Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

274 Nearly all elementary and middle schools in Kentucky received incorrectly low test scores last fall, and fixing the error will mean that teachers will get an estimated $2 million in additional reward money.... While the error by Advanced Systems in Measurement and Evaluation, Inc., amounts to a small change in the schools’ actual scores—an average of about 1 point on a 140–point scale—there could be serious consequences for the state’s test, which has already been at the center of controversy. Critics seized upon the mistake as evidence that significant changes are needed in the testing system created by Kentucky’s 1990 school reform law. The March/April, 1997 issue of Kentucky Citizens Digest carried an article entitled “Are Basic Skills a Casualty of KERA?—Are state tests causing teachers to underemphasize basic skills?” which revealed that: If two recent reports are any indication, basic skills among students may very well be a ca sualty of education reform in Kentucky. A report from RAND, a prominent national research organization, found that tests now being used under KERA (called KIRIS tests) are causing public school teachers to de-emphasize basic skills instruction in Kentucky schools. “The subject areas for which the most teachers indicated a decrease since KIRIS began,” said the report, “were art, social studies, science, and reading. Eighty-nine percent of the teachers indicated that these changes were due largely to KIRIS.”] L AMAR A LEXANDER , FORMER GOVERNOR OF T ENNESSEE , SECRETARY OF EDUCATION IN P RESI dent George Bush’s administration, and Republican presidential candidate in 1999, was quoted in Southern Living (Vol. 25, No. 6, June 1990) in an interview when he was serving as president of the University of Tennessee as saying: I suggest we create a brand-new American school, as different from today’s schoolhouse as the telegraph was from The Pony Express. Such a school would probably start with babies and go through the eighth grade. It would be all year long. It would be open 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Every child would have his or her own computer and workstation. Every child would have a team of teachers that would stay with that child until graduation…. We already spend more money than any country per pupil on education. I just don’t think we spend it well. T HE B LUMENFELD E DUCATION L ETTER FOR A UGUST 1990 INCLUDED IN ITS COLUMN “V ITAL Q UOTE ” 6 the following quote from Professor George Reisman’s The Intellectual Activist : I believe that the decline in education is probably responsible for the widespread use of drugs. To live in the midst of a civilized society with a level of knowledge closer perhaps to that of primitive man than to what a civilized adult requires (which, regrettably, is the intellectual state of many of today’s students and graduates) must be a terrifying experience, urgently calling for some kind of relief, and drugs may appear to many to be the solution.... This is no longer an educational system. Its character has been completely transformed and it now clearly reveals itself to be what for many decades it has been in the process of becoming: namely, an agency working for the barbarization of youth.

George Reisman, Prof. of Economics, Pepperdine University, The Intellectual Activist, p. 8.