American Federation of Teachers Sells Out to Rockefellers, Trilateralists, and Big Tech

On May 1st, 2021, Americans for Public Trust leaked email correspondences between the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, these emails revealed how the bureaucracy of this teachers’ union was lobbying the CDC to roll back its school reopening guidelines. 

Pumping the brakes on the return to in-person learning, the AFT emails successfully petitioned the CDC to add “language” recommending that schools continue to provide “telework” and “virtual teaching opportunities” as alternatives to face-to-face education. The AFT also requested that the Center for Disease Control add a coronavirus “variant closing metric” that would renege on the CDC’s greenlight for in-person instruction “at any level of community [COVID] transmission.” By prioritizing “telework” and “virtual teaching,” while seeking to reinstate COVID lockdown measures in the event of new coronavirus variants, the lobbying efforts of the AFT basically pressured the CDC into relegating schools to prolonged virtual “distance learning” that is outsourced to private ed-tech corporations. 

To put it bluntly, the AFT has been attempting to sway the CDC to ratchet up COVID restrictions that perpetuate public education’s reliance on Big Tech company privatization. These companies have been raking in record profits by selling ed-tech products to schools during lockdown. In turn, just after their email exchanges with the CDC, the AFT and the National Education Association co-authored Learning Beyond COVID-19: A Vision for Thriving in Public Education, which calls for increased access to “devices needed for online learning” along with increased access to “virtual” tutoring.

Why would the American Federation of Teachers go against “following the science” by lobbying the CDC to backpedal its relaxation of school health and safety protocols? Why would the AFT defy CDC experts by opposing school re-openings in favor of extending COVID restrictions that prop open the floodgates for the ed-tech industry to advance its privatization of public education through “remote” e-learning contracts? Why do this when mainstream medical journals, such as the Lancet, have published data which finds that “[c]hildren and young people remain at low risk of COVID-19 mortality”? What is the point when there is mounting evidence that in-person schoolhouse learning does not result in rising community transmission rates of COVID-19? 

These questions are even more perplexing when considering the increase in adolescent suicides resulting from depression caused by social isolation from school lockdowns that sequester students from their classmates. At the same time, peer isolation from school lockdown is harming the cognitive, social, and emotional development of students who are in the crucial stages of learning the fundamentals of how to communicate by reading facial expressions, body language, and other social cues which are indispensable to in-person human interaction. Not to mention there is copious data showing that face-to-face classroom instruction has far more benefits for student learning than virtual “distance learning” through a computer screen.

So the question remains, with all these reasons for students to go back to brick-and-mortar classrooms, why didn’t the AFT “follow the science” by going along with the CDC’s school reopening recommendations? What motivated AFT bureaucrats to stump for corporate-technocratic distance learning by petitioning the CDC to tighten the screws on its COVID mitigation protocols for schools? 

To be sure, the AFT states that health and safety priorities are their motivating factors for doubling down on COVID mitigation policies, which effectively necessitate remote online schooling. Nevertheless, a close look at the history of the AFT reveals that it has a long track record of selling out its dues-paying teachers to the global ed-tech industrial complex by cutting side deals with Big Tech companies, such as IBM and Microsoft; corporate philanthropies, including the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; and world governance institutions, like the Trilateral Commission and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

In light of these past dealings with corporatists, globalists, and technocrats, it appears that the AFT may have ulterior motives to stall the full return to in-person learning in order to wedge schools into contracting with the union’s ed-tech cronies, such as IBM and Microsoft, which are driving “Reimagine Education” campaigns along with UNESCO to spur the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” for the “Fourth Industrial Revolution.” By pressing the CDC to drag out COVID constraints that relegate education systems to “distance” and “hybrid,” or “blended,” combinations of virtual-online instruction, the AFT has essentially been lobbying to hitch schools to multinational ed-tech cartels which aim to data-mine students’ psychometrics for workforce “competence” in the global “Social Credit” economy of the “surveillance capitalist” Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The AFT-Rockefeller Alliance: Trilateralist Globalization of Behaviorist Ed-Tech

Beginning with John D. Rockefeller’s funding of educational psychology contrived by AFT founding member, John Dewey; followed by former AFT President Albert Shanker’s ties to David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission; all the way to the AFT’s recent collaborations with employees of the Rockefeller Foundation and members of the Rockefeller family—the AFT has been spun into the corporate-globalist web of Rockefeller philanthropies and think tanks. The common thread among these AFT-Rockefeller connections is workforce schooling through stimulus-response methods of psychological conditioning, including behaviorist “programmed instruction” delivered by computerized “teaching machines.”

