Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

255 licensed to practice obtain an additional prestigious credential.... For each of these credentials the task is to figure out “what teachers should know and be able to do.” Then designers must devise ways of measuring teachers using new techniques like video simulations of classroom situations. All in all, it’s a five-year, $50 million project for which the National Board [National/Carnegie Board for Professional Teaching Standards] is seeking Federal, corporation and foundation support.... The National Board has thus signaled that four years from now it intends to start issuing credentials based on the image of a teacher who would have a hard time functioning in most public schools today. The choice would seem to be either to back away from this image or put pressure on schools to change.... David Kearns, Chairman of the Xerox Corporation and a member of the board, believes schools should change. “Schools must find ways of driving decision-making down to the people who actu ally do the teaching,” he said. The "Effective" Eighties : c. 1989 T HE B ANGOR [M AINE ] D AILY N EWS OF J ULY 18, 1989 CARRIED AN A SSOCIATED P RESS ITEM en titled “Long-Awaited National Teaching Certificate Detailed” which described in a nutshell the so-called “voluntary” national teacher certification system first called for in 1986 by the Carnegie Forum on Education and Economy report, A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century. Excerpts from the article follow: Teachers will be rigorously tested on their specialty, teaching techniques and knowledge of child development under a voluntary national certification system outlined Monday by an independent panel. With its new national credential, to be offered in 29 fields starting in 1993, the Na tional Board for Professional Teaching Standards says it hopes to dispel the myth that “any modestly educated person with some instinct for nurturing has the requisite qualifications to teach.” The private group said it hopes that the system will also lead to improved teacher training and, ultimately, to better-educated children. “The process will push the renewal of American education a big step closer to real ity,” former North Carolina Governor James Hunt, chairman of the 63-member board, said Monday in releasing the guidelines. The nation’s 2.3 million teachers will need a bachelor of arts degree and at least three years of experience to apply for certification, according to the blueprint. Board president, James A. Kelly, said professions such as medicine and law took decades to set standards for practitioners. He said the teacher standards board, formed in 1987, will compress the process into five years “because we want to influence the quality of the enormous influx of new teachers needed during the 1990s.... The new credential is expected to help draw more and better people into teaching and help teachers move into new roles as mentors, curriculum specialists and other positions requiring expertise or extra responsibility.” The national board was proposed three years ago. Many were skeptical that its mix of teachers, government officials, business leaders and higher education representatives could succeed at what they said was a highly controversial task with uncertain potential to improve education. Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers and a longtime backer of national teacher certification, said the criteria laid out Monday prove the skeptics wrong. “They said it couldn’t be done, but we did it,” Shanker said. “We can be proud that we have come so far.”