Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

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Clinton has set a goal of 3,000 charter schools nationwide by the time he leaves office. There now are about 1,000. Charter schools tend to be smaller and custom-designed. Under charter schools laws, depending on the state, parents, community activists, teachers or even private companies may set up schools under a special agreement or charter. The schools might emphasize a particular curriculum such as arts or technology, or more traditional teaching methods using repetition and drills, or experimental methods that let children learn at their own pace. [Ed. Note: Charter schools are obliged to adhere to federal guidelines; i.e., Goals 2000 , etc. Individuals familiar with charter school legislation consider them unaccountable to the tax payers due to their being run by unelected councils; taxation without representation.] A N ATIONAL I NSTITUTE ON C AREER M AJORS WAS ANNOUNCED N OVEMBER 4, 1998 BY THE National School-to-Work Office. The accuracy of predictions made by anti-school-to-work citizens—that their children’s academic education would be watered down, if not eliminated, once the Marc Tucker Plan moved out of its planning stage and into the following action mode—is demon strated by the following: Just one month after it announced that all 50 states were “on board” to receive federal School-to-Work Implementation Grants, the National School-to-Work (STW) Office has now announced (Nov. 4) a National Institute on Career Majors to be held in Chicago, Illinois on February 4–6, 1999. “The purpose of the Institute is to bring together State Teams to strategically design a plan to implement career majors at the State and local levels.” To participate, states are asked to assemble “an interagency team of 6–10 members representing State level policy-makers around education and labor; business and industry; educators at the secondary and post secondary level; and include representatives from a local-level partnership that is currently building a STW system around career majors.” Activities will “focus on strengthening the capacity of education and business leaders to develop a standards-based curriculum leading to high skills, high wage, high demand occupations. Through individual team facilitation, each State Team will develop or revise a plan to organize school learning around career majors.” Attendance at this institute is limited to 15 teams, but more are sure to follow. Funds are being provided for team travel. Funds are also going to be made available to states at a later date to host similar career majors institutes for their local STW partnerships. The event will take place at the Fairmont Hotel... Chicago, Illinois. “N EW M ODEL FOR T EACHER E DUCATION — WITH F OCUS ON C ONTEXT AND W ORKPLACE : Project Could Better Prepare Students” by Michael Childs was published in the November 9, 1998 issue of Columns (p. 2), a University of Georgia faculty newsletter. Excerpts from the article follow: University of Georgia’s College of Education is beginning a three-year project that will attempt to bring together classroom and real-life work experiences in a way that could change how teachers are taught and what they’re taught to teach. The project could better prepare students for the challenges they are likely to face in the changing workplace of the 21st century. The college will develop and pilot-test a new teacher-education model that will place