Governor Snyder said in his 2011 State of the State Addresss,
“We’ve been spending money without delivering the results to give our young people a bright future. It is time that we view our educational system which runs from pre-natal to lifelong learning. It’s time to start talking about P-20 instead of just K-12. We need to establish a system that focuses on real achievement for all of our children. ”
Holland (Michigan) Public Schools has hopped on board Governor Snyder’s P-20 train through the Cradle-to-Career Initiative. The graphic on their website, copied below says it all.
Looking at this graphic makes it easier to understand many of the recent initiatives enacted in Michigan. The initiatives listed below may appear disconnected but together they build the P-20 cradle-to-career education pathway envisioned by President Obama, Governor Snyder, major corporations, and many others.
- The Early Learning Challenge,
- Common Core State Standards,
- Kindergarten Entry Assessments,
- Smarter Balanced Assessments (pending),
- Third-Grade Reading Retention,
- Educational/Career Development Plans,
- Michigan Merit Exam with ACT and WorkKeys (Career Readiness Certification),
- Teacher evaluations
- College and university quality standards
The cradle to career scheme is designed for a managed economy that meets the demand of the state not the dreams of the child. As students travel the P-20 pathway, their data is collected and stored in Governor Snyder’s P-20 State Longitudinal Data System and shared with whoever may have a legitimate educational interest. Data drives the decisions from birth into the workforce.
DQC encourages states to securely link their prekindergarten through grade 12 systems with postsecondary and workforce systems. This way states can better understand student pathways from early childhood programs through K–12 to postsecondary and as they enter into their careers.
Cradle-to-Career education for workforce development plans are in nearly every state leading to a nationalized centralized education system.
Hillsdale Professor Daniel Coupland correctly identified exactly where this all leads in his lecture on common core:
“As long as students are told that the end of education is a job or a career, they will forever be servants of some master….We are not programming machines. We are teaching children. We are not producing functionaries, factory-like. We are to be forming the minds and hearts of men and women… to be human beings, honoring what is good and right and cherishing what is beautiful.”
Common Core and the entire P-20 cradle-to-career scheme destroys true school choice, local control, educational freedom, and our children’s minds and hearts. We must defeat it now or forever be enslaved to it.