Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

234 “We are not opposed to the concept of teaching children the fundamental facts that they ought to know. The issue is who controls the curriculum,” said Kirkwood School District Superintendent Thomas Keating. Keating and other superintendents aired their complaints at a joint meeting last week of the Cooperating School Districts of the St. Louis Suburban Area and the Missouri School Boards Association.... …One of the harshest critics of the test plan is Ferguson-Florissant Superintendent Daniel B. Keck, who said the districts may just as well replace their school names with “Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, State of Missouri, Local Annex.”... Keck, however, said the state has bypassed elected school board members and estab lished a direct “pipeline” to local schools. He said administrators are accountable to whoever sets the curriculum.... “To whom am I as the chief executive officer of a school district re sponsible: to you, or DESE?” Keck said. “In this particular system, there are no checks and balances. That is bad governance.” He said the media will create public pressure to excel on the new tests. Keck said the legislature has “inadvertently” transferred accountability for educational quality to itself. He predicted that if the test scores aren’t satisfactory, the state will lower the standards “until the legislature looks good.”... …“And the same number of kids will walk out the door functionally illiterate,” he said. One of the test items (objectives) found in Missouri’s Educational Objectives, Grade 12, resulting from passage of Missouri’s Excellence in Education Act of 1985 , follows: Given a description of an individual with a debased character, such as a child murderer or a person who has set fire to an inhabited building, students should reject suggestions for punishment which would detract from the dignity of the prisoner. I N THE M AY 15, 1986 ISSUE OF E DUCATION D AILY AN ARTICLE RELATED TO STUDENT AS sessment reported that “Secretary Bennett names study group to evaluate student assessment” and lists “Chairman Lamar Alexander, Governor of Tennessee and Chairman, National Governors Association, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, First Lady of Arkansas and partner in the Rose law firm” amongst members of the study group. A N ARTICLE ENTITLED “C ARNEGIE T EACHING P ANEL C HARTS ‘N EW F RAMEWORK ’—G RANTS Total ing $900,000 Made to Press Reforms” written by Lynn Olson appeared in the May 21, 1986 issue of Education Week . The announced “New Framework”—amongst other things—carved in stone the methodology which teachers would be required to use in order to obtain board certification. Excerpts follow from this extremely important article: The Carnegie Corporation of New York announced here last week that it has awarded two major grants, totaling nearly $900,000, to forward the recommendations of the Carnegie Task Force on Teaching as a Profession. Last year, the corporation created the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy, a multi-million dollar initiative designed to help chart U.S. education policy during the next 10 years. The forum assembled the 14-member task force on teaching as one of its first ini tiatives. The foundation awarded $817,000 to Stanford University for a 15-month research