AMAIRIKUHN EDGYKAYSHUN AND COMMON CORE: IT’S ALL ABOUT PROFITS ...
I hear alot from teachers and their concerns about Common Core and its "individually adaptive computerized standardized assessment process," which for me (and many others) has always been the central issue about the "program". (Why the quotation marks around "program"? Because it's a "program" in the sense that racketeering and Mafia "protection" is a program. It's a "program" in the sense that every nutty fad to come ouot of the progressive education movement since the 19th century has been a "program.") Putting parenthetical asides aside for the moment, the real problematic for me and many others - especially teachers - has always been the assessment process of the "program," and not the idea that there should be some "common core" or standard canon of knowledge in each discipline. This individually adaptive assessment process constitutes the true Orwellian horror at the heart of the "program" that reveals it to be nothing but corporate welfare and a vast expansion of the corporate surveillance state, paid for by you the taxpayer with your tax dollars, and utilizing your children as the unwilling - and perhaps unwitting - participants.
For stop and think about it, a computerized individually adaptive assessment process is the standardized test, on steroids, not only empowering that hidden and anonymous "test preparing 'elite'" even more, but one which now allows the corporations preparing and administering such tests to build up all sorts of profiles and to mine data, while making everyone else pay for it. Profiles from the individual and his or her habits, to profiles of regions, demographic groups, and so on.
Of course, all of this has been fervently denied by the corporations and billionaire busybodies involved. "Oh no! We would never mine data from the Common Core assessment process! We respect the students' privacy!"
Uh huh.
Yea.
Sure...
And if you believe that I have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale, cheap.
Consider this bit of news that was shared with me by a few teachers:
Now, in case you missed it, let me point it out for you:
NYSED’s emails to the Gates Foundation about inBloom and Wireless Generation from 2012 are below; highlights include a dinner party at Merryl Tisch’s home, to which Commissioner King invites an array of corporate reform leaders — to the dismay of Joe Scantlebury of the Gates Foundation. Also amusing is their account when I crashed a Gates-sponsored ” SLC Learning Camp” designed to lure software developers into designing products to take advantage of the wealth of personal student data to be gathered and shared by inBloom.
Her fourth entry details the controversy roiling inBloom and its final death throes.
She introduces this last entry:
This post, the final one with excerpts from the emails I FOILed from NYSED, documents the rise and fall of inBloom; through their communications to officials at the Gates Foundation and assorted consultants and allied organizations. inBloom was formally launched as a separate corporation in Feb. 2013 and died in April 2014, after little more than one year of existence. These fourteen months were marked by myriad public relations and political disasters, as the Gates Foundation’s plans for data collection and disclosure experienced national exposure for the first time and fierce parent opposition in the eight inBloom states and districts outside NY.
Once parents in the rest of the country learned through blogs and news articles of the Foundation’s plans to upload onto a data cloud and facilitate the sharing of their children’s most sensitive personal information with for-profit vendors, their protests grew ever more intense, and inBloom’s proponents were powerless to convince them that the benefits outweighed the risks. Though the Gates Foundation had hired a phalanx of communications and PR advisers, they were never able to come up with a convincing rationale for inBloom’s existence, or one that would justify this “data store”, as they called it, that cost them more than $100 million dollars to create.
This is, essentially, corroboration and confirmation of my and others' suspicions, and which I and my co-author in the forthcoming book Rotten to the (Common) Core, suspected all along, that the "program" isn't about improving education. It's simply another bit of corporate welfare and yet another intrusion of the surveillance state and culture into one's private life. It is, so to speak the front end of the other surveillance programs emplaced and "legitimized" since 9./11. It has nothing to do with educational improvement, and everything to do with data mining and collection and making you pay for it. It is the ultimate manifestation of the Progressivist Faith and its shahadah: there is no God but Government, and the Program is its Prophet. And its ultimate, and I am bold to suggest, eschatological goal is the creation of the technology of the Akashic records, the "Book of (Digital) Life," where all one's choices, preferences, deeds, decisions, are tracked and monitored from cradle to grave; it is the creation of a book - or, if I may be permitted to borrow the observation of Catherine Austin Fitts, the "control file" - created for each individual "account" monitored by a technological "god" and its "priests," the hidden technocrats and billionaire busybodies that oversee it.
And it's a system destined to fail just as the Galactic Empire in Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels failed, for the system will be the demise of poetry, literature, mathematics, philosophy... in short, of independent human critical thought and ability; the technocrats become consumed by the technology and dumbed down themselves to the point they can no longer maintain the great technological infrastructure they have created. And at that point, the system begins to crack and crumble. Corruption and greed are the name of the day, and in the end, this is not the foundation of any civilization or civil society.
It's that assessment process that's the rotten core of Common Core, for the real heart of the issue is the computerized adaptive tests, programmed by far off and anonymous "experts" with no real hands-on personal contact with the individual student, that is designed to mine data, and reduce everything human, to being cogs and bytes in a machine.
I for one say simply:
No.
See you on the flip side...
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COMMON CORE EXEC REVEALS ANTI-AMERICAN AGENDA: Guns, STDs, Islam, Climate Change, Dead White Guys
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bioW5SJMFDs
You mean dead white western European white guys eastern European whites like the darkies are beast of burden to be worked to death. And is the US Constitution that difficult that a late elementary-high school student wouldn’t be able to understand it. The classic literature I have had to read on my own thanks to the closure of bookstores I doubt I can get my hands on Aristotle and Plato works to read them.
Joseph I look forward to the new book Rotten to the Core.
I had just been thinking about this today, that I would really like to see
some proposals for how we should be educating children, from someone like
Mr. Farrell.
I do hope that some prescriptions are in the works and that the book is not just description of how bad the problem really is. Of course having intellectual ammunition with which to attack the elite’s brain deadening machinations is important.
Here is a classic as a political call for Classical Education
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8H19V35SEXk
all good points in these comments.
when someone designs something to fail, my first thought is the designer is mistaken.
a second thought is that their design is intended to achieve a different result than stated goals.
clearly, improved eduction and smarter wiser humans is not the goal of the gates fdtn.
control is a much more likely goal.
even so, control might not be the ultimate nor even the first and earliest goal.
it might just be as simple as gates’ famed ted talk freudian slip about vaccines.
he touted vaccines as one of gates’ favorite weapons in gates’ arsenal for population control.
easy to recognize for those of us familiar with a few of the vaccine crises in third world countries with a generation of young girls neutered and/or kids debilitated and killed.
Mexico’s had some of the worst incidents in the last 5 years.
for those of us willfully ignorant bad intents within our own culture, it might not be so easy to see.
zendogbreath
[now, I try to double check the spelling]
Obsolescence is purposely engineered in.
Ipso facto.
I certainly cannot see the future, and I hope you are right that this program will fail.
But my opinion is that it is quite possible that it could succeed for quite a long time.
Despite people like JPF and those who hang out here, my personal experience is that 99% of everyone I meet are INCAPABLE of admitting even just the possibility that “they” could be out to control everyone.
Like Mark Twain said, it is easier to deceive someone than it is to UNdeceive then. Most people just do not want to hear anything bad about their own group. They will accept any info at all, no matter how negative, about any OTHER group (the Russians, the Chinese, the Muslims, the Democrats, the Republicans, etc), but not their own.
The overall ‘system’ does have the danger of supplying enough behavioral and intellectual data on an individual to enable ‘modeling’ of them. Possibly, even an accompanying, personal ‘AI’, which would be used to give accurate forecasting of an individual’s decision-making and future behavior. Kind of a technological version of the SF movie “Minority Report.”
One could also ‘invert’ this process: Once you have massive-enough data on standard humans, you can look for ‘statistical outliers’. This could be ‘mundane’ things like early detection of genius-level skills (even useful savants). Or, they could detect ‘intruders’ like purported Indigo Children or even alien-human hybrids. Possibly even Anunnaki-type traits…
It does make one wonder ‘why’ all this money and technology is being swung-into-place.
At least one “channeled” message I came across in the last year or two has stated that at least one of the motives of the surveillance state is, in fact, to detect and/or keep track of literal (off-planet) aliens.
Doesn’t prove anything of course, but sounds possible.
I just hope that Joseph’ and “you knows who” book does wake up some parents, because it’s the parents who have to see the “slight of hand” in this mess.
They have capitalized on human ingenuity only to reduce it down to work for their desired world of predictability and fascism. It’s a concoction for regression and for their own eventual demise.
They should know by now that karma has physics.
It is indeed going to fail because at it’s core it’s rotten. Also they are dependent on centralized control and secrecy from the public. But a new paradigm shift is under way that they are resisting and trying to usurp. This is explained succinctly by Reggie Middleton below
it is at 16:33 clicks in
https://rt.com/shows/keiser-report/329159-episode-max-keiser-863/
Quoting the Agnostic Saint of Critical Thinking “They want people just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. They don’t want well informed citizens capable of critical thinking.” Common Core takes this new level of programming to the sub-basement.. The Borg are here.
Sadly highly effective. I see so many young adults just running after their next “dopamine” fix thru consumerism or other less civilized ways that are represented as normal behavior.
These jerks make the lowest and dumbest drug dealer look smart. This is what’s the word psycho-babel they dream money in itself is real. A postal child for this is the reeducation camps for conquered people by the ancestors of these people over centuries for at least five hundred years. Thinking is something our oligarchs now fear they are so immature they what to live in the perpetual now.