Standardizing Education – Common Core’s Hidden Agenda
Anthony Cody’s article from last year Classrooms of the Future: Student Centered or Device Centered offers a very important analysis, looking at the hidden agenda of Common Core and the technology industry. Anthony believes that the goal of “aligning” tests and curriculum with Common Core is to “standardize” education the way computers and other forms of technology are standardized. This helps to explain why Bill Gates haspoured so much money into Common Core and testing.
Think about your PC, all top-selling computers (with the exception of Apple) have the same standard design. That’s what allows Gates’s Microsoft company to maintain a global monopoly with their operating system. Whether your computer is made by Dell, Sony, HP, Samsung or Toshiba they are all configured to the same global industry standards, aligned with Microsoft Windows’ software.
Gates and others from the business, technology and financial industries see education as a new multi-billion dollar international market, especially if the Common Core standards go global. There is a not-so-hidden agenda here to take professional teachers, local communities and national differences out of the equation. Anthony quotes Margo Day, the vice president of U.S. Education, for Microsoft:
“Personalized learning for every student is a worthy and aspirational goal. By combining the power of touch, type, digital inking, multitasking and split-screen capabilities that Windows 8 with Office 365 provides with these new Pearson applications, we’re one step closer to enabling an interactive and personalized learning environment.”
This is an attempt to give us an updated hi-tech version of the factory school model, first developed at the beginning of the last century. They are using the terms individualizedand personalized as a marketing strategy, a way of hiding the truth that these technologies are standardized. Local autonomy, creativity and differences in study are to be eliminated. Student and teacher relationships are no longer central. As Anthony explains:
“In this mode of instruction, these devices become the mediator of almost every academic interaction between students and their teacher, and even one another. Students are assigned work on the device, they perform their work on the device, they share work through the device, and they receive feedback via the device. What is more, the means by which learning is measured—the standardized test—will also be via this device.
It is the appliance that now becomes “intelligent” about each student and the appliance is the vehicle by which lessons are “personalized,” because the appliance is what is keeping track of what the student is capable of, and where the student is weak.
Of course the teacher has the ability to oversee and monitor the assignments the device is making, but the whole idea is to automate this process. And this is happening in an environment where there is a clear desire to increase class sizes. Thus we have “personalization” via digital device, at the same time we make teacher-student relationships far more difficult because budget constraints are increasing class sizes..”
I believe that Anthony is right, that this is the hidden agenda behind both the standards Standardizing Education – Common Core’s Hidden Agenda | Creative by Nature:
