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‘Obstacles’ Category

  1. The BIG Disguised Shift In Education

    November 16, 2013 by Tunya

    ►  What is the "Shift”, the "Transformation"  in public education K-12 in the 21st Century?

      √     Many Western nations are planning or are in the early stages of implementation.

      √    Common Core Standards, 21st Century Skills, Personalized Learning are names used.

    Huge thanks to two brilliant cartoonists — John Deering and John Newcombe — who vividly are giving us another tool to help decipher this new social experiment tossed into our laps.

     

    educ - Zack Hill - John Deering - John Newcombe

    Where Do They Get These Ideas?

    Is the school administration itself simply a parrot of even more distant managers?  Has some travelling lobby of consultants or change-agents been in town lately?  

    What is the literature brought forward that supports this SHIFT that puts students in charge?  And why?  What are the intended outcomes? 

    Is there, by chance, some international connection?  UN agencies?  International organizations?

    Well, this OECD news release (2003) gives more clues about an envisioned new global social order. 

    http://148.228.165.6/fpes/OECD.pdf

    Individuals are to learn to “function in groups and social orders”  to mobilize the “social and behavioral components including attitudes, emotions, and values and motivations.”

    IS THAT CRAZY?  Or some deliberate attempt to actually manipulate human behavior for a new world order?  Some people still consider human nature to be infinitely "malleable" !

    The shifts we are now seeing and talking about, 10 years after that OECD report are:

    √ from individual to collective,

    √ from “sage on the stage to guide at the side”,

    √ from content to process,

    √ from knowledge and skill based to inquiry/discovery-based,

    √ higher-order comnpetencies needed — creativity, collaboration, critical thinking

    √ from reporting to parents to communicating with parents,

    As a long time observer and activist in parent rights I am seeing these changes happening  — NOW — with very minimal preparation.  I worry about the psychological damage and meltdowns resulting from ill-equipped push already happening.  Parents and grandparents are witness to family anxieties.

    I worry the most because this shift is experimental and untested and questionable. There are no safeguards.  Protocols on human psychological experimentation are absent. And, it’s being foisted on an uninformed and uninvited public, without consent. In other words, why is this shift so hasty, stealthy,so programmed and giving the appearance of being shifty — surreptitious, dubious, devious and deceitful?

    “progressives are forever ready to mold and remold society at will and have no doubt about their ability to control events.”  – Albert Hirschman

     

     

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  2. Exits & Choices Needed When Oppressive “Education” Looms

    August 15, 2013 by Tunya

    Client Exit Really Bothers the Central Planners

    Of course, in free democratic countries, people are not physically compelled — other than in court-ordered situations — to do what is against their will. Oh —I forgot — taxes! Even “compulsory” public schooling can be bypassed by home education or independent school attendance.

    Anyway — about universal public education as a means to change the minds and hearts of people so that they are more compliant and governable — that is a go-ahead in schools adopting 21st Century Learning. (I was dismayed today to find in my local paper a prestigious private school advertising 21st C skills focus.)

    What we are gleaning today about the homogenizing 21st C Learning was foreseen 40 years ago when the “deschooling” issue was being discussed. I was in Mexico and heard Ivan Illich expound on deinstitutionalization and the need to retrieve individual responsibility from “disabling professionals”. He, by the way, was not keen on Paul Erhlich’s book, The Population Bomb (1968), or its predictions, or its coercive solutions.

    Illich called public schools a “false public utility”.

    An early school reformer, John Holt (How Children Fail), attended Illich’s Institute. Undoubtedly, Holt must also have recoiled from Ehrlich’s population solutions as he also deplored America’s authoritarian education. In one of his letters he wrote: “What scares me is the amount of Fascism in people’s spirit. It is the government that so many of our fellow citizens would get if they could that scares me — and I fear we are moving in that direction.” (Free Schools, Free People, Ron Miller, pg 89)

    Holt was one of the few counterculture people of the 70s who went on to develop something concrete and positive from this period. He went on to promote and support home education — the biggest alternative we have yet to organized state education systems of the world.

    However, who knows what lasting value there is to mankind to promote such alternatives? What’s the use? My jaundiced experience is that far too frequently critiques of the system only stimulate the establishment to produce more contrived ways to subvert and to keep seducing their captive audience. Using the cover of “democracy” the state and its hangers-on have become “predatory” as Revel explains in “How Democracies Perish”.

