Rotten to the (Common) Core
Description
Joseph P. Farrell, well known for his widely-discussed investigations on contemporary banks and ruling structures, co-writes this fascinating book regarding contemporary schooling with long-time New York state instructor Gary Lawrence.
Say Farrell and Lawrence:
Standardized Testing in America has a troubled history. Its agenda has long remained veiled behind "expert opinions" and "latest studies." The future of American education stands in a tradition of social engineering, data mining, pseudo-psychology, and dumbing down classroom strategies.
Common Core promises great advances though its true benefits are monetary ones for software companies and partner politicians.
It it is our contention that the goal of Common Core, or rather, of its assessment process, is nothing less than a massive addition to the power of the surveillance state, to the privileged corporations destined to manage it, to the further drastic curtailment of our civil liberties, and to the eventual inhibition of any individual creativity, genius, responsibility, and any general or popular intellectual culture resulting from them.
Our argument is different than that leveled by many critics against the Common Core standards, for our focus is thus not upon pedagogy, or content but rather upon its assessment process and its implicit consequences for parents, students, and the teaching profession.
Our goal is to stimulate not only discussion of Common Core's radical agenda for the consolidation of the surveillance state, but for its ultimate rejection.
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Content
Acknowledgements v
Foreword by Catherine Austin Fitts vii
Preface xiii
PART ONE:
THE HISTORICAL MATRIX OF THE PUBLIC SCHOOL
AND THE STANDARDIZED TEST
1. Measurement Mania, Or, Tales from the Dark Side: Measuring the Measures and Measurers
A. Inside the Testing Corporatocracy: Whistleblower Todd Farley Talks
1. The Resemblance of Standardized Tests to Electronic Surveillance
2. The Human Factor: The Scorers Themselves
B. Farley's Details of the Testing Devil
1. Getting the Feet Wet: Farley's First Test Scoring Experience
2. "The Committee Said...": The Banality of Edubabble
a. "Calibrating the Group"
b. The Correct Adjective for the Flavor of Pizza(and Ice Cream)
c. Determining the Rubric: Was that "Fizzes" or "Fizzles"?
3. The Unreability of the Reliability Numbers
4. Interpreting the Rubric, or Rubric Creep
5. Eliminating the Human Factor
2. The Twitification of America: "Facilitators" and the Standardized Test
A. Hoffmann, the Standardized Test, and the Punishment of Individual Brilliance and Creativity
1. Jacques Barzun's Foreword
2. "Simple" Questions, the Problem of Interpretation, and the Punishment of "the Finer Mind"
3. Testing the Tests
B. The Real Goal?: Hoffmann vs. The Educational Testing Service on Questions of Science
1. Deeper Ambiguities and Analogies
2. The Use of Statistics by Test-Defenders
3. The Strategies and Tactics of Defense of Standardized Tests in Practice: The Science Questions and Hoffmann's Battle with the Educational Testing Service
3. Elites, Educators, Facilitators, and Foundations: Part One: Wundt, Americans and Teachers as Change Agents
A. Common Core Standards and the Common Core Assessment Process: Two Different Things, and a Clever Strategy
B. The Education Episcopacy, the Testing Theocracy, and the Wundtian Succession
1. Conant and the Revolutionary Transformation of the American High School
2. "The Leipzig Connection": The Stimulus-Response Cosmology and the Redefinition of Education and the Teacher
C. Dewey, Counts, and the Rockefellers
1. The First Wundtian Succession: Wundt, Hall, and Dewey
2. The Second Wundtian Succession: Wundt, Russell, Thorndike, and the Columbia Teachers' College
3. The First Wundtian Succession Again, and George S. Counts
4. The "Edugarchy": Standardized Testing, and the Cosmology of the Global Skinner Box
A. The Dumbed-Down Elites and Quackery at the Heart of Quackademia: Abraham Flexner, the Rockefeller General Education Board, and the Lincoln School
1. Flexner and the Beginning of "Allopathic" Medicine
2. Flexner's Lincoln School: Dumbing Down the Elite Themselves
B. Conant, Chauncey, and the Testing Theocracy
1. Education for "World Citizenship"
2. Henry Chauncey and the "Census of Abilities"
3. A Coup d'État via Social Engineering and Standardized Testing
4. The First Dirty Little Secret: The Designer of the SAT was a Eugenicist
5. The Invention of the Markograph and Computerized "Objective" Evaluation, and the Emergence of the Educational-Industrial Complex
5. "The Business Model" of Billionaire Busybodies: Foundations and the Educational-Industrial Complex
A. The Technology Factor and the Education-Industrial Complex
1. The Computer, Standardized Tests, and Operant Conditioning of the Student
2. Teacher Evaluation of Operant Conditioning
3. Schools as Change Agents: Social Engineering, "Lifetime Learning Accounts", and the Harvesting of the Individual
B. The Foundations Factor
1. Tests, "Deschooling," and Governance
2. The Power and Unaccountability of Foundations
a. The Short-Lived Cox Committee, and its Findings
b. The Reece Committee Enabling Resolution
3. The Reece Committee Findings
a. The Historical Parallels and Mediaeval Foundations
b. Subtstantive Findings
c. Methodological Findings
4. The Dirtiest Connection: The Edugarchy, Mind Control, the National Security State and the Surveillance Culture
6. "More" Is Neither Better Nor Necessary: Concluding Remarks
A. The Modern Classroom
B. More of What?
C. Ineffective Solutions Offered:
1. More Time
2. More Homework
3. More Summer Assignments
4. More "Group Work"
5. More Technology
6. More Teacher Workshops and "Professional Development"
7. On-Site "Professional Development"
8. Off-Site Conferences for "Professional Development"
9. What is Effective Teaching?
Epilogue - Our Wings Are Melting: Artificial Intelligence and the Enslavement of the Human Mind
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