Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

445 history, elements and types of COP, as well as strategic planning concepts necessary to COP implementation. This will also leave us with tasks to perform, should there exist a consen sus opinion to proceed with Phase II of the COP initiative. We recommend that members of your department holding the rank of Captain and above attend this meeting (in uniform) and that they be instructed prior to the meeting to disperse themselves evenly throughout the audience. [Ed. Note: Accolades to the police departments and public officials who understand that their law enforcement resources should be applied toward fulfilling their constitutional law enforcement duties rather than to help them engage in public/private partnership community development and social service programs which, due to the blurring of lines of responsibility, are unaccountable to the public and truly “communitarian” in their tone.] The Noxious Nineties : c. 1999 C OLUMBUS — A national organization, hired to look at Ohio’s education system, issued a report card yesterday and the results were not good. The critical assessment, presented to the state’s educational policy leaders, was sur prising because the nonprofit organization, Achieve Inc., was hired at the urging of former Gov. George Voinovich, who helped devise the funding system. The organization is made up of executives from some of the nation’s largest corpo rations—IBM, Boeing and Procter & Gamble—and governors from North Carolina, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin. [The National Governor’s Association set up this organization to “manage” reform, ed.]… Among the findings: • Ohio’s academic goals are not clearly defined. Accountability standards are ineffective because there are no rewards or punishments associated with failure or success. The emphasis is on holding kids, not adults, accountable. • If the state is serious about improving academics and holding schools accountable, it must provide districts with the resources and tools—that, is more money—to do the job. • The state should provide assistance in districts that are performing poorly, close schools if no improvements are made and re-open them with new leaders.... Fred Blosser, superintendent of Canton schools, agreed with Achieve’s assessment. “The state’s academic goals are not defined,” he said. While Canton has adopted its own goals—graduating every child with the ability to think and reason, to have concern for others and to have a desire to continue to learn—the state’s only concern is getting children to a minimum level of knowledge, he said. “All I am hearing is ‘proficiency, proficiency, proficiency—and attendance.’ There is more to educating a child than meeting minimum proficiency,” Blosser said. [Ed. Note: Note that the emphasis is placed on only attaining a “minimum” level of profi ciency. If anyone still has any doubts by now what the full implementation of education reform will mean for the children, teachers and schools of America, read the article again carefully. Reformer (change agent) David Hornbeck’s original recommendations for rewarding or penal “S TATE OF E DUCATION C RITICIZED —N ONPROFIT ORGANIZATION H IRED A T F ORMER Governor’s Urging Pinpoints Weaknesses Within Ohio’s Academic System” is published in the March 24, 1999 issue of the Akron, Ohio Beacon Journal . Excerpts from this article follow: