Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

212 a 1960 seminar of businessmen and social scientists to discuss programmed learning and its application to business, at which professors B.F. Skinner, Arthur A. Lumsdaine and Robert Glaser were the speakers and discussion leaders. Robert Glaser was also a research advisor to the American Institute for Research at that time. Several pages of this report of the seminar are devoted to Glaser’s “Principles of Programming.”) According to the following quote from an official Mission, Texas, school memorandum to concerned parents, Exemplary Center for Reading Instruction (ECRI), the fraternal twin of DISTAR (Direct Instruction for Systematic Teaching and Remediation), led the pack as far as Robert Glaser’s National Commission on Reading was concerned: In 1986 ECRI was evaluated as playing a primary role in the United States becoming a nation of readers. The Regional Laboratory for Educational Improvement (sponsored by the U.S. Office of Educational and Improvement) published Implementing the Recommendations of Becoming a Nation of Readers. This document makes a line-by-line comparison of 31 reading programs, including ECRI. ECRI received the highest score of all 31 programs in meeting the specific recommendations of the National Commission on Reading. Siegfried Engelmann’s DISTAR (Reading Mastery) and ECRI are both based on the very sick philosophical world view that considers man nothing but an animal—an “organism” (in Skinner’s words)—responsive to the manipulation of stimulus-response-stimulus immediate reinforcement or rewards to bring about predetermined, predictable behaviors. Skinner’s quote about making a “pigeon a high achiever by reinforcing it on a proper schedule” is repeated often in this book to impress on the reader the horrifying aspect of animal training masquer ading as education in these programs. The National Research Council’s Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children , com piled by Catherine E. Snow, M. Susan Burns, and Peg Griffin, Eds. (National Academy Press: Washington, D.C., 1998) acknowledged G. Reid Lyon, Ph.D., chief of the Learning Disabilities, Cognitive, and Social Development Branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Hu man Development of the National Institutes of Health (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) who supports behaviorist reading programs like ECRI and DISTAR (Reading Mastery) as well as instruction based on so-called “medical and scientific research.” Other individuals mentioned in Preventing Reading Difficulties who were involved in the promotion of DISTAR include Edward Kame’enui, Department of Special Education of the University of Oregon and Marilyn Jager Adams. These two individuals also served on the Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children, and Adams is mentioned in Becoming a Nation of Readers . (See 1998 Herzer critique of Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children. ) What does all of this tell the reader? Perhaps the same thing that is suggested to this writer: that the Reading Excellence Act will provide the funding and technical assistance to implement across the nation not just reading programs, but all curricula—including workforce training—in the mode of DISTAR and ECRI, which are based on “scientific, medical research.” It is difficult to come to any other conclusion. In light of this information, the Reading Excellence Act of 1998 should be repealed. It is an unconstitutional curriculum mandate in violation of the General Education Provisions Act of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 . Call your congressmen and senators and ask that they support legislation to repeal this Act .]