Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

428 should raise red flags for those opposed to the philosophy behind Goals 2000 and the School to-Work Opportunities Act . When Ms. Rees says “Congress needs to shift the goals of the ESEA from one confined to inputs to one focused on achievement” she really means she supports outcome-based edu cation, since the word “achievement” as she has used it means “outcome.” She then goes on to recommend all the “nasties” associated with Marc Tucker’s National Center on Education and the Economy which are also associated with all recent restructuring legislation, as well as with outcome-based education: “empowering of parents, teachers, and principals”; “sending more federal dollars to the classroom”; “boosting the quality of teachers”; “allowing flexibility”; and “demanding accountability.” Of special interest here is her recommendation to boost the “quality of teachers.” The reader is urged to turn to the 1992 entry regarding Filling the Gaps for the new millenium definition of “quality of teachers.” Note also how this report uses the word “achievement.” This is the alternative to focusing on “inputs”—the legal requirement of most state constitutions with regard to their responsibility to the public to “offer,” “make available” or “furnish” educational opportunity to all citizens. Most of our state constitutions—unless they have changed in the last few years—do not require the state to be responsible for each student’s success, because the state cannot ensure what is a personal responsibility. States are responsible for the provision of everything necessary for a child or student to have the opportunity to achieve academic success—“inputs.” (This has traditionally been known as the Carnegie Unit requirement.) It is when the state becomes the guarantor of success—Ms. Rees’s “achievement”—that parents have felt the stifling hand of the state in the area of privacy and personal freedom. Sending more “dollars to the classroom” may sound like returning to local control, but is in fact the reverse since it bypasses not only state legislators—who presumably represent their constituents at the state level—but also local school boards who traditionally have made decisions at the central office building level—not at the school building level—on how their constituents’ tax money could best be spent. Much damage has been done over the years under the guise of “accountability.” Exactly to whom does the Heritage Foundation want the schools to be accountable? Parents and tax payers who have had no say whatsoever in restructuring plans, or the international business community which initiated and supports the recommendations spelled out in most of Heritage Foundation’s reports, including its call for the use of Skinnerian Direct Instruction (DISTAR) as presently implemented in Houston, Texas at Thaddeus Lott’s Model Wesley Elementary School, and which is on a roll across the nation since the passage of the Reading Excellence Act ?] C ENTER ON E DUCATION AND W ORK OF THE U NIVERSITY OF W ISCONSIN PUBLISHED A PAPER in 1998 entitled “Changing Admission Procedures in Four-Year Colleges to Support K–14 Reform.” 67 The paper lists as the principal investigators: L. Allen Phelps, University of Wisconsin-Madison and David Stern, University of California at Berkeley. Christine Maidl Pribbenow, University of Wisconsin-Madison is listed as project director. The following project areas are listed as: Postsecondary; competency-based admissions; secondary; integrated curriculum; and perfor mance-based assessment. Excerpts from the project abstract follow:

This one-year (1998) National Center for Research in Vocational Education (NCRVE) project