Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

210 awarded a grant to Terry Sanford, who had recently left the governorship of North Carolina, to transform the Conant idea into reality. John W. Gardner was Carnegie’s president at the time. A preliminary draft of the compact was completed by July and endorsed by represen tatives from all 50 states and the territories in September. Within five months, 10 states had ratified the agreement, giving it legal status. Out of the compact was born the Education Commission of the States (ECS).... “We invented a little device to get the compact approved quickly,” Mr. Sanford, now the president of Duke University, said recently. “We didn’t need money from the legisla tures, we had plenty of foundation funding, so we agreed that the governors could ratify it by executive order.”... But since the establishment under Governor James B. Hunt [also of North Carolina] of the Commission’s Task Force on Education for Economic Growth two years ago, ECS’s role has begun to change. The task force’s report Action for Excellence joined A Nation at Risk and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching’s High School as principal voices in the chorus of reform. It gained Gov. Hunt and several other “education governors” who were linked to ECS wide national publicity, and, in making a series of specific reform recommendations, thrust ECS into the policy-making arena. [Ed. Note: The multi-million dollar contract to operate the National Assessment of Educational Progress, awarded to the ECS in 1969, was transferred to Educational Testing Service (ETS) in 1983. This move was significant due to Carnegie’s deep involvement in establishing, funding, and directing ECS’s and ETS’s activities. Essentially, this move gave Carnegie Corporation and Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching extensive control over the direction and content of American education as a whole and individual state policy making in paticular with regard to education. Dennis Cuddy, Ph.D.—rightly, it seems—refers to the U.S. Department of Education as the “Carnegie Department of Education.”] T HE PRESIDENTIALLY APPOINTED N ATIONAL C OUNCIL FOR E DUCATIONAL R ESEARCH (NCER) issued two “Policies on Missions for Educational Research and Development Centers,” dated June 14 and October 25, 1984, shortly after regional hearings had been held regarding the need for regulations to implement the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA). The following are excerpts from NCER’s two policy statements: JUNE 14, 1984. In the past two decades, federally funded research and curriculum projects have frequently provoked considerable controversy. This is primarily a result of deeply di vergent philosophical views on the nature and purpose of public education in this country. During this period, the views of the general public were, for the most part, excluded from serious consideration as educational research came to be viewed as the observation and measurement of the education process using the largely quantitative techniques of modern social science [Skinnerian behaviorism]. OCTOBER 25, 1984. Insofar as it represents a broad spectrum of interests, including parents who have a serious stake in the outcomes of federally funded educational research, the Council affirms that the fundamental philosophical foundation for such research should be the unambiguous recognition and respect for the dignity and value of each human person.

For the past fifteen years the U.S. Department of Education has ignored the testimony