Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

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The Noxious Nineties : c. 1997

ated Cardinal by Pope John Paul II in May 1985. • Edwin Lupberger , chairman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and member of the U.S. Chamber’s Center for Workforce Preparation, also serves on the board of the Committee for Economic Development (CED) and is Louisiana’s Honorary Consul of the Federal Republic of Germany. • Bruno V. Manno , executive director of the National Commission on Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, is closely associated with Vanderbilt University and the Hudson Institute. Manno has served as assistant secretary of education for policy and planning and as director of planning for the Office of Educational Research and Improvement under Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander in 1986. • Sanford McDonnell , chairman of the Character Education Partnership and McDonnell Douglas Corporation. • Michael Novak , currently holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Novak has received numerous awards, including the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion (1994). • Lester Salamon , director of the Institute for Policy Studies at The Johns Hopkins University, and was the co-editor of Human Capital and America’s Future with David Hornbeck. • Robert Woodson, Sr. , founder and president of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise which has been in the forefront of the movement to “empower” low-income Americans. In 1990 Woodson received the high-profile John and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship. He is a board member of the American Association of Enterprise Zones and the Commission on National and Community Service. [Ed. Note: The writer cannot help but compare this commission and its raison d’etre with for mer President Dwight Eisenhower’s American Assembly, which developed the pre-determined, socialistic “Goals for Americans” in 1960. As to the meeting of minds on “common ground,” Shirley McCune (referred to previously in this book as a major education change agent with the Mid-Continent Regional Educational Laboratory) quoted from The [John] Naisbitt Group’s training materials regarding political philosophy at an educational restructuring presentation to the Millard, Nebraska School District 53 when she explained that basic shifts related to re structuring move across a continuum: Naisbitt listed “From” and “To” as being “left vs. right politics” resulting in “a politics of the radical center.” This is an excellent illustration of the Hegelian Dialectic at work and is the basis of the activities of the National Commission on Civic Renewal.] N ATIONAL B LUE R IBBON S CHOOLS P ROGRAM WAS THE SUBJECT OF I NFORMATIONAL L ETTER No. 54 from Maine’s Commissioner of Education J. Duke Albanese to all superintendents of schools and secondary and middle school principals, dated May 16, 1997. The reader should realize that all states participate in this program, so the next time your superintendent or any member of the education bureaucracy says your school is not controlled by the state or federal govern ment, pull out a copy of this letter and show it to them. The criteria for selection, which are noticeably short on references to traditional “academic excellence,” are taken from Goals 2000 materials. Excerpts follow: