Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

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The Noxious Nineties : c. 1998

development. The Initiative expands and elaborates on the highly successful Student Aspirations Sur vey. The approximately 30-minute survey will provide schools with information and insight, from their students’ perspectives, in areas of the total learning environment, including: • aspirations

• conditions in schools • challenging behaviors • school climate • parent-school interaction • parental support and guidance

The Initiative is highly relevant to the Maine Learning Results. While the Learning Results allow the measurement of achievement, the Benchmarking Initiative will allow the measurement of motivation to achieve. The Initiative will enable schools to begin to assess themselves as related to the Guiding Principles which have not yet been addressed in content standards. Survey questions strongly relate to Guiding Principles II and IV—a Self-Directed and Life-Long Learner, and a Responsible and Involved Citizen, respectively. The Initiative will provide baseline data on career development and help schools and the standard of career preparation.... …Schools participating in the Initiative will receive several important benefits—all at no cost: 1) schools will receive detailed informative reports of their students’ responses, providing an assessment of the school dynamics and their effect on aspirations, motivation, and learning; 2) broader reports based on the data will provide the opportunity for schools to compare their profiles against state and regional profiles; 3) schools can take advantage of responsive programs and technical assistance to create or strengthen aspiration conditions in areas of need identified by schools; and 4) schools will receive assistance in monitoring the impact of reform efforts, including a follow-up survey toward the end of the project to check against the baseline data, an important, but often neglected step in the action research process. T HE FEDERALLY FUNDED N ORTH C ENTRAL R EGIONAL E DUCATIONAL L ABORATORY (NCREL), which serves seven states in the Midwest, published “New Times Demands New Ways of Learning” in its Winter-Spring issue of EdTalk . This article “is intended to offer a way to evaluate the effectiveness of various technologies and technology programs against the backdrop of new research on learning.” Some excerpts follow: “Learning” here does not mean how well students perform on standardized tests. That’s not learning, as researchers and educational reformers are coming to understand it. There’s a dynamic shift occurring in this country as we move from traditional definitions of learn ing and course design to models of engaged learning that involve more student interaction, more connections among schools, more collaboration among teachers and students, more involvement of teachers as facilitators, and more emphasis on technology as a tool for learn ing. It is in this context that our framework operates; it is this type of engaged learning that technology must support to be effective.... 1999