Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

417 at the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh; etc., etc., etc., who are supposed to give this hand-picked committee an “appropriate balance.” The “treatment” suggested in both of the above-mentioned books [Jager’s Beginning to Read and Preventing Reading Difficulties ] for teaching young children to read appears to have been designed for the mentally retarded to severely handicapped children—not aver age children. This group is proposing language training from birth. Apparently parents are to be trained as though none have any normal/natural instincts in child rearing or language. HIPPY, PAT (Parents as Teachers) and other home-bound programs are now proposed for the “at risk”—the poor and minority children, but how long will it be before the radical behavioral scientists demand home visits and training for all children and their families as was mandated in the former Soviet Union? In my opinion, the individuals involved in producing the two above-mentioned books and especially the U.S. government, who supplies the grant money, are not interested in children learning to read but only in training and programming them for the planned global workforce. Otherwise programs like DISTAR, ECRI and Madeline Hunter’s Essential Elements of Instruction would have been exposed and stopped long ago. When I evaluated the Texas Alternative Document (TAD), I was not aware of the significance of TAD until Reid Lyon and others responded on the internet education loop. These individuals apparently are supporting the Skinnerian DISTAR, or similar programs, as a method to teach reading through the distribution of TAD. TAD is now being pushed in Nebraska as curricula for language arts. I predicted it would be the national model for restructuring and teacher training. DISTAR is now training teachers in California, according to Education Week . The big emphasis nationally is on “teacher training,” especially in Read ing—”re-training,” not “education”—is the emphasis [emphasis in original]. The Noxious Nineties : c. 1998 T HE S EPTEMBER 1998 ISSUE OF THE A MERICAN F AMILY A SSOCIATION J OURNAL CARRIED AN article entitled “Despite Heavy Funding Public Schools Showing Marks of Internal Crumbling” which stated that 59% of new teachers in Massachusetts failed to meet the minimum standard of a basic reading and writing test. Excerpts follow: This past April, the Massachusetts Board of Education for the first time required new teach ers to take a basic reading and writing test. Officials were horrified, however, to discover that 59% of the new teachers failed to meet the minimum standard. John Silber, Board of Education Chairman, complained that the test only required would-be teachers to score at an eighth-grade level. The test results were “pretty frightening,” Silber said. “These were all college graduates.” Massachusetts’s strategy following the embarrassment? Education officials lowered the minimum score required to pass the test from a 77% to 66%. The new strategy succeeded; only 44% of would-be teachers failed the test.

T HE S EPTEMBER 16, 1998 ISSUE OF T HE W ASHINGTON T IMES CARRIED AN ARTICLE ENTITLED “New Tack Taken on Religion in Schools: Group Seeks End to Secular Bias” which chronicles the publication of a new guidebook, Taking Religion Seriously across the Curriculum co-authored by Charles Haynes of the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University and Warren Nord of the University of North Carolina (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development