While researching the Mitchell Superintendent controversy started by Cory Heidelberger and now getting coverage by Keloland, I came accross a payment of $2,275 reported in the September 14, 2015 minutes of the Mitchell School district to "Mid Central Ed Coop" for "SD Inovative Lab days". I then found the "South Dakota’s Innovation Lab Pilot Report" subtitled, "The Transformation of Rural Education" that was copyrighted in 2014 by South Dakota Innovative Lab and the PAST Foundation. On page 6 we learn:
In 2010, a conversation took place between Dan Guericke, the Mid-Central Educational director and Dr. Melody Schopp, South Dakota’s Secretary of Education. It was a conversation they would have many times. The gist of the conversation was that the format of education needed to change. The successful industrial model of the 1880s is obsolete. The criteria still employed by schools is producing students who fit the model of efficiency for the early 20th century, not the early 21st century. Schopp challenged Guericke to create a new model, tailored to rural South Dakota. Guericke accepted the challenge.
Guericke looked to his own educational cooperative to develop a plan. His goal was to bring the best of education to the rural schools pulling from best practices, not simply popular norms. By 2011 he convinced four, Mid-Central school districts to pilot the SDIL/PAST TPBL model in order to inaugurate the change and opportunities he sought for South Dakota students. The pilot communities Armour, Platte, Bonesteel, and Wessington Springs had a common, yet unique element. The relative size (~24 teachers, and <200 students K-12), a rural environment, and a high percentage of low-income families, allowed the schools to save energies and resources by combining efforts. The uniqueness and cultural diversity within each school allowed each school to shape their curriculum into its own version of the 21st Century School. All of this was possible with the expertise and partnership of Sanford PROMISE and Sanford Research, leaders of the state Department of Education, Mid-Central Educational Cooperative, and the PAST Foundation.
Take note that 2010 was also the year that the Rounds adminstration sucessfully had the Common Core standards approved by the South Dakota State Board of Education before reading more details found on page 8 of the pilot report:
The success of the current SDIL schools lies in four key partnerships. Sanford Research, MCEC (Mid Central Educational COOP), the system transformation and education expertise of the PAST Foundation, and the flexibility of the South Dakota Department of Education have helped the transformation of the pilot schools.
1. Mid-Central Education Cooperative is the foundation in this public/private partnership. MCEC helps the other partners and the schools involved to understand and develop ownership of the vision of the developed. Along with this we have the responsibility of supporting the deployment and evaluation of this change process. We also have the role of researching, evaluating and securing of resources to support this process, both human and financial. It is also our role to provide leadership and to support all members of the team both in positive as well as not so positive situations.”
2. Sanford Research offers a deep informed engagement from the corporate world of health and wellness. Their education initiative, Sanford PROMISE, has a mission to increase the community’s understanding of science and their awareness about the benefits of research to society. The Sanford PROMISE’s role in the SDIL Initiative is to provide rich content/ curriculum resources as well as access to equipment and expertise. Through this partnership, students have at their disposal equipment and expertise that is unheard of in a small, rural school’s lab. Students synthesize DNA and access a real, working lab to increase hands-on knowledge and access to materials that most rural school districts could not afford. In addition, Sanford Research opens its labs and offers to students an on-site experience in a working research lab.
3. The PAST Foundation offers a transformative education model that embraces community and geography. The model is a replicable process that is flexible and takes on a community’s tenor and belief, delivering rigorous education in a holistic and customized way. By partnering anthropology with science and technology, PAST invites the world to design, construct and engage in experiences that link learning to life. The PAST foundation’s partnership in this initiative is to provide ongoing professional development and assistance to participating schools and teachers.
4. The South Dakota Department of Education (SD DOE) made it possible for rural school districts to work collaboratively. Their leadership helps participating schools navigate state requirements that might impede innovation, supports alternative professional development, and provides technical assistance. Without the assistance of the SD DOE, Innovation Lab school districts would not have been able to proceed. Dr. Melody Schopp, SD Secretary of Education, called TPBL “an ambitious effort” in her August 2011 column for the DOE and published as an editorial in the Argus Leader. Schopp praised the Innovation Lab school districts for “their vision and commitment to searching out solutions for their students." The SD DOE cleared a pathway allowing the innovation of TPBL in SD.
On Page 16 we find out that this public/private partnership added two more partners, the Clinton Global Initiative and MCEC's GearUp program:
Leading off the second year, SDIL partnered with the Clinton Global Initiative America (CGI America) in a commitment to Redefine Rural and Native American STEM Education. Becoming a CGI partner accomplished a number of positive and powerful things for SDIL. First, it recognized the innovative nature of the Innovation Lab in naming SDIL the only rural educational commitment selected in 2012. Second, it brought to the attention of businesses, communities and other organizations the work of SDIL paving the way for further expansion of the Innovation Lab network.
