Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

216 tion and changing values are probably more important than reading in moving low income families into the middle class. [Ed. Note: What an extraordinary comment from someone supposedly involved in helping inner city students learn the basic skills! Nine years later, in an article in the March 5, 1996 issue of the Washington Times, the extent of academic damage caused by the Mastery Learn ing programs initiated by Spady and Sticht in 1977 was revealed: In the verbal portion of the 1995 Scholastic Achievement Test (SAT) D.C. public school stu dents scored 342 out of a possible 800—86 points below the national average. On the math portion of the SAT, District public school students scored 375 out of a possible 800—107 points below the national average. In 1999 the Washington, D.C. schools are using the same mastery learning/direct instruc tion method which caused the problem to solve the problem! In addition, the same Washington Times article stated that present Secretary of Education Richard Riley’s home state of South Carolina, which probably has been more deeply involved in Effective Schools Research than any other state with the notable exception of Mississippi, had the next lowest scores.] Important: The “Excellence in Instructional Delivery Systems” grant (the “Utah Grant”) evaluation report, entitled Models of Instructional Organization: A Casebook on Mastery Learn ing and Outcomes-Based Education and compiled by project director Robert Burns (Far West Laboratory for Educational Research and Development: San Francisco, April 1987), stated in its “Conclusion” that: The four models of instructional organization outlined in this casebook are difficult programs to implement. The practices of the ten schools described in the case studies are indeed com mendable. Yet we do not offer these ten case studies as “exemplary schools” deserving of emulation. Rather, they describe educators who have attempted to go beyond current cur ricular, instructional or organizational arrangements found in the majority of schools today. They have accepted the challenge of translating a difficult set of ideas into actual practice. And while they may not have always been completely successful, their experiences have provided us with ideas about how to begin moving closer to the ideal of successful learning for all students. [Ed. Note: The above wording is similar to wording in the evaluation of Project INSTRUCT, another model mastery learning program (1975). Neither mastery learning project had positive “academic” results. One can only conclude that academic achievement was not the intent. The documented results were changes in “curricular, instructional and organizational arrange ments” in the schools involved so that they could become performance-based, necessary for school-to-work training. Lack of positive results indicated in the evaluation of the mastery learning/outcome based education experiments in schools—including the much-touted Johnson City, New York’s Outcomes-Driven Developmental Model—did not deter the educators/sociologists from imple menting outcome-based education/mastery learning in “all schools of the nation.” In assembling this research on mastery learning/outcome-based education/direct instruc tion programs and their evaluations, it appears that academic achievement has not been the desired object or the result of the use of these “What Works” methods and curricular thrusts.