Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

244 In 1991 Lamar Alexander, working with Chester Finn and others who were familiar with the work of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in enacting a national curriculum in England and Wales, convinced Bush to endorse the idea of national standards for education. Of interest here is that the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) had been working on assessment for many years, dating back to 1980, with Clare Burstall of Wales, U.K. Also, one might ask why the United States would want to copy the English education system in light of the poor performance of its students on basic skills tests. The December 9, 1988 issue of The Wall Street Journal carried an editorial entitled “And You Thought American Schools Were Bad!” in which Theodore Dalrymple, the pen name of British physician Anthony Daniels, said that: In eight years in medical practice in an English slum (in which lives, incidentally, a fifth of the population of the industrial English city where I work) I have met only one teenager of hundreds I have asked who knew when World War II was fought. The others thought it took place in the early 1900s or the 1970s, and lasted up to 30 years. Another recurrent theme, which will become evident throughout the rest of this book, will be the growing emphasis on what Utah’s Superintendent Burningham referred to as “research verified programs.” This term will change subtly as Effective Schools programs are referred to as “scientific, research-based,” implying that they are “acceptable and desirable”—or as Secretary of Education William Bennett explained, ”What Works.”] D R . S UE E. B ERRYMAN , DIRECTOR OF THE I NSTITUTE ON E DUCATION AND THE E CONOMY AT Teach ers College, Columbia University, New York, presented a paper entitled “Education and the Economy: A Diagnostic Review and Implications for the Federal Role” at a seminar on the federal role in education held at the Aspen Institute, Aspen, Colorado on July 31–August 10, 1988. Under acknowledgments one reads: This Seminar was sponsored by The Carnegie Corporation, The Ford Foundation, The Hewlitt Foundation, The Primerica Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation. This paper is based heavily on, and could not have been written without, research conducted under the auspices of The National Center on Education and Employment, funded by the Office of Research, Office of Educational Research and Improvement of the U.S. Department of Education. The paper also relies on research funded by the National Assessment of Vo cational Education.

An excerpt from Dr. Berryman’s resumé, which was attached to her paper, follows:

1973–1985 Behavioral Scientist, Behavioral Sciences Department, The RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, California, and Washington, D.C. Analyzed individuals’ educational and employment choices and the nature and conse quences of military, corporate, and federal human resource policies.

The table of contents of Dr. Berryman’s report is reproduced here:

I. A FRAME OF REFERENCE