Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

G–16 Partnership. Usually refers to a new concept of governance which calls for a merger of the public and private sectors, commonly known as corporate fascism or socialism. Partnerships between government and the private sector result in a breakdown of the representative form of government and a lessening of accountability to the taxpayer. (See 1981 “President’s Task Force on Private Sector Initiatives,” 1984 Washington Post article “Industrial Policy Urged for GOP” and Participatory Democracy ) Planning, Programming, Budgeting, Management System (PPBS) and Management by Objectives (MBO). A system used for planning and accounting which calls for: 1) estab lishing a goal; 2) setting forth plans to achieve it; 3) funding the effort; 4) evaluating success or failure at the end of the funding cycle; and 5) adjusting plans to achieve the goal, including funding, and starting over again with more precise focus. The following background information is taken from Goals 2000: Restructuring Our Schools... Restructuring Our Society by Kathie Finnegan (Hearthstone Publishing, Ltd.: Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, 1996), pp. 306–307:

...Originally developed in 1961 by Robert McNamara when he was Secretary of Defense in cooperation with the Rand Corporation. PPBS is the vehicle for achieving predetermined goals in government. In 1961, following suggestions of the Rand Corporation, President Kennedy launched PPBS in the Department of Defense (DOD) under Robert Strange McNa mara. Although PPBS was clumsy, costly, and ineffective (and no more successful in industry than it was in managing the Vietnam War), President Johnson initiated PPBS in 1965 throughout the entire legislative branch due to its administrative effectiveness. Later it was put into all branches of the federal government. A key point about running the government by PPBS is that it is government by appointed—not elected—officials. In 1972 the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (another name for PPBS) was established in Austria with twelve nations participating, including the United States and the Soviet Union. PPBS under many names has become the dominant organization/restructuring/re-engineering model for most of corporate America and many institutions and organizations. PPBS has been described as applied scientific socialism. It is used to control what people produce, what they consume, how they spend their work and leisure time, what they think, and how they react to various stimuli. The concept applied to education works this way: if you know what you have to start with (young, impressionable children) and you know what you want to end up with (citizen-workers for a centrally planned global economy), it is pos sible to design a system that will achieve that “outcome.” PPBS is a continuous loop, renewable/reviewed/re-funded every three, five, or seven years so that basic assumptions and goals can be re-calibrated.

(See 1967 PPBS in California, 1972 June 11th speech by Mary Thompson, Systems , and Appendix IX and XXII) Privatization. Transferring policy-making and implementation from the public tax-supported domain into the private or business sectors, where educational leaders and elected boards become accountable to wealthy funders (such as the Carnegie, Ford, Danforth, Pew, Rock efeller, Spencer, or Annenberg foundations, to name a few), multinational corporations, and non-profit organizations, rather than to concerned parents and taxpayers. (See 1981