It’s easy to be confused by what is said about schools today. We are told one thing, when quite the opposite is taking place.
We are told that with the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), education will involve local decision making. Simultaneously, the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation is giving $44 million to affect state school decisions.
A citizen may have suggestions for their local school board, but who’s going to listen when that school district is taking money and doing what the Gates Foundation wants them to do?
Another example is North Dakota. Superintendent Kirsten Baesler did a podcast six months ago discussing “innovation” and “customization” of learning. She was trying to get teachers and citizens to support ND 2186, a bill that passed there to transform schools to technology.
The discussion involves double talk. These same buzz words and claims can be found in school districts across the country.
Claim: Teachers will be “empowered.”
The Reality:
Empowered is a popular word. But in North Dakota they are handing schools over to Knowledgeworks, a foundation that will convert schools to technology.
The only way teachers will be empowered is if they sign on to Knowledgeworks!
Claim: We are moving away from No Child Left Behind (NCLB).
The Reality:
NCLB was all about destroying public schools with strict accountability.
Total technology without teachers is the NCLB frosting on the cake!
Claim: Teacher creativity is important.
Reality:
The State of North Dakota has partnered with Ted Dintersmith, who wrote a book about what schools should be like. But he is not an educator.
Ted’s professional experience includes two decades in venture capital, including being ranked by Business 2.0 as the top-performing U.S. venture capitalist for 1995-1999. He served on the Board of the National Venture Capital Association, chairing its Public Policy Committee. From 1981 to 1987, he ran a business at Analog Devices that helped enable the digital revolution.
Where’s the teacher creativity in this?
Dintersmith uses the same line as Betsy DeVos and other corporate school reformers. In a Forbes interview he says, Schools still use a 125-year-old model, put in place to train people for industrial jobs, which lives with us to this day.
He has also worked with Tony Wagner who once worked with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Claim: Customized learning is innovation.
Reality:
Customized learning is also called personalized, competency-based, proficiency-based, digital, and online learning. It means children will rely on screens for instruction and nonstop testing. Much data will be collected about them.
Teachers will become secondary to the computer as facilitators, or they could be out of a job.
Brick-and-mortar schools are also jeopardized. Students might learn at home or in libraries, museums, or charter schools.
Claim: Teachers will get authority because they are trusted.
Reality:
If this is true, why has North Dakota partnered with Dintersmith, and turned schools over to Knowledgeworks? Are teachers being used to spread the customized learning message? Will their jobs be intact in a few years?
Claim: Loosening regulations and laws will help students.
Reality:
This is dangerous. We hear it echoed by Betsy DeVos. Think about laws that protect students.
For example, if it weren’t for IDEA, schools would not have to work with students with disabilities.
Other federal laws include Section 504, FERPA, and Protection of Pupil Rights.
North Dakota State laws can be found here.
ND 2186 permits these changes, found on the Knowledgeworks website.
- Awarding credit for learning that takes place outside normal school hours
- Awarding credit for learning that takes place away from school premises
- Allowing flexibility regarding instructional hours, school days, and school years
- Allowing any other appropriate flexibility necessary to implement the pilot program effectively
How will we know what students learn? You can see here how brick-and-mortar schools could be on their way out.
Claim: We are doing what’s right for children.
Reality: There is no proof that this is true. An OECD study in 2015 found that students did better with less technology!
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This is just some of the double talk out there. Check out my list of state superintendents and compare what they say with other state leaders.
Tune in to the language. It isn’t always what it seems.
Note. Knowledgeworks will be working with North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina (and Indiana?). Will they be coming to your state?
All of the changes in North Dakota were across party lines.
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Here is a well-researched and more detailed explanation of North Dakota’s situation. “They’ve Got Trouble, up there in North Dakota.” Wrench in the Gears.
Orwellian doublespeak can assume all forms. One reality can suddenly become another. North Dakota, of all places, should know the value of teaching. Their kids are always above the curve, especially above the curve of the northern latitudes.
I agree, Roy! I’ve heard it said many times that ND has great public schools. They seem to be changing for change sake. Not a good idea. Thank you for taking the time to comment.
CHANGING for the sake of CHANGE. All across the nation….
I am a parent of two middle-schoolers who attend public school here in Tucson, AZ. They are both very bright and get good grades, but both hate being in school because it’s so boring and because they see very little relevance to their lives in what they are being taught. I am in the middle of reading Dintersmith’s What School Could Be. It has opened my eyes to the problems in American education (beyond the extreme lack of funding – I am helping with the #RedForEd initiatives). I was just wondering if you have read the book. There seems to be a lot of good suggestions in there.
I am no fan of Dintersmith. He is a businessman, not an educator. Look and see what’s happening in North Dakota where he has partnered with the state to push his education agenda. He is a venture capitalist. I think he is pro all-tech schools. Unproven.
Nancy, I’d be happy to talk, but would love for you to read my books and listen to my talks. I support teacher-led advances in education, not my own ‘education agenda.’ I express considerable skepticism about “all-tech schools.” In North Dakota, I’ve supported a range of initiatives, primarily responding to input from teachers in the field. I’m expressly non-prescriptive, other than to offer the certainty that kids who leave school with a narrow set of competencies (memorizing content, replicating low-level procedures, following instructions) are in deep trouble in an increasingly-innovative world. But from your comments, I think you may be jumping to a conclusion that my views are similar to the misguided views of many with business backgrounds (and I do apologize for them!). But you should read my new book. If you do, I’m confident you’ll revise your comments above, which don’t reflect my beliefs — at all.
