Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

190 President Reagan is scheduled to visit P.S. 48, an elementary school in the Bronx, New York City. During his visit the President will meet Dr. Ethna Reid, Director of the Exemplary Center for Reading Instruction, a program in the National Diffusion Network. Dr. Reid will be at P.S. 48 to train staff members in the use of ECRI. 9 [Ed. Note: Whether the President, a very busy man, met with Dr. Reid or not, is insignificant. What IS highly significant, however, is WHY this extraordinary effort was made to introduce the President of the United States to Dr. Ethna Reid of Utah. In retrospect, scheduling President Reagan to meet with the developer of the “chosen” teaching method which incorporates Skin nerian mastery learning and direct instruction makes sense.] U.S. S ECRETARY OF E DUCATION T.H. B ELL ’ S C OMMISSION ON E XCELLENCE PUBLISHED A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform in 1982. This report laid the groundwork for the controversial restructuring Americans face today. Initially, the commission engaged in a slick, expensive propagandistic roadshow, intended to mobilize American opinion in favor of the umpteenth reform since the federal government seized control of education in 1965, causing steep declines in academic test scores. The recommendations were couched in terms Americans would accept; i.e., mastering basic skills, more homework, etc. Its hype was best illustrated by the following excerpt: If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.... We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament. [Ed. Note: The rhetoric worked. Spending increased. Ideas, which would never have been accepted had a crisis not been deliberately created, were embraced without question. These included doing away with the only valid criterion for measuring student academic achieve ment—the Carnegie Unit—with its required four years of math, four years of English, four years of history, etc., in order to graduate from high school. Of interest was an informal com ment made by Secretary Bell at the initial (closed to the public) commission meeting in July of 1981. Secretary Bell commented that one had to “create conflict in order to obtain one’s objectives.” The conflict was indeed created between the conservatives (falsely represented by big business interests) and the liberals (the left-wing tax-exempt foundations and leadership of the teacher unions, etc.), in order to be able to come to a compromise (arrive at the consensus or common ground) which represented what the United Nations and its educational agencies had been promoting since 1945. The U.N. agenda included socialist lifelong learning and training for the global workforce. This consensus required—and succeeded in obtaining—partnerships/ mergers between individuals and groups that had formerly had nothing in common—especially the partnership between government schools and business. Such a partnership is required by socialist/fascist forms of government.]

T HE C ENTER FOR E DUCATIONAL R ESEARCH AND I NNOVATION (CERI), 10 WHICH IS ATTACHED to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris, France, held an International School Improvement Project (ISIP) conference in Palm Beach, Florida in 1982.