Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

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The Noxious Nineties : c. 1998

Excerpts of Lewis’s article follow:

The Michigan Strategy Proposal for Drug and Violence Free Schools and Communities states:

Michigan now has one of the Nation’s most aggressive and comprehensive long-term strategies to reach Goal 6: “By the year 2000, every school in America will be free of drugs and violence and will offer a disciplined environment conducive to learning.” Governor John Engler and the Michigan State Board of Education have worked jointly to provide leadership and establish a clear plan of action to enable our schools and com munities to create safe, disciplined and drug free learning environments for our children by the year 2000. It will demand local community action, greater coordination, and careful targeting of $17 million in federal Drug Free Schools and Communities Act (DFSCA). 62 Throughout this document the Communitarian agenda is apparent. This philosophy assigns responsibility to the community, not the parents, for the development of the child.... The section on “Action Items” refers to State and Local Goals and shows us how dictatorial the state and federal Government have become toward recipients of Drug Free Schools and Communities Ac t funds. Notice there is no choice—”the school district will ....” Every school district will develop a local school-community coalition and advisory team. The data banks established for continual assessment and analysis will be the controlling factor, not only regarding the individual, but the school and the community, establishing community norms as well.... As one reads this proposal for accomplishing Goal 6, it becomes clear this document became the foundation for the Bias Crime Response Task Force Report. Surveys, marketing and a media blitz will be used to convince the public that violence is out of control and every community must be used to address the problem and fully imple ment Goal 6. Five years ago—1993—this document (Michigan’s Strategy Proposal) cited the State Goal to be: Every school-community drug education advisory team will review current needs assess ment and problem statements, undertake and complete a comprehensive needs assessment with data sufficient to identify, alter or select prevention programming and utilize data to plan evaluations of program impact by June 1994. The state will compile a county by county risk and protective factor profile as a local resource and for comparative data. The State Goal reveals just how extensive the databanks will be and how the data will be used as a means to dictate how every school/community will address the problem and develop prescribed national norms. The target date, June 1994, aligned perfectly with the 1994 Student Data Handbook: Elementary, Secondary and Early Childhood and the 1994 Staff Data Handbook: Elementary, Secondary and Early Childhood . 63 These data handbooks were first developed in 1974.... One of the original ten data handbooks was on community and number-coded community values—the values every U.S. community was eventually to embrace as their norms. 64 ... …The systems change and the implementation of the School-to-Work system will force the continual assessment of children to analyze the progress being made toward the elimination of all bias, individualism and privacy. Common unity cannot prevail unless all children develop the predetermined behavior, attitudes, and values for existence in the in terdependent global society of the future. The federal government is up to its old trick of creating a problem—which they cer tainly have done by limiting discipline in schools, subjecting children to certain learning experiences, requiring inclusive education which requires juvenile offenders in tethers to be