts and methods to educational tasks.  

What has always stood in the way of the perfect system of efficient rote learning, however, has been the caring and inefficient teacher whose understanding of child needs has always intruded upon the requirements of the most measurably efficient delivery system.  (See Part 1 of The Mismeasure of Education for the skinny on the social efficiency movement during the early 20th Century).

Among business elites, social managers, and entrepreneurial opportunists, the dream of teacherless learning is very much alive today, and with the financial help of arrogant billionaires like Bill Gates and back-slapping, deal-making middle men like Duke Albanese of Maine, it is being tried on a large scale once more in states like Maine.  In fact, competency-based computer assisted parrot learning promises is planned as a principal delivery system for the Common Core that Gates has spent billions to promote.  CBE promises to be a primary tool to get back that money and more for tech companies.

The conduit from Gates to the classroom in Maine flows through financially-connected front groups like the Great Schools Partnership, and the "Duke" occupies positions on that Boards of Directors and others linked to Gates money.  As a former Commissioner of Education in Maine, he knows how to use influence and to get Gates money from Point A to B to C and, of course, to the D.

Below is a letter from Duke to his new friend, Tom Vander Ark in 2002, when Duke was Commissioner of Education and Vander Ark was head of the Gates Foundation.  

It is important because it threw open the door to the massive experiment underway today on the children of Maine today. 

Here is the Press Release from the Gates Foundation in 2002 for its $10 million grant to Maine.  Note that University of Southern Maine is a primary recipient, and you may note, too, that a number of the main actors from the Great Schools Partnership are in charge of this charade being played out in Maine.  These same folks received their credentialing from USM.