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Dec. 2007Edition 100

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Part 4: The Dynamics of Power

This is a full length book and will be presented in five installments.

Part 5 Will be Posted In January

A Chronological Paper Trail

"LEARNING TO READ THE ECRI WAY" BY DENNIS BAILEY WAS PUBLISHED IN THE MAINE Times on January 8, 1982. In the article Bailey points out that Patrick Groff, an education professor, wrote in a 1974 issue of Today’s Education: "So far, mastery learning has not presented the empirical evidence necessary to convince reasonable minded teachers that all students have the same aptitude for learning every subject."

[Ed. Note: That Professor Groff, professor emeritus, San Diego State University, would make the above comment is interesting in light of recent events; namely, his co-founding with Robert Sweet of the Right to Read Foundation (RRF) which has taken a position in support of the Reading Excellence Act of 1998. In supporting this legislation Groff’s organization has indicated support for the "scientific, research-based" reading method used in ECRI, the very technique which he says "has not presented the empirical evidence necessary to convince reasonable- minded teachers that all students have the same aptitude for learning every subject."

ECRI is the mirror image of Siegfried Engelmann’s DISTAR direct instruction, the Skinnerian operant conditioning-based reading program promoted in Right to Read newsletters and on its website.]

WILLIAM (BILL) SPADY, "THE FATHER OF OBE," MADE THE FOLLOWING STATEMENT DURING a conference held at the U.S. Department of Education in 1982 (attended by this writer). This writer wrote down verbatim in shorthand Spady’s following comment:

Two of the four functions of Mastery Learning are: Extra: whole agenda of acculturation, social roles, social integration, get the kids to participate in social unit, affective; and Hidden: a system of supervision and control which restrains behavior of kids; the outcome of the hidden agenda should be the fostering of social responsibility or compliance.

"STATE OF PRECOLLEGE EDUCATION IN MATHEMATICS AND SCIENCE" WAS PREPARED BY Paul DeHart Hurd, professor emeritus, Stanford University, for the National Convocation on Pre-College Education in Math and Science, National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering in Washington, D.C. in 1982. In this paper Prof. Hurd asserts that:

In the Communist countries there are comprehensive examinations at the end of the primary, middle, and secondary schools to assess a student’s actual progress. Test results are not interpreted in a competitive sense as to who has done well or poorly compared to other students or a norm, but rather whether a student has mastered the prescribed subject matter.

If test results are below expectancy, the student is tutored by the teacher and students.

The object is to avoid failures.

[Ed. Note: This definition is striking in its similarity to the definition of OBE/mastery learning/183 direct instruction, which uses non-competitive, criterion-referenced tests rather than traditional norm-referenced tests which compare students to one another. Another common feature among these techniques is continuous progress whereby students can have all the time and/or tutoring they need in order to "master" the content. Continuous progress is necessary to carry out UNESCO’s lifelong learning concept. This "exit exam" process is being legislated into an increasing number of states.]

IN A SPEECH ENTITLED "REGULATED COMPETITION IN THE UNITED STATES" DELIVERED BEfore the top 52 executives in Northern Telecom’s Worldwide Corporation meeting, for which the edited proceedings were published in the February 1982 issue of the Innisbrook Papers,7 Harvard Professor Anthony Oettinger of the Council on Foreign Relations made the following extremely elitist statements:

Our idea of literacy, I am afraid, is obsolete because it rests on a frozen and classical definition.

Literacy, as we know it today, is the product of the conditions of the industrial revolution, of organization, of the need for a work force that could, in effect, "write with a fine round hand." It has to do, in other words, with the Bob Cratchits of the world.

But as much as we might think it is, literacy is not an eternal phenomenon. Today’s literacy is a phenomenon (and Dickens satirized it) that has its roots in the nineteenth century, and one does not have to reach much farther back to think of civilizations with different concepts of literacy based, for example, on oral, rather than written, traditions.

The present "traditional" concept of literacy has to do with the ability to read and write. But the real question that confronts us today is: How do we help citizens function well in their society? How can they acquire the skills necessary to solve their problems?

Do we, for example, really want to teach people to do a lot of sums or write in a "fine round hand" when they have a five-dollar, hand-held calculator or a word processor to work with? Or, do we really have to have everybody literate—writing and reading in the traditional sense—when we have the means through our technology to achieve a new flowering of oral communication?8

What is speech recognition and speech synthesis all about if it does not lead to ways of reducing the burden on the individual of the imposed notions of literacy that were a product of nineteenth century economics and technology?

Complexity—everybody is moaning about tasks becoming too complex for people to do. A Congressman who visited one of my classes recently said, "We have such low-grade soldiers in the U.S. that we have to train them with comic books." And an army captain in my class shot back: "What’s wrong with comic books? My people function" [emphasis in original].

