Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

A–152 norm-referenced testing, grade levels, etc. Effective School Research calls for outcome-based education, which is mastery learning and can include direct instruction. Both are closely related to Total Quality Management and Planning, Programming, and Budgeting Systems. Of course, for those who don’t have any problem with this type of education/training, STOP: you need read no further. For those who may have questions, please bear with me. First, you will want to be sure I am correct in my claim that this is, in fact, Skinnerian dog training. The final piece of the puzzle, which should be the clincher and for which many of us are most grateful (God works in wondrous ways!) came in the publishing of What Works in Education , edited by Crandall, Jacobson, and Sloane (Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1997). 1 The Center’s activities and publications can be accessed on their website (http://www.behavior.org) . Following are some excerpts related to two of the nine programs discussed in this book: What Works in Education is the result of a collaborative effort between two organizations: The Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies and Division 33 of the American Psychological Association.... We would like to extend our gratitude to Doug Carnine, Professor of Education at the University of Oregon, and Bonnie Grossen, Editor of Effective School Practices , for consulting on this project. The Mabel B. Wesley Elementary School in Houston, Texas, has had a schoolwide Direct Instruction language arts curriculum since 1976, and has implemented other direct instruction programs and other programs based on related approaches in other subject matters.... Dr. Thaddeus S. Lott, Sr. is the Project Manager for the Northwest Charter District and Mrs. Wilma Rimes is the principal of Mabel B. Wesley Elementary School. In 1975... in searching for a means of improving reading skills, Dr. Lott, then the new principal, visited a campus that was implementing the DISTAR reading curriculum (see Direct Instruction for Teaching Reading and Remediation , Carnine and Silbert, 1979), developed by Engelmann (reported in Becker, Engelmann and Thomas, 1975A and 1975B). He was impressed by what he observed and began the implementation of DISTAR [now called Reading Mastery, ed.] in 1976. The chapter entitled “Exemplary Center for Reading Instruction—ECRI” by Ethna R. Reid of the Reid Foundation states: ABSTRACT: ECRI provides consulting and training for individual classrooms, grade levels, or entire schools in implementing a direct instruction model in language arts. The ECRI model is applied to and adapted for existing instructional materials. From these materials, structured lessons are developed to teach an integrated curriculum of phonics, oral and silent reading, comprehension, study skills, spelling, literature, and creative and expository writing. ECRI also includes rate building, mastery learning, and behavior management components. ECRI identified effective teaching strategies later corroborated in the Follow Through Program (Stebbins, L.B., St. Pierre, R.G., Proper, E.D., Anderson, R.B., & Cerva, R.T., 1977) and now known as Direct Instruction (Jenson, Sloane & Young, 1988, pp. 335–336, The chapter entitled “Mabel B. Wesley Elementary” states: