Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

387 Little have parents realized that Skinnerian direct instruction and Skinnerian mastery learning are identical twins with very bad track records which caused William Spady et al. to rename them “Outcome-Based Education” in the early 1980s. In order to assure passage of The Reading Excellence Act , Douglas Carnine, Ph.D., director of the Follow Through Direct Instruction Model in the University of Oregon’s Department of Special Education which is associated with the National Center to Improve the Tools of Edu cators (NCITE) funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education, sent a letter to “Concerned Friends” requesting they lobby for passage of H.R. 2614. The author has deliberately emphasized the word “special” in special education because the fact that direct instruction programs are designed for special education students should not be lost on the reader, since all students—not just those needing special education—will be exposed to the direct instruction process and the Skinnerian operant conditioning method. (For more information regarding direct instruction, please refer to Appendix II, III, VI, XVII, XX, XXI, XXV, and XXVI.) The following critique of DISTAR, Engelmann’s Direct Instruction special education pro gram, by a special education teacher in Florida should serve as a warning for those who do not understand the implications of using special education programs on all children. 57 The teacher points out that DISTAR was: The Noxious Nineties : c. 1997

1. Developed for teaching the severely impaired (retardation and neurologically im paired).

2. NOT suitable EVER for regular education. 3. Is political “goosestepping”—group training. 4. Purely “mechanical” system—“authoritarian.”

5. For NORMAL intelligence to SUPERIOR intelligence—a DISASTER. Teacher pounds away (scripted); children become bored; “frigidity” sets in and children tune out. Become the next behavior problems [emphasis in original]. 6. We would be deliberately creating behavioral (mental) dropouts.

You can teach (the teachers) DISTAR in two days (“mechanistic”). Teachers don’t have to know anything about language development. “El cheapo” response to whole language debacle.]

B ARBARA C ROSSETE WROTE AN ARTICLE , “H OW TO F IX A C ROWDED W ORLD : A DD P EOPLE ,” pub lished in The New York Times on Sunday, November 2, 1997, which took a refreshingly different position on the subject of population control than that taken by most journalists writing for the major print media. Some excerpts follow: In the 200 years since Thomas Malthus published his Essay on the Principle of Popu lation and threw a scare into the human race about the limits of the earth’s resources, people everywhere have been asking: Are there too many of us? This week, leading demographers from around the world will meet here to fret over a revolutionary new fear: Will there soon be too few of us?... …But for demographers, the problem lately is not absolute numbers of people and their pressures on the environment and natural resources. Now the experts are worried about what happens when population growth slows in a lot of places or even stops entirely or declines in some. Fertility rates in many places are dropping rapidly, especially in the richest countries, where, to put it simply, any two people are not producing two more people.