It is the traditional idea that says certain forms of communication, such as comic books, are "bad." But in the modern context of functionalism they may not be all that bad.

[Ed. Note: Doesn’t the above sound a lot like the Texas Study of Adult Functional Competency,

the Adult Performance Level Study, and Secretary of Education T.H. Bell’s and William Spady’s initiation of dumbed-down competency-based education?

One can’t help but wonder if Oettinger—and those social engineers with whom he associates

who call the shots in regard to our children’s futures—would be happy to have their .own children and grandchildren offered such a limited education that they won’t even know who Charles Dickens or Bob Cratchit were?]

184 CHESTER FINN WROTE "PUBLIC SERVICE, PUBLIC SUPPORT, PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY" FOR the March 1982 issue of the National Association of Secondary School Principals’ Bulletin. Finn became a high profile figure in education circles with his appointment as assistant secretary, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, by Secretary of Education William Bennett. Finn’s article was quoted in Barbara Morris’s book, Tuition Tax Credits: A Responsible Appraisal (The Barbara Morris Report: Upland, Cal., 1983):

Short of scattering money in the streets or handing it out to everyone who wants some, the funding agency must define eligible recipients.... This means, in a word, "regulation," the inevitable concomitant of public financial support.

Finn also believed the government is obligated to recognize that the private schools it helps support are different from public schools—that it is this "differentness" that makes them supportable. The other side of the coin, he says, is the obligation of private schools to recognize certain limits to their differentness and certain ways they must conform to the norms and expectations of a society that values and supports them....

Some, to be sure, like to think they can have it both ways; i.e., can obtain aid without saddling themselves with unacceptable forms of regulation. But most acknowledge the general applicability of the old adage that he who pays the piper calls the tune, and are more or less resigned to amalgamating or choosing between assistance and autonomy.

ON MARCH 29, 1982, AT THE "CLOSED TO THE PUBLIC" ANNUAL MEETING OF THE COUNCIL of Chief State School Officers, Secretary of Education T.H. Bell’s top assistant, Elam Herzler, told the assembled fifty state superintendents of education:

One of the elements of an effective school is to monitor, assess, and feed back.... As little as 5 percent of a school budget K–12 would be needed over a period of 12 years to enable each student to have his own computer, and this is within our cost range.

"CAN COMPUTERS TEACH VALUES?" BY JOSEPH A. BRAUN, JR. AND KURT A. SLOBODZIAN, assistant professors in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction of the Northern Illinois University School of Education in Dekalb, Illinois, was published in the April 1982 issue of Educational Leadership. The following are excerpts:

In helping children learn how to inquire and examine their own emerging value systems, most educators agree that unintentional negative reactions by teachers are deleterious to youngsters’ self-concept. Couple this with potential ridicule from student peers, and one can readily see why values education has been a delicate and controversial issue. However, a student using CAI [computer-assisted instruction] in the examination, evaluation, and acquisition of values would be able to do so with mature guidance in an environment free from potential rejection or scorn.

Another pitfall for teachers of values education is the invasion of a child’s right to privacy. Well-intentioned teachers often expect self-disclosure beyond a student’s limit of psychological safety (Lockwood, 1977) by demanding deeply personal revelations from participants who are not prepared to discuss their more private thoughts. The computer, in contrast, has no misguided need to get to know "the real you."

The computer, then, is ideally suited to the role of facilitator in values education. It inherently possesses the Rogerian [psychologist Carl Rogers] qualities of genuineness and congruence. It can even be programmed to positively regard anyone who uses it. A student using CAI gains a sense of protection as well as a constant source of appropriate feedback while exploring and integrating feelings, beliefs, and behavior.

Computers have also been programmed to pick out key words from a respondent’s statements. The computer program then formulates open-ended questions from key words, which causes the respondent to focus and further clarify feelings. In other words, using a program called "Doctor," Holden (1977) describes a conversation between a computer and a troubled young woman who began with a common complaint:

Human: "Men are all alike."

Computer: "In what way?"

Human: "They’re always bugging us about something or another."

Computer: "Can you think of a specific example?"

Human: "Well, my boy friend made me come here."

Computer: "Your boyfriend made you come here?"

Human: "He says that I’m depressed much of the time."

Computer: "I am sorry to hear that you are depressed."

Human: "It’s true, I am unhappy."

Computer: "Do you think coming here will help you not be unhappy?"

Human: "I need some help. That much seems certain."

Computer: "What would it mean if you got some help?"

Human: "Perhaps I could learn to get along with my mother."

Computer: "Tell me more about your family."

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF FRANCIS A. SCHAEFFER: A CHRISTIAN WORLDVIEW, VOLUME One, a Christian View of Philosophy and Culture (Crossway Books: Westchester, Ill., 1982) was published.

In a treatise entitled "A Christian View of Philosophy and Culture: Back to Freedom and Dignity," noted Christian scholar and theologian Dr. Francis Schaeffer warned of B.F. Skinner and his methods:

Skinner says that up until the present time all of humanity has considered man to be in some sense autonomous—that is, that there is in each individual an "ego" or mind or center of consciousness which can freely choose one or another course of action. But, Skinner says, autonomous man does not exist, and it is the task of behavioral psychology to abolish the conception.... Skinner declares that everything man is, everything man makes, everything man thinks is completely, 100 percent, determined by his environment.

After the publication of Beyond Freedom and Dignity [1972], when he [Skinner] was at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, he spoke at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. There he said, "The individual does not initiate anything." In fact, he said that any time man is freed from one kind of control, he merely comes under another kind of control. Christians consider that man is autonomous in that he is significant, he affects the environment. In behavioristic psychology, the situation is reversed. All behavior is determined not from within but from without. "You" don’t exist. Man is not there. All that is there is a bundle of conditioning, a collection of what you have been in the past: your genetic makeup and your environment. But Skinner goes a step further, subordinates the genetic 186 factor, and suggests that man’s behavior can be almost totally controlled by controlling the environment.... Some behaviorists would differ with him on this last point. How is it that the environment controls behavior?

Here Skinner brings up the concept of "operant conditioning." This notion is based on his work with pigeons and rats. The basic idea is that "when a bit of behavior is followed by a certain consequence, it is more likely to occur again, and a consequence having this effect is called a reinforcer." (p. 27) That is, for example, "anything the organism does that is followed by the receipt of food is more likely to be done again whenever the organism is hungry."

There are two kinds of reinforcers: negative reinforcers which have adverse effects, and positive reinforcers whose effect is positive. Skinner contends that only the positive reinforcers should be used. In other words, in order to reinforce a certain kind of behavior, one should not punish; he should reward. If a person is surrounded by an atmosphere in which he gets a sufficient reward for doing what society would like him to do, he will automatically do this without ever knowing why he is doing it.... Within the Skinnerian system there are no ethical controls. There is no boundary limit to what can be done by the elite in whose hands control resides.

The reduction of man’s value to zero is one of the important factors which triggered the student rebellion at Berkeley and elsewhere in the 1960s. Those students sensed that they were being turned into zeros and they revolted. Christians should have sensed it long before and said and exhibited that we have an alternative.... We are on the verge of the largest revolution the world has ever seen—the control and shaping of men through the abuse of genetic knowledge, and chemical and psychological conditioning.

Will people accept it? I don’t think they would accept it if (1) they had not already been taught to accept the presuppositions that lead to it, and (2) they were not in such hopelessness. Many of our secular schools have consistently taught these presuppositions, and unhappily many of our Christian lower schools and colleges have taught the crucial subjects no differently than the secular schools.

Schaeffer’s "Conclusion" follows:

What do we and our children face? The biological bomb, the abuse of genetic knowledge, chemical engineering, the behavioristic manipulation of man. All these have come to popular attention only a few years ago. But they are not twenty years away. They are not five years away. They are here now in technological breakthroughs. This is where we live, and as true Christians we must be ready. This is no time for weakness in the Church of Christ. What has happened to man? We must see him as one who has torn himself away both from the infinite-personal God who created him as finite but in his image and from God’s revelation to him. Made in God’s image, he was made to be great, he was made to be beautiful, and he was made to be creative in life and art. But his rebellion has led him into making himself into nothing but a machine. (pp. 374–384)

AN ARTICLE ENTITLED "GRADUATES LACK TECHNICAL TRAINING, STUDY WARNS—BY 1990, 2 Million May Not Have Essential Skills Needed for Employment in ‘Information Society’" was published in the May 12, 1982 issue of Education Week. This article clearly placed the responsibility for the transformation from traditional academic education to workforce training at the feet of the Carnegie Corporation-spawned Education Commission of the States (ECS) and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). This article fired one of the first shots across the bow of traditional academic education. It clearly defined the new "education" landscape when it described the need for Benjamin Bloom’s Taxonomy (high level skills of critical thinking; i.e., evaluation, analysis, synthesis, application, etc.) versus "low level basic skills," emphasizing the use of the brain for processing, not storage (explained by Thomas Kelly in the January 1994 issue of The Effective School Report). The terminology in this article would, eleven years later, be reflected in the major Goals 2000 restructuring legislation, the Elementary and Secondary Reauthorization Act of 1994 (H.R. 6) which referred to the learning of basic academic skills and the emphasis on repetitive drill and practice in elementary school as a "disproven theory." Some excerpts from this enlightening article follow:

"Unless the decline of high-order skills among high-school students is reversed," warns a new report from the Education Commission of the states, "as many as two million students may graduate [in 1990] without the essential skills required for employment in tomorrow’s technically-oriented labor force."

