Got Skills?

Anti Fed Ed Warriors, in my last article I shared with you the Senate Resolution which has set aside September 2019 as “Workforce Development Month”. If you’re not sure why or how this connects to your students, I am sharing it, here.

Our government has bought into the belief that a skill based worker is more valuable than a free thinking citizen. Warriors, it’s not simply at the federal level either. Recently, I attended a city meeting to voice concerns over another issue. To my surprise, a county leader from the Chamber of Commerce got up, at the mayor’s request and starting sharing data figures on how well the advertising of our area has been in the past month. During this presentation, it was stated that ‘workforce education is the wave of the future.’ Why wasn’t I horrified? Well, the Chamber of Commerce at the county level is tied to the Chamber at a State level. That State level is, and has been, paid to promote this mindset from the National level Chamber of Commerce.
Warriors, back in 2015, I shared with you how this chain of workforce (indentured servitude) got started. I also shared that NC’s Chamber was delighted to have a ‘talent supply pipeline’ for workforce education. Isn’t that a tremendous way to refer to humans?

Common Core’s famous for stating it can have our students ‘college ready’, now it claims ‘career ready’, too.

Earlier this year, I exposed how much ‘progress’ has been made in America to continue the shifting of academic education to the global workforce mantra. The CCSS Machine has spun it in one word “Competent”. If you think our education needs to be more European, you’re in luck. America’s education system is already European. So much so, we lack very little to seeing history repeat itself via oppression of the citizens at the mercy of the government. If you doubt this can happen, scroll back up and look at the picture. It’s from the past, not a made up story.

So, Where Did Work And Education First “Meet”?

Warriors, here in the US, I traced it back to the 1950s. Since then, workforce based education was called ‘vocational education’. Now before you accuse me of being ‘anti job’, consider this, it’s the CCSS Machine which has ruined not only academic education, but vocational education as well! As I’ve shared before, ‘vocational education’ was rebranded
“CTE, Career Technical Education”. Under CTE, you get ‘adult Common Core’. Under CTE you also get the direction connection to the UN’s STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and, Math) which is 100% workforce education.

Most  think Common Core (or its rebrand, “College and Career Ready”) END at 12th grade.

Hardly. The UN (United Nations), the ILO (International Labor Organization), and scores of other related groups meant ‘lifelong learning’ to be an endless track of some form of training. It’s where ‘cradle to grave’ came from, too. 

A key member of the ILO? The U.S. Dept.of Labor. Below, you can see that the workforce needed is health and technology. Both these fields are in CTE and STEM.

If you’ve not seen the ‘Adult Common Core Standards‘, I found them back in 2014. Most folks, if they believe the truth that Common Core goes well beyond 12th grade, may not know that these ‘standards’ don’t add on to where 12th grade left off. No, these ‘standards’ begin on a 2nd grade level. Why? The reasoning (then) was that it would be impossible to have adult education be at an adult level, when not every adult finished their education up to 12th grade. Of the ‘standards’ which go beyond 2nd grade, they end somewhere before the end of 12th grade.

Warriors, the reality in 2019, is that ‘grades’ and ‘grade levels’ are disappearing. What’s replacing them? How will we know that Johnny and Suzy are ready to graduate? Competency and Proficiency in mastering skills. This is part of the global education/workforce system.

(Article the above image can be found)

Warriors, don’t think the support for workforce education is simply a one political party pony. Nothing could be more false. BOTH major political parties, and all the other minor parties, have embraced the global shift in education. This press release from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce details how the Trump created National Workforce Council backs up the Obama era WIOA (Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act) and ESSA (Every Student Succeeds Act) shift away from academics to workforce.

From the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s website, you can see how they feel about workforce education. In fact, if we all want to go to D.C. in October, we can hear workforce education experts discuss the ‘future of talent’ and the ‘future of work’. So, will we see that skill based education will be rebranded ‘talent based education’?

Are there other US groups chomping at the bit for workforce education? Plenty. This group has ties to another former President (Bush). You can find that tie in the article above highlighted by ‘plenty’.

Closing:

Warriors, in the first article of this series, I showed you the 116th Senatorial nod to devoting an entire month to workforce development. In this article, I hope you’ve seen a few of the past strings which are now chaining us to a workforce future. In my next article, I’ll share the U.S. Dept. of Labor’s latest on uniting education to skills. Or, should I use the new educratic term ‘talents’?