Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

376 speech writer for former Independent Party presidential candidate John Anderson’s National Unity Campaign in 1980; issues director for Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale’s campaign; senior advisor for then-Senator Al Gore’s campaign for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination; and since 1989 served as senior advisor for the Democratic Leadership Council and the Progressive Policy Institute. • Lamar Alexander , former governor of Tennessee, former U.S. Secretary of Education, former and present candidate for the Republican Party nomination for President of the United States. * Elaine Chao , Distinguished Fellow, The Heritage Foundation. Until recently, Elaine Chao was president and chief executive officer of United Way of America. • Ernesto Cortes, Jr. , Industrial Areas Foundation (IAI), Southwest regional director. Founded more than fifty years ago in Chicago by the late Saul Alinsky, the IAF is a non-profit organization, originally operating throughout the Catholic Church in the U.S., designed to provide leadership training to poor and moderate income people in more than forty broadly based, multi-ethnic organizations in the United States and the United Kingdom. (See Resources for availability of Stephanie Block’s article and forthcoming book dealing with the highly controversial activities of the Industrial Areas Foundation.) • Amitai Etzioni , professor at Georgetown University, founder and chairman of The Communitarian Network, is involved with the Education For All (EFA) activities both nationally and internationally, the Character Education Partnership, and the activities of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Foundation (Vanderbilt University). According to Webster’s New World Dictionary (1976) a “communitarian” is “a member or advocate of a communistic community.” Communitarianism is the social philosophy of the Skin nerian Walden II experimental commune at Los Horcones, Mexico. 52 • John Gardner , professor of education at Stanford University in California, has served as former president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which—as the reader knows—has had virtual control over American education since the early 1900s. • Peter C. Goldmark, Jr. , was elected the eleventh president of the Rockefeller Foun dation in June 1988. Goldmark is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. • Oz Guiness , Senior Fellow with The Trinity Forum. Guiness headed up the contro versial Williamsburg Charter Character Education Project whose work was continued by Charles Haynes of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Foundation at Vanderbilt University. • Michael S. Joyce , president and chief executive officer of The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee, was former leader of the John M. Olin Foundation in New York and the Goldseker Foundation in Baltimore. A strong supporter of parental choice in education, Joyce spent six years with the Educational Research Council of America and was a contributing editor to a textbook series on the social studies. Joyce served on the Presidential Transition Team in the Reagan Administration and in 1993 joined with William Kristol to found the Project for the Republican Future. • Richard D. Land , president-treasurer of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, the agency for “applied Christianity” (social and moral concerns) for the Convention. • His Eminence Bernard Cardinal Law , Archbishop of Boston since 1984. He was cre-