Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

A–151

Appendix XXV

by the way, is NOT TRADITIONAL PHONICS INSTRUCTION. I immediately thought, “Wait a minute. What’s going on here? Is this the same Doug Carnine who was involved with Siegfried Engelmann’s Follow Through DISTAR program (now known as Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons or Reading Mastery), about whom I had written in my 1985 book Back To Basics Reform or… OBE Skinnerian International Curriculum? ” Of course it was, and from that time on I devoted much time trying to convince parents that “direct instruction,” regardless of whether it is spelled with lower or upper case “d” and “i,” is based on the operant conditioning experiments with animals carried out by the Russian Ivan Pavlov and the American professor B.F. Skinner. In January of 1997 I wrote many memoranda on this subject which were included on the Internet Education Loop website, identifying Carnine and Engelmann with Ethna Reid’s learning program which Ann Herzer (a traditional phonics reading teacher opposed to Skinnerian operant conditioning) so valiantly fought in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. When Herzer objected to the training, she was asked, “Don’t you know we are training our children to be people pleasers?” [See Appendix XVII of this book, ed.] I pointed out that my 1985 book Back To Basics Reform Or... discussed the ECRI/DISTAR method. Many of us have fought this method for twenty years and, sad to say, we have gotten nowhere. I suppose that is to be expected since we are not part of the national conservative leadership nor are we part of the education establishment leadership. No one listens to you unless you are well funded and have fancy letterhead. Follow the money, follow the money. We didn’t have the resources to make a difference. However, all is not lost if those of you who read this alert will take the necessary action to stop the funding of the Reading Excellence Act at the local level. Millions of tax dollars will be gushing forth in your communities to implement this Skinnerian reading program under the guise of “scientific, research-based” phonics reading instruction. Let me quote from an October 1997 letter Doug Carnine wrote to “concerned friends” asking them to support H.R. 2614, The Reading Excellence Act, which called for the use of “research-based” reading instruction programs; i.e., his and Engelmann’s program (ECRI/DISTAR). Obviously, use of these programs could be of financial benefit to those involved in the development of the program. Carnine’s letter encouraged the following: As you know, significant reforms are in process in the bellwether states of California and Texas as well as in many other states. State lawmakers, education leaders, and concerned citizens are joining forces to ensure that the wealth of scientific research on reading conducted during the past three decades is fully transformed into effective classroom reading instruction. Much of the “scientific research” to which he refers is the Skinnerian dog-training method used in DISTAR and ECRI. Whenever you see the word “effective” related to education, realize that it relates to the late Ron Edmonds’s Effective School Research (Harvard and Michigan State). It says “almost all children can learn” when taught to the test, provided the necessary environment for that individual child and enough time for the child to “master” whatever the content (or workforce skills) is made available. That’s Skinnerian/behavioral terminology, for those who are not initiated. The new term for “environment” is now “ positive school climate ,” which takes the place of the behaviorist term “psychologically manipulative environment.” Effective School Research calls for the elimination of the Carnegie unit,