Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

76 Thinking for Social Action” for the institute’s H. Rowan Gaither Lectures Series at the University of California at Berkeley (under the sponsorship of the Graduate School of Business Adminis tration and the Center for Research in Management Science, 1970), critically evaluated Project Follow Through and its results. Following are excerpts from Rivlin’s speech: The Follow Through program is another example of a current attempt to use federal funds to learn how to produce services effectively—in this case, services for young children. Follow Through is a quasi-experiment, with a statistical design far less sophisticated than that of the New Jersey income maintenance experiment. There was evidence that children could move ahead rapidly in a good preschool program, but that when they were dumped back into the same dismal slum school the gains were lost. The objective of Follow Through was to determine whether the gains achieved through Head Start could be maintained through special programs in the early years of elementary school.... The approaches were extremely varied. The Becker-Engelmann program [Direct Instruction], developed at the University of Illinois, emphasized intensive work with small groups of children on the cognitive skills that deprived children often lack—verbal expression, reading, math skills. The methods involve rapid-fire questioning of students by instructors with rewards in the form of praise and stars for the right answers. It is a highly-disciplined approach and has been described as an intel lectual “pressure cooker.”... Since Follow Through was not a scientifically designed experiment, there is reason to question whether valid conclusions can be drawn from it about the relative effectiveness of the various approaches.... In any case, there are not enough projects of any type to support definitive statements about what works best with different kinds of populations. [Ed. Note: Although the evaluation of Follow Through cited some academic and self-esteem gains at some Direct Instruction model sites, it would have been virtually impossible for these gains not to have been made considering the models with which they were compared—the non-academic focus of the “touchy-feely” open classroom. Had the Direct Instruction model been in competition with a traditional phonics program which was not based on animal behav ioral psychology (“scientific, research-based”), it is most unlikely it would have been able to point to any gains at all. Unsuspecting parents in the 1990s seeking more structured academic education for their children than can be found in schools experimenting with constructivistic developmental programs (whole language, etc.) are turning to DI, not realizing they are embrac ing a method based on mastery learning and animal psychology.] P LANNING , P ROGRAMMING , B UDGETING S YSTEM (PPBS) WAS APPLIED TO EDUCATION IN 1967. During Ronald Reagan’s tenure as governor of California, PPBS was installed in the California school system. The California Assembly passed AB 61 (1967) which authorized a pilot study of PPBS; ACR 198 (1970) created the Joint Committee on Educational Goals and Evaluation; AAB 2800 (1971) and SB 1526 (1971) set up the essential PPBS subsystems to facilitate federal funding and centralized control of state schools’ goals, evaluation and management of all school programs and people; AB 293 (1971), the “Stull Bill,” provided for teacher evaluation; the California State Board of Education approved Program Budgeting in a new California School Accounting Manual (Phase I of PPBS); and Reagan signed AB 1207 (1973), giving the accounting manual legal mandate in districts throughout the state. PPBS implementation in education (and in other governmental functions) was given considerable impetus by Governor Reagan who “strongly expressed” the intent of his administration to activate PPBS, a management tool of political