How the Local Becomes the Global – Fundamentally Transforming Education in America

It is time to start asking Presidential Candidates… Do you support 21st Century Learning?

Because in the 21st Century the learning that is going on is not academic.

Mr. or Mrs. Candidate, are you for American children being able to read well, write well and doing math well? Because if that is what you are for, you can not be for 21st Century Learning.

Here are the facts.

In every state of the country and in all public school types, both traditional and charter and many private schools, the shift is to what the White House is touting as Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Competencies.

Do you know who the OECD is? You may have seen Rand Paul reference this organization when he rejected the reauthorization of ESEA/No Child Left Behind.

“The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) tests 15-year-old students around the world every three years for proficiency in math, literacy, and science.  The results are unacceptable—below average in mathematics in comparison to the other thirty-four OECD countries, and average in science and literacy.”- Rand Paul

OECD is pushing and wants to assess “Skills for Social Progress: The Power of Social and Emotional Skills.” As noted, it just so happens this is also mandated in the ESEA/No Child Left Behind reauthorization which passed both the US. House and Senate.  “As do charter schools under the contractual language that gets them approved now and renewed.” 

Why NOT Academics- Reading, Writing and Math? 

Robin Eubanks has warned…  “The OECD is a participant on the Advisory Board of an entity called Global Education Futures (GEF) that has been holding alarming meetings this year in preparation for issuing a report on global directions in education at Davos next January.” 

Robin goes on…

I want to focus here on the active deceit going on around school choice and local control and how it directly connects to this global agenda. Also on the GEF Advisory Board is Tom Vander Ark, an education consultant who was previously with the Gates Foundation. On July 31, 2015 he wrote a story “10 Next Steps for EdLeaders: The Advanced Course” touting Fulton County in metro Atlanta as “inventing the future of learning.” Now I live in that cutting-edge district and that is not what parents are being told. They certainly are not being told that in twenty years all their precious children will be left with is highly manipulated neural structures and personalities and what GEF calls ‘existential competencies’.

Yet Fulton is a charter system the Heritage Foundation-affiliated state public policy ‘think tank’ touted as an example of ‘school choice’ ( I was there) even though the language of the charter spells out non-consensual psychological rape of the kind described in my book “Credentialed to Destroy” as Transformational Outcomes Based Education. I nicknamed it Tranzi OBE to keep the references shorter. It is all over Texas too as this 2010 report lays out. http://www.bobpearlman.org/Articles/Coppell_Shannon_Buerk.pdf 

We can also connect it to GEF via the March 2015 P21 Summit “Patterns of Innovation: 21st Century Learning in Action” because GEF touts P21 as a global exemplar and because Kelly Young of the Convergence Center for Policy Resolution Re-Imagining Education Project spoke at both the P21 Summit and the 2015 TASA (Texas Association os School Administrators) Midwinter Conference.

She spoke in Texas with Michael Hinojosa who was also part of that Project along with the NEA, AFT, Heritage Foundation (except Stuart Butler skipped over to Brookings in mid-Project), and others while he was the Cobb County Super (next to Fulton) and while he was training local Texas Supers or aspiring to be a Super admins. Hinojosa is now the Interim Dallas Super again and thus brings the GEF vision there when we trace these things all the way through.  It is also Hinojosa whose picture is up on the website of the Large County-Wide and Suburban District Consortium–Success At Scale–lobbying Lamar Alexander and Johnny Isakson and others over the ESEA Rewrite and letting local districts take the lead. That meeting on February 4, 2014 was the day after the White House meeting on Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Competencies covered in the last post. Coincidental? Awfully convenient given all these intersecting agendas.

The “Our Values and Priorities” link at that website, which again is intended to get at and change the orientation of the schools that are actually still working and retaining an academic emphasis, is full of references to the need for schools now to be driven by student learning goals set by “internationally benchmarked standards and expectations.”

We are back to the OECD again then and the various UN pushes like UNESCO, IB, and the Learning Metrics Task Force that fit with the language in Lamar Alexander’s Every Child Achieves Act. This is again how the Local Becomes the Global, while GEF admits it is really Delocalization because so much education now is digital and embedded in virtual reality. The software writer is the real source of control over what will be targeted in the student’s mind. 

So as I have said before….“School Choice” is the mother of all public/private partnerships that will be the demise of  academic education in America.   

This globally coordinated effort is about equalizing and controlling the economy of the United States and the citizens of America.  You are no longer that boy from Amarillo, Texas who was a baseball star or in the band. You are now a global citizen. Not an AMERICAN.

American children are no longer to believe they are American’s living in a Global world, they are Global Citizen’s living in America.

Nationalism is destroyed.  The US Constitution becomes Null and Void.

What is happening today is a Revolution through education.

Little did they know, (moms and dads) would actually take the time to read legislation like the re-authorization of ESEA much less the UN (United Nations) documents that say explicitly that “School Choice” is the means to get their “change the child” model into all schools because with public money comes public accountability. The discussion starts on page 86 but the money words are on page 91 and then on page 92 it goes into Human Capital, which connects to the WIOA (Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act) passed by the US Congress last July, 2014 and all its tentacles. Interestingly, no one seems to want to talk about WIOA. Except for Moms and Dad’s doing the research who do not see our children at “Human Capital” for the Government. 

Even more scary, is what the reality is on the ground for our children, they are “Hyperaroused” intentionally to literally change the brain of the next generation of American children. This comment from the Invisible Serfs Collar site clearly describes it….. 

“Psychologist Dan Gilbert talks about how our brains respond with feeling and action to situations that are intentional, immoral, imminent, and instantaneous – and not to situations that aren’t. This was an adaptive trait that kept us alive long ago, but it short-circuits an appropriate and collective sense of urgency in the face of wicked problems like global warming and education reform, whose consequences play out day by day over decades. ”

Translation: Problems whose consequences play out day by day over decades have previously been dealt with using rational, empirical, and reality based thinking. We must change education so that children’s brains respond with feeling and action to such problems instead of rational thought. For example; we must respond to questions about changing climate with urgency and emotion rather than scientific methods. In particular, we must respond to shortcomings in education in an urgent and emotional way. Then we must respond to problems caused by this approach with further urgent and emotional methods. Rational thinking has no place.  

A perfect example of this in real time is what we are seeing play out in Keller ISD, where the district is fully implementing TASA’s  “Learner Centered” formula. Instead of an academic environment of rules and expectations, when it is learner centered the student get’s to design their own learning environment. But, seen through the “lenses” of those setting the agenda. In Keller ISD the agenda is the LGBT/ Transgender movement of “Forced Equity.”