Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

A–153

Appendix XXV

350–362). ECRI adopted a general direct instructional approach and expanded it... in ways that allowed application to existing subject material in any content area.

Can you not see that this is the necessary Skinnerian method for application to workforce training? Skinner said, “I could make a pigeon a high achiever by reinforcing it on a proper schedule.” The above ECRI connection with DISTAR (Reading Mastery), the direct instruction program being pushed all over the country (Thaddeus Lott’s Houston site is the best known) should come as no surprise since the developer of DISTAR, Siegfried Engelmann, has his work in Skinnerian operant conditioning cited several times in Ethna Reid’s Teacher Training Manual . Of interest is the fact that the U.S. Department of Education in 1981, when Ann Herzer tried to have ECRI shut down, lied in writing when it said ECRI did not use operant conditioning. I have all the correspondence regarding this controversy. A class action suit should be filed against the U.S. Department of Education for its role in promoting this type of training/ conditioning under the guise of “education” and for lying about the method. In other words, ECRI and DISTAR are not just close cousins; they are, in fact, fraternal twins. The only difference between them is their name. They were both funded during the War on Poverty, Great Society 1960s, and since that time have been used on the most helpless members of our society, the underprivileged and minority children. Professors Benjamin Bloom and Lee Shulman’s 1968–1981 Chicago Mastery Learning Program was, according to a March 6, 1985 article in Education Week a tragedy of enormous proportions with almost one-half of the 39,500 public school students in the 1980 freshman class failing to graduate, and only one-third of those graduating able to read at or above the national 12th grade level. Of interest is the fact that claims of effectiveness similar to those made regarding the Houston DISTAR program were made by the elitist change agents during the 1970s and early 1980s. The Chicago Program crashed in 1981. What happened to the students who participated in Chicago’s Skinnerian experiment? What happened to Lee Shulman, who was involved in the Chicago Mastery Learning disaster? Lee Shulman went on to become the Director of the Carnegie Foundation’s Board for Professional Teaching Standards, which is the architect of the performance-based (Skinnerian) teacher training model. Shulman, who had been a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and a Fellow of the Center for the Advancement of Behavioral Sciences, later became President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The reader should refer to the fact that the book What Works in Education is a result of a collaborative effort between the American Psychological Association and the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies. What rewards for such a disaster! The lives of the children involved in the experiment are not so decorously documented. One simple question should be asked which should put this whole matter to rest: Why haven’t the underprivileged, the minorities, etc., had more academic success if these programs (which have been used in most of our inner cities under the guise of effective schooling practices) are in fact so “effective”? Why is it that some very good anti-OBE people out there don’t even realize that this method is OBE? It is based on Bloom’s and Spady’s