This pre-school education is a VITAL part of workforce training and is taken from Soviet Pre-School Education Model [Vols. I & II].
I have a copy of the primary resource (book) and you can still buy it at Amazon (see above link). I was lucky to find the following which gives you a flavor of its contents; just one page: Soviet Pre-School Education Model
Let me point out that Henry Chauncey, Educational Testing Service, who wrote the Foreword to this book, was involved in the Chicago Mastery Learning (first Skinnerian OBE/ML/DI program) which Education Week referred to as a ‘human disaster of enormous proportions’ and which was the first pilot project to implement Soviet education into the USA in the 1960s.
I have written extensively on that subject and the original professional paper is posted HERE. There is also much information regarding the Chicago Inner City Disaster in my DDD book:
“Learning and Instruction, A Chicago Inner City Schools Position Paper” presented in June of 1968 to the Chicago Board of Education, was produced by the planning staff in Chicago made up of Dr. Donald, William Farquhar, Lee Shulman, and the Chicago and Michigan State universities in collaboration. One reference used was “Soviet Preschool Education” translated by Henry Chauncey (Educational Testing Service, Princeton, N.J.) This position paper laid out the plan to restructure Chicago’s inner city schools from a traditional grading plan to an ungraded plan using Skinnerian mastery learning and continuous progress/individual education plans. Education Week carried an article in its March 6, 1985, edition entitled “Half of Chicago Students Drop Out, Study Finds: Problem Called Enormous Human Tragedy”. The program was one of the first experiments with mastery learning, later referred to as Outcomes-Based Education and in the 90’s and early part of the Twenty-first Century, referred to as Direct Instruction. The paper also called for extensive community involvement and emphasis on changing the values of teachers, students, and the community as a whole. This project was the most important pilot project for the restructured educational system presently being implemented in the United States and worldwide today, and is a perfect example of the use of the minority community in educational research which would in 2008 affect all teachers, students and schools in the nation. The new system satisfies the needs of the business community worldwide since it is performance based.
This original document was given to me by a teacher in Ohio years ago; I wish I could remember her name in order to thank her for sending it to me. Henry Chauncey’s name, along with Sophie Bloom, and Lee Shulman (the latter most recently President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching before moving on to assist Catholic educators with implementation of Common Core) were included as being involved in development of that inner city disaster. As you will see, it was always the inner city children upon whom “they” experimented in order to restructure traditional competitive American education to the non-competitive, non-graded workforce training model being implemented across the nation today; which includes the latest kid on the block, Soviet Pre-School Education, described in article sent to me by SJ today.
Also see text below from DDD pages 79-80:
LEARNING AND INSTRUCTION, A CHICAGO INNER CITY SCHOOLS POSITION PAPER PRESENTED in June of 1968 to the Chicago Board of Education, was produced by the planning staff in Chicago made up of: Dr. Donald Leu, William Farquhar, Lee Shulman, and the Chicago and Michigan State universities in collaboration. One reference used was Soviet Preschool Education, translated by Henry Chauncey (Educational Testing Service, Princeton, N.J.).
Excerpts from the Chicago Mastery Learning Project position paper, Learning and Instruction, follow:
“We view the child with his defined characteristics as input to a school organization which modifies his capabilities toward certain goals and objectives as output. The school organization is an optimal deployment of teachers employing a special subject matter who attempt through instruction, with the aid of selected elements of the community, to achieve specified outputs. The joint participation of the children, school and community leave none of these elements unchanged…
This emphasis should be accomplished within the context of a truly ungraded structure which we shall denote by the terms Continuous Development-Mastery Learning. This approach has the following characteristics: (a) Beginning with Chicago’s present concept of Continuous Development, the objectives of the language arts curriculum must be much further differentiated and articulated in the manner currently being conducted by Sophie Bloom [wife of the late Benjamin Bloom] in Chicago, and Pittsburgh’s Individually Prescribed Instruction Project. In the Continuous Development-Mastery Learning approach, a large number of sequentially designated objectives, tied into specific capabilities to be mastered by pupils, are identified. This is done by curriculum development specialists in collaboration with instructional personnel. [References used in this paper were from the late Benjamin Bloom, John Carroll, Robert Gagne, Robert Glaser and Henry Chauncey, ed.]
The following is an excerpt from an article published in Education Week, March 6, 1985 entitled “Half of Chicago Students Drop out, Study Finds: Problem Called Enormous Human Tragedy”:
Calling the dropout problem in Chicago “a human tragedy of enormous dimensions,” a recent study has found that almost half of the 39,500 public school students in the 1980 freshman class failed to graduate, and that only about a third of those who did were able to read at or above the national 12th grade level. “These statistics about the class of 1984 reflect the destruction of tens of thousands of young lives, year in and year out,” says the study, released in January by Designs for Change, a nonprofit research and child-advocacy organization in Chicago… “Most of these young people are permanently locked out of our changing economy and have no hope of continuing their education or getting a permanent job with a future,” the authors wrote.
Professor Lee Shulman’s involvement in the Chicago Mastery Learning disaster was however, quickly forgotten or considered unimportant. According to Education Daily of May 21, 1987 two years later: Lee Shulman, who heads Stanford’s Education Policy Institute, last week was awarded $817,000 by Carnegie Corporation to develop over the next 15 months new forms of teacher assessment materials that would be the basis of standards adopted by a national teacher certification board.
NOTE FROM CHARLOTTE: Michael Farris, head of Home School Legal Defense Assoc., rudely shut me, Charlotte, down when I called him in 1987 to ask him to help knowledgeable education researchers in their opposition to any federal funding of Shulman’s involvement in changing of teacher assessment.
The Education Daily article, dated May 21, 1987, further discussed the requirement for teacher critique of the way two textbooks treat photosynthesis and how they (teachers) developed a lesson plan based on each one: The teacher then would be directed to use the textbooks to tell the examiners how he or she would teach students with varying religious, cultural and ethnic backgrounds.
Nine years later Education Week of October 23, 1996 reported Shulman again leading the outcome-/performance-based teacher education bandwagon of social change agents: His successful performance as developer of new forms of teacher assessment materials leads to his being named President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, filling the vacancy created by the death last year of Ernest L. Boyer. An excerpt from an October 21, 1996 New York Times article entitled “Carnegie Foundation Selects a New Leader” emphasized Shulman’s importance in the field of behavioral psychology: He [Shulman] has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He is the immediate past president of the National Academy of Education and a former president of the American Education Research Association.”
I guess all of this research is irrelevant now that President Trump and his Secretary of Education DeVos have made it official policy to transform what used to be known as “United States Academic Education” to “Soviet Workforce Training”.
Of course, using tax-funded school choice and charters with unelected boards, was the nail in the coffin. Slipping in the system without the American people recognizing what was happening was due to the exquisite diversion (aka Common Core, which we have had under many labels, esp. the National assessment of Education Progress) since the early seventies.
Here’s one more quote to close with:
DDD, page 198: THE COMING REVOLUTION IN EDUCATION: BASIC EDUCATION AND THE NEW THEORY OF SCHOOLING (University Press of America, Inc.: Baton Rouge, 1983) by the late Eugene Maxwell Boyce, former professor of educational administration, Bureau of Educational Studies and Field Services, College of Education at the University of Georgia, was published. An excerpt follows:
In the communist ideology the function of universal education is clear, and easily understood. Universal education fits neatly into the authoritarian state. Education is tied directly to jobs—control of the job being the critical control point in an authoritarian state. Level of education, and consequently the level of employment, is determined first by level of achievement in school. They do not educate people for jobs that do not exist… No such controlled relationship between education and jobs exists in democratic countries. (p. 4)