Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

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b) Local boards will be advised by created community teams or collaboratives. c) Local boards must let go... presiding over student or employee grievance hearing. d) Grievance hearings will be delegated to “duly appointed mediation and arbitration panels.” e) Local boards won’t decide field trip requests, student transfers, challenges to library books, school calendar decisions, bus routing problems and athletic program con cerns. f) Local boards must “move away from... hiring, firing and promoting employees.” g) Local boards “will be freed of constraints and obligations that impede their ability to address the global issues which are more worthy of their time.” h) Local boards must “give up the role of keeper of the purse” (won’t control edu cation money). i) The local “appointed” school superintendents (LSS), are to be trained and controlled by the state. [Ed. Note: When Georgia’s radical “break the mold” Next Generation School Project proposal was not accepted as one of the original New American School Development Corporation (NASDC) design teams, corporate and non-profit “partnership” funding was generated to accomplish the Project within the state. Mrs. Carroll’s comments were paraphrased from the “Next Generation School Project” manual. Professor Luvern Cunningham would be pleased to see how his recommendations to get rid of school boards are being carried out across the country.] “S CHOOL TO W ORK G ETS P OOR G RADE IN S TUDY ” BY M ARK S HRUG AND R ICHARD W EST ern of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, professors who conducted a study for the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, appeared in the January 19, 1999 issue of The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Excerpts follow: More than $195 million, almost all federal money, was spent from 1991 to 1998 in Wisconsin on programs under the label School-to-Work, but it has had almost no demonstrable impact on the state’s schools or economy.... It has had no identifiable impact on the academic learning of K–12 students in Wisconsin and it has involved too few students in its core, work-based learning activities to register a significant aggregate impact on Wisconsin’s workforce. Many school districts, including MPS (Milwaukee), generally have dropped the term. And attention, some suggest, has shifted to different policies, particularly proficiency testing and a looming statewide test that all students will have to pass to graduate. The study says one of the few tangible accomplishments of School to Work was that 347 students had graduated from apprenticeship programs statewide. But, the study says, that was equal to 1/10,000th of the state workforce in 1996.... The study says there was no “reliable evidence” that School-to-Work had accomplished any of its major goals. Grants were used ($30 million) for teacher training, apprenticeships, job shadowing and connections between schools and individual businesses. James H. Miller, president of the policy research institute, said, “As with most bureau cratic educational reforms, School-to-Work sounds terrific, but in reality it is all style with absolutely no substance.” [Ed. Note: Let’s hope that the old adage “You can lead a horse to water, but can’t make him drink” will play itself out in regard to school-to-work.