Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

G–12 from academics to OBE and STW will require IEPs for all students. (See 1982–1983 Profiles in Excellence: Secondary School Recognition Program ) Individually Prescribed Instruction (IPI) or Individualized Education. Developed in the early 1960s at the University of Pittsburgh’s Learning Research and Development Center and at the federally funded laboratory Research for Better Schools in Philadelphia, PA, Individu ally Prescribed Instruction’s development coincided with the Great Society’s accountability movement in the sixties which had as its focus equal opportunity and would increasingly deal with outcomes at the individual student level. Performance-based education (IPI) calls for mastery learning/direct instruction, which has been gradually implemented over the past thirty years, initially as a result of the emergence of computer technology which permitted the student to work at his own pace with programmed learning. Computer assisted-instruction using OBE/mastery learning/direct instruction enables the planners to predictably achieve their “outcomes”; i.e., to bring about behavior change as well as training in skills necessary for the global workforce and to collect and store data in such detail as to include information on the individual student/adult, necessary for “recycling” and remediation purposes. (See Appendix II, III, VII and VIII) Life Skills, Life Role Competencies, Lifelong Learning. Preparation for all life roles. The total development of the child—body, mind, and spirit as a learner, worker, consumer, family member, and citizen. What the student will believe, think, and do to meet the exit outcomes. UNESCO coined the phrase “lifelong learning” and identified the life skills/life role competencies which are being implemented worldwide. Outcome-based education, mastery learning, and direct instruction lend themselves to “lifelong learning” since one can take as long as one wants or needs—forever, if need be—to master whatever the controllers want him to “master.” (See Appendix IV) Literacy, Functional. Basic literacy skills, such as reading a bus schedule, needed to “function.” Professor Oettinger of Harvard, who supports functional literacy, says “in the modern context of functionalism, comic books may not be all that bad.” (See 1975 Commissioner of Education T.H. Bell comments, 1979 “K-12 Competency-Based Education Comes to Pennsylvania,” 1981 Professor Oettinger speech, and 1983 “Functional Literacy and the Workplace”) Local Control. A euphemism to pacify critics of federal control, since all control in the 1990s rests with those who determine the national standards and assessment and provide the money to implement the restructuring. Local educators are free only to find ways to meet those national standards. If local schools do not meet the standards (perform), they will be penalized. Taxpayers should be aware of the fact that state intervention in local schools does not always mean that your school is not doing well academically. It may mean just the opposite: there is still resistance from good educators who refuse to participate in the “teach to the test dumbing down” which is part of performance-based teaching, OBE, mastery learning and direct instruction. Sometimes called “localized control” and often incorrectly associated with block grants which circumvent elected officials at the state level, thereby lessening true local control. The 1994 Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development Yearbook: The Governance of Curriculum stated: “...[I]ndeed, local control has been, and continues to be, the most durable myth, or operating principle, of educational governance in the United