Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

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or financial or district pressures, have abandoned it.

T HE N ATIONAL S CHOOL B OARDS A SSOCIATION (NSBA) RECOMMENDED RADICAL CHANGES for lo cal school boards at its annual meeting in New Orleans in April of 1994. An article entitled “N.S.B.A. Endorses All Alternatives to Traditional School Governance” in Education Week for April 13, 1994 relates the following: “A New Framework for School Governance” endorses school-based decisionmaking, charter schools, and other alternatives to traditional governance structures, provided they meet local needs.... Much of the report focuses on improving the alignment of government services at all levels so that children can meet high academic standards. In addition to the national education goals, the new report advocates the creation of national goals for child and youth development.... Establishing explicit, substantive goals based on children’s needs will allow providers to coordinate services more effectively and insure that help is available to those in need. [Ed. Note: What a difference seventeen years can make! On March 27, 1977 the immediate past president of the National School Boards Association warned school board members “to be aware of and leery of… proposals for public involvement in public school operations that would shift decision-making authority to ‘vaguely-defined groups of citizens’ at the school site level,” which is exactly what NSBA meant when it called for “alternatives to traditional governance structures” in 1994.] S CHOOL - TO -W ORK T RANSITION IN THE U NITED S TATES : T HE C ASE OF THE M ISSING S OCIAL Part ners—A Report of the Governance and Finance Team of the Comparative Learning Teams Project (Center for Learning and Competitiveness, School of Public Affairs of the University of Maryland: College Park, Md., 1994) was prepared by Robert W. Glover, team leader for the Center for the Study of Human Resources, and Alan Weisberg, Foothill Associates, with assistance from team members: Andrew M. Churchill, Jobs for the Future; Sharon Knotts Green, Motorola, Inc.; Robert McPherson, Center for the Study of Human Resources; Janet Lewis, Hewlett Packard Corporation; Quint Rahberger, Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries; Mark Scott, Center for Learning and Competitiveness; and F. Eugene Scott, Sutter Health Systems. This document was published as a joint project of the Center for Learning and Competitiveness (CLC) and The Greater Austin [Texas] Chamber of Commerce. The CLC Advisory Board includes the following persons: The Hon. William E. Brock, 33 chair, senior partner of The Brock Group; Dr. Anthony P. Carnavale, director of Human Resource Studies, Committee for Economic Development; Nancy S. Grasmick, state superintendent of schools for the State of Maryland; Dr. Herbert J. Grover, professor of education, University of Wisconsin at Green Bay; Mayor Vera Katz, Portand, Oregon; Eugenia Kemble, assistant to the president for educational issues, American Federation of Teachers/AFL-CIO; The Hon. John R. McKernan, Jr., governor of Maine; Hilary C. Pennington, president, Jobs for the Future; William B. Rouse, chief executive officer, Search Technology, Inc.; and, Marc Tucker, president, National Center on Education and the Economy. Anne Heald is the executive director of the CLC. Excerpts from School-to-Work Transition in the United States follow: