Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

348 School Boards Association, the National PTA) have joined with the Citizens for Excellence in Education and other conservative groups to continue the search for common ground on education. [Ed. Note: Robert Simonds’s co-option by the very groups responsible for at least thirty years of failed, so-called “reform,” is beyond this writer’s comprehension. 44 ] “C ONTENT OF O UR K IDS ’ T ESTS S HOULDN ’ T B E S ECRET ” BY M ARGARET S ITTE , COLUMNIST , ran in the March 3, 1995 issue of The Bismarck (N.D.) Tribune . Excerpts follow: In 1990 North Dakota eighth-graders scored highest in math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Questions of psycho-analysis have surfaced, however, leaving many parents to ask, “What exactly is the NAEP?” Senator Bob Stenehjem, R., Bismarck, thinks it’s time to find out, and he has introduced SB 2308 allowing parents the right to see it. Anita Hoge, a Pennsylvania mother of three, listened intently one day in 1986 as her ninth-grade son came home complaining, “I’ve just taken the weirdest test in the world. It was so hard. You couldn’t answer the questions.” “The prospect of working most of my adult life depresses me. Check ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ or ‘sometimes.’” Being a concerned parent, Anita marched to school and demanded to see the test, the Pennsylvania Educational Quality Assessment. She was refused. A feeling in the pit of her stomach told her something was terribly wrong. Anita called other parents, and together six women embarked on an extensive inves tigation that lasted several years. Berit Kjos’s Brave New Schools (Harvest House Publishers: Eugene, Ore., 1995), in dis cussing Anita Hoge’s case, states: Anita Hoge, a native of Pennsylvania, is no stranger to concerned parents or to the educational establishment. While her story has encouraged thousands of parents across the country, it has also brought anxiety to the change agents who hoped to conceal their strategies until they accomplish their purpose. Anita’s courageous search for answers to mystifying school practices has given us a glimpse of an educational process designed to conform all children to the new, politically correct version of “appropriate mental health.” Anita’s journey will take you through a maze of white papers and technical documents and expose the true nature of contemporary education: social engineering. It will give you an inside look at the deceptive testing mechanism designed to measure the attitudes and values of our children and make sure every student will demonstrate the pre-planned nonacademic “outcomes.” Unwilling to give up in the face of overwhelming opposition, Anita has become a living demonstration of the hope that “one person can make a difference.” (p. 206) [Ed. Note: Anita Hoge filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education, the Pennsyl vania State Department of Education and others, using the federal Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment . The outcome of her suit was delayed by the U.S. Department of Education’s tactics until the statute of limitations expired, thus its acknowledgment that her suit was le gitimate served only as a moral victory. The Pennsylvania Department of Education continued to stonewall Mrs. Hoge’s efforts to uncover the privacy-invading components of its statewide assessment test, discontinuing its use for a time and later changing the name of the test—as