Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

295 in student achievement” and the only measures that exist are those associated with the Skin nerian operant conditioning method used in mastery learning/direct instruction/outcome- /results-/performance-based education, all of which are synonymous with the new definition of “achievement.” The Skinnerian method identifies each and every minute component of the subject to be learned and measures each and every response by the student and teacher, leaving much real learning out of the picture. It is evident that the teacher will also be “trained” in the same way the student is “trained” in order to become a “quality teacher” who never deviates from the script and whose every action, including facial expressions and body gestures, can be precisely measured, accounted for, and evaluated. As a teacher, you WILL perform, or you will lose your job. As a student, you WILL achieve, unless you are unwilling to be trained like an animal, in which case you may be sent to some form of “boot camp” for “re-education.” In order to accomplish the above, you, as a teacher, WILL teach to the test.] Perhaps the most important data gap in understanding how teachers affect the educational process is the lack of a good definition of “teacher quality.”… The National Education Sta tistics Agenda Committee… has recommended that OERI fund special studies to improve the measurement of, among other things, “important school processes including… methods of training teachers and assessing their competence.” Another gap relates to the assessment of teacher quality…. The qualifications measures that NCES does not collect cannot currently be related to measures of student achievement…. Development of a measure of “teacher quality” would be hastened by obtaining student outcome measures that could be linked to the rich nationally representative data on teacher qualifications…. These data are collected from information available in school records…. This student records form, if found feasible, could provide the data necessary to improve our understanding and measurement of “teacher quality.” [Ed. Note: In addition to data-gathering based on teach-to-the-test produced student perfor mance measures of “teacher quality,” Filling the Gaps also outlines other data gathering that is related to the “quality” measure—quality of life. According to Filling the Gaps : Socio-economic status (SES) of students is important for understanding, among other things, student outcomes including achievement test scores and graduation rates…. [C]ompletion in 1993 of the project to map decennial census information to school district boundaries will enable most elementary/secondary data to be linked to school district SES measures for analysis. The original 1981 Census Mapping Project, a joint venture between the National Center for Education Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau, was kept a highly guarded secret for a long time. One can only speculate as to the reason—perhaps it is related to the fact that exchang ing information of this type between government agencies has been, technically, illegal. (The reader may remember the cries of protest that surfaced in the mid-1980s over the idea of the IRS tracking unpaid student college loans by sharing data from the U.S. Department of Edu cation. The justification for continuing to illegally share interagency data was lost in the shuffle as the dust settled over that debate. Perhaps the 1981 Census Mapping Project was used as justification for “on-going practice constitutes acceptable practice.”) However, it is important to note the fact that the SES measures projected for the 1993 NCES-U.S. Census project are to be arrived at by analyzing data collected on the “community”—or school district—level. The Noxious Nineties : c. 1992