Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

A–129 the National Education Association seems to be assured. The AFT supports both Direct Instruction and Hirsch’s Core Curriculum . The NEA supports the new reading research recommended in the Reading Excellence Act . Bob Chase, President of the NEA, said in the January 1998 issue of Today’s Education , “Stop the sound and fury of the phonics vs. whole Appendix XXI How conservatives can so wholeheartedly support what and who the unconstitutional U.S. Department of Education has funded in the past (Engelmann and Carnine) and what the U.S. Department of Education, AFT, NEA, and, most recently, the left-of-center Learning Alliance and President Bill Clinton support is difficult to understand. The unconstitutional Reading Excellence Act , passed by Congress in 1998, will for the first time in the history of American education mandate a particular method of teaching. In order to get approval of the DI method, its use was attached to reading, which is the essential tool for learning. If the Direct Instruction method had been attached to legislation related to some other discipline, about which controversy was not raging, it is unlikely it would have passed the House of Representatives. The whole language controversy facilitated passage of this legislation—a perfect example of the dialectic method in action. The method, Direct Instruction, will be used to teach all disciplines, including workforce skills. Direct Instruction is not content; it is method, as was the 1968 federally-funded program Exemplary Center for Reading Instruction (ECRI) which trained teachers (1968–1998) in Mastery Learning (virtually the same method as Direct Instruction). Teachers who have been trained by ECRI trainers can apply their training to any discipline (math, science, history, etc.). Interestingly enough, Siegfried Engelmann, the developer of DISTAR (Direct Instruction), is referenced on numerous occasions in the ECRI teacher training as a developer of programs based on operant conditioning. ECRI and DISTAR are both based on operant conditioning. Skinner said “I could make a pigeon a high achiever by reinforcing it on a proper schedule” (operant conditioning), exactly what David Hornbeck, Bill Spady, Thomas Sticht and all the education change agents criticized by conservatives, are looking for, right? High achievers in the planned global workforce economy. All of this fits nicely into Total Quality Management and ISO 9000. That TQM is based on many of the principles of Mastery Learning has been admitted by key change agents. Whether E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge or some other sequential curriculum is used will be irrelevant. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge seems to be the choice at the present time, but who knows? Curriculum for the computer can be changed overnight. The method cannot. Regarding Hirsch’s so-called credentials and his support of “historical revisionism,” the Free Congress Foundation’s daily programming regarding Hirsch, February 1997 reads: A History of Us: All the People by Joy Hakim and published by the Oxford University Press has initiated a great deal of controversy concerning its historical revisionism. Discussing their review of this textbook on NET’s Morning View were Allan Ryskind, senior fellow at the National Journalism Center, and Peter LaBarbera, executive director of Accuracy in Academia who co-authored a critique of the textbook in the Sept. 12th issue of Human Events . According to Ryskind and LaBarbera, the textbook reports that the deficit was 2.3 trillion dollars when Ronald Reagan left office in 1988 [Ryskind puts the deficit at $155 billion, ed.]; claims Ho Chi Minh’s goal was to free Vietnam from outsiders; blames language war: we need both.” (Done.) Whole Language vs. Direct Instruction