Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

253 A multitude of state reform plans in the early 1990s include diagrams of this same plan, exhibiting the school as the center (or “hub”) of the community; significantly, some diagrams show churches, recreation and other private aspects of life encompassed within the “hub” concept. With the advent of school-to-work programs, the concept has been expanded to include “one-stop training centers” for workforce development and placement. Children who don’t pass the proficiency assessments will be sent through these “centers” for services and remediation which will rely on operant conditioning methods to ensure “success”. Substitute “government” for schools like this “hub” plan and what political/economic sys tem do we have? Who exactly asked for—voted for?—this alien “education” system which places our citizens and communities under the control of the unelected school superintendent?] B ARRY B EAR , A MILDLY RETARDED 11- YEAR - OLD I NDIAN BOY LIVING ON A RESERVATION AND being taught at home by his mother, was declared a “child in need of assistance” (CINA) by a land mark Iowa Supreme Court decision on May 17, 1989. Barry Bear was removed from his home when the court cited “his parents’ failure to exercise a reasonable degree of care in supervising him” because he was not in school. His parents had been previously jailed for violating the state’s compulsory attendance (truancy) law. This precipitated the filing of a CINA petition, leading ultimately to the legal challenge which resulted in the Iowa Supreme Court decision. According to “The Tama Story: Educational Tyranny in Iowa,” an article by Samuel Blumen feld, 23 the following occurred: [The State of Iowa] wanted to establish a legal precedent whereby home-schooled children could be removed from parents found guilty of violating the compulsory attendance law. The juvenile law states that a child in need of assistance is a child (1) whose parents physically abused or neglected the child, (2) a child who “has suffered or is imminently likely to suffer harmful effects as a result of the failure of the parent... to exercise a reasonable degree of care in supervising the child,” or (3) a child who is in need of treatment for seri ous mental illness or disorder. Definition two is the one the State decided could be effectively used to prosecute Barry Bear’s parents. It is also vague enough, wide enough to include fundamentalist Christian home schoolers. After all, the State can always get humanistic psychiatrists, psychologists, guidance counselors, and other “experts” to testify that keeping a child out of public school can cause “harmful effects” by depriving the child of needed socialization.... ...Barry was taken from his family and placed in foster care. [Ed. Note: This ominous decision was supposed to have created court case precedent in Iowa and around the country. A handful of heroic homeschoolers stopped these efforts; at the same time foiling a truancy bill in the Iowa legislature that would have allowed—even mandated—a homeschooled child to be removed from his parents and placed into foster care. The Barry Bear case provides a snapshot of the future, of the “penalties” that will be imposed on parents who fail to comply with various aspects of compulsory attendance and testing laws. The full weight of this “hammer” will be felt when school-to-work certification requirements and newly proposed “performance-based” national standards and assessments for “accountability” and “quality” are imposed on all children, including the homeschooled. It should be noted that no national organization assisted in the grassroots homeschoolers’ resistance, on behalf of the Bear family, to these aggressive state actions.] The "Effective" Eighties : c. 1989