Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

199

The "Effective" Eighties : c. 1983

Incentives and Rewards for Students Are Used to Promote Excellence:

1. Systems are set up in the classroom for frequent and consistent rewards to students for academic achievement and excellent behavior; they are appropriate to the developmental level of students; excellence is defined by objective standards, not by peer comparison. 2. All students know about the rewards and what they need to do to get them. Rewards are chosen because they appeal to students. 3. Rewards are related to specific achievements; some may be presented publicly; some should be immediately presented, while others delayed to teach persistence. 4. Parents are told about student successes and requested to help students keep working toward excellence. Brophy (1980); Brophy (1981); Emmer (1981); Evertson (1981); Hunter (1977); Rosswork (1977); Rutter (1979); Walker (1976). [Ed. Note: An example of the pervasiveness of Skinnerian operant conditioning, with its rewards/reinforcement system, is found in the Effective School Research on “school climate.” The definition of “positive/effective school climate” has varied; one definition being “psycho logically facilitative environment”—Skinner to the core. The Charles F. Kettering Foundation Ltd. (Dayton, Ohio) School Climate Profile , based on Eugene Howard’s Colorado Model, con tains a mark-off sheet with blocks in which data are arranged by “Almost Never, Occasion ally, Frequently, and Almost Always” to score behavior. Under “Program Determinants” from “Definitions of Climate Terms” in Howard’s Colorado Model, we find this wording:

2. INDIVIDUALIZED PERFORMANCE EXPECTATION AND VARIED REWARD SYSTEMS:

Practices are identified whereby staff members recognize individual differences among pupils. Everyone is not expected to learn the same things in the same way or in the same length of time. Rewards are sufficiently available so that all pupils, with effort, may expect to be positively and frequently recognized by the school.

R ESEARCHER AND WRITER K.M. H EATON , IN HER REVISED EDITION OF AN ARTICLE ENTITLED “Pre conditioning for Acceptance of Change” explained very clearly in 1983 how radical change in our republican form of government has been brought about at the local level through the use of psychopolitics. 11 The following are excerpts from Mrs. Heaton’s article: Variants of these control strategies have been, and are being, used on every front in this war. A case in point: In the early seventies, a textbook was developed by a think tank in Berkeley, with the authority of the Governor’s [Ronald Reagan] office, and coordinated by the Council on Intergovernmental Relations, which provided an elementary course in the use of psychopolitics “to provide the operant mechanism to change events in local government” (a direct quote). Named as the essential elements for planned change were:

• development of a climate for change; • a crisis of major importance;

• a catastrophe having a physical effect on community; • mounting cost of government, and/or major services; • and/or collapse of government’s ability to deal with these.