Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

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University... was chosen... to train the faculties of these 12 new institutions.... Q. Now when the proposal was first made... was it contemplated that Boston University might do all the training of Portuguese teachers themselves? A. Yes, I did. My feeling is that in this particular project the stakes are enormously high. The 120 people who are currently right now being selected for these roles in these 12 institutions are going to be there for 20 or 30 years; so that the course they have on teaching or supervision is going to set an intellectual and training agenda for them for a number of years. They are going to go on and train all these teachers with what they learned. Q. And do you have any responsibility with respect to the curriculum that will be used in the program to develop a teacher training instruction? A. Well, the Portuguese did a lot of study on their own, and they looked at various curricula for teacher education.... I think one of the reasons they selected Boston University was because the curriculum that they wanted taught seems to be one like an American teacher education curriculum. And we have their indication of what courses they want, and the sequence. And we—and this happened before I was there—we went with our course outlines and, in a sense, negotiated with them to a mutual satisfaction about what the content of what the various courses would be. Q. Do you belong to any professional associations? A. I am a member of the American Educational Research Association; I am a member of Phi Delta Kappa; I am a member of the Network of Educational Excellence; I was a member of the Master of Arts in Teaching Association—in fact, I was president, before it—before—I think it’s defunct now. [Ed. Note: Of interest is the fact that Paulo Freire, the well-known radical Brazilian educator who wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed , was also a consultant to the government of Portugal at the time of its revolution. (See August 19, 1986 entry for New York Times article.) As of 1992 Professor Kevin Ryan is reported to be involved in and the director of the Center for the Advancement of Ethics and Character at Boston University.] A N ARTICLE ENTITLED “O BSERVING THE B IRTH OF THE H ATCH A MENDMENT R EGULATIONS ” by Bert I. Greene and Marvin Pasch was published in the December 1984 issue of Educational Leadership, monthly journal of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Excerpts from the article follow: However, from the day the Hatch Amendment was passed, the written consent requirement lay dormant, that is, until 1984. As Charlotte Iserbyt, an education activist and former De partment of Education employee, [stated] in a memorandum to her conservative allies dated 10 January 1984:

The only tool available to us to protect our children in the government schools is a federal law, the Hatch Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment, passed unanimously by the U.S. Senate in 1978, for which the Office of Education promised regulations in early 1979.... I know that many of you, for good reason, feel that the Hatch Amendment has been use less. Of course it has been useless. Any statute which has no mechanism for enforcement is nothing more than a scrap of paper....

Iserbyt then turned her attention to the reason why regulations have not been promul gated: