There’s a term too few people know about: “The Stalinization of Education.” I learned this from page 68 of the book by Professors Christopher Tienken and Don Orlich, “The School Reform Landscape: Fraud, Myth, and Lies.”
The Stalinization of Education is a term that describes how America’s “No Child Left Behind,” “Common Core” and national testing are eerily similar to Stalin’s 5 year plan of over 70 years ago. How?
- There was the complete politicization of schools (today it’s form is “teaching for social justice”).
- There was the transformation of teachers from caretaker-nurturer to technician-like soldier, from child centered to test- or curriculum-centered.
- There was the conversion of teachers to a new party line (today it’s “environmental sustainability”)
- There was the altering of loose-tight to tight-loose controls over education. Secretary Arne Duncan used those exact words in his speech to the inter-american-development-bank (Ed secretary speech to a bank!?!) –recently.
- There was the removal of teachers’ use of intellectual skepticism, benevolence, spontaneity, and openness to an emphasis on militaristic strength, effectiveness and being political and curriculum-centered.
- Pay-for-performance transformed the definition of what a high quality teacher would be.
Academia has been bought by the Common Core pushers (Gates, Soros, Pearson).
And academia not questioning the lack of empirical evidence behind the push the Common Core experiment is the promotion of educational malpractice. Common Core is absolutely intellectually dishonest. It’s academic fraud. But the highest ranking academics in our nation will not say so.
No one can explain this problem better than these guys do in this book (it’s the book I mentioned on Glenn Beck.)
Still, it’s true that countless educators believe our educational system was so awful that it is worth giving up local constitutional control of standards, for the cure-all of supposedly much better standards.
In South Carolina’s Senator Mike Fair’s words, we need to show them that Common Core is a case of trading our birthright for a mess of pottage –but not even getting the pottage.
The real trade was actual education and actual local control, for one size fits all progressive education and no control.
COMMON CORE 