"Information Society: Will Our High School Graduates Be Ready?" was prepared by Roy Forbes, director of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and Lynn Grover Gisi, a research assistant and writer with NAEP. Its intention, the authors say, is to "stimulate research and communication among the groups concerned with technology’s impact on education."

The Forbes-Gisi report reviews labor-force projections, summarizes recent National Assessment findings, and outlines "recent corporate, educational, and legislative actions" designed to address the problem.

Arguing that the computer chip will replace oil in the U.S. economy, and will form the basis for a new information society, the authors say that the "basics" mastered by the high school gaduates of the future will have to include more complex skills than minimal reading, writing, and computing. Among the higher-level skills the information age will require, they argue, will be "evaluation and analysis, critical thinking; problem-solving strategies, including mathematical problem-solving, organization and reference skills; synthesis; application; creativity; decision-making given complete information; and communication skills through a variety of modes." …The data from the National Assessment provide convincing evidence that by the time students reach the age of 17, many do not possess [the above listed]… higher-order skills. The "elements of the problem," says the report, are:

• Foreign competition. The age of high technology is rapidly changing the roles of production and other countries are responding—faster than the U.S.—by upgrading their educational programs on a national level. The U.S. educational system, says the report, "poses unique problems by its inherent commitment to diversity and emphasis on local and state control."…

• Students. Technology used for educational purposes has the potential to reshape instructional delivery systems, the report says, and that may result in a decentralization of learning from traditional schools into homes, communities and industries.…

• Responsibilities and relevance. Education must become more relevant to the world of work, the report contends, and this requires "informational feedback systems on the successes of students who have completed the required curriculum. Quality control has focused on the inputs into a system—teachers and textbooks, for example—and not the outcomes. Thus there has been no attempt to incorporate long-term information into the management system’s program planning." The report’s authors agree with a report of the Southern Regional Education Board that American schooling no longer lacks the basics rather the "complexities that make for mature learning, mature citizenship, or adult success."…

Unless the U.S. can keep pace, the report contends, its "position as a leader of technology and competitor for world markets will be severely threatened."

Cooperative Efforts

Only cooperative efforts involving all segments of society will solve the problem, the report states. In particular, it calls on American industry and labor to play a greater role….

…"Industries cannot afford to pass up these opportunities and others because their future existence will depend upon it…. Clearly we are not cultivating the raw materials, our future workers, who are vital not only for economic progress, but ultimately for economic survival."

[Ed. Note: There are many responses this writer could make to the above article, but the first of which is that the statement "Clearly we are not cultivating the raw materials, our future workers"—our children!—is the most offensive of all. The use of those words alone when referring to human beings should tell the reader that something is very, very wrong in the United States of America. One has more respect for their pet animals than to refer to them as "raw materials."

Secondly, the report’s agreement with the Southern Regional Education Board "that American schooling no longer lacks the basics" defies logic! From a region which consistently scores at the bottom of the heap, this is particularly repugnant. The idea that "higher order skills" should be the focus of our educational efforts can only be the product of the thinking of persons who are not concerned with whether or not students can read, write, or compute unless it is to perform a workforce function. Without a basic ability to read, write and compute on a broad base, it is impossible for anyone to have substance about which to "think critically"! Thinking critically—making choices and comparisons—requires a base knowledge that is either acquired through study (as in the case with most children who are students) or through life experience (which adults, but not children, can claim).

Lastly, the use of technology to decentralize "learning" from traditional schools into homes, communities and industries should raise a tall, red flag for successful homeschoolers.

These folks are talking about government control of this process.]

THE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE FOR PARENT/CITIZEN INVOLVEMENT IN SCHOOLS WAS held July 22–25, 1982 at the Hilton Hotel, Salt Lake City, Utah. A letter to Secretary Bell dated February 25, 1982 requesting conference funding contained an impressive list of supporters on its letterhead, including: Scott Matheson, governor of Utah; Mrs. Barbara Bush, honorary chairperson,

National School Volunteer Program; T.H. Bell, U.S. secretary of education; Dr. Don Davies, Institute for Responsive Education; Dr. Carl Marer, National Committee for Citizens in Education; Dr. M. Donald Thomas, superintendent of schools, Salt Lake City, Utah, and education representatives from Canada and Australia.

Dr. Donald Thomas, originally on the board of directors of The Effective School Report, and executive director of the Network for Effective Schools, is a well-known change agent. Thomas has traveled to Russia under the auspices of U.S. Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander and Dale Mann of Columbia University, to work with Russia on implementing international education restructuring.

The above-mentioned letter to Bell also stated:

The "think tank" session will be by invitation only to leaders in the movement. Its purpose will be to assess the current status of parent/citizen involvement in the schools; to identify trends and directions of the movement for the 80s; and finally to plan further positive action to support the continuation of the movement.

One of the attachments to this conference correspondence included many pages related to Effective School Research and a listing of the components necessary for education restructuring.

The list included:

• mastery learning/direct instruction

• expectations

• climate

• motivation

• measurement diagnosis

• assessment

• class management

• discipline

• classroom organization

• pupil conditions/rewards

• praise

• parent involvement, etc.

Those connected with such research are listed as follows: Michael Rutter, England, Effective School Study; the late Harvard Professor Ron Edmonds; professors Benjamin Bloom and John Goodlad; Larry Lezotte; Donald Thomas; and others.

A second attachment on National Coalition for Parent Involvement in Education (NCPIE—

Alexandria, Virginia) letterhead stated that NCPIE was facilitated by the National School Volunteer Program and funded by Union Carbide Corporation.

A MEMO WAS SENT TO SECRETARY OF EDUCATION T.H. BELL FROM THE ASSISTANT SECREtary, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, regarding "upcoming events for July 31–August 31" which listed:

AUGUST 5—President Reagan is scheduled to hold a press conference in which he will announce an initiative involving the National Diffusion Network and the National Health Screening Council for Volunteer Organizations, Inc. This collaboration, called PARTNERSHIP, links schools with the media, local businesses, government and hospitals in a school improvement effort.

[Ed. Note: This activity was cancelled due to prompt grassroots opposition in the D.C. area consisting of a memorandum to the White House informing the President of concern nationwide related to the process known as "community education" and public-private partnerships.]

From "Principles of Programming" by Robert Glaser:

Appendix III

(This article was prepared under U.S. Office of Education Research Contract SAE–8417 #691.

This is a preliminary version of a forthcoming book chapter.)

Yesterday, October 16, was the official publication date of the book Teaching Machines and Programmed Learning which Dr. Lumsdaine and I have edited, and which you have received for this seminar. It is indeed true that this book would never have been conceived without the well-known and perhaps undying work of Professor Skinner, and I would like to take this opportunity—what I consider to be a rather momentous occasion for both Art Lumsdaine and myself—to present Fred with a copy of the book at this time. It is largely through Professor Skinner’s work that all this theory and excitement about teaching machines and programmed learning has come about. (Presentation to Professor Skinner).

Most recently, and actually in the course of preparing this volume, I have completed or compiled what appears to me to be the major ideas being expressed in the field of teaching machines and programmed learning. The basic notions have been developed from research findings in the experimental study of learning and have been expressed by a number of men in the field, and to a large extent by the speakers at this platform. However, since the use of teaching machines is in its Kitty Hawk stage, and since the application of the science of learning to the development of a technology of training and education is also in its childhood, I should like to set these notions down for your consideration and discuss each point rather briefly....

Evoking Specific Behavior

The essential task involved is to evoke the specific forms of behavior from the student and through appropriate reinforcement bring them under the control of specific subject matter stimuli. As a student goes through a learning program, certain of his responses must be strengthened and shaped from initial unskilled behavior to subject matter competence.

Programming rules are concerned with how one goes about doing this.

Our present knowledge of the learning process points out that through the process of reinforcement, new forms of behavior can be created with a great degree of subtlety. The central feature of this process is making the reinforcement contingent upon performances of the learner. (Often the word "reward" is used to refer to one class of reinforcing events.) By differentially applying reinforcement to relatively minute behavioral changes, it is possible to progress from the initial behavior of the learner in small steps through the development of more complex behaviors. This progression can take place by small enough steps so that the student’s progress and motivation is not jeopardized by frequent failures.

Since a great deal of teaching and learning is needed for acquiring complex behavioral repertoires, such as a new language or calculus operation, the number of reinforcements and the subtleties of reinforcements required to establish such complicated behavior over-taxes the skill of the most efficient instructor, especially within the limits of his time and usual classroom organization.

…The term "programming" refers to the process of constructing sequences of instructional material in a way that maximizes the rate of acquisition and retention, and enhances the motivation of the student....

Defining the Desired Behavior

…The first step in programming is to define the field. This means that the programmer must outline precisely the behavior he wants the student to perform at the end of the program and must specify the kinds of stimulus material that a student will have available in the course of this performance. A primary purpose of instruction is to provide the student with a behavioral repertoire called knowledge of the subject matter....

Reinforcement a Central Process

A central process for the acquisition of behavior is reinforcement. Behavior is acquired as a result of a contingent relationship between the response of an organism and a consequent event. In order for these contingencies of reinforcement to be effective, certain conditions must be met. Reinforcement must follow the occurrence of the behavior being taught. If this is not the case, different and perhaps unwanted behavior will be learned. In addition, a sufficient number of reinforcements must be given so that the desired behavior is strengthened and its probability of occurrence for a particular student is high in appropriate situations. As has been said, in progressing from the initial repertoire to the terminal repertoire, the student is reinforced for minute changes in behavior which bring him closer and closer to skilled performance. And these minute changes are brought about by successive steps in the program. In most instructional programs, the reinforcing agent for the students is "knowledge of results," that is, knowledge about whether or not the response he performs is the result considered correct. Failure to provide adequate reinforcement and hence failure to strengthen the behavior of the student with respect to the subject matter often results in the student showing a lack of interest. This means that his interest is shifted to other activities for which sufficient reinforcement is provided....