Before helping to found the AFT in 1917, John Dewey was the first student to conduct laboratory studies under one of the founding fathers of American psychology: G. Stanley Hall, who was the first American to study at the world’s seminal psychology lab in Leipzig, Germany, under the progenitor of stimulus-response psychology, Wilhelm Wundt. Dewey expanded stimulus-response psychology with his theory of functionalism, which he developed as Chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Chicago, which was founded with huge sums of Rockefeller money starting in 1892, the same year Dewey was hired at the U of C. There, he taught John B. Watson, who would become the originator of behaviorist psychological conditioning. 

Dewey would go on to become a high-ranking Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University where his functionalist ed-psych became the pedagogical bedrock of the Lincoln School, which was founded with financing from the Rockefeller General Education Board in 1917, the same year that Dewey helped found the AFT. At Columbia University Teacher’s College, which established the Lincoln School, E. L. Thorndike applied behavioral psychology to educational pedagogy, including applications for early models of programmed instruction through mechanized books that were hypothesized in his Education: A First Book

In short, for at least twenty-five years, Rockefeller money fueled the educational psychology of AFT founding member, John Dewey, whose functionalist ed-psych shaped the progression of stimulus-response conditioning into programmed instruction through automated teaching machines, which have evolved into modern computerized ed-tech, such as the cognitive-behavioral adaptive-learning courseware that are endorsed by the AFT as it “reimagines” schooling for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Rockefeller tentacles also entangled the American Federation of Teachers through AFT President Albert Shanker, who remained at the helm of the teachers’ union for twenty-three years from 1974 until he died in 1997. During his reign as AFT president, Shanker attended meetings hosted by David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission, which the Robber Baron successor set up as a globalist “roundtable” where corporatist oligarchs from North America, Europe, and Asia meet together to orchestrate a planned world economy. In a 1985 “Address” to Sanoma State University, AFT President Shanker professed how he attended “a meeting of the American Branch of the Trilateral Commission and there were bankers and there were politicians there and there were former ambassadors and secretaries of state. Henry Kissinger was present and others.” In this speech titled “Critical Thinking and Education Reform,” Shanker also discussed meeting with “the head of IBM” as he forecasted that the future of “international competition” would pivot on “who is going to develop the best [computer] chip. We are living in a world in which advanced technology and information of the issues . . . emerge from the knowledge industry.” Praising the benefits of audio-visual ed-tech, Trilateralist Shanker added that, “if we gave teachers in a sense, no choice, some of this is going to be done technologically.”

In brief, this speech signifies how, under Shanker’s leadership, the AFT aligned with the corporate-technocratic vision of Rockefeller’s globalist Trilateral Commission in order to cultivate school reforms geared to develop hi-tech job skills for “competition” in an “international” economy built upon the computerized “knowledge industry” of the coming Fourth Industrial Revolution. 

Three years later, in an April 27th, 1988, WAMU-FM radio interview, AFT President Shanker reiterated his commitment to hi-tech workforce schooling reforms that train students to “compete in the world” economy being built by Rockefeller’s Trilateralist cronies, such as IBM. When asked how he would improve school systems, Shanker replied, “[w]ell, it’s very much like what an automobile company does when it wants to create a new automobile.” According to Shanker, this new manufacturing model of education would be led by teacher “teams” that “use technology.” In response to another question inquiring how he would ensure that all students could learn in his “upgraded” schools, he responded, “[w]ell, some of them might learn by looking at videotapes and seeing things in a more pictorial form. Some of them could profit from computer simulation games.” By proposing factory-modeled school reforms that implement “computer simulation games” and other educational technologies, Trilateralist Shanker advocated for “gamified” workforce training through computerized ed-tech that is now being implemented through artificial intelligence (AI) deployed by IBM’s Cognitive Ability Assessments, which track cognitive-behavioral algorithms to test for job “competence.”

Shanker’s alignment with the Trilateralist plans for a global ed-tech schooling system is further illustrated in the 1970 futurist tome, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era, by President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who co-founded the Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller. In Between Two Ages, Brzezinski forecasted how schooling in the “Technetronic Era” of the Fourth Industrial Revolution would be transformed into a hi-tech system of “home-based education through television consoles and other electronic devices.” In short, Trilateralist Brzezinski charted the proto-computerized ed-tech system that would later be adopted by Shanker in collaboration with his corporatist comrades at American Trilateral meetings.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (New York: Viking Press, 1970)

If you think that Shanker was merely practicing a certain “diplomacy” by attending meetings with the Rockefeller-Brzezinski Trilateral Commission, it should be noted that, after the Arizona branch of the AFT passed a 1984 resolution to ban psychological conditioning pedagogy, including methods of programmed instruction that can be delivered through computerized ed-tech, the AFT’s National Executive Board tabled the resolution, which was drafted to “oppose such programs as ECRI, Project INSTRUCT and/or any Mastery Learning, Classroom Management, Precision Teaching, and Discipline, and petition the US Congress for protection against the use of such methods on teachers and students without their prior consent.” By shooting down this Arizona Federation of Teachers’ resolution to bar schools from utilizing ed-psych conditioning, including computer-programmed instruction, the AFT’s National Executive Board effectively sided with the corporate-technocratic interests of Shanker’s Rockefeller-Trilateral constituents while kicking aside the classroom interests of the teachers whom the AFT purports to represent.

Almost forty years later, Rockefeller connections still entangle the AFT today. For instance, in 2015, the AFT, along with the National Education Association, entered into an “English language learners” partnership with a Washington D.C. public television company, WETA-TV, where the president is Sharon Percy Rockefeller, who is married to David Rockefeller’s nephew: former US Senator Jay Rockefeller. Currently, the AFT’s Assistant to the President for Educational Issues, Marla Ucelli-Kashyap, is a former Associate Director of Working Communities at the Rockefeller Foundation. In a 2020 AFT news article titled “AFT International Connects on COVID-19,” the former Rockefeller director called on “internet service providers and tech companies . . . to do more” to accommodate remote online learning by closing the “digital divide” for students who “do not have access to the technology needed for distance learning.” Ucelli-Kashyap also participated in the leaked AFT-CDC email exchange in which the American Federation of Teachers lobbied the Centers for Disease Control to reinstate school lockdown protocols and distance-learning accommodations that perpetuate the corporate ed-tech takeover of public education.

Meanwhile, the Rockefeller Foundation is presently exploiting emergency COVID overhauls in order to launch its “Great Transition” campaign, which mirrors the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset. Through public-private partnerships between “governments, multilateral agencies, philanthropies, civil society, and the private sector,” the Rockefeller Foundation’s Great Transition is aspiring to accelerate the “digital revolution” that will expand virtual “distance learning opportunities” by “pushing the boundaries of the remote learning shift” through “[a] common platform for planning, testing solutions, and peer-to-peer learning” linked to “digital identities . . . for education.” In other words, the Rockefeller Great Transition is calling for public-private partnerships that expand online “distance learning” with virtual “platforms” programmed to test and track students’ “learning analytics” in order to assemble psychological profiles which can be data-mined to “personalize” education based on Social Credit metrics derived from students’ “digital identities.”

To put it all together, for over a hundred years, Rockefeller agendas have shaped the AFT’s capitulation to ed-psych and ed-tech driven by technology corporations, such as IBM, which data-mine students’ psychometrics in order to behaviorally condition the student body for workforce competence in the global economy of the emerging Fourth Industrial Revolution.

“Cradle-to-Career” Schooling for a Global Workforce: Public-Private Virtual Ed for the 4IR

The techno-fascist “stakeholder capitalism” of the Fourth Industrial Revolution has origins in the public-private charter schooling industry, which was supported by AFT President Albert Shanker, who endorsed public school reforms through partnerships with private educational corporations subsidized by tax dollars, thereby setting the legal precedent for private ed-tech companies to rake in profits from government coffers funneled through contracts with public schools. In fact, with AFT backing, public-private charter school markets hatched the first virtual edu-corporations, such as K12 Inc., which deliver learning services exclusively by means of remote online lessons through digital classrooms that integrate adaptive-learning courseware, the modern version of Skinner-box teaching machines, in order to condition students for workforce competence in a globally planned economy.

At Shanker’s 1988 speech at the National Press Club, the AFT president became one of the very first advocates for the concept of charter schools designed for workforce training that would prepare students for hi-tech jobs in a globalized economy. To this day, despite the unpopularity of charter schools among public educators, especially unionized teachers, the AFT carries on Shanker’s charter school vision. Under the current presidency of Randi Weingarten, the Winter 2014 edition of American Educator, the AFT’s journal, published an article entitled “Restoring Shanker’s Vision for Charter Schools,” which resolves that, “[t]he relevant question today is no longer whether charter schools are good or bad as a group. Rather we ask, can charter schools be taken in a better direction.” It should be noted that, before becoming the President of the AFT, Weingarten was the President of the United Federation of Teachers union where she oversaw New York City’s UFT Charter School, which was set up to dispel the sentiment that “the union contract is an impediment to success” of charter schools, according to Weingarten.

