Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

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The Noxious Nineties : c. 1991

THE CHALLENGE: America’s Skills and Knowledge Gap

Introduction: As a nation, we now invest more in education than in defense. Nor is the rest of the world sitting idly by, waiting for America to catch up. Serious efforts at education improvement are under way by most of our international competition and trading partners. While more than 4 million adults are taking basic education courses outside the schools, there is no systematic means of matching training to needs; no uniform standards measure the skills needed and the skills learned. [Ed. Note: Carnegie’s Marc Tucker took care of matching training to needs when his Human Resources Development Plan for the United States , developed by the National Center for Edu cation and the Economy, was unveiled in 1992. (See Appendix XVIII.) As far as keeping track of the progress of our “international competition and trading partners” is concerned, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the General Agreements for Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and international co-ordination of ISO 9000 and 1400 through the United Nations will ensure that we maintain “computability.”] W HO WOULD EVER HAVE IMAGINED THAT THE EDUCATIONAL AND CULTURAL EXCHANGES signed between President Reagan and President Gorbachev, and those negotiated since 1985, would result in Russian “cops” from the recently disintegrated “Evil Empire” flying American police helicopters as described in the following article “Cop Swap: His Beat Is Leningrad but He’s on Loan to LAPD—His Local Host Will Visit U.S.S.R.” by Bob Pool, which appeared in the April 30, 1991 issue of The Los Angeles Times . Excerpts follow: That wasn’t Gorky Park that a burly Russian cop was swooping over Monday in a police helicopter. That was Griffith Park. Leningrad policeman Albert Vorontsov went airborne to get acquainted with Los Angeles and launch a first-ever swap of Soviet and local police of ficers that is aimed at spreading goodwill—and trading good ideas. Vorontsov will shadow Los Angeles Police Sergeant Greg Braun for two weeks. Then Braun will travel to the So viet Union in June to work with Vorontsov.... “We may think we’re on the cutting edge of technology in police work, but a lot of other people are doing very innovative, bright things all over the world,” said Bayan Lewis, an LAPD commander who helped Braun arrange Vorontsov’s visit. Kern County lawmen have adapted a simple Soviet “pole vault” technique that can flip SWAT team members into second-story windows, he said. A N ARTICLE ENTITLED “S ENIORS ’ C HURCH A TTENDANCE ” WAS PUBLISHED IN THE J UNE 12, 1991 issue of Education Week . The central premise of the article was summed up in the following quote: High school seniors in 1990 were much less interested in, and involved with, organized reli gion than were their counterparts in the 1970’s, according to data compiled by the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at the University of Michigan. [Ed. Note: The Institute for Social Research (ISR) is, interestingly enough, the same institute that was involved in Ronald Havelock’s The Change Agents’ Guide to Innovation in Education