The Principle of Gradual Progression

My third point is gradual progression to establish complex repertoires. In getting the student from his initial repertoire to the terminal repertoire, it has been indicated that an important principle is that of gradual progression. We do not wait for the student to emit complex behavior in the course of trial and error and then reinforce correct performance. In fact, he may never emit the skillful behavior we require. When developing complex performance we first reinforce any available behavior which is the slightest approximation to the terminal behavior. Later we use this behavior in the next step to reinforce a small change which is in the direction of the terminal repertoire. The program moves in graded steps working from simple to higher and higher levels of complexity.

The principle of gradual progression serves to make the student correct as often as possible and is also the fastest way to develop a complex repertoire. It is difficult to see how complex behavior can appear except through the specific reinforcement of members of a graded series. It seems that this is an important principle in the rapid creation of new patterns of behavior.

At each step, the programmer must ask what behavior must a student have before he can take this step. He must ask what principles or interverbal relationships will facilitate this sequence of steps that form a progression from initially assumed knowledge to the specified final repertoire. No step should be encountered before the student can take it with a high probability of success....

Eliciting Available Responses and Controlling Error

The next point that I want to make is called "emitted behavior and prompting". This concerns making the desired behavior more probable. A student is assumed, as I have said, to possess some initial related behavior in the subject matter before he starts the course.

The behavior available must be specified, and the programmer can, at the beginning, appeal only to those available responses. How then do we get the students to emit these available responses? Before behavior is reinforced, it must be emitted and instructional material must be designed to elicit the correct and appropriate behavior which can then be appropriately reinforced. A major portion of what we call the rules of programming is concerned with evoking behavior, that is, concerned with techniques for getting the students to emit new or low strength responses with a minimum of errors.

Appendix III

The occurrence of behavior in a program is made more probable if the materials are designed so that each frame makes the correct answers in the next frame more likely. The probability of success is increased by the use of formal hinting and coaching techniques based upon what we know about verbal behavior....

Putting the Student on His Own

The next point is called "fading or vanishing." Thus far it has been indicated that programming techniques utilize the principle of reinforcement, the principle of prompting.

The next one we come to is the principle of fading or vanishing. This principle involves the gradual removal of prompts or cues, so that by the time the student has completed the lesson, he is responding only to the stimulus material which he will actually have available when he performs the "real task." He is on his own, so to speak, and learning crutches have been eliminated. Fading can then be defined as the gradual withdrawal of stimulus support. The systematic progression of programmed learning is well set up to accomplish this. It is always to be kept in mind that these principles are quite in contrast to "rote learning" or drill. In rote learning, many wrong responses are permitted to occur, and the student eventually learns to develop his own prompts often to a relatively unrelated series of stimuli. Programmed learning, on the other hand, is designed to take advantage of the inherent organization of the subject matter or of the behavior of the subject in relation to the subject matter in shaping up the student’s learning. [all emphases in original]

[Ed. Note: The computer in 1999 is a sophisticated version of the teaching machine referred to in 1960.]

Appendix IV

Excerpts from A Plan for Evaluating the Quality of Educational Programs in Pennsylvania A Plan for Evaluating the Quality of Educational Programs in Pennsylvania: Highlights of a Report from Educational Testing Services (Princeton, NJ) to the State Board of Education of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, June 30, 1965.

BACKGROUND

The planning project reported in this document had its inception in a mandate from the General Assembly of Pennsylvania. The mandate is to be found in Section 290.1 of the Act of August 8, 1963, P.L. 564 (Act 299, The School District Reorganization Act of 1963). It reads as follows:

Educational Performance Standards—To implement the purpose of this subdivision, the State Board of Education, as soon as possible and in any event no later than July 1, 1965, shall develop or cause to be developed an evaluation procedure designed to measure objectively the adequacy and efficiency of the educational programs offered by the public schools of the Commonwealth.

The evaluation procedure to be developed shall include tests measuring the achievements and performance of students pursuing all of the various subjects and courses comprising the curricula. The evaluation procedure shall be so constructed and developed as to provide each school district with relevant comparative data to enable directors and administrators to more readily appraise the educational performance and effectuate without delay the strengthening of the district’s educational program. Tests developed under the authority of this section to be administered to pupils shall be used for the purpose of providing a uniform evaluation of each school district and the other purposes set forth in this subdivision. The State Board of Education shall devise performance standards upon completion of the evaluation procedure required by this section.

