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.
“Bald Piano Guy” is a New York teacher who sings “Opting Out” to the tune of Billy Joel’s “Moving Out,” and sings “Seen Them Opting Out on Broadway” to the tune of “Seen the Lights go out on Broadway”. He sings “The Arrogant Man” dedicated to NY Governor Cuomo, to the tune of “Angry Young Man”. He has many more YouTube performances but I’ll share just a few here.
As I’ve said before, please be wise and very careful about what happens in each of our states as a replacement for high stakes testing. The controlistas love to take a crisis and turn it to their own advantage.
According to an article at EagNews.org, some states have true local control and some do not. Wisconsin, Ohio and North Carolina have local control; Utah does not.
The article explains:
MADISON, Wis. – If you live in a “local control” state in terms of public education – and chances are you do – here is some enlightening news.
Your local school board probably has the legal right to remove your school district from the new Common Core academic standards that are being forced on school districts around the nation by state education officials.
It’s true in my home state of Wisconsin, and it’s been confirmed by state education officials in Ohio and North Carolina.
Legislators and (state education departments) have, in my opinion, kept this information very close to the vest. That is deceit of the ugliest kind.
I contacted the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and asked the following question: If a school district decides to reject Common Core standards and replace them with a superior set of standards, will that school district still receive state and/or federal funds?
I received the following response from Emilie Amundsen, director of the Common Core State Standards Team at DPI:
“Yes. In Wisconsin, each school board has the statutory authority to adopt the state standards or any other set of standards, inferior or superior. This is called local control. When applied to schools, local control means that decisions about standards, curriculum and instruction are made at the local level. School districts must have standards. The type, quality and scope of those standards are left to local school boards to decide. This has always been the case in Wisconsin, and this has not changed as a result of Wisconsin adopting Common Core state standards.”
The staff at EAGnews is trying to contact education officials in numerous states, to determine if their districts also have the right to opt out of Common Core.
So far only three states have responded. Officials in North Carolina and Ohio have acknowledged that districts are free to dump Common Core, but caution that students in those districts may struggle with mandatory state tests, which will be aligned with Common Core.
Officials in Utah say local districts do not have the power to drop out of Common Core…
COMMON CORE 