Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

329 placed the development of skill standards and certification on the table as a major policy instrument for improving the education and training preparation of the American Work force.… Specifically, the Commission’s first recommendation called for “A new educational performance standard... for all students, to be met by age 16... established nationally” (p. 69)… [and] described the new assessment system as focusing on thinking-based achievement rather than routine skills. This new certification, which has come to be called the Certificate of Initial Mastery was envisioned as a cumulative assessment and certification process in volving a variety of assessments, including a portfolio of performances and projects. It was to be administered by an independent examining organization and focus on “thinking-based achievement, not routine skills.” Recommendation number 3… called for the development of “a comprehensive system of Technical and Professional Certificates and associate’s degrees for the majority of our students and workers who do not pursue a baccalaureate degree” ( Commission on Skills of the American Workforce , 1990, p. 77). The Certificate of Initial Mastery aims to cover general workplace skills whereas the envisioned system of Technical and Professional Certificates and associate’s degrees was aimed at assessment and certification of specific occupational skills. The two types of certification are parallel and complementary…. The two sets of skills are related but separable. Obtaining a Certificate of Initial Mastery was considered by the Commission as a gateway or threshold conveying eligibility to compete for Technical and Professional Certificates. The Commission on Skills of the American Workforce recommended that the Certificate of Initial Mastery be “benchmarked to the highest standards in the world” [undefined] (p. 69). Likewise the standards of Professional and Technical Certificates should be “at least equal to those set by other advanced industrialized nations” (p. 77). Since the publication of America’s Choice: High Skills or Low Wages! in June 1990, considerable progress has been made toward moving the concept of a cumulative portfolio of tests, projects, and achievements into reality. Within a short year, public opinion about national testing made a remarkable transformation from high negative to positive (Marshall and Tucker, 1992). The Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS), chaired by William Brock (who also served as co-chair of the Commission on Skills of the American Workforce [U.S. Secretary of Labor]), developed an innovative taxonomy of trans ferable generic skills applicable to all workforce entrants in a high performance economy. The New Standards Project, under the direction of Marc Tucker of the National Center on Education and the Economy and Lauren Resnick of the Learning and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh, working with a consortium of 19 states and 6 local school districts, is developing new approaches to assessment toward the creation of a certificate of initial mastery (National Center on Education and the Economy, 1994a, 1994b, and 1994c). Now the recommendations of the Commission are embodied in the Goals 2000 legislation recently passed by Congress and signed into law. As an amplification of the above report, the writer would like to quote from the pre sentation by Paul F. Cole, secretary-treasurer of the New York State AFL-CIO Chapter, at the Second Annual Model Schools Conference in Atlanta, Georgia in 1994. Mr. Cole’s statements included: I worked on the critical thinking skills portion of the Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) report. The fundamental revolution in the workplace called for restructuring of education to meet the challenge…. Value-added students produce a high performance environment…. 36 We must go from norm-referenced to criterion-referenced testing. Educational equality The Noxious Nineties : c. 1994