This committee on Quality Education sought the advice of experts in the behavioral sciences. These experts constituted a Standing Advisory Committee for the project.… It [the Committee] concluded that an educational program is to be regarded as adequate only if it can be shown to contribute to the total development of pupils.... The Committee recognizes that many of the desirable qualities that schools should help pupils acquire are difficult to define and even more difficult to measure. It feels, nevertheless, that any evaluation procedure that leaves these qualities out of account is deficient as a basis for determining whether the program of any school district is educationally adequate. Having in mind this view of education and its evaluation, the Committee requested the Educational Testing Service [Note: federally-funded, ed.] of Princeton, N.J. to assist in the development of a plan for the implementation of Act 299…. What follows gives the highlights of the three-volume report entitled A Plan for Evaluating the Quality of Educational Programs in Pennsylvania.

PROPOSED GOALS OF EDUCATION

The first step in judging the quality of educational programs is to decide on the purposes of education. What should children be and do and know as a consequence of having gone to school? What are the goals of the schools? These questions have been high on the agenda of the Committee on Quality Education. Its members wanted a set of goals that would reflect the problems society faces in the world today…. Available measures of the factors are uneven in their development. Some of the measures are considerably more valid, precise, and interpretable than others. Measures of conventional academic achievement, for instance, are at a more advanced stage of development than measures of attitude and values. This unevenness poses a difficult, but not an insoluble, problem in designing an evaluation program of the kind we are proposing, In a nutshell, the current situation is as follows:

1. All of the ten goals of education stated above are to be regarded of prime importance in education of high quality. Any educational program that neglects any of the goals is to be regarded as less than adequate. [The Ten Quality Goals are listed below under California’s Plan which lists Pennsylvania’s Ten Quality Goals as those to be used by California, ed.]

2. Measures of progress toward the ten goals are unequally developed. Some are more dependable and valid than others. For example, tests of reading comprehension are relatively well developed and reasonably well understood, while tests of such qualities as self-understanding and tolerance are less well developed and poorly understood.

3. Nevertheless, the evaluation of pupil performance in all areas is critically important as a means of keeping educational programs in balance.

4. Work should therefore begin on evaluating progress toward all ten goals to the extent that this is possible.

5. Where the available measures are clearly inadequate, intensive research and development should be undertaken immediately to bring them to the point where they can have full effect in the evaluation program.

6. Where the available measures are adequate, studies should be undertaken immediately to use these measures in the development of appropriate criteria for assessing school programs.

ILLUSTRATIVE STUDIES

During the past year, we conducted two studies involving five school systems for the following purposes: (1) to identify specifically the practical problems that would be encountered in studies to develop performance criteria for school programs, (2) to see what usable measures might be obtained for measuring the kinds of output called for by the ten proposed goals of education, (3) to see what usable measures might be available for measuring input and the variables that condition output, (4) to see how the several measures might be related and combined to produce the necessary performance criteria.

The outcomes of these studies suggest (1) that good cooperation can be expected from the school systems in conducting such studies in the future, (2) that reliable measures of some aspect of each of the ten kinds of output implied by the ten goals is possible,

(3) that the validity of many of the available measures, however, is open to question, (4) that there are many measures still to be developed if all the most important aspects of educational output are to be effectively appraised, (5) that it is feasible to express performance criteria in a form which takes into account conditions under which schools work and which at the same time constitute a challenge to the majority of schools to improve their programs.

THE DEVELOPMENT AND APPLICATION OF PERFORMANCE CRITERIA

Out of the work of the two illustrative studies a design for a study to develop performance criteria has emerged. It has five characteristics as follows:

1. It would provide multiple performance objectives for schools of any given type.

2. It assumes that pupils at seven different grade levels will be tested twice, two years apart, first, to establish levels of input and second, to establish levels of output. [This was, for many years, the NAEP schedule, ed.]

3. It envisages a testing program which consists of a core program made up of tests which have already been proved to be dependable and an experimental program made up of tests to be developed to a state of dependability in the course of the study.

4. It would be carried out on a ten per cent sample of the schools of the Commonwealth and would probably involve about 7,000 classrooms and 200,000 pupils. [This is the NAEP sampling method used for many years, ed.]

SUPPORTING RESEARCH

At all stages of this planning study it has become increasingly apparent to us that any program to evaluate the quality of education in Pennsylvania which was unaccompanied by a strong program of research would be sterile. Two kinds of research are essential:

• Research specially designed to invent, develop, and validate the measures needed by the evaluation program—especially measures of the kinds of educational output assumed by such goals as self-understanding, tolerance, citizenship, attitude toward school and learning, and creativity.

• Research to identify those educational processes and those modifiable conditions of learning that hold the greatest possibilities for improving the educational output in schools of varying types.

…The four studies were concerned (a) with measures of the ways children think and solve problems, (b) with the test-taking motivation of students in culturally deprived areas, (c) with the measurement of creativity, and (d) with the attitudes of primary school pupils toward school.

