The National Pulse – DeVos’ Swiss Agreement Overlooks Deep Problems with School-to-Work Model

This article, written by Dr. Karen Effrem for The National Pulse, details the flaws in Secretary of Education Betsy Devos’ agreement with the Swiss Government to model U.S. school workforce on the vocational system of Europe. It also highlights similarities with this plan and other such initiatives like those put forth by billionaire Bill Gates.

This is reminiscent of the Gates Foundation “Smaller Learning Communities (SLC)” initiative that preceded their Common Core push. In that program, students were funneled into choosing a career path in sixth grade with little option to receive a broad-based academic education and before they had any idea what they wanted to do. Gates spent between $650 million and $1 billion on that school-to-work scheme, and it failed miserably, just like almost every other Gates education initiative, including Common Core.

Besides these concerns, there is a clear link between apprenticeships and competency-based education (CBE), Common Core, and social emotional learning (SEL). As previously noted, Anthony Carnivale — a board member of the National Center on Education and the Economy when Marc Tucker wrote his infamous “Dear Hillary” letter urging the remolding of “the entire American system” into “a seamless web that literally extends from cradle to grave and is the same system for everyone” — wrote in the Washington Post this summer that the new American workforce should include the following elements:

Assessments of “values and personality traits” — i.e. psychological screening and data mining, as does the OECD and education technology companies that want to do affective data mining.

“Firsthand exposure to alternative occupational pathways through internships and other applied learning opportunities” — which is edu-speak for further diluting the academic curriculum that has already been devastated by Common Core.

“Work experience to cultivate basic employability skills such as conscientiousness and collegiality in diverse workplaces” — translation: training in group-think and becoming worker bees.

The full article can be found at The National Pulse’s website here.

Dr. Effrem’s National Pulse archive is available here.

The National Pulse: Invasive Plan to Data Mine Preschoolers Globally Draws International Criticism

by Dr. Karen Effrem, MD

Back in February, both Education Liberty Watch and American Principles Project warned about and submitted comments to The Federal Register opposing U.S. participation in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) latest ill-advised and invasive International Early Learning Study (IELS). This is a new scheme to extend international standardized testing, social-emotional profiling, and data mining via tablets.   See the full article at: Invasive Plan to Data Mine Preschoolers Globally Draws International Criticism

The National Pulse: Mother Denied Parental Rights over Transgender Teen Appeals Court Ruling

Last month, Dr. Effrem described the bizarre and dangerous Minnesota federal court decision that “emancipated” a minor child from his mother, thereby denying her inherent parental right to direct the academic, medical, and other aspects of the care and upbringing of her own son — all without any of the due process normally involved in such situations.

The story continues:

According to the Minnesota Child Protection League (CPL), an organization which has been supporting Ms. Calgaro’s efforts, attorneys for the district made the situation painfully worse:

Attorneys for the school district went on to state that, since Calgaro had filed a lawsuit to assert her parental rights, her request should be denied in order to protect her son from “further harm.”  Consider that. The school administration is empowered to decide that Calgaro is harmful to her son because she challenged the violation of her parental rights in court.

Continue to read!

The National Pulse: There He Goes Again: Jeb Bush Still Interfering in Education

Dr. Karen Effrem’s recent Florida Legislative testimony bears witness to sound advice falling on deaf ears.

“This would be especially tragic for our already beleaguered school districts, because this concept of tying NAEP proficiency to state test achievement levels has NO, and I repeat NO support in the government and research communities. The National Center for Education Statistics that administers the NAEP, as well as the National Academy of Sciences, The National Academy of Education, and the Brookings Institute all say that proficiency on the NAEP and achievement levels on state tests like the FSA are completely unrelated and should have nothing to do with each other.”

There He Goes Again: Jeb Bush Still Interfering in Education