Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

81 Direct Instruction in instructing teachers how to use operant conditioning, stimulus-response stimulus to get desired behaviors. Reviewed by the U.S. Department of Education’s Joint Dis semination Review Panel (JDRP) and approved as an exemplary education program in 1974, ECRI was promoted throughout the National Diffusion Network (NDN), the federally funded transmission belt for controversial and mostly non-academic programs. On May 5, 1984 the officers of the Arizona Federation of Teachers unanimously passed a resolution—spearheaded by Ann Herzer, an Arizona teacher—which stated in part that mem bers of the Arizona affiliate oppose such programs as ECRI, Project INSTRUCT and/or any other programs that use oper ant conditioning under the guise of Mastery Learning, Classroom Management, Precision Teaching, Structured Learning and Discipline, and petition the U.S. Congress for protection against the use of such methods on teachers and students without their prior consent. The Arizona resolution was supported by Dr. Jeanette Veatch, internationally known expert in the field of reading, who in a July 1980 letter to Ann Herzer called the ECRI program “a more modern version of breaking children to the heel of thought control.... It is so flagrantly dangerous, damaging and destructive I am appalled at its existence.” Unfortunately, Albert Shanker, then president of the national American Federation of Teachers (AFT), tabled the Arizona affiliate’s resolution at AFT’s August, 1984 national convention in Washington, D.C. With this historical perspective in mind, consider an article which appeared in Education Week September 6, 1997 entitled “New AFT President Urges Members to Help Floundering Schools.” The late Albert Shanker would be pleased that the AFT continues to support Skinner ian mastery learning/direct instruction, for the article states in part: “Also featured [at AFT’s QUEST Conference] was Direct Instruction, a scripted set of lessons used for teaching at-risk students.” The Sick Sixties : c. 1968 J OHN G OODLAD ’ S ARTICLE , “L EARNING AND T EACHING IN THE F UTURE ,” WAS PUBLISHED by the National Education Association’s journal Today’s Education in 1968. Excerpts from Goodlad’s article follow: The most controversial issues of the twenty-first century will pertain to the ends and means of modifying human behavior and who shall determine them. The first educational question will not be “what knowledge is of the most worth?” but “what kinds of human beings do we wish to produce?” The possibilities virtually defy our imagination. T ECHNOLOGY OF T EACHING BY B.F S KINNER WAS PUBLISHED (P RENTICE H ALL : N EW Y ORK , 1968) and became part of the educational lore of the day. An excerpt follows: Absolute power in education is not a serious issue today because it seems out of reach. How ever, a technology of teaching will need to be much more powerful if the race with catastro phe is to be won, and it may then, like any powerful technology, need to be contained. An appropriate counter control will not be generated as a revolt against aversive measures but by a policy designed to maximize the contribution which education can make to the strength of the culture. The issue is important because the government of the future will probably