Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

A–18 can be shown to contribute to the total development of pupils.... The Committee recognizes that many of the desirable qualities that schools should help pupils acquire are difficult to define and even more difficult to measure. It feels, nevertheless, that any evaluation procedure that leaves these qualities out of account is deficient as a basis for determining whether the program of any school district is educationally adequate. Having in mind this view of education and its evaluation, the Committee requested the Educational Testing Service [Note: federally-funded, ed.] of Princeton, N.J. to assist in the development of a plan for the implementation of Act 299…. What follows gives the highlights of the three-volume report entitled A Plan for Evaluating the Quality of Educational Programs in Pennsylvania. PROPOSED GOALS OF EDUCATION The first step in judging the quality of educational programs is to decide on the purposes of education. What should children be and do and know as a consequence of having gone to school? What are the goals of the schools? These questions have been high on the agenda of the Committee on Quality Education. Its members wanted a set of goals that would reflect the problems society faces in the world today…. Available measures of the factors are uneven in their development. Some of the measures are considerably more valid, precise, and interpretable than others. Measures of conventional academic achievement, for instance, are at a more advanced stage of development than measures of attitude and values. This unevenness poses a difficult, but not an insoluble, problem in designing an evaluation program of the kind we are proposing, In a nutshell, the current situation is as follows: 1. All of the ten goals of education stated above are to be regarded of prime importance in education of high quality. Any educational program that neglects any of the goals is to be regarded as less than adequate . [The Ten Quality Goals are listed below under California’s Plan which lists Pennsylvania’s Ten Quality Goals as those to be used by California, ed.] 2. Measures of progress toward the ten goals are unequally developed. Some are more dependable and valid than others. For example, tests of reading comprehension are relatively well developed and reasonably well understood, while tests of such qualities as self-understanding and tolerance are less well developed and poorly understood. 3. Nevertheless, the evaluation of pupil performance in all areas is critically important as a means of keeping educational programs in balance. 4. Work should therefore begin on evaluating progress toward all ten goals to the extent that this is possible. 5. Where the available measures are clearly inadequate, intensive research and development should be undertaken immediately to bring them to the point where they can have full effect in the evaluation program. 6. Where the available measures are adequate, studies should be undertaken immediately to use these measures in the development of appropriate criteria for assessing school programs. ILLUSTRATIVE STUDIES During the past year, we conducted two studies involving five school systems for the following purposes: (1) to identify specifically the practical problems that would be encountered in studies to develop performance criteria for school programs, (2) to see what usable measures might be obtained for measuring the kinds of output called for by