Competency-Based Workforce Training and the Medicalization of Hegelian Education:
Currently, corporate-fascist workforce planning under the Trump-DeVos administration is shifting away from OBE rhetoric and switching to "competency-based education" directives under the new ESSA legislation. In particular, the ESSA law stipulates federal provisions for "the development of comprehensive academic assessment instruments ... that emphasize the mastery of standards and aligned competencies in a competency-based education model."Admittedly, competency-based education is simply a rendition of OBE workforce training. According to a 1994 whitepaper titled Outcome-Based Education: Final Report, which was published by the US Department of Ed, "Competency-Based Education (CBE), originally conceived to ease the transition from school to work, contained elements of OBE.... Rather than being accepted as a holistic approach to school reform, CBE survives chiefly as a vocational training program." Indeed, when conducting a peer-reviewed journal search for the simple phrase "competency-based education" in the EBSCO host Academic Search Complete research database, over 70% of the articles in the first 40 search results are tabulated with the key-phrase "outcome-based education" in the detailed record [5].
Attorney Jane Robbins, who is a senior fellow at the American Principles Project, concurs with this comparison between OBE and CBE workforce schooling. In a recent Federalist report, Robbins exposes cronyism between Secretary DeVos and Jeb Bush's CBE lackeys from his "school choice" nonprofit, the Foundation for Educational Excellence. The article, entitled "Why 'Competency-Based Education' Will Deepen America's Education Crisis," demonstrates how "CBE is essentially the same thing as outcome-based education (OBE) ... OBE and now CBE posit that the government should establish outcomes it wants students to achieve and then work backwards, setting interim benchmarks along the journey to that goal. Students would work at their own pace to establish 'competency' at each benchmark."
Robbins's analysis of OBE-CBE workforce planning under Secretary DeVos is affirmed in the ESSA bill. Subsection 4205(a)(14) stipulates federal provisions for "build[ing] career competencies and career readiness and ensur[ing] that local workforce and career readiness skills are aligned with the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act of 2006 (20 U.S.C. 2301 et seq.) and the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (29 U.S.C. 3101 et seq.)."
Currently, the trend in OBE-CBE workforce education is hi-tech training for healthcare-job competencies needed to operate the IT and other digital technologies that are being increasingly integrated into the new national healthcare system. It should be noted that Billionaire Betsy's husband Dick DeVos, who is also heavily invested in Neurocore, campaigned for the governorship of Michigan in 2006 by pledging to upgrade the state's healthcare-technology infrastructure. According to Chimes, the official student news publication of Dick's alma mater, Calvin College, Mr. DeVos promised "[t]o combat rising health care costs ... [with] a streamlined system that utilizes technology to reduce hospital errors by making medical records more efficient."
While Dick has been pushing hi-tech healthcare at the state level, the enactment of Obamacare has been rolling out federal provisions for OBE-CBE workforce training that cultivates medical technology competence.
In 2010, the RAND Corporation published a whitepaper study titled "Use of Outcome Metrics to Measure Quality in Education and Training of Healthcare Professionals." This document examines "the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) stipulat[ions] [for] the establishment of a National Health Care Workforce Planning Commission to undertake comprehensive workforce planning in healthcare and so help synchronising federal investments into workforce development." That same year, the Annual Review of Public Health published an article entitled "Outcome-Based Workforce Development and Education in Public Health," which "recommend[s] a framework for workforce education in public health, integrating ... competency-based education ... This framework provides a context for designing and developing high-quality, outcome-based workforce development efforts and evaluating their impact, with implications for academic and public health practice efforts to educate the public health workforce."
To streamline this national healthcare workforce, Betsy DeVos is promoting educational institutions that are pioneering innovations in healthcare technology, such as Arizona State University. On May 9th, at the 2017 Arizona State University and Global Silicon Valley Summit in Salt Lake City Utah, DeVos lauded ASU's Entrepreneurship (PLUS) Innovation program for its invention of the G3Box, which re-engineers shipping containers into portable medical clinics that can be transported anywhere at relatively inexpensive prices. To facilitate such new healthcare-technology infrastructure, OBE-CBE initiatives are commencing specialized training for competencies in hi-tech treatments for all patient populations across the lifespan from pediatrics to geriatrics.
A 2015 issue of the scholarly journal Pediatrics published an article entitled "Blueprint for Action: Visioning Summit on the Future of the Workforce in Pediatrics." This article studies the "need for outcomes-based research" so that "the field of pediatrics and its workforce [can] adapt to meet challenges created by such changes" resulting from "[t]echnology and electronic medical record (EMR) systems" as well as other "health care delivery system" changes.
In 2011, the Journal of the American Society on Aging printed an article titled "A Competency-Based Approach to Educating and Training the Eldercare Workforce." This article explores "ongoing initiatives that address geriatric workforce competency and how these efforts support and can be supported by the goals of the ACA [Affordable Care Act]" (Mezey et al. 53). More recently, a 2015 issue of the same journal published an article entitled "Ensuring Care for Aging Baby Boomers: Solutions at Hand." In this peer-reviewed article, the authors recommend eldercare initiatives that "maximiz[e] how we deploy our existing [eldercare] workforce, [by] incorporating quickly evolving technology" (Bragg and Hansen 96). In particular, the authors recommend workforce competencies in geriatric-care technologies such as "robot caregiver[s]," "health information technology," and "smart technolog[ies]," including "telephone-based symptom monitoring system[s]" as well as "personalized apps, wearable sensors, and social networks that encourage behavioral change" by recording and sharing "health status in real time" (94, 96).
This "cradle-to-end-of-life" education of the healthcare workforce parallels the "cradle-to-career" charter schooling system for corporate-fascist workforce training that is being pushed by the Trump-DeVos Administration. Likewise, this cradle-to-grave system of healthcare workforce planning at the national level parallels the public-private P-20 (preschool-to-age-twenty) council systems of workforce education at the state levels, which are already merging public education departments with public health and human services agencies. For a thorough breakdown of the P-20 fusion of public schooling and public health, see my following two articles: "National Charter School Fascism" and "Corporate-Fascist Workforce Training for the Hegelian State."
As I explicate in the latter article, this public-private collectivization of clinical medicine and public education stems from the Hegelian roots of corporate-fascist political-economic planning in the United States. Moreover, in "Billionaire Betsy DeVos, Big Data, and the Public-Private Planned Economy," I document how Carnegie-funded national learning benchmarks for outcomes-based workforce education are rooted in the Hegelian ideology of Skull-and-Bonesman Daniel Coit Gilman [6], who was the first President of the Carnegie Institution [7]. Gilman, as the first President of Johns Hopkins University, fused Hegelianism with Wundtian proto-behaviorism by appointing the Wundtian Hegelianist, G. Stanley Hall, to the Chair of Psychology and Pedagogy at Johns Hopkins (Sutton 82, 90, 101) [8]. Thus, the public-private merger of clinical healthcare and public schooling for OBE-CBE workforce planning is the culmination of over a century of Hegelian-collectivist philosophy steering classroom implementations of Wundtian stimulus-response psychology techniques that have been propagated by Robber Baron capitalists to manage the health of the Corporate State.
ESSA, IDEA, WIOA: Neurocore Therapies for Disabled Workforce Incompetency:
As privatized P-20 collectivization of public education with public health blurs the lines between traditional classroom learning and "community-based" lifelong learning, educational institutions will incorporate more clinical approaches to conditioning student learning/cognition and psychosocial development for workforce competency. In time, under sections 1005, 1008, and 4108 of the ESSA law, a student's workforce incompetency could be pathologized as a cognitive-behavioral disability that requires psychological and/or biomedical intervention, which could be administered through Neurocore biofeedback therapies.Clause 1008(b)(7)(A)(iii)(I-III) of the ESSA legislation obligates schools to "'(iii) address the needs of all children ... at risk of not meeting the challenging State academic standards, through activities which may include--'(I) counseling, school-based mental health programs, specialized instructional support services, mentoring services, and other strategies to improve students' skills outside the academic subject areas; '(II) preparation for and awareness of opportunities for postsecondary education and the workforce, which may include career and technical education programs ... ; [and] '(III) implementation of a schoolwide tiered model to prevent and address problem behavior, and early intervening services, coordinated with similar activities and services carried out under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act." In simpler terms, this clause authorizes the employment of various psycho-behavioral health support services to accommodate the workforce handicaps of students with cognitive-learning disabilities and "problem behavior[s]" that impede their competencies in "career and technical education programs."
Clause 1005(b)(2)(B)(vii)(II) mandates that assessments of workforce competencies must "(vii) provide for-- ... (II) ... appropriate accommodations, such as interoperability with, and ability to use, assistive technology, for children with disabilities (as defined in section 602(3) of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (20 U.S.C. 1401(3))), including students with the most significant cognitive disabilities, and students with a disability who are provided accommodations under an Act other than the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (20 U.S.C. 1400 et seq.), necessary to measure the academic achievement of such children relative to the challenging State academic standards or alternate academic achievement standards described in paragraph (1)(E)." In other words, this clause permits the use of "assistive technolog[ies]," such as Neurocore's biofeedback technologies, that can reduce the symptoms of cognitive-behavioral disabilities that hinder a student's competencies in "alternate academic achievement standards" such as workforce training through career-pathways curriculums.
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