The roots of the AFT’s charter schooling agenda can be traced back to Shanker’s alliance with corporatist oligarchs at the globalist Trilateral Commission, which was co-founded by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was also an advisor to President Barack Obama, whose Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, championed the expansion of public-private charter schools, including virtual charter schools, that carry out “cradle-to-career” workforce training. In Brzezinski’s Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era, which forecasted the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the Trilateral boss conceptualized the emergence of a public-private schooling system in which businesses would “scientifically” manage workforce education programs: 

“Business[es] are becoming more involved in education, for psychological as well as for professional reasons. Greater multiplicity in educational training will make for a more pluralistic national community, and the increasing involvement of business companies in education may lead to a more rapid adaptation of the latest techniques and scientific knowledge to the educational process. American business and, to a lesser extent, government have already undertaken extensive programs of managerial ‘retooling’ and retraining.”

As foreshadowed by Brzezinski, the “stakeholder capitalist” Fourth Industrial Revolution in education has been spearheaded by a public-private network of virtual charter school corporations, including K12 Inc., contracting with ed-tech companies, such as Dreambox, which “scientifically” manage learning outcomes by deploying courseware products that psychologically condition the student body with AI algorithms. Those algorithms are programmed to train students for workforce “competence” in a technocratically planned world economy.

Integral to Brzezinski’s public-private business model of proto-charter schooling is a corporate system of “cradle-to-career” workforce training, which is endorsed by the AFT. In response to Secretary Duncan’s authorization of the US Department of Ed’s 2010 grants for “cradle-to-career services to improve educational outcomes” in “Promise Neighborhoods,” AFT President Weingarten praised how these public-private workforce-schooling partnerships were “a huge step forward.” The American Federation of Teachers’ support for these cradle-to-career charter curriculums is also rooted in AFT President Shanker’s corporatist bond with Trilateral Commission globalists, such as Zbigniew Brzezinski. 

In Between Two Ages, Brzezinski postulates how his proto-charter business model of public-private schooling would conform to the “technetronic” industrial revolution by restructuring education so that: 

“It could be more generally pursued within a work-study framework, and it should be supplemented by periodic additional training throughout most of one’s active life.  . . . by direct involvement in some professional activity and by advanced, systematic training within that area . . . Regular and formally required retraining—as well as broadening—could ensue at regular intervals throughout most of one’s professional career” (266-267).

By combining “a work-study framework” with a business network of edu-companies, Trilateralist Brzezinski posited a prototypical schematic for the AFT-endorsed system of cradle-to-career charter schooling, which spawned virtual charter edu-corporations that laid the public-private building blocks for multinational ed-tech companies to globalize digital ed-psych conditioning for workforce competence in the “stakeholder capitalist” Fourth Industrial Revolution.

In alignment with the AFT-Trilateral promotion of cradle-to-career charter schooling, the Albert Shanker Institute partnered with the New Economy Information Service through a “Task Force” that produced “A Report of the Task Force on Workforce Development” entitled “Learning Partnerships: Strengthening American Jobs in the Global Economy.” In this white paper, the Task Force, which included both “rightwing” and “leftwing” interest groups, such as the AFL-CIO, the Heritage Foundation, and the Progressive Policy Institute, reported that “[g]lobal economic competition” requires “Learning Partnerships” that develop workforce “skills” and “capabilities” in the industry of “information technology” as “[t]echnological change is also sweeping away millions of relatively routine jobs, while creating new demands for well educated and highly skilled workers.” The Task Force also references the “National Security” needs of workforce training in “software code development,” citing “Bill Neugent, chief engineer for cyber security at MITRE, a non-profit research and engineering corporation, [who] says ‘It’s an issue that worries the big vendors, companies like Microsoft, IBM and Sun.’”