    So glad Robin has brought forward Jean-François Revel. This Revel quote clearly illustrates the dichotomy we are working with: “The inequalities within productive liberal societies are constantly subject to a mixing process and always in flux. In statist, redistributionist societies, the inequalities are frozen in place.”

    I interpret that this way — free liberal societies are dynamic and self-correcting whereas controlled socialist societies are rigid and require an “elite” to control and redistribute. Am I basically right?

    Are there others like Revel who can help us claw out of this self-subversion we are slipping into?

    Even researchers and PhDs are to fall into line. See “It takes a global village to develop the next generation of PhDs” http://depts.washington.edu/cirgeweb/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/NERAD-fin-Developing-the-Next-Generation-AASuppl2010_2_eversion-1.pdf

     

    [NOTE: The above essay was published as a comment on blog — Invisible Serfs Collar — http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/progressively-producing-new-kinds-of-students-pre-equipped-via-schools-to-work-harmoniously/ — a site reviewing 21sr Century Learning and Common Corre Curriculum]

     

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  3. Still in the Wilderness — Parents & Public Schools

    April 11, 2013 by Tunya

     

    Parents and Schools: The 150-year struggle for control in American education, William W. Cutler III, 1992, University of Chicago Press
     
    Synopsis
     
     
    The Journey
     
    The Status

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  4. MORE BANG FOR THE BUCK

    March 26, 2013 by Tunya

     

    GETTING MORE BANG FOR THE BUCK IN PUBLIC EDUCATION

    If it weren’t for financial woes troubling our governments, we wouldn’t be getting so much pressure to reform public education.  So, despite whatever personal hardship we personally experience in economic downturns, we should be thankful that these realities force people to see how efficiently or poorly public money is being spent.

    Reasonable, practical people want hard data, not utopian or self-serving lobbies, to help guide decision-making for the 21st Century.

    It was in 1977 that Nat Hentoff wrote about the US public education system in this story in Social Policy — THE GREATEST CONSUMER FRAUD OF ALL  That was an era of Back to the Basics.

    It was in the 1980’s that New Zealand did an audit of education spending and found that 2/3 of the education dollar never reached the classroom.  They abolished regional school boards and devolved decision-making to school-based management at each school — accountable through their charters (contracts) to central government.

    Economies have their ups and downs and we are again into tough times.

    The education establishment — all the way from teacher training in universities to teacher unions to early childhood lobbyists — is now under the spotlight by governments and researchers.

    The big question is:  How can we get a better bang for the buck in education spending?

    Obviously, the establishment, the BLOB (Bloated Learning Organized Bureaucracy), is doing it’s best to denounce reform efforts.  Here are the unceasing complaints — social justice and equity will be compromised, poverty is the problem, we are underfunded, etc., etc., etc.  Add such labeling as neo-liberalism, privatization, deprofessionalization, and you’ve got the playbook of the educator body.

    Utah research findings by Martineau on the positive effect charter competition has on nearby public school performance is a great piece of good news. Competition and choice can actually have a positive effect on other schools in the pool. A rising tide lifts all boats!

    See — Nearby charter schools boost public school performance, researcher says http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865575865/Nearby-charter-schools-boost-public-school-performance-researcher-says.html

    These charters and other reforms such as Parent Trigger and tuition tax credits for private schools are legislature responses to parents who embrace the UN Declaration of Human Rights Declaration regarding parents right of choice in education.

    The “audit culture” so attacked by those of the BLOB mentality is, unfortunately for the BLOB, the way decisions are informed today.

    Regrettably, the resistance is still strong; the opposition is well-organized and well-oiled.  If there are good models that need adoption, such as the Utah charters or the New Zealand model, they are vigorously attacked.  The tall poppy — the New Zealand high achievement country — because its management model includes a majority of parents on their individual school boards, must be chopped down.  Teacher unions and principals associations don’t like this model.

    Here is speech just given to New Zealand principals by the Labour Party spokesman, Chris Hiskins.  They are the opposition party and against competitive models of delivery. Leading the charge against this 25 year successful model is massive “research” by Cathie Wylie which pushes for replacement of parent involvement by professional collaboration, professionals who know what’s best.  You know the spiel. http://chrishipkins.org.nz/?p=1036

    CONCLUSION

    As a parent involvement advocate for the last 40 years I do not see any sizeable improvement for meaningful involvement coming from the organized public systems.  Therefore, as consumers and biologically-duty-bound humans, parents must stay determined to seek options, which circumvent and exit when an established system becomes oppressive and harmful. 

    Legislators, using audit principles, are seeing the economic benefits of providing for choices for parents. They also recognize the human folly of usurping parental involvement in nature’s most imperative duty — education of the young.

    Freedom is a value unto itself. But in education, freedom it is a precious tool for truth-seeking.  Parents, regardless of any errors they may make, or regardless of poorer academic results that may pertain, will, in the aggregate, yield well-educated, functional citizens.  Citizens who respect freedom.

    Home education is an excellent strategy but not practical for many parents.  Thus, the choice movement advocating for vouchers, charters, tuition-tax credits, etc. should be supported,

     

     

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  5. Launching PARENTS TEACHING PARENTS

    February 28, 2013 by Tunya

    I prepared this site as a handy place

    • to record efforts in the cause of parent involvement in education

    • to pass on what might be of use to parents today

    I’ve been, by definition, a “reformer” as I’ve stood up for parents’ rights and duties in the education of their children — for 50 years. My involvement connected me with similar parents and groups around most of North America — our challenges are comparable. It’s been a dismal journey. Parents are still largely excluded.

    What is troubling today is that reformers are being fiercely attacked for their well-meaning efforts. Maybe there are different kinds of “reformers”, but I will maintain that parents seeking to be meaningfully involved with the education of their children should be respected and welcomed.

    This site will be devoted to keep parents in the picture, front and center.

    The THREE things to immediately bring forward are:

    1. Parent Rights and Their Children’s Education. This is a compilation of what we see as best practice to help parents advocate and get the best education for their children. http://genuine-education-reform-today.org/2010/04/06/parent-rights-and-their-childrens-education/

    2. Effective Schools Checklist. This was compiled in 1978 by Dr. Ron Edmonds of Harvard and has stood the testy of time as to validity. But it’s not being faithfully applied. Here is where parents can bring forward this material if their schools don’t already apply these principles. http://education-advisory.org/2007/08/effective-schools-checklist/

    3. Home Education: the third option. I was active in the early stages of the home education movement in North America, with some association with John Holt and the Moores. This is the ultimate commitment some parents undertake on behalf of their children’s education. http://education-advisory.org/2006/11/home-education-the-third-option/

    I will also do BOOK REVIEWS. These are the first two I will report on:

    01) Parental Involvement and the Political Principle: Why the existing governance structure of schools should be abolished, Seymour B Sarason, 1995

    02) So Little for the Mind, Hilda Neatby, 1953. (& reviewing her influence in the field)

    I will also deal with major THEMES and the first one will be the matter of SUBSIDIARITY. This was brought to my attention by articles on the anti-reform movement in the United States and the latest protest in Texas where Diane Ravitch, an education historian and a prolific “anti-reform” blogger, was a prominent speaker.

    Subsidiarity came up in one of the items from this story from the Washington Post “An Education Reform Warning for Democrats http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/02/27/an-education-reform-warning-for-democrats/?print=1

    Jerry Brown, Governor of California, critical about top-down decisions from afar concerning curriculum standards and accountability testing, said:

    “This year, as you consider new education laws, I ask you to consider the principle of Subsidiarity. Subsidiarity is the idea that a central authority should only perform those tasks which cannot be performed at a more immediate or local level. In other words, higher or more remote levels of government, like the state, should render assistance to local school districts, but always respect their primary jurisdiction and the dignity and freedom of teachers and students.
    Subsidiarity is offended when distant authorities prescribe in minute detail what is taught, how it is taught and how it is to be measured. I would prefer to trust our teachers who are in the classroom each day, doing the real work – lighting fires in young minds.”

    There is further amplification of “subsidiarity” in the comments section of this article. I, of course, see subsidiarity as including parents at the ground level as well.

    PARTICIPATION in PTP — Since this is all about parents passing on their wisdom I encourage comments, suggestions and questions through the contact form or COMMENTS. Names will not be published.

     

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