Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

398 sold on ISO 9000—but unable to articulate how it will affect the classroom. That’s a red flag to the business world. The U.S. Department of Education is so hopeful that it is funding the Lancaster ex periment with $800,000 in federal grants. [With a per pupil expenditure of $18,000 a year, the Lancaster School District is having a hard time making ends meet and was at the begin ning of 1999 saddled with $95 million in debt, ed.] It will be the first school district to get certified, although the Brandywine district in Delaware is not far behind. The New Jersey State Legislature wants the state’s entire public school system to be ISO 9000 certified and has enacted a waiver from state monitoring to those that implement it. However, only four of 600 school districts are so far considering it. Success is far from certain. ISO 9000 is laden with flowcharts and statistics and comes steeped in manufacturing terminology guaranteed to make teachers cringe. Curriculum is a “process control.” “Scrap” is a lost learning opportunity. The biggest roadblock has been the inability of educators to fully understand it. There have been workshops for two years, but many still are unable to cite examples about how it has changed the classroom. That’s a warning sign to Kurt Landgraf, chairman of DuPont Europe, who has a master’s degree in education. At this stage in ISO 9000 training, every employee “should be able to tell you exactly what they’re doing differently,” he says. But Robert Bowen, the business consultant the school district hired to implement ISO 9000, says he’s not worried. He knows first-hand that ISO 9000 is difficult to grasp because he’s spent a decade unsuccessfully trying to explain to his parents what he does for a liv ing.... Business leaders hesitate to get their hopes up. Throughout the 1990s schools have dabbled in continuous improvement and other pieces of total quality management (TQM). But despite those methods, U.S. 12th graders finish ahead of only Cyprus and South Africa in the international Math and Science Survey, says IBM CEO Louis Gerstner. Trade magazine Quality Progress said the number of public schools surveyed that had TQM projects in 1997 dropped 32% from 1996. “We lost our way,” says Mary Schutz, a principal in Wagon Mound, N.M. where teach ers were once as excited about TQM as Lancaster’s are about ISO 9000. He (William Kiefer, the Lancaster schools’ ISO coordinator) also promises solid evidence by this fall that academic achievement is on the rise in Lancaster. So far, such evidence does not exist. [Ed. Note: When the writer attended the 1992 National Governors Association “Quality in Education” Conference held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the session designed for school and other public officials was facilitated by a representative of IBM. During the question and answer period, a superintendent inquired about what to do when the expense of processing older teachers through staff development was not yielding changes in their behavior or level of acceptance of “reform.” The facilitator, without a second thought, pointed to the TQM flowchart on the wall behind her and indicated a box marked “Waste Management.” She then answered, “You watch them; you document their mistakes; then you get rid of them.” That is the TQM/ISO 9000 process at work.]

A SSOCIATION FOR S UPERVISION AND C URRICULUM D EVELOPMENT ’ S J UNE 1998 ISSUE OF Education Update carried a “Message from the Executive Director” subtitled “South Africa Tackles Ambi tious Curriculum Reform Effort.” Revealing excerpts follow: