From Hillary to Bush to Obama. Now you know the rest of the story…
These are excerpts from Donna Garner…
HILLARY CLINTON ENTERS THE PICTURE
During the early 1980’s, Hillary Clinton worked hand-in-glove with Marc Tucker, Ira Magaziner, Gov. Cuomo, and the National Committee on Education and the Economy (NCEE) to implement the School-to-Work model. It was Hillary and the NCEE that came up with the term “cradle-to-the-grave.”
The NCEE idea was to create a three-legged stool – education, labor, and healthcare; and the federal government would direct people’s lives from the cradle-to-the-grave.
All were to be joined together under one banner with government healthcare controlling people’s lives; school healthcare clinics providing abortions and contraceptives; classrooms emphasizing workforce development skills instead of academic knowledge; and the Dept. of Labor directing students into a career pathway at a very early age.
The government was to manipulate students into the career pathways (or career clusters) based upon whatever the labor market needed at the moment – not upon what students’ natural talents, desires, and interests were. A certificate of mastery was to be awarded instead of a graduation diploma based on the Carnegie credits, and the last two years of high school were basically dumbed down for those going out into the workforce instead of going to college.
The SCANS Report in 1991 *Taken from: What Work Requires of Schools: A SCANS Report for America 2000. The Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills, a publication of the US Department of Labor, June 1991 is what helped to change the direction of our nation’s schools from knowledge-based, academic content (Type #1) INTO the Type #2 philosophy that is subjective; project-based; constructivist; emphasis on emotions, opinions, beliefs (i.e., affective domain); performance standards (know and be able to do); workplace competencies, etc.
Here is the link to the SCANS report: http://www.academicinnovations.com/report.html
The U. S. Sect. of Labor Robert Reich under the Clinton administration took the SCANS report, introduced the idea of the Real World Forums (or similar names) in each state, and managed to drive the narrative that schools are meant to be for workforce development and not for students to gain a wide-and-deep liberal arts education based upon fact-based, academic content.
To make the public think they had thought of the changes schools needed to make, the NCEE, Hillary Clinton, and Robert Reich established the Real World Forums. These were local community meetings in which the facilitators used the Delphi Technique (psychological manipulation methods) to make the attendees think they had actual input into the final Real World Forum report.
However, what actually happened is that the final “report” had already been written by NCEE/Clinton/Reich and focused schools on collaborative learning, interpersonal relations, and the affective domain (feelings, emotions, opinions). This took the emphasis in the public schools off deep content knowledge and individual learning and moved classrooms into group think, co-operative learning, and outcomes based education.
Reich organized a huge survey of businessmen through the Chambers of Commerce across the country; and it was widely reported that the majority of businessmen had said something such as, “What we want our employees to have more than anything else is good interpersonal skills. We will take care of teaching them everything else.”
I believe this survey was bogus and that what the majority of businessmen really said was “What we want is employees who can read, write, and compute accurately and quickly.” However, Reich reported it the NCEE way which drove classrooms from the academic to the performance-based, socio-emotional level.
As if on cue, the standards movement popped up all over the country. Texas (similar to other states) appointed writing teams to rewrite all of the courses in K-12, and the new standards required students “to be able to know and be able to do.”
The emphasis in the classroom changed from students’ “knowing” to students’ being able to do; and it was this aspect that changed our curriculum into subjective assessments where the verbs used in the standards documents directed teachers into subjective evaluations. The typical person would not have thought that verbs would make such a difference in standards, but let’s consider this partial list of verbs and the way they direct teachers’ lesson plans and testing:
Type #1 (right-or-wrong answers): omit, label, choose, recite, describe, select, identify, list, locate, match, memorize, name, recognize, state.
Type #2 (subjective, fuzzy, values-and-opinion based): dramatize, generalize, paint, prepare, sketch, survey, construct, design, make up, role play, hypothesize.
Up until this time, the U. S. Department of Education’s laws had required schools to offer students equal opportunities; but under the Clintons, there began to be a shift toward equal outcomes. In other words, teachers were pressured to grade subjectively to make sure that the “outcomes” were the same for all students… that all students passed and felt good about themselves.
No more red pens were to be used on students’ papers because it would hurt their self-esteem. This soon degenerated into not grading students’ compositions at all for both grammar/usage and for content but instead grading them holistically with a number score of 1, 2, 3, 4.
Holistic scoring was tied to whole language where students no longer had to go through the step-by-step process to learn phonics but instead were supposed to be surrounded by big, colorful books with lots of pictures. This was supposed to help emergent readers to predict what the text was, and this whole-language method eventually raised up students who could not tell the difference between “horse” and “house.” (Not much difference, right? Not so…)
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH ENTERS THE PICTURE
When Pres. George W. Bush was elected in 2000, there was a legitimate effort made to implement the National Institutes of Health’s empirical reading research which emphasizes phonemic awareness and decoding skills (phonics). Reading academies were set up all over the country to train teachers in these methods, and actual improvements in students’ reading skills (particularly among the low-income children) were recorded and became a part of the reading research.
However, the Type #2 people desperately did not want students to learn to read because then they could not be so easily manipulated at the ballot box; and these Type #2 people set out to destroy Pres. George W. Bush’s efforts.
Where Pres. George W. Bush and his administration went astray is when they set up No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and its “impossible” goals based upon states’ showing average yearly progress (AYP).
[At least NCLB still left the states in charge of their curriculum and tests. Under Obama, the Common Core Standards Initiative completely takes that state control away and puts the federal government in charge.]
To get AYP under NCLB, the states quickly figured out that they needed to set up state-mandated tests that could be subjectively scored so that students’ scores could start out very low and then be raised artificially and at will to show AYP! In other words, schools learned how to “rig the game.”
Texas and the other states set up Type #2 standards with Type #2 subjectively scored assessments that were steeped in multiculturalism and political correctness. This then drove the day-to-day curriculum to follow the same Type #2 philosophy of education.
I believe the main reason Pres. George W. Bush’s (GWB) administration collapsed in the last two years of his second term was a direct result of Karl Rove’s bad counsel to GWB throughout his Presidency. Rove believed that the end justifies the means, and I believe he was capable of instigating almost anything to accomplish his goal.
After GWB was vilified and his administration collapsed when the House and Senate both fell into the Democrats’ hands (the last two years of his second term), the reading academies vanished; and the idea of nationalizing education went into full gear. Of course, GWB and his family are all globalists; and they set in motion many of the foundational pieces that allowed the Common Core Standards Initiative to blossom.
OBAMA ENTERS THE PICTURE
Obama was exactly the person to resurrect School-to-Work, NCEE, Marc Tucker, Achieve, Inc., and Hillary Clinton’s scheme. However, Obama brought something more to the table. He brought the social justice ideology that fitted perfectly into the Common Core Standards Initiative, and his ruthless administration (followers of Bill Ayers, Saul Alinsky, Linda Darling-Hammond, Robert Marzano, Arne Duncan, David Coleman, Marc Tucker, Hillary Clinton, etc.) understood full well that: National standards lead to national curriculum which leads to national assessments which lead to teachers teaching the national curriculum each day because their own teacher evaluations depend upon their individual students’ scores. The end game is the national database in which personally identifiable information can be gathered on every student, family, and teacher in America; and everything can be sent to the NSA.
Obama’s ideology also includes a heavy emphasis on victimization, white supremacy, fake climate change, race baiting, redistribution of wealth, multiculturalism, and political correctness.
BOTTOM LINE TODAY
We have Hillary Clinton (et al.) to thank for the mess our country’s schools are in today. It is because of her Type #2 philosophy of education as birthed by the NCEE that we now have the Common Core Standards Initiative pouring into our nation’s schools, capturing the College Board and its products (AP, SAT, PSAT), and making billions of dollars in profits for Bill Gates, Pearson, Jeb Bush, and others. Even PISA, the international test, is being rewritten to align with Common Core.
We also need to lay the blame for the Common Core Standards Initiative right at Hillary’s door. It was birthed at the NCEE and partially implemented under Bill Clinton and Hillary. Then under Obama, this germ of an idea has turned into the complete takeover of our nation’s school system by the federal government and the indoctrination of a nation of children into Obama’s social justice agenda.
We have Hillary to blame for a nation of adult non-readers who get most of their news from their social media gadgets; and it is for that reason that I have used my institutional memory to try to educate those people who have no knowledge of Hillary Clinton.
Whatever happens in the classroom eventually controls what happens at the ballot box.
Hopefully a large majority of people have now realized that terrible elections have terrible consequences.