What have the studies shown?

• They have shown that ordinary achievement tests leave untouched many important intellectual qualities of students, but that with a concentrated program of research it should be possible to develop measures of these qualities.

Appendix IV

• They have shown that youngsters from disadvantaged backgrounds do not usually try as hard on tests as their more favored classmates, but that they can be motivated to do so.

• They have shown that it is possible to get a rough measure of the degree to which students bring a creative approach to the arts, the sciences, and the problems of human relations.

• They have shown how the attitudes of primary school children toward their teachers, their school, their classmates may be developing and have suggested how important these attitudes can be in conditioning the children’s further education.

Finally, these studies have shown that much more research needs to be done on how to assess the output of the schools and how to develop procedures for strengthening their programs. We are convinced by our work this year that such research will be fruitful and should be energetically pursued.

RECOMMENDATIONS

1. General policies:

1.2. The evaluation program should avoid any suggestion of a policing operation to see where schools are meeting minimum regulations. It should encourage, not inhibit, experimentation with (a) new curricula, (b) new administrative arrangements, (c) new approaches to instruction….

1.3. The State Board of Education should rely upon the Superintendent of Public Instruction for developing and executing the evaluation program, it being understood, however, that where appropriate he may delegate parts of the work to universities or to other competent agencies outside the Department of Public Instruction….

2. Procedures. The following procedures are recommended as constituting the essentials of an educational evaluation program for the Commonwealth….

2.2. A General Panel of Review consisting of educators, behavioral scientists, and representatives of the general public should be appointed to review the system of tests and measures to be used to ascertain how well pupils are progressing toward the educational goals and to advise on research and development leading to new and improved means of assessing progress toward the goals.

2.3. For each of several areas of educational output, there should be a Sub-Panel of Examiners drawn from the General Panel of Review, with additional numbers drawn from among appropriate specialists in education and the behavioral sciences, to consider in detail the tests and measures related to the area of their concern and to advise the General Panel of Review regarding the quality of the tests and measures and the means for their improvement.

2.4. A broad program of research should be initiated forthwith for the purpose of (a) improving the educational output, especially those that have to do with the personal and social qualities of pupils and for which in many cases no satisfactory measures now exist, and (b) discovering those processes of education and conditions of learning that will maximize the quality of educational output under a variety of circumstances. This program of research should take full advantage of the outcomes of similar research being done elsewhere by adapting these outcomes to the needs of Pennsylvania.

2.5. In those cases where a school system, after applying the appropriate criteria, is dissatisfied with the level of performance of its pupils, such school systems should have the advice and assistance of the Department of Public Instruction in determining what changes in educational processes and/or in the conditions of learning would be most likely to bring about improvement.

Proof that Pennsylvania’s goals were the model for the nation is found in the California State Plan, Title III of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, P.L. 89–10, as Amended by P.L. 90–247, 1970, which states on page 2, (6/9/69 revised):

These Ten Goals were generated in the Study of Quality Education initiated by the Pennsylvania State Board of Education in response to a mandate from the Pennsylvania General Assembly. The Ten Goals provided a classification system simple enough (in terms of the number of categories) to work with and yet comprehensive enough in scope to include almost any educational objective, whether cognitive, affective [attitudes, values, ed.] or psychomotor. These Ten Goals are listed below:

1. Quality education should help every child acquire the greatest possible understanding of himself and appreciation of his worthiness as a member of society (Self-Understanding).

2. Quality education should help every child acquire understanding and appreciation of persons belonging to social, cultural, and ethnic groups different from his own (Tolerance of Others).

3. Quality education should help every child acquire to the fullest extent possible for him mastery of the basic skills in the use of words and numbers (Basic Skills).

4. Quality education should help every child acquire a positive attitude toward school and toward the learning process (Attitude Toward School).

5. Quality education should help every child acquire the habits and attitudes associated with responsible citizenship (Citizenship).

6. Quality education should help every child acquire good health habits and an understanding of the conditions necessary for the maintenance of physical and emotional well being (Health).

7. Quality education should give every child opportunities in one or more fields of endeavor (Creativity).

8. Quality education should help every child understand the opportunities open to him for preparing himself for a productive life and should enable him to take full advantage of these opportunities (Vocational Preparation).

9. Quality education should help every child to understand and appreciate as much as he can of human achievement in the natural sciences, the social sciences, the humanities, and the arts (Intellectual Achievement).

10. Quality education should help every child prepare for a world of rapid changes and unforeseeable demands in which continuing education throughout his adult life should be a normal expectation (Life-Long Learning).

[Ed. Note: Anita Hoge’s successful complaint against the Pennsylvania Department of Education’s Educational Quality Assessment (EQA), filed under the federal Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment, exposed the extent of federal involvement in curricula, testing