EDU 2020, Part Deux: The Worst Worst Case Scenario Gets Worse

[Peter Campbell <campbellp@mail.montclair.edu>]

Research in Education - By 2020, research is now called "REserch" and  
scientific evidence is called "The New Science" thanks to the brave,  
pioneering souls from the NICHD who brought us the Report of the  
National Reading Panel (NRP). REserch and The New Science are bold  
new efforts to set the record straight on the truth. Let's face it:  
prior to REserch and The New Science, most research was conducted by  
people we had never heard of. Worse, it was conducted by people that  
we didn't regularly have lunch with, people whose grandparents didn't  
vacation with our grandparents ((http://www.thenation.com/doc/ 
20020128/metcalf), and whose methodologies included that icky, yucky,  
ethnographic and qualitative "research data." Yeah, right! Give me  
The Gold Standard Double-Blind Experimental Study With Meta-Analysis  
and a Side of Mayo or Give Me Death! With REserch, we only trust our  
friends to tell us the truth. After all, what are friends for? And if  
you can't trust your friends, who can you trust? Are you really going  
to trust someone you don't even know with a funny last name and a  
fuzzy agenda? Yeah, right! As if I'm going to turn my kids' futures  
over to some stranger! Thank God for The New Science and its emphasis  
on REserch!

Teacher Preparation and Curriculum - By 2020, colleges of education  
will be dissolved. At long last, all the Commies in those festering  
pools of wacko left'ism will be on the street, begging for change,  
desperately trying to convince people at bus stops to listen to their  
pathetic pleas for "social justice." America will finally realize  
that teacher preparation is about preparing teachers to teach, not  
pumping young students up with Kumbaya Commie Crap about racism and  
equality. No sir, teachers will learn how to be teachers! In 2020,  
there will be a fourth R added to the classic three: it will be  
Reading, (w)Riting, (a)Rithmetic, and (psychomet)Rics. In addition to  
Reading classes on Phonemic Awareness, Phonemic Analysis, Phonemic  
Phonemics, and Phonemic Phonecalls (aka "How to Talk to Parents So  
You Are Understood Clearly"), there are (psychomet)Ric classes in  
Standard Deviation, Deviant Standards, Standardizing Deviance, and  
Deviating from Standards. Writing instruction has been replaced by a  
critical job-training skill tied to real-world needs. Formerly called  
"shorthand," the new writing instruction -- called "Everyone Is  
Write!" -- prepares young inner-city children to be critical members  
of office support teams. (a)Rithmetic -- now called "Rithmetic" --  
introduces Kindergartners to spreadsheet programs and, as part of  
their real-world instruction to prepare them to be competitive in the  
global marketplace, demands utmost rigor of them as they prepare the  
district's financial statements for state auditors. In 2015, this  
service was outsourced to a company in India, but parents got wind of  
it and demanded that their children be prepared to crunch numbers for  
large corporations, saying that Kindergartners could do the work for  
even less money than the Indians. They were right! Thank God for  
parental involvement!

Principal Preparation and Educational Technology - As part of their  
preparation, principals are trained to assess students' level of  
competence from 500 feet away using a Visual Rubric Enhancement Data- 
Driven Tool Facilitation Mechanism (VRED-DTFM), pronounced "Vee Red  
Dash Do It For 'Em." The VRED-DTFM is mounted on the head of the  
principal and features a laser ocular mechanism (LOM) that the  
principal looks through in order to assess students. Between classes,  
the principal walks the halls, wearing the VRED-DTFM. As the  
principal scans the students through the LOM, an alarm goes off  
inside the helmet when the LOM locks on to a student on the verge of  
passing the state standardized test. The alarm, called the "Bubble- 
Kid Audial Assistance Guide" (B-KAAG), saves hours and hours and  
thousands of dollars. In the stone age of 2005-2006, principals had  
to give benchmark assessment tests every month to find out who the  
bubble-kids were so all the school's resources could be focused on  
them. But with the VRED-DTFM, all the principal has to do is walk the  
halls and --- BINGO -- the B-KAAG goes off and there's your bubble kid!

--
Posted by Peter Campbell to Transform Education
http://transformeducation.blogspot.com/