Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

73 P RESIDENT L YNDON B. J OHNSON ISSUED AN E XECUTIVE O RDER IN 1965 INTRODUCING THE Planning, Programming and Budgeting System (PPBS) into use throughout all departments of the entire federal government. T HE E DUCATION C OMMISSION OF THE S TATES (ECS) WAS CREATED IN 1965 “ IN ORDER TO bring some degree of order out of this chaos,” wrote Harvard University President James B. Conant in 1964 in reference to education policy making in the United States. ECS was to be made up of dues-paying “members” comprising representatives of each participating state’s legislative Education Committees and their governors. The Competency-Based Education (CBE) move ment—which evolved into outcome-based education (OBE), both using mastery learning as a base—was orchestrated by ECS. Since ECS served as the resource and coordinator of information flowing to state legislative committees and governors’ offices across the land, it is no wonder that all states ended up having the same curriculum. A very important article, entitled “E.C.S. at 20: The Compact’s Potential Is Still To Be Realized” by Thomas Toch which covered the history of ECS, was printed in Education Week (October 24, 1984). Excerpts follow: “Some degree of order needs to be brought out of this chaos,” wrote James B. Conant, the President of Harvard University, in 1964 in reference to education policy making in the nation. “We cannot have a national educational policy,” he added in his book Shaping Educational Policy , “but we might be able to evolve a nationwide policy.” The solution, Mr. Conant concluded, was a “new venture in cooperative federalism,” a compact among the states to create an organization to focus national attention on the pressing education issues of the day. The following spring, the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford Foundation awarded a grant to Terry Sanford, who had recently left the governorship of North Carolina, to trans form the Conant idea into reality. John W. Gardner was Carnegie’s president at the time. A preliminary draft of the compact was completed by July and endorsed by representatives from all 50 states and the territories in September. Within five months, 10 states had ratified the agreement, giving it legal status. Out of the compact was born the Education Commission of the States (E.C.S.).... “We invented a little device to get the compact approved quickly,” Mr. Sanford, now the President of Duke University, said recently. “We didn’t need money from the legislatures, we had plenty of foundation funding, so we agreed that the governors could ratify it by execu tive order.”... But since the establishment under Governor James B. Hunt of the Commission’s Task Force on Education for Economic Growth two years ago, ECS’s role has begun to change. The task force’s report Action for Excellence joined A Nation at Risk and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching’s High School acted as principal voices in the chorus of reform. It gained Gov. Hunt and several other “education governors” who were linked to ECS wide national publicity, and, in making a series of specific reform recommendations, thrust ECS into the policy-making arena. The Sick Sixties : c. 1965

P SYCHOSYNTHESIS : A M ANUAL OF P RINCIPLES AND T ECHNIQUES (P SYCHOSYNTHESIS R E search Foundation: Crucible imprint of Aquarian Press, Thorsons Publishing Group: Northampton shire, England, 1965) by Dr. Roberto Assagioli, a practicing psychiatrist in Florence, Italy, was published.