Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

362 experiment to which they were subjected between 1968 and 1981?]

T HE C HICAGO T RIBUNE RAN THE ARTICLE “C ITY S CHOOLS D ROPPING I OWA S KILLS T ESTS ” on March 7, 1996. An excerpt follows: The new test would assess whether students have mastered what they have been taught.... One potentially contentious issue remains: direct instruction, a strategy aimed at forcing low-achieving schools to accept a curriculum based on scripted lessons and recitation.... “I can’t imagine that the majority of the teachers in our school would at all be willing to implement direct instruction,” said Julie Wopestehoff, Executive Director of Parents United for Responsible Education. A N UNTITLED ARTICLE APPEARED IN T HE C HICAGO S UN T IMES ON M ARCH 8, 1996. A N excerpt follows: Determined to show that all Chicago public school students can succeed, DePaul University is waiting for the stroke of Governor Edgar’s pen to kick off plans for its own charter school.... “These children can learn at the same rate as the children of Ph.D.’s.... We have a list of things we can choose from. There’s direct instruction, whole language, team learn ing, cooperative learning,” said Barbara Sizemore, Dean of DePaul University’s College of Education, Chicago. [Ed. Note: Well, well. This quote stripped the Empress and her change agent associates of whatever clothing they had left—which wasn’t much due to this type of “bait and switch” technique having been used on parents over and over again. Create the problem; parents scream; impose a solution they would never have accepted in the first place; parents gratefully accept it, not knowing the only difference between the solution and what they had before is a new label. Some parents understood the manipulative mastery learning method. This writer has boxes full of letters from teachers, doctors, and parents in Texas, Ohio, Arizona, Indiana, etc., deploring the serious negative effects of mastery learning—sickness and stress. But when the change agents substituted the “direct instruction” label for the failed “mastery learning” label, how could parents be expected to recognize the deceit? Actually, it does take some kind of nerve to propose a solution which only fourteen years earlier had been discredited as a failure in Chicago, and which has put Chicago, Washington, D.C., and South Carolina at the bottom of the heap as far as test scores go. If one checked all the other inner city schools that have used this Skinnerian method, one would find only minor differences between their low test scores and those of the three mentioned above. Dean Sizemore was telling parents and teachers something—something very important. She was obviously very proud of the menu being offered to the naïve charter school parents and children in Chicago—the menu to be offered to all schools in the nation. The implement ation of site-based management (unelected, hand-picked councils) would assure approval of Sizemore’s controversial outcome-based education which consisted of cooperative learning and Engelmann’s direct instruction/DISTAR/SRA/mastery learning in conjunction with lit erature-based whole language instruction, etc.—a delicious concoction to be sure, guaranteed