Tag Archives: civil disobedience

Common Core & The “Amairikuhn Edgykayshun” system

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COMMON CORE: THE RESULTS ARE IN, AND PREDICTABLY, THEY’RE BAD

April 30, 2020 By Joseph P. Farrell

Many people spotted this article and passed it along, and I’d like to thank you for  doing so. When co-author Gary Lawrence and I wrote our book Rotten to the (Common) Core, one of the things that Mr. Lawrence kept stressing to me was the deleterious effects of standardized testing, which would only get worse – much worse – under Common Core (and let it be recalled, for the record, that Billious Hates was one of its sponsors).  The reason it would get much worse, he emphasized, was its reliance on adaptive computerized standard tests. The result would be “teaching to the test, on steroids”, reduction of teachers to proxies for the testing company, and a dramatic erosion of academic standards in the name of a standardized curriculum.

He didn’t need to convince me, because in my own short stint of college teaching, I could readily see the “results” of America’s obsession with all things technological, including standardized tests “graded” and “scored” by computers. Students overwhelmingly were unable to think, unable to write, and most of all, wanted to know “the answer”, when what I wanted to know was why they were thinking what they were thinking. In a nutshell, there simply is no substitute for the human interaction element of pedagogy, and there is no substitute for the ability to write out answers and argue a case. I recall even in my geometry and algebra classes in school, when teachers were still permitted to teach their subject disciplines, that they were always interested in “seeing our work,” the steps we used in a geometric proof or the working out of a quadratic equation. The process of reasoning getting to the answer was as important as the correct answer itself.

Regurgitating an answer for a computerized test is not education, it’s indoctrination.

With that in mind, consider now the results of Common Core:

Study Finds ‘Historic’ Drop In Math, Reading Scores Since Adoption Of Common Core

What intrigues me with this article is that the results are even worse than I or Mr. Lawrence were imagining when we wrote our book:

Reading and math scores in the US have suffered ‘historic’ declines since most states implemented the Common Core curriculum standard six years ago, according to a new study from the Pioneer Institute.

While Common Core was promoted as improving the international competitiveness of U.S. students in math, our international standing has remained low while the skills of average and lower performing American students have dropped in both math and reading. –Pioneer Institute

The study notes that in the years leading up to common core, fourth and eight-grade reading and math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) were rising gradually (2003-2013). After Common Core was implemented, scores for both grades have fallen – with eighth grade falling nearly as fast as it had been rising.

One of the components of the Rotten to the Common Core “system” was computerized books. There too, the USSA has paid a heavy price, adopting a technology just as studies were being done about the reading retention between an actual physical book, and an ebook read on a computer screen or ipad. For most people, those studies concluded that the physical book somehow correlated with retention of knowledge. (Personally, I can vouch for that; I do little research reading computer screens, and when I do, I seem to get much less out of it.)

What caught my eye here, however, was this:

“Several of us allied with Pioneer Institute have been pointing out, ever since it was introduced, the deeply flawed educational assumptions that permeate the Common Core and the many ways in which it is at odds with curriculum standards in top-achieving countries,” said the institute in a statement.

According to the report lower scores as a result of Common Core were predicted a decade ago.

“Nearly a decade after states adopted Common Core, the empirical evidence makes it clear that these national standards have yielded underwhelming results for students,” said Pioneer Executive Director Jim Stergios. “The proponents of this expensive, legally questionable policy initiative have much to answer for”

“It’s time for federal law to change to allow states as well as local school districts to try a broader range of approaches to reform,” Rebarber added. “With a more bottom-up approach, more school systems will have the opportunity to choose curricula consistent with our international competitors and many decades of research on effective classroom teaching”

It’s precisely those “progressive”  assumptions that were the focus of our book, and that some teachers have been warning about for years, for ultimately those assumptions stem from the “stimulus-response” psychology of German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt in the 19th century, and his influence spread far and wide, with Russian psychologist Pavlov (of bell and salivating dog fame), and American “educators” John Dewey, Thorndike and many others falling under his spell. And that means at the rotten core of Common Core there’s a philosophy that humans are nothing but cattle and consumers, a ball of chemical reactions disguised as emotions and thoughts. A mechanism, with a heartbeat. That philosophy is behind all computerized standardized tests, and I do mean, all, without exception. The stimulus is the question; the response is selecting the “correct” answer. Learn by rote, don’t think. Stimulus: “Who killed John Kennedy?”  Response: Answer C: “Lee Harvey Oswald.” No room to question, no acknowledgement that that case has massive problems. Just memorize, repeat. Next question. Memorize. Repeat. Next question… An endless cycle of boredom, of having to “pass” tests designed to ensure you agree with “the narrative.” No wonder our students are not only failing, but bored. In the end, the Amairikuhn edgykayshun system is nothing but a form of mind control technology. A soft form of it, to be sure, but a form of it nonetheless. And if you think I may be exaggerating in that assumption, check out our book, where we expose the curious relationship between the Clowns In America’s MK Ultra program of mind control and standardized tests.

And those types of assumptions, like it or not, form the basic assumptions of most of the entrenched “progressive” “elite” that fill the federal “education” bureaucracy. Those assumptions empower them because they keep the “products” – there’s that assumption again – of the “education” “system” indoctrinated and subservient. Expecting that they, or the federal bureaucracy will relinquish that power is whistling in the wind.

But here’s a thought: civil disobedience maybe should begin in the school “systems”…

See you on the flip side…

from:    https://gizadeathstar.com/2020/04/common-core-the-results-are-in-and-predictably-theyre-bad/

On Popular Uprisings

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People Rise Up: The Streets Are Alive with the Sound of Movement

by
Randall Amster

Protesters on Dec. 5 in Boston.  (Photo: Tim Pierce/flickr/cc)

In an era rife with pop-culture trivialities juxtaposed with escalating calamities, we find ourselves at a remarkable moment that poses profound existential questions for the soul of the nation. Systems that have claimed the mantle of “justice” (while practicing little of it) are being exposed to an unprecedented level of scrutiny, demonstrating in stark terms that tragic episodes from Ferguson to New York are not exceptional but instead constitute the baseline norm of official behavior. The message is not that this system is broken, but rather that it is working exactly the way it was designed. The primary difference now is that people are paying attention.

To make sure that this moment of collective scrutiny doesn’t get lost in the woodwork of an attention-deficient culture, people have been taking to the streets and public places to remind us all of propositions that shouldn’t even have to be said, let alone agitated for, in a healthy society: #blacklivesmatter. Still, one is likely to hear the common retort that this emerging movement is incoherent, inconvenient, incomprehensible. “What do these people want, anyway?” utters a bystander. “I’ll run them over if they get in my way!” tweets another. “It’s terrible that they’re so violent,” laments many a liberal friend. The narrative of the mainstream response reads as a combination of confusion and contempt, simultaneously rapt and repulsed by the spectacle.

Most significantly, analytical consternation has focused more on the seemingly uncoordinated mayhem of the demonstrations than on the coordinated violence of the systems they oppose. The “flash mob” and “pop-up” protest ethos of today’s cutting-edge movements may be as confounding to the “old guard” of movements from a bygone era as they are to the entrenched powers. Still, if we go back a mere half century or so, for many Americans the appearance of a coordinated movement seeking an end to legalized discrimination in schools, transportation, and other places of public accommodation may have seemed like the beginning of a threatening revolution. Notwithstanding that this movement has been cast historically as more reformist than revolutionary in its aims and outcomes, in real-time the widely disseminated images of lunch counter sit-ins and street demonstrations were generally taken as radical in their implications.

The lessons we can take from this are instructive. Just as legislative brushstrokes were incapable of ending institutionalized racism in the nation, we can surmise that contemporary reforms such as police body cameras and civilian review boards will not sufficiently address the deep-seated issues being raised in the aftermath of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases. More pointedly, today’s demonstrations ultimately are asking us to confront the realization that “business as usual” in itself is inherently unjust and reflective of a deeply rooted racial and socioeconomic caste order that persists despite decades of ostensible reforms—and that as long as this order remains intact, there in fact will be no business as usual.

In this sense, what is often taken as the American mythological “norm”—i.e., a level societal playing field defined by equal opportunity, mobility through merit, and justice for all—is undeniably inflected with our unchecked historical baggage and a set of unquestioned values that reflect the requisite power, property, and privilege of an entrenched ruling class consciousness. Those of us who are able to resemble that ruling cadre in certain manners, even superficially, can acquire some of the perquisites attendant to the elite strata—even as the reality is that we are not “them” at the end of the day. Those who lack the elite indicia or the capacity to emulate it sufficiently are left as little more than prey for profiteers, militarists, and wardens, with the double-edged construction of their identities as something to be feared by the elite emulators.

The police, oftentimes appearing as modern-day equivalents of the “palace guard,” are on the front lines of enforcing this racialized socioeconomic order. Somewhat ironically, many of them actually come from the “other side” of the line than the one they’ve been hired to defend; in fact, joining the force may be viewed by some as one of only a few available pathways to try and cross the class divide. This renders the trope of “police versus protesters” particularly problematic, but also suggests a point of leverage if that latent consciousness can be aroused within the ranks of the police themselves. Indeed, it is hard to envision a movement ultimately succeeding without police defections, or at least accommodations such as those voiced by a police chief in Tennessee last week: “In Nashville, if you want to come to a public forum and express your thoughts, even if they’re against the government, you’re going to get your First Amendment protection and you’re going to be treated fairly by the police officers involved.”