...
All aspects of the commitments have had resounding impacts on the evolution and development of the network. Clinton established CGI America to address economic recovery in the United States. CGI America brings together leaders in business, government, and civil society to generate and implement commitments to create jobs, stimulate economic growth, foster innovation, and support workforce development in the United States. Since its first meeting in June 2011, CGI America participants have made more than 160 commitments.
In the second year four more schools were added to SDIL through a partnership with the Native American program GearUP.
Untill recently we have not heard much about SDIL and GearUP. We now know they were administered by MCEC
Most also know little about the Clinton Global Initiaitve and STEM:
The implementation of the Common Core State Standards will provide many opportunities for the private sector to support enhanced STEM learning in the classroom.
Yes, most have heard about Common Core. Page 15 of the pilot report calls Common Core "national standards" and explains how the teachers will be controlled:
At the close of the first year, all faculty from the inaugural four Innovation Lab school districts were given the opportunity to attend TPBL PD bootcamp. In 2012 the Department of Education (SD DOE) also rolled out the Common Core Standards for Language Arts and Math. SDIL proposed to SD DOE an alternative to introducing the national standards, which would fully integrate the practical application of the standards into the PD planning process to help teachers apply the concepts in a practical manner within planned lesson modules. Also, the draft Next Generation Science Standards were introduced to teachers and integrated into the PD planning process. The SDIL process was cross-walked to the State professional development workshops to insure that nothing was missed and state trained coaches from Mid-Central Educational Cooperative who had participated in the Year 1 bootcamp were invited to join the PD and offer in-depth coaching to teachers (Appendix C: Common Core Cross walk for TPBL). The PD bootcamp was then opened to schools, outside the four, SDIL pilots who were invited to participate. The weeklong bootcamp integrated Common Core and Next Gen Science standards, along with Charlotte Danielson’s Framework for Effective Teaching into SDIL TPBL planning process.
This provides the real agenda behind transforming rural education via this public/private partnership:
We'd like to believe these claims and efforts can trump the more political uses of the Common Core project. But we can't.
For starters, the misnamed “Common Core State Standards” are not state standards. They're national standards, created by Gates-funded consultants for the National Governors Association (NGA). They were designed, in part, to circumvent federal restrictions on the adoption of a national curriculum, hence the insertion of the word “state” in the brand name. States were coerced into adopting the Common Core by requirements attached to the federal Race to the Top grants and, later, the No Child Left Behind waivers. (This is one reason many conservative groups opposed to any federal role in education policy oppose the Common Core.)
Written mostly by academics and assessment experts—many with ties to testing companies—the Common Core standards have never been fully implemented and tested in real schools anywhere. Of the 135 members on the official Common Core review panels convened by Achieve Inc., the consulting firm that has directed the Common Core project for the NGA, few were classroom teachers or current administrators. Parents were entirely missing. K–12 educators were mostly brought in after the fact to tweak and endorse the standards—and lend legitimacy to the results.
The standards are tied to assessments that are still in development and that must be given on computers many schools don't have.
So under the guise of promoting technology (STEM), the rural schools are are being set up to be controlled by the Common Core national standards whose enforcement requires computers. The aforementioned appendex to the pilot report admits these computer based assessments are designed to force alignment to the standards:
SDIL TPBL forms a toolkit that when used in coordination with existing programs and tools such as Teachscape provide both teachers and administrators with a consistent set of evidence to evaluate and a consistent manner in which to evaluate. Completed TPBL forms, specifically the 2wk planner and the Snapshot, provide detailed information regarding planning, standard alignment, and create the foundational components of SLOs for each project, as well as the baseline comparison for gap assessment against standards-‐based assessment. In short, the SDIL TPBL forms and process are an excellent partner for South Dakota's newest initiatives.
And South Dakota's newest education initiatives are designed to implement the globalist elites' New World Order:
Andrew Gavin Marshall writes, "For the first time in human history, free humanity is faced with the dominating threat of a truly global elite, who have at their hands the technology to impose a truly global system of control: a global scientific dictatorship. The great danger is that through the exponential growth in scientific techniques, elites will use these great new powers to control and dominate all of humanity in such a way that has never before been experienced." [New Eugenics and the Rise of the Global Scientific Dictatorship]
And that control and domination of humanity includes rural South Dakotans and South Dakota Indians thanks to the Melody Schopp, the education cooperative in Platte, and the deception behind the Common Core agenda. And we should also understand that this system of control is being put together by both political parties. Don't let the party activist hacks distract you from that truth.
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