GSV ASU Summit in Salt Lake City in May: Is This Really About Abolishing Elected School Boards and Pushing Common Core?

According to its vision document entitled “American Revolution 2.0”, the pro-Common Core investment group GSV Advisors is plotting a lucrative U.S. “revolution” (GSV’s own words) that will include pushing the school choice movement and abolishing locally elected school boards.  GSV is co-hosting its huge ed-tech summit in Utah in May with Arizona State University.

The very fact that a financial institution has a 27-point business plan that involves removing local control in education –and that it’s promoting that vision to a national elite-only audience ($2,795 ticket) right here in Utah, in a few weeks –is very unnerving.  How many voters who want to preserve local control can afford a $2,795 ticket?

Look at page 302 of the GSV vision document if you think I am inventing this madness about eliminating local control.

GSV lists a  “Strategic Battle Plan” for fifteen years, with 27 steps to that plan.  First of the twenty-seven steps is “Common Core”.  Fifth is “No Child Left Behind 2.0” (which was ESSA).  Twenty-first is “Eliminate Locally Elected School Boards”.  Read.  Share it with your ed-tech friends.

This vision feels as creepy as it feels greedy. Remember, this is coming from a financial investment company, but the document’s title is “American Revolution 2.0” –and in its conclusion, it poses in the language of the founding fathers, pretending to care about, or to even comprehend, liberty:

“A System whose characteristics are thus marked by every example which may be defined a failure, is unfit to be the platform of the knowledge citizens of the future….We, therefore, the Representatives of Education Innovators of the United States of America, solemnly publish and declare, that our students ought to have the chance to succeed, that they have access to the best learning technologies, and that as free and independent learners, have the full power to choose their path to success in life. And for the support of this Declaration, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

Using the language of our noble founding fathers to promote this greedy, $elfish, anti-liberty agenda –brazenly pretending to do it for the cause of liberty –is sickening to me.

I would never, ever, ever invest in any of these networks of companies that profit from the destruction of local control of education.  Boycott Pearson, Knewton, Aspen, Lumina, and the countless, countless ed-tech groups that are in this collusion against local liberty.  Don’t use CEDS common data standards for education.  Don’t profit from the thieves of liberty.  Walk away.

I am certain that the average person working for Pearson or Gates or Aspen or Microsoft or Lumina may have no idea that he/she is daily empowering a devastating collusion against local liberty in U.S. education, yet the fact remains that this is exactly what’s happening.

And Utah friends, it’s happening under your noses.

In a few weeks, in May 2017, international big names in the ed-tech world will convene in Salt Lake City at GSV’s Ed-Tech Summit with ASU.

The average person can’t go.  It costs $2,795 per person, just to walk in the front door of the two day conference.

The very long list of summit speakers includes former Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan and GSV founder Deborah Quazzo, who is listed as “a prolific angel investor” who leverages “technology in the global $4.9 trillion education and talent technology sectors.”

A prolific angel investor?  I’m not sure what that means.  I do know that Quazzo is the co-author of the GSV document “American Revolution 2.0” that aims to eliminate locally elected school boards.

Here she is, onstage with Bill Gates at last year’s summit.

Deborah Quattro and GSV!  Our ed-tech industry is looking to these for guidance?!  It makes me quake to think that hundreds of ed-tech leaders will listen to her, to Arne and to the others.  Will they see the GSV vision document  as some sort of blueprint, recklessly forgetting the God-given Constitutional rights and duties of local control of education? Such rights go away when unelected businesswomen, philanthropists and governments “partner” behind the backs of voters and take over what used to be real learning, the kind that happened between one teacher and her students.  The new ed-tech allows extremists’ philosophies, dumped from socialist think tanks through massive online curricula, to fill student devices and minds, thinly disguised as pedagogy.

The list of sponsoring companies at Salt Lake City’s upcoming GSV summit? I bet you can already guess.  These are the not-so-secret combinations:  Gates. Lumina.  The Center for Education Reform.  National Geographic.  USAFunds. Amazon.  Microsoft.  Et cetera.