Short History

Way back in the mid-1990’s, when my kids were in elementary school, the nation’s public schools began to change - again.  Around here, the first thing to go was a meaningful grading system, and by meaningful, I mean a report card that the parents could understand.  This made it nearly impossible for parents to realize how badly their children were starting to perform on tests, quizzes and other class work.  Homework was almost non-existent, so parents didn’t have that to go by either.  Along with this change was the switch to teaching methods that were known to fail horribly at producing student achievement.  Whole Language, which was blatantly anti-phonics, came to Florida after it was proven to fail to teach reading – California’s student reading scores had already begun plunging very shortly after its implementation.  The math curriculum, known variously as “Discovery Math” or “Fuzzy Math”, earned nation-wide scorn as did the federal-level folks who wrote the new math standards described as “a mile wide and an inch deep” by upset mathematicians.  Nothing was left untouched.  Grammar instruction had vanished long before.  History and Science teaching stopped; students instead were exhorted to learn to “explore” and “access information”.  Ever more ignorant students constantly had their self-esteem boosted by teachers gushing praise – for nothing.  Parents diving more deeply into what was going on were introduced to the concepts of Values Clarification, cognitive dissonance, change agents, and the Delphi Technique.  The Educators called this new paradigm “Outcome-Based Education”, Blueprint 2000” and “Holistic”, but I thought of it as “Spooky”. 

This was the worst spasm of dumbing down I’d ever seen or read about.  Naturally, children began to lose interest in their own education and to not care about the quality of their work.  I was complaining to my son about a terrible piece of work he showed me - a shoebox diorama book report with a short paragraph filled with misspellings and other errors sloppily pasted on the back that had received not one mark, correction or comment when he said to me, “But Mom, the teacher doesn’t care; why do you?”

 Pointing out that all these progressive methods had been tried before , and failed miserably, back in the 60’s-70”, had no effect on the E’s no matter how many people tried to tell them, how many expert articles were written (by fellow Educators!), how many pages of research were shown to them.  Nothing was going to change the course already set – by whom was a matter of great conjecture.  Meanwhile, my children were not receiving an education.  I had majored in English & Secondary Education – I hit the books.   And it turns out that dumbing down, both selectively and collectively, has a much longer and more sordid history than I ever dreamed.

For decades now, one of the more worrisome issues in the education world is the drop-out rate.  There are battles going on right now about how to define it and who to count.  The states give one percentage, and the feds give a different, less flattering percentage.  Everywhere, there is intense hand-wringing over what causes so many young people to lose interest in their futures to such an extent that they’d drop out of their schools. The Educators are willing to do just about anything to find out how to prevent it, so they say.

It is all a lie.

School personnel have known for several generations exactly how to produce drop-out behavior in children – in some cases, psychologically, as young as second grade.  It stands to reason that they have also known how to prevent it.

Parents whose kids were stuck in poor to mediocre schools were told in the 90’s that all the “improvements” the E’s were bringing about were “research-based”.  The parents understood this to mean that the new methods had been proven to be better at producing student achievement.  It turns out, however, that all the changes were an essential part of the actual research itself, but the curricular, grading and method changes were not experimental part. The research money that came pouring into the states was paying for all the various “Drop-out Prevention Programs” that would be tested on the students who fit the drop-out criteria.  The dumbing down of the 90’s, was simply the means of producing the criteria for the drop-out programs.   That’s right – the schools brought about drop-out behavior in order to study how to prevent drop-out behavior.

Education research money has been devastating the once vaunted United States public school system for generations.  Sometimes, primarily before anti-discrimination laws, the experiments have touched smaller, specific groups of students such as minorities or the poor. Other times, such as in the 1990’s – and the 60’s to70’s - the experiments will effect nearly everyone.  I believe this explains a great deal about the mess we find ourselves in today.  The extreme dumbing down that produced the criteria for filling various “Prevention” programs is what provided much of the impetus for the Charter School and Voucher movements as well as the further growth of the home school population. These are great movements, but they are way too limited to bring about the end of using the vast majority of trapped students as the Education Monopoly’s guinea pigs.  The voucher programs are primarily geared toward the very poor or the students who have already been labeled, often falsely. As it stands, there are next to no options for the mid to lower middle class and working class students, especially in these economic times.  We must have Universal Parental Choice so that everyone can have the same chance at providing their children with the education they deserve.  Our children shouldn’t have to be poor, or labeled, or win a lottery in order to Pursue the Happiness of thriving in a decent school.

This blog will cover many areas of the education issue, but I want to primarily focus on informing my readers about the extent, the depth, and the history of experiments performed on this country’s students without their parents’ knowledge, let alone permission.  The language quoting the results of school-based research can be pretty stilted.  I will usually give direct quotes and sources with my own commentary where I feel it necessary.  Here is one example of an experiment on reinforcement:

“In the first class of fifth-grader pupils the ‘extroverts’ were praised after each task, and the ‘introverts’ were blamed.  In the second class of pupils this procedure was reversed and the ‘extroverts’ were blamed while ‘introverts’ were praised.” (Kerlinger, Fred N. Foundations of Behavioral Research. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964.) (Citing: G. Thompson and C. Hunnicutt, “The Effects of Repeated Praise or Blame on the Work Achievement by ‘Introverts’ and ‘Extroverts,’” Journal of Educational Psychology, XXXV (1944), 257-266.)

Did the parents know, way back in the 1940’s that their children were being labeled as ‘introverts’ or ‘extroverts’ and that this was the basis of an experiment?  Were all the children in the class labeled one or the other?  Did the quality of the student’s task have no bearing on the teacher’s response – just the label?  Exactly how many billions of tax-payer money have been squandered on unnecessary experimentation under the mask of education?