It isn’t about your books. I haven’t read them. It is what they are doing in N.D. working closely with Knowledgeworks and your association with that. .
I just purchased your book. Thank you for being open to speak with teachers in the field and out of the field. Thank you for responding to NANCY’s post. As antiquated as it may sound, when all is said and done, all of our work must be “all about the kids.” In the reform maze of 2018, this is a hard vision to maintain but it is the vision that unites true change through love.
Mr. Dintersmith, you are in the business of making money and have no clue about the education of young children. Lets get real. You are not pushing education but work force training to fill the needs of the planned global economy. This is training not education and this is how they “educate” children in Communist China. Our children are not some experiment and they are not human capital for your investors. We educated some of the greatest minds in the history of the world in one room school houses and at our kitchen tables. We need to stop the experiments and get back to what worked in the past. We are moving away from education and closer to Communist school to work. “When education is beaten by training, civilization dies.” C. S. Lewis
“Education has become a modern American caste system. We fuzz up the issue in a sea of statistics about test score gaps, suggesting that social inequity is a classroom issue. We bemoan the achievement gap but dwell on the wrong “achievement” and the wrong “gap.” Achievement should be based on challenging real-world problems, not standardized tests that amount to little more than timed performance on crossword puzzles and sudoku. The gap we need to face is how
much more we spend to educate our rich children than our poor.” – Ted Dintersmith – What SchoolCould Be – pages 124/125.
Ted,
I’d be happy to exchange books with you. Mine is “Infidelity to Truth: Education Malpractice in American Public Education”.
In it I discuss the purpose of American public education and of government in general, issues of truth in discourse, justice and ethics in teaching practices. The abuse and misuse of the terms standards and measurement which serve to provide an unwarranted pseudo-scientific validity/sheen to the standards and testing regime and how the inherent discrimination in that regime should be adjudicated to be unconstitutional state discrimination no different than discrimination via race, gender, disability, etc. . . .
Feel free to contact me at duaneswacker@gmail.com and we can arrange an exchange.
And the offer of my book goes to anyone reading here. Just contact me!
Mr. Dintersmith, I’m afraid that you don’t fool me. I know about the Dear Hillary letter from Marc Tucker and the scheme to turn education into “Workforce Development”. I know how Common Core , as bad as it was, was merely a smoke screen for what was going on in No Child Left Behind and the Every Student Succeeds Act. I know that DeVos is lying, that the unions are betraying their teacher members to push for this, but that the charter people also intend to replace public school with charter schools, which are all infested with Gates money (among other vulture capitalists). I know about the ESSA and it’s ties to WIOA. And I know that CTE is actually Common Core/Fed Ed/Workforce Development (it once was called Career Technical Core). And I know about SEL and Social Emotional Learning and how they plan to change our “values, attitudes, and beliefs”.
I also know that one of your last steps in development is that you guys want to reauthorize the Higher Education Act so that you guys in Big Business and Big Government can govern us from preschool through the workforce.
I know about the Federal Career Pathways program and the thirteen federal departments involved in that. I know about the OECD and the UN and their schemes and how this is all part of the UN’s Sustainable Development goal for education.
I also happen to know that the tech shortage was a fake for a long time (possibly as early as the 1990’s when AIG was replacing Americans with H1Bs) and that some sneaky people were going to fund the American career technical education for all the H1B visas fees they were going to get by giving the companies more cheap labor visas in the thankfully foiled Gang of Eight immigration bill. And I’ve heard stories from construction workers, IT workers, engineers, pharmacists, chemists, physicists, and how the “shortages” in those job markets are all fake.
Plus, I have read lots of job seeker posts of frustration wondering why the companies were whining about shortages yet treated training like a swear word. Now I can tell them it’s cuz they want to train younger workers via taxpayer money and use our “education” system to pidgenhole kids into careers and that older workers are no longer needed now that they plan to have their endless supply of young cheap labor via the Career Pathways/Career Clusters, whatever name you give it, programs.
And I happen to know that STEM is also being pushed by the UN. And I know that these Afterschool programs like the Afterschool Alliance are also in on these schemes with Gates funding, STEM pushing, and Common Core/Fed Ed/Workforce Development pushing.
Personalized learning, competency based education, career technical education, college and career ready, whole child, SEL, Common Core, workforce development, etc. I see through it all.
I am still reading What School Could Be (I don’t get to read very many pages at a time so it’s taking forever…), and I really don’t see any evidence that Mr. Dintersmith has an agenda. He seems to support public schools and minimal standardized testing. Please read his book.
It is about what is taking place in N.D.
Cathyrn, You have to understand Dintersmith within the larger context of the next wave of education reform that aims to get rid of bricks and mortar neighborhood schools altogether. These links provide important background: https://wrenchinthegears.com/2018/03/21/ted-dintersmith-is-not-here-to-save-neighborhood-schools/
https://wrenchinthegears.com/2018/04/19/theyve-got-trouble-up-there-in-north-dakota/
Great article Nancy. We need more like this to show people the double meanings to the words they use to deceive the public.