Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

A–93 National Center to Improve the Tools of Educators letterhead which also says in fine print “To address the Quality of Technology, Media and Materials for Students with Diverse Learning Needs, funded by the U.S. Office of Special Education Programs.” Carnine’s letter to Moran stated that “the Center is working closely with the VA Dept. of Education and State Board on aligning their state assessment with their standards and in developing their accountability system…. NCITE is also preparing informal assessment benchmarks for first and second grade in math and language arts that schools can volunteer to use before the formal assessment begins in grade 3. Our center is willing to make these and other materials we develop for Virginia available to the Commission without charge.” DISTAR/Reading Mastery is being promoted as an alternative to Whole Language reading instruction. Even if one doesn’t object to Skinnerian behavior modification/operant conditioning/animal training being used on children, doesn’t it make sense to question whether one wants their perfectly normal children subjected to a program designed for disadvantaged children (10-15% of students). Many critics of Skinnerian training programs have gone even further and suggested that it was unethical to use disadvantaged children for experimentation, such as was done with the “Follow Through” program in the late sixties. I have before me a study entitled Educational Outcomes and Indicators for Students Completing School , from the National Center on Educational Outcomes, The College of Education, University of Minnesota, in collaboration with St. Cloud State University and National Association of State Directors of Special Education, 1993, which says: “The National Center on Educational Outcomes (NCEO) is working with federal and state agencies to facilitate and enhance the collection and use of data on educational outcomes for students with disabilities. In doing so, it has taken an inclusive approach: Identifying a conceptual model of outcomes that applies to ALL students, not just to students with disabilities.” Is this what the “deliberate dumbing down” of America is all about? All children are considered to have disabilities and are categorized as special education? All children will have an individualized education plan? All children will be taught using Skinnerian behavioral psychology, be it mastery learning/OBE or Direct Instruction/DISTAR/Reading Mastery? Although the Evaluation of Follow Through cited some academic and self-esteem gains at some sites due to the use of the Direct Instruction model, it would have been virtually impossible for these gains not to have been made considering the open classroom, touchy-feely models with which it was compared. Had the Direct Instruction model been in competition with a good traditional phonics program not based on animal psychology, it is most unlikely it would have been able to point to any gains at all. Also, the results of the Follow Through program should be questioned as valuable to our society as a whole since they were based, again, on the results in inner city schools. Why didn’t those involved reach for the stars and try to find out what it was, in our most academically oriented schools, with high test scores, in middle income communities, that lead to success, and use that model in the inner city schools? Isn’t it elitist to suggest that low income, minority children were not capable of attaining the same results as those of their more advantaged classmates in other parts of the country? And isn’t it interesting that the model for the “disadvantaged” children (Engelmann’s Direct Instruction/Reading Mastery) seems to have been selected for ALL our children as the model for the schools of the 21st Century, publicly funded charter schools, run by unelected directors, whose purpose will be to “train” our children (human Appendix XVII