Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

316 T HE FOLLOWING LETTER FROM U TAH G OVERNOR M ICHAEL O. L EAVITT AND HIS S TATE S U perin tendent of Public Instruction Scott W. Bean, dated September 30, 1993, gave a clear picture of the role of the governors of the individual states in implementing United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) lifelong learning “cradle-to-grave” agenda in the United States. Utah’s state report, “A Utah Perspective on the National Education Goals,” was written and edited by Dr. David E. Nelson of the Utah State Office of Education who was also involved in the 1984 Utah OBE grant. Some excerpts follow: At the education summit in Charlottesville, Virginia, in September 1989, the nation’s governors agreed to establish national education goals and a system to assess and monitor progress toward achieving them. Today, September 30, 1993, the anniversary of the historic summit, the National Education Goals Panel will issue its third annual education report. The report will focus on national and state progress toward achieving the education goals set in 1990 by the President and the governors. This progress report will inform the nation on how well we are doing on each of the goals. The governors also agreed to report individually on efforts of their respective states related to their state’s performance toward achieving the national goals. Our own report, “A Utah Perspective on the National Education Goals,” is issued to citizens of the state of Utah to inform them on the progress being made in our state toward the national goals. Because the goals are “cradle to grave” and cover the preschool years and the after school years, the information has been compiled from many state agencies. Meeting all of these six goals will require the coordination and work of all state agencies. I N L ONNIE H ARP ’ S ARTICLE “W IDELY M IXED T EST R ESULTS L EAVE S OME IN K ENTUCKY Puzzled ,” which appeared in Education Week ’s October 13, 1993 issue, the problems with the national reform leader’s implementation of its widely-acclaimed restructuring— Kentucky Education Restructuring Act (KERA)—were outlined. An excerpt follows: As Kentucky moves toward implementation of its path-breaking system of rewards and sanctions for schools, state students have handed officials a hard-to-read snapshot of the progress of reform. Results of the second year of a new open-ended assessment system, released last month, produced widely mixed results and, in the case of older students, some troubling declines. T HE N OVEMBER 15, 1993 ISSUE OF T HE A TLANTA C ONSTITUTION CARRIED AN ARTICLE entitled “Ware Students Are Drawn to Swampy Experiment: Magnet School Makes Okefenokee Its Lab.” Outlining what could be interpreted as the use of magnet/charter schools in a school-to-work scenario, excerpts follow: The Ware County School of Agriculture, Environmental and Forestry Sciences is an experiment in educational excellence that was years in the dreaming and application-pending stages. The concept was to create a magnet school unlike any other in the Southeast, a school where the study of sciences most important to the surrounding land would be incorporated into almost all the curricula. That would produce graduates oriented toward the disciplines most needed by employers in the region’s forestry and agriculture industries.