Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

91 new elementary program will come. California, he said, has a long way to go to catch up with the rest of the nation in accepting this new program. However, he said the government was spending “fantastic amounts of money and the Federal Government is totally behind it, pushing it and providing all the money you can possibly need.” (p. 4) T HE N ATIONAL A SSESSMENT OF E DUCATIONAL P ROGRESS (NAEP), MANDATED BY THE U.S. Con gress, was initiated in 1969. NAEP has periodically “assessed” (monitored the knowledge, skills, and performance of) students aged 9, 13, and 17, as well as various grade levels. The subject areas assessed have included: reading, writing, mathematics, science, citizenship, U.S. history, geography, social studies, art, music, literature, computer competence, and career and occupational development. NAEP also has collected background information from students, teachers, and administrators, and has related these data to student achievement. The Educa tional Testing Service (ETS) in 1983 took over the contract to administer the NAEP from the Carnegie Corporation-spawned Education Commission of the States. This move effectively kept Carnegie in control of educational assessment, since it was the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (a subdivision of the Carnegie Corporation) which had provided the $750,000 initial endowment (start-up funds) to launch ETS in 1947. Through an agree ment between the American Council on Education, the Carnegie Foundation and the College Entrance Examination Board, all of whom turned over their testing programs and a portion of their assets to ETS, the move to establish Educational Testing Service as the primary provider of testing material was accomplished. In 1988 Congress established the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB). The purpose of NAGB was to provide policy guidance for the execution of NAEP. The board was composed of nationally and locally elected officials, chief state school officers, classroom teachers, local school board members, and leaders of the business community, among others. Specifically, NAGB has been charged by Congress to perform the following duties: select subject areas to be assessed; identify appropriate achievement goals for each age group; develop assess ment objectives; design a methodology of assessment; and produce guidelines and standards for national, regional, and state comparisons. O VER A PERIOD OF THREE DECADES RESEARCH FOR E DUCATION FOR R ESULTS : I N R ESPONSE to A Nation at Risk, Vol. 1: Guaranteeing Effective Performance by Our Schools was conducted by Robert E. Corrigan, Ph.D., and Betty O. Corrigan. 12 This final publication was published in 1983 for the Reagan Administration’s use. Rather than being the protection from harmful innova tions that concerned parents had been promised, this report actually served as a springboard for implementing OBE. This writer is including it under the “Sick Sixties” since most of the programs comprising experimentation history (pilot OBE/ML/DI programs, including one in Korea) were, in the words of the Corrigans, implemented “across our country over a period of 22+ years (1960–1983).” (For more complete understanding of the impact of this study, see Appendix VI.) The Sick Sixties : c. 1969

Endnotes: 1 John Goodlad, “A Report from the State Committee on Public Education to the California State Board of Education—Citizens for the Twenty-first Century—Long Range Considerations for California Elementary and Secondary Education,” 1969. 2 The function of the National Diffusion Network has been distributed throughout the U.S. Department of Education’s organiza