This characterization is complicated by another matter that is beginning to be unpacked in the public dialogue. The police are not merely modern-day Pinkertons hired by the bosses to maintain order in the company towns and terror among the workers to prevent them from organizing. Today, increasingly, they are also trained military alumni, having served tours in America’s imperialist wars (which can be viewed as the exported version of systemic violence), and oftentimes are armed with the vestiges of a bloated military-industrial complex that produces more implements of destruction than it could possibly use for its already anachronistic purposes. The police forces in many American cities function as a burgeoning occupying force that cuts a direct swath from Fallujah to Ferguson and all critical points of engagement in between.

We can choose to skirt around all of this and simply ask for a few cosmetic changes to business as usual, perhaps easing some of the more blatant atrocities for a time and even strengthening the mythological fabric of due process and equal treatment. The momentary rupture of traffic and commerce being disrupted [insert characterization here: by angry young people of color] will soon fade into the background with a Christmas-magic cutaway to a yule log and sparkling ornaments. “The system works after all, order is restored—and now back to our regularly scheduled programming…” will proclaim the voiceover reading the cue cards. The task for engaged viewers is to prevent the impending delivery of this colossal lump of holiday coal.

 

*           *           * 

The pop-up protests in the streets right now present the best opportunity for us to collectively engage the difficult issues that most have chosen to ignore but that are coming home to roost. It serves no purpose to continue denying the convergence of the military-industrial complex, the school-to-prison pipeline, redlining and racial profiling, environmental (in)justice, and the rest of the architecture of a dysfunctional system. Indeed, the recent episodes that have brought people into the streets—typifying cases that have been happening every day for a very long time—almost read like an admission of injustice and the raw power to not even care about appearances: “Your cameras and chants and crowds mean nothing; soon enough, most people will resent the intrusions and long for us to restore the comforts and conveniences of their ordinary lives. Your moment of protest will be a minor hindrance at best, and you’ll be branded as the enemy in the process. In the end, our power will be further consolidated and your subjugation expanded.”

Speculative machinations aside, the history of social change counsels that we tread cautiously when broaching revolutionary demands—not to flinch away from making them, but more so to be clear about to whom they are being presented. The gained experiences of movement actors themselves can be inspiring and transformative, and in themselves are part of the measure of success any time people slip the bonds of conformity and take a stand for a better world. On the other side of the coin, entrenched elite interests are not likely to be persuaded to suddenly embrace the “arc of the moral universe” and abdicate their positions of power and privilege. In the middle is that vast pool of onlookers—sometimes horrified, sometimes amused, sometimes inclined to ignore the whole thing and just get about their lives. These are the folks whose consent is counted on to maintain the present order, and whose conversion a movement seeks.

In addressing those still somewhere between elite detachment and flash-mob radicalization, a few points of consideration might be helpful. First, an inherently unjust system inevitably catches all of us in its tentacles, over time becoming an equal opportunity exploiter; when some are not free none are truly free, since (as MLK said) “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Second, the top tier in society do not actually resemble the masses of people, superficial appearances notwithstanding; the gross economic disparity in America, in which the upper echelon controls the vast majority of wealth while the middle and bottom’s combined holdings are nearly negligible, tells a good deal of this story. Third, the emergence of a militarized controlling force (and its concomitant securitized clandestine apparatus) does not discriminate between “good” and “bad” people in its application, but only between those who are an inconvenience and those who can for the moment be tolerated. Fourth, ignoring the crises at hand, from constant cruelty to changing climate, will not keep them from your doorstep.

And to those looking for a condensable movement message, consider that the preferred method of organizing today—consonant with the tenor of the times—is the decentralized network rather than the top-down “central organization” model favored by more entrenched actors. While this may give today’s movements the look of being incoherent, it also more closely resembles the ways in which many of us increasingly meet the world and process information. The internet appears to us as a decentralized network (even as this masks a deeper form of centralization and authoritarianism), so it is unsurprising that those raised squarely under its ambit would replicate this ethos. But the tendency to “pop up” and “go viral” reveals a more subtle consciousness articulated by today’s movements, namely that the most effective response to systemic injustice is one that meets it wherever it is found and that uses its own conveyances to undo its worst aspects. In particular, these disruptions yield great impact (via the conduits of real-time dissemination) at the day-to-day level, where oppressive structures often operate unabashedly yet are unnoticed by the masses: spaces of consumption and transportation, the habitus of low-wage workers, neighborhoods beset by police violence and other deprivations, urban and rural spaces of environmental despoliation. In other words, in the ordinary course of our “business as usual.”

“No Justice, No Profit” isn’t merely a protest chant; it reflects an emerging sensibility that, in many respects, the appearance of justice at all is wholly incompatible with the drive for profit. As a nation, we have blithely ignored this for too long, having become “comfortably numb” (as the Pink Floyd song opines) in the process and failing to recognize that the struggles of oppressed people must become the struggles of all people if any of us are to flourish … or perhaps even survive. As Howard Zinn wrote four decades ago in another moment of upheaval:

“As soon as you say the topic is civil disobedience, you are saying our problem is civil disobedience. That is not our problem…. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience…. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.”

Noncooperation with oppression and injustice is a crucial first step; the next one is perhaps even more challenging: articulating and manifesting a vision to strive toward. Sustaining a movement will require the creation of alternative institutions, new models of distribution and collective decision-making, spaces of both diversity and equality. In today’s parlance, we come to discover that the movement itself is part of this message, constituting both a means and an end. On the cusp of pivoting from protest to resistance, movements for justice can sustain by leveraging resistance into persistence, and ultimately prevail through persistence for the continuation of our very existence. Martin Luther King Jr. once spoke of the perils of “sleeping through a revolution.” Today, the alarm bells are ringing in town squares and city streets everywhere, urging everyone still holding out hope for a more just world to rise up and get busy making it.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Randall Amster, JD, PhD, is Director of the Program on Justice and Peace at Georgetown University, and serves as Executive Director of the Peace and Justice Studies Association. His recent books include Peace Ecology (Paradigm Publishers, 2014), Anarchism Today (Praeger, 2012), Lost in Space: The Criminalization, Globalization, and Urban Ecology of Homelessness; and the co-edited volumes  Exploring the Power of Nonviolence: Peace, Politics, and Practice (Syracuse University Press, 2013) and Building Cultures of Peace: Transdisciplinary Voices of Hope and Action.

from:    http://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/12/06/people-rise-streets-are-alive-sound-movement

People Are Joining Together

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Birth of a Progressive Coalition: 30,000 Attend March in March in Melbourne

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19th March

By Michael Marriott

Guest Writer for Wake Up World

The March in March was a stunning success for the grass roots organisers — a rival to the Vietnam Moratorium marches of 1970.

This wasn’t merely a small gathering of the disenfranchised. In attendance, one could find a true cross-section of the community.

Tens of thousands came to march peacefully and express their justified outrage. Grandparents came with their children and their grandchildren. Generations united in disgust at the actions of this government. Climate activists united with those fighting for animal rights. Trade unionists made common cause with environmentalists.

As I mingled with the crowd, I asked people what prompted them to protest.

I asked them:

“Why are you here? What made you come?”

What surprised me was the uniformity of their response. It wasn’t a single concern that motivated them to participate in this incredible display of people power.

I asked a group of teenage girls why they were there:

“To lock the gates” said the one holding the now ubiquitous yellow triangle of that grass roots movement.

“There is no planet B!” said the girl with the beanie.

Said the one with the black cap:

“It’s… everything! Everything Abbott is doing!”

As the protesters began to make their way down Swanston Street, I asked a family why they’d decided to come.

Said a mother holding a sign declaring her support for refugees.

“It’s just about everything! He (Abbott) is ignoring climate change. He is anti-women. He is cutting government services to those who need them.”

Again and again I heard the same sentiments and sense of outrage.

Ordinary Australians expressing alarm with the policies of the Abbott lead government. These are people concerned about their children’s future. They want a more just society.

This is why this past weekend was an incredible display of authentic people power.

There were no politicians or celebrities there to hog the limelight. Those who marched were people like you and me.

Like us, they are frustrated and disgusted with this present generation of politicians, media hacks and spin doctors.

On Sunday, we witnessed the emergence of something many of hoped for, but feared wouldn’t come — the birth of a progressive coalition prepared to embrace civil disobedience.

Perhaps the March in March movement heralds the arrival of a new phase in Australian politics.

Citizens organising themselves in protest and uniting in common cause while rejecting the major political parties.

How this shapes politics in Australia is yet to be seen. Anyone dismissing this past weekend’s events is a fool.

And there is no fool like a News Corporation fool. Andrew Bolt dismissed the 30,000 Victorians who marched as ‘barbarians‘.

Be careful what you wish for Andrew; barbarians have a habit of bringing down empires.

As the crowds dissipated toward the late afternoon, I chatted to a group of friends about the success of the march and what it meant.

Without reservation we all agreed.

We no longer felt alone.

NOT IN OUR NAME from OPTICAL ALKEMI (J.Dujon.P) on Vimeo.

from:    http://wakeup-world.com/2014/03/19/birth-of-a-progressive-coalition-30000-attend-march-in-march-in-melbourne/