In sum, since the conception of charter schooling, the AFT has championed the Trilateralist mission to technocratically plan the world economy through public-private workforce-training partnerships between multinational technology corporations and national government agencies. Setting the precedent for public-private management of workforce education systems, the AFT-Trilateral push for charter school reforms has opened the doors for international ed-tech companies to privatize public school systems through the online distance learning industry. This technocratic privatization stratagem was initially sparked by virtual charter school corporations, such as K12 Inc., which was set up by President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education, William Bennett, who oversaw Project BEST. In my recent article, “From UNESCO Study 11 to UNESCO 2050,” I documented how Project BEST, in coordination with Reagan’s Task Force on Private Sector Initiatives, collaborated with UNESCO Study 11 to set up public-private “school choice” partnerships that contract with globalist ed-tech corporations to deploy computerized e-learning technologies which psycho-behaviorally condition students for workforce competence in the globally planned Social Credit economy of the techno-fascist Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The AFT’s pivotal role in pushing corporate “school choice” not only set the precedent for public-private ed-tech partnerships through the virtual charter schooling industry. It also opened the doors for public-private “community school” partnerships that install educational technologies to data-mine students’ cognitive, behavioral, and socio-emotional psychometrics in order to track students into “wraparound,” or “pipeline,” services such as job-placement “pathways,” healthcare treatments, and crime-prevention programs for at-risk students. The counterpart to corporate charter schools, public-private community schools are instrumental to instituting “pay for success” impact finance for Social Credit in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

By data-tracking students’ biopsychosocial algorithms through public-private wraparound services, community schools provide pay-for-success pipelines for “social impact investments” from for-profit corporations, non-profit foundations, and global governance institutions, such as IBM, the Rockefeller Foundation, and UNESCO, all of which have ties with the AFT. Endorsed by the Trilateral Commission, “[g]lobal impact invest[ments]” finance community pipeline services based on “predictive analytics” extrapolated from students’ cognitive, behavioral, and socioemotional learning metrics, which can be aggregated into Social Credit Scores that are recalibrated according to the student outcomes resulting from such pay-for-success programs. In turn, corporate oligarchs can leverage predatory impact investments as a means to socially engineer students’ thoughts, feelings, and actions by making their access to jobs, healthcare, and other social programs contingent upon their Social Scores, which are calculated based on how the students perform when carrying out the stipulations of their “community-based” pay-for-success assignments.

In the wake of COVID, the AFT has been pressing hard for the expansion of community schools. Just last month, on July 6, 2021, AFT President Weingarten gave a speech at the AFT “TEACH Conference” where she lauded how “AFT affiliates have worked with school districts to expand community schools” while “using our [AFT] Innovation Fund this year, as we have in the past, to help seed more.” According to Weingarten, community schools are crucial to education in a post-COVID society because they provide “wraparound support[s]” that assist with healthcare, housing, and food access while helping with ed-tech accessibility: “We saw just how essential community schools are when COVID-19 hit.  . . . [T]hey helped lessen the fallout of the pandemic” by “address[ing] barriers to remote learning and . . . provid[ing] virtual services like tutoring . . . and mental health services. They helped families access food and housing assistance.” Calling for “bold action” to “accelerat[e] progress toward our goal of creating 25,000 community schools,” President Weingarten gave another speech entitled “Return, Recover and Reimagine: Toward A Renaissance in America’s Public Schools,” which invokes the “Reimagine Education” campaign of the Gates Foundation, which has bankrolled the AFT Innovation Fund.

In its efforts to spread community schools across the United States, the AFT has partnered with the Coalition for Community Schools (CCS) where AFT Assistant Director of Education Issues, Shital C. Shah, has been a member of the CCS Steering Committee. In 2015, the AFT-sponsored CCS issued seven “Community Schools Awards for Excellence” in honor of various “community partnerships, [or] public-private partnerships” that utilize ed-tech to track and trace student “[d]ata on cognitive, social, emotional, [and] physical factors” in order to “pipeline” students into “wraparound services,” including “mental health supports,” “[c]rime . . . reduction” programs, and job-placement “pathways” for “cradle-to-career collective impact.” With AFT endorsement, these “community-based” collective impact pipelines are financed by “social impact bond[s]” from for-profit companies, such as Goldman Sachs, and corporate foundations, such as Atlantic Philanthropies, which are subsidized by government-funded “pay for success” grants.

By championing these public-private pay-for-success partnerships with community-school wraparound services managed by Big Data, the AFT has been promoting the advancement of the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s technocratic “Social Credit” economy, which combines techno-fascist “surveillance capitalism” with communitarian “stakeholder capitalism.” Indeed, “pay for success” financing, “collective impact” investments, and “social impact” bonds are all parts of the same “fintech” package, which goes hand in hand with “community-based” public-private partnerships that digitally

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