KnowledgeWorks provides states with a framework for personalized learning. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Until you peel back the layers.
Personalized learning sounds good on the surface. Your child will get personalized learning opportunities to cater to their personal needs. But what does that look like in the classroom? How can it be personalized if it’s all Common Core? Maybe they mean that children can learn at their own pace? How does that work in a classroom of 25 children?
What does this look like?
Gone are the days when the teacher stands in front of the class and teaches your children the academic content. In this article by Joanne Jacobs, titled It’s too noisy for kids to learn, she reports on what the average classroom looks like today. Keep in mind, these classes include children who struggle with paying attention.
Jacobs says:
It’s hard for students to focus on learning in noisy classrooms, writes Natalie Wexler in Forbes. The average elementary classroom is a hub of activity, distraction and noise. Teachers are told that students who are talking are learning.
I wouldn’t necessarily blame the teachers because much of this is dictated by others. What happens in the classroom is normally dictated to teachers from education reformers who sell this pedagogy like it’s the next best thing to happen to public ed.
Gone are the traditional classrooms where a classical curriculum focused on academics. Instead, students are left to discover knowledge.
As I reported before, children now have access to the internet, so reformers will tell you that teachers aren’t needed to teach the academic content. (See video below) Instead schools will focus on raising up in public schools with attitudes, values, and beliefs dictated by the State.
Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) is replacing academic learning:
KnowledgeWorks is there to make sure states facilitate this transformation in the classroom.
But what else does KnowledgeWorks say about public education?
There is a strong focus on Competency-Based Education. CBE is the vehicle for Social and Emotional learning assessments. SEL is the vehicle to change your child’s attitudes, beliefs, and values. Public education isn’t about learning history, mathematics or Science, it’s about instilling political indoctrination in your children.
So what does KnowledgeWorks say about that?
In Scenario A: Education Liberation Commons Grow at the Speed of Trust :
In the decade following the 2020 Presidential election, growing disappointment in the lack of transformational movement in fighting climate change, labor automation, social injustice and anti-oppressive structures convinced many community organizers, families, educators and students to tackle issues directly rather than through the polls.
What does this have to do with learning how to add and subtract? This sounds like political action. As you read through their edu-babble, you can see that there is no emphasis on making sure children are literate in the core academic subjects. There is nothing about literacy or academic excellence. But yet, they have the framework for your schools!!
Their framework is focused on using Competency Based Education as a vehicle for SEL and CRT in the classroom. A traditional classroom focused on academics grades children objectively. Competency Based Ed. uses a subjective grading system which allows for subjective grading of attitudes and values. Then all of this data is collected on your children which becomes an even bigger problem. How will that data be used in the future? What if your child doesn’t exhibit the values the state has determined as acceptable?
KnowledgeWorks goes on to expose how they want to create a “liberation” education system of some sort to “promote critical consciousness and encourage social action.” That’s a new name for community organizing and pushing more political indoctrination on your children.
These people are selling snake oil to the communities instead of educating their children. Antifa will be thrilled to see this, but parents who aspire for their children to become doctors and lawyers will be disappointed. An education focused on activism will not prepare any of those marginalized children for the rigors of our top colleges and universities. It will not prepare them for much of anything past high school graduation.
Here is more of their edu-babble below. Replace “promote critical consciousness” with political indoctrination. Replace “Encourage social action” with creating illiterate community organizers:
A local region’s education liberation commons is a cooperative web of community agencies, services, learning resources, tutors, community elders and volunteers. These contributors help build vibrant learning environments and experiences, promote critical consciousness and encourage social action among those who have for decades been underserved and marginalized by traditional educational institutions. Experts, mentors and learning guides come from the neighborhoods, regions and social networks that comprise the education liberation commons. These individuals know their learners deeply and vice versa. For example, the West Valley Rural Education and Liberation (REAL) Commons used its local and global 4-H network to create a dynamic liberatory education environment focused on climate justice and food security.
Then KnowledgeWorks demonizes traditional public education where the focus is on academics. We can’t have these children learning about the U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence, Magna Carta, Periodic Table, Calculus or anything else that mirrors a classical education focused on knowledge. See for yourself:
Despite this residual authority, public education systems are passively coasting and maintaining the status quo. They continue to focus on academics using traditional, 20th-century curricular standards and pedagogies
Instead of promoting an improvement to the academic content that has been watered down over the years, they shift completely away from academics to pushing the Critical Race Theory agenda and SEL. It is Competency-Based Education that will be the vehicle for this kind of indoctrination. CBE is the old and failed Outcome Based Education model from the 90s. The focus is on outcomes, but not academic outcomes. The outcomes they expect will be focused on the students learning CRT values.
While some schools have implemented project-based learning or personalized, competency-based learning, states and districts remain heavily divided on the extent to which curricula are culturally responsive and school cultures are anti-racist. Schools are more equitable than in the past, but they are not liberatory. Many states continue to dismiss acknowledgement of systemic racism as a political talking point. In other states, whitewashed versions of African-American history and “culturally relevant” pedagogies are taught. Many public schools are simply not willing to devote the time and energy to work through the discomfort and challenges of becoming anti-racist. In contrast, education liberation commons are inherently rooted in multiple ways of knowing, diverse forms of knowledge and culturally responsive curricula. They represent education in service to its communities.
Black, Indigenous and youth of color leaders, as well as LGBTQ+ and disabled youth, cultivate innovation in local education liberation commons and in the design of learning priorities and experiences. They help set social norms by modeling cross-cultural and racial literacies with peers and community members. For example, the West Valley REAL Commons Youth Hive designed a collaborative online forum to inform people about, and mobilize action on, issues shaping their futures, such as climate change and social justice.
Liberation Commons means that schools better get on board with this CRT agenda to be fully liberated. This is more about training ANTIFA members than it is about offering students of color the best academic education so that they can pursue anything in life if they just put effort into it.
Public education does need a boost in terms of literacy and academics, but this solution is no solution at all, unless you are a recruiting officer for ANTIFA. Their solution is to indoctrinate students into their political ideology. That doesn’t help our black and brown students, nor does it help any of the other students.
Those who can escape this dumbed-down system will find better private schools, or parents will home-school their children. The rest will fall through the cracks that these social justice warriors are creating.
True social justice comes from giving children the knowledge they need to pursue any vocation they choose in life. This framework is a path to illiteracy paved by social justice warriors.
We all need to make sure we let the Commissioner of Education, Frank Edelblut, and the State Board of Education members know that we do not want any part of this plan. We need better quality academic standards and tests that raise the bar in our schools. That is true social justice. When all children receive a quality academic education, that’s what will open doors to success as long as they are willing to put in the effort.
Here is what KnowledgeWorks reported on New Hampshire.
