Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

318 There [Littleton, CO.], a slate of three “back-to-basics” candidates crushed another coalition, including two incumbents, that supported a host of trendy educational reforms and was backed by the educational establishment. All 15 principals, for example, released an open letter to voters denouncing the insurgent slate. Yet the margin of victory was nearly 2 to 1. What had so galvanized voters? The fact that their district is a national leader in implementing “outcome-based education” (OBE) and that officials there had, as the journal Education Week explained in a pre-election article acknowledging the contests’ significance, “pioneered new performance assessments and standards for high school graduation.” …Having acknowledged that American schools are in need of improvement, a growing number of educators are gravitating toward the view that the fault lies in too much emphasis on “content knowledge” and not enough concern, to quote the Littleton principal again, with “decision-making skills, thinking skills, and the ability to find and use information.” Or, to quote the Littleton elementary principals’ letter, students “must do more than spell and compute. They must be able to reason, persuade and solve problems.” Nevertheless, OBE proponents, with their emphasis on “thinking skills,” repeatedly contrast their theory with an approach that hasn’t been in vogue for decades, one of perpetual rote learning in which all creativity is stifled. Education Week is typical in presenting this caricature. It described the Littleton reforms as nothing more than encouraging students “to focus on problem-solving rather than memorization”—as if a nation in which only 32% of 17-year-olds in a 1986 survey could place the Civil War in the correct half-century was in danger of stuffing too many facts into students’ heads. Across America, school districts are considering, or putting in place, reforms similar to those in Littleton. Educators, often with the best of intentions, are rewriting report cards to include fuzzy criteria such as self-esteem and interpersonal relationships. They are deni grating standardized measurements of knowledge and the memorization of facts. To be sure, not all of the rethinking is misguided, but some of it amounts to dubious experimentation on children. Littleton proves that with the proper candidates, the movement toward a vague, “skill-oriented” curriculum can be stopped in its tracks. [Ed. Note: Very regrettably the above refreshing and impressive victory over the bureaucracy was short-lived. Slick change agent tactics managed to bring at least one new supposedly anti reform, back-to-basics board member “on board” what one hoped to be a sinking ship, thus assuring a return to implementation of the “nationally-detested” OBE. Littleton, Colorado be came one of Willard Daggett’s Model School systems and a national model for implementation of outcome-based education. Six years later Littleton tragically made front-page news nationally and internationally when on April 20, 1999, two teenagers at Columbine High School killed twelve students and one teacher, wounding many others with shotgun blasts, automatic pistol fire, and homemade pipe bombs, after which they took their own lives. This was the worst of what has become a rash of school violence against fellow students and teachers by young people. The sites of this lengthening list of tragedies are also sites of schools and school systems which have been restructured and embraced the outcome-based/performance-based/mastery learning concepts of schooling, with all the programs and methods with which they are associated. This writer, in a letter to the editor published by several national journals, discussed what she perceives to be a possible cause of such violence. The text of this letter is reprinted here in its entirety: An important question should be examined in regard to the tragedy in Littleton, Col orado. “What was going on inside the brains of the two boys who committed this terrible crime?”