Eco­nom­ic Devel­op­ment with the Human Resource –
just one goal of Com­mon Core

By Jean­nie George, 3D Research Group

There’s been a shift in edu­ca­tion. The goal has changed from ‘gain­ing knowl­edge’ to ‘get­ting a job’. That goal has caused the delib­er­ate dumb-down; the steady dete­ri­o­ra­tion of every aca­d­e­m­ic sub­ject taught in school. Thus, stu­dents (human resources) are being trained to be career ready.

Remem­ber the adage, “knowl­edge is pow­er?” It’s often mis­quot­ed as “infor­ma­tion is pow­er”. Either way, your pri­vate infor­ma­tion (or knowl­edge about you) in the hands of the elite empow­ers them to con­trol you. And they plan to do just that.

There have always been sources that encour­age gain­ing knowl­edge; none bet­ter than the book of Proverbs. From “fools hate knowl­edge” (1:22) to “wise men lay up knowl­edge” (10:14) to “with­out knowl­edge it is not good” (19:2) to “a man of knowl­edge increaseth strength” (24:5) we’re taught knowl­edge is a good thing. The lack of it is not good. This refers to YOU hav­ing knowl­edge – not your gov­ern­ment hav­ing knowl­edge about you.

And, so it has been, as schools have replaced sub­ject mat­ter (knowl­edge) with empha­siz­ing the adjust­ment of atti­tudes to make good work­er drones, soci­ety has blind­ly accept­ed the new goals. Through School-to-Work or Col­lege and Career Ready, the terms mean the same thing, the chil­dren are being pre­pared to go to work with no more knowl­edge than it takes to do the job they’ll be assigned.

Have you heard stu­dents are get­ting col­lege cred­it for high school work? Have you won­dered if that makes them dou­bly smart? Have you heard the stu­dents are leav­ing school to work jobs or go to anoth­er loca­tion for ‘advanced’ edu­ca­tion or tak­ing class­es to hur­ry them into col­lege or career? Sure­ly you must know it isn’t because they’re so much smarter than their grandparents.

The big ques­tion is, “how do you find out how this is being accom­plished?” What’s going on and how in the world do you fig­ure out where this orig­i­nates? More specif­i­cal­ly, where will you find the leg­is­la­tion that is pro­mot­ing this? The answer is — any­where and everywhere.

In Indi­ana, we had an eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment bill, HB 1003, passed in 2014 that explains how busi­ness­es, schools (pub­lic and char­ter), tax mon­ey and stu­dents will be used. The bill looks thor­ough­ly fas­cist to me, but I could be wrong. And, Repub­li­can house mem­bers could repent of their dirty deeds. Nei­ther is likely.

This eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment will assist Indi­ana busi­ness­es by giv­ing tax cred­its so they can devel­op basic work­force skills for their future employ­ees. Now, who would think that busi­ness­es should expect to train their employ­ees at their own expense? I digress. The grants will be admin­is­tered by “the cor­po­ra­tion”. The cor­po­ra­tion isn’t iden­ti­fied in this bill. How­ev­er, The Indi­ana Eco­nom­ic Devel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion* is the cor­po­ra­tion award­ing the grants to school cor­po­ra­tions and char­ter schools to sup­port the coop­er­a­tive arrange­ments with busi­ness­es for train­ing students.

In this bill we also find the Indi­ana Work­force (and Edu­ca­tion) Intel­li­gence Sys­tem is now Indi­ana Net­work of Knowl­edge (INK). This data col­lect­ing sys­tem is nec­es­sary for a fed­er­at­ed data sys­tem to track the stu­dents from preschool to the work place! But we’re not to wor­ry because Indi­ana has a “rou­tine and ongo­ing com­pli­ance with the fed­er­al Fam­i­ly Edu­ca­tion­al Rights and Pri­va­cy Act” (FERPA). Of course, FERPA won’t pro­tect anyone’s rights or pri­va­cy. But, hey, doesn’t it make you feel warm and loved to think they know you want to be protected?

In a nut­shell, here’s what I think the bill says.

The school cor­po­ra­tions and/or char­ter schools (no elect­ed boards here) get grants to send the stu­dents to work at busi­ness­es. (This busi­ness will be cho­sen by the Indi­ana Eco­nom­ic Devel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion. These polit­i­cal cronies (none elect­ed) will cer­tain­ly approve the busi­ness­es that are on their “favored sta­tus” (my term) list.

The stu­dents will be miss­ing what we think of as tra­di­tion­al edu­ca­tion because the folks in charge want them dumb­ed down. The busi­ness trains the stu­dent for a “high wage, high demand job that requires indus­try cer­ti­fi­ca­tion.” Then, the busi­ness pro­pos­es to employ the stu­dent and the Indi­ana Eco­nom­ic Devel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion enters into an agree­ment for a tax cred­it for the busi­ness if that busi­ness qual­i­fies under the corporation’s eli­gi­bil­i­ty stan­dards. Duh! Polit­i­cal crony­ism will assure they com­ply one way or anoth­er with the standard.

Did you notice? The busi­ness only has to ‘pro­pose’ to hire – what­ev­er that means.

Terms which beg for def­i­n­i­tions are “high wage”, “high demand” jobs. After search­ing for any kind of def­i­n­i­tion from Indi­ana sources, it appears the high wage might not be so high. Gen­er­al­ly, high wage and high demand don’t come in the same job def­i­n­i­tion. The best lists I could find for high demand includ­ed cer­ti­fied nurs­ing assis­tant (CNAs), truck dri­vers, casu­al and fast food man­agers and crews, call cen­ters, den­tal and med­ical assis­tants, phar­ma­cy techs and retail clerks. I know, I know, all of these don’t require cer­tifi­cates – yet, but we’re look­ing at “high demand”. RNs, gen­er­al den­tists and phys­i­cal ther­a­pists are also list­ed but they require more than a cer­tifi­cate so they don’t qualify.

Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion is cer­tain­ly no guar­an­tee of an aver­age or medi­an wage, but I can find NO evi­dence that it equals “high wage”. Since every job is even­tu­al­ly going to require cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, cer­ti­fi­ca­tion gives no assur­ance of even a decent wage. High wage cer­ti­fied jobs in high demand were not to be found. Where are the def­i­n­i­tions in this bill? The wages that I found for high demand cer­ti­fied jobs ran between $23,000 and $38,700.

Now, don’t under-esti­mate these guys. They may start out putting a few of the brighter stu­dents into good pay­ing posi­tions in some of the busi­ness­es. After all, when they’re try­ing to sell a con­cept to the pub­lic, they’ll show­case it long enough to get it embed­ded. They may even have to ‘fudge’ the fig­ures, but they have a long his­to­ry of this.

This is what I think the results will be. The school will get mon­ey to do noth­ing more than per­haps fill out some paper work. The busi­ness will receive tax cred­it to train their own work­ers. These “favored” busi­ness­es get the oppor­tu­ni­ty to hire the best and cer­ti­fy (or fail) the rest. Per­haps they won’t need to real­ly hire any­one (just pro­pose to hire) — because next year anoth­er round of new trainees will be avail­able. The cer­tifi­cate may or may not be worth the paper it’s writ­ten on. And, the stu­dents? The jobs they are trained to do may or may not be avail­able. They may get a job; maybe not. High wage? Not likely.

The bot­tom line: the tax­pay­er is pay­ing the school; sub­si­diz­ing the busi­ness and get­ting no rep­re­sen­ta­tion for their tax­a­tion. All the while, the stu­dents’ opin­ions, atti­tudes, per­for­mance and more are being data banked. Wouldn’t Adolf be proud?

What hap­pened to the think­ing that per­haps they should be gain­ing knowl­edge? No one even remem­bers that used to be a goal.

* “…a body politic and cor­po­rate, not a state agency but an inde­pen­dent instru­men­tal­i­ty exer­cis­ing essen­tial pub­lic functions”