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Read the transcript of Engineering Failure: Common Core with Anthony Cody here (PDF)
Listen to the Interview MP3 audio file
The Solari Report 2015-05-14
http://player.vimeo.com/video/127946577
Listen to the Money & Markets MP3 audio file
The Solari Report 2015-05-14
May 21: The Global Financial System with James Turk
May 28: Creative Destruction – Launching a Breakthrough Product with Mark Dansie
June 04: The Meaning of Negative Interest Rates with Don Coxe, Coxe Advisors.
“I’ve noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my thirty years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders.”
~ John Taylor Gatto
By Catherine Austin Fitts
This week on the Solari Report, Anthony Cody and I discuss one of the most important stories currently flying “under the radar” in the US: the sweeping changes underway in the US educational system due to the Common Core initiative.
Anthony is the author of The Educator and The Oligarch: A Teacher Challenges the Gates Foundation. He worked in the schools of Oakland, California for 24 years, 18 of them as a middle school science teacher. He was one of the organizers of the Save Our Schools March in Washington, DC in 2011 and he is a founding member of the Network for Public Education.
What is at issue with the Common Core initiative?
- Common Core is standardizing curriculum on a national basis.
- Common Core organizes curriculum around standardized testings.
- Early results indicate that Common Core tests yield a failure rate of approximately 70%.
With technological advances including robotics, driver-less cars and 3-D printing, the corporate economy of the future will need fewer employees. What to do? Why not “convince” the majority of the young people that they are unworthy of careers, let alone entrepreneurship and the skills that facilitate political power and economic ownership? And educate the few who succeed to serve large monopolies. Enter Common Core.
Those who promote Common Core report that this program is making education more rigorous. That is not what I hear and see when talking with students, teachers and parents. It is the ultimate in dumbing-down.
As discussed in the 1st Quarter Wrap Up, I believe that Common Core is the first wave of federal mandates in education which cumulatively represent the darkest political agenda yet.
In Let’s Go to the Movies, I will discuss the documentary, The School.
For three decades, Russian visionary Mikhail Shetinin has been shattering both mainstream and ‘alternative’ views on education, while creating humanity’s new future. At his School, the children have designed, built, and decorated their own campus. They cover the entire high-school curriculum in one year and get official Master’s degrees by the time they are seventeen.
The School offers an inspiring vision of what excellence in education can be. Time to organize one in your community? I think so.
In Money & Markets, I will be reporting on global geopolitics and financial markets from Australia. Make sure you post your questions for Ask Catherine!
Talk to you on Thursday!