Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

Glossary G–9 diverse group to arrive at a predetermined consensus position through circulating infor mation for comment in several rounds, synthesizing the responses until all agree. If a participant’s view cannot be synthesized with the group’s view after repeated rounds, then the premise must be declared invalid and abandoned. More recently, the foregoing original definition has evolved into allowing the participant’s opposing view to be aban doned in order to achieve consensus. (See Common Ground , Consensus Building and Group Process ) Dialectic, Hegelian. Common ground, consensus, and compromise/thesis-antithesis-synthesis. (See Preface, Common Ground , Consensus Building and Group Process ) Direct Instruction (DI). Developed by Siegfried Engelmann in the 1960s and known as DISTAR (Direct Instruction System for Teaching and Remediation) or SRA’s “Reading Mastery,” it was one of the models used in Project Follow Through. Direct Instruction is based on Skinnerian operant conditioning and has traditionally been used with special education students. DI requires teachers to teach from a script and to use hand signals and sounds to punctuate the “learning” process. The following excerpts taken from the research of those deeply involved in the development and promotion of Direct Instruction provide important information about this Skinnerian “scientific, research-based” method of instruction.

(1) “The Direct Instruction Model emphasizes group face-to-face instruction by teachers and aides using carefully sequenced lessons in reading, arithmetic, and language. These programs were designed by Siegfried Engelmann using modern behavioral principles and advanced programming strategies (Becker, Engelmann, & Thomas, 1975), and are published by Science Research Associ ates under the trade name DISTAR.” (“Sponsor Findings from Project Follow Through,” Wesley C. Becker and Siegfried Engelmann, University of Oregon, Effective School Practices , Winter, 1996, page 33) (2) “Direct Instruction: A behavior-based model for comprehensive educational intervention with the disadvantaged.” Paper presented at the VIII Symposium on Behavior Modification, Caracas, Venezuela, February, 1978. Division of Teacher Education, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon. Reference Notes at the end of the article include: “A Constructive Look at Follow Through Results” by Carl Bereiter, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, and Midian Kurland, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, originally published in Interchange (Vol. 12, Winter, 1981), which was reprinted, with permission, in Effective School Practices (Winter, 1996). (3) “First, he (Engelmann) hypothesized that children would generalize their learn ing in new, untaught situations, if they could respond perfectly to a smaller set of carefully engineered tasks. He also favored a rapid instructional pace and choral group response, punctuated by individual student responses, believing that this would heighten student engagement and allow teachers to perform regular checks for student mastery,” from “Making Research Serve the Profes sion” by Bonnie Grossen, Research Associate with the University of Oregon’s National Center to Improve the Tools of Educators, a project funded by a grant from the U.S. Office of Special Education, and publisher of Effective School Practices , published in the Fall 1996 issue of American Educator , journal of the American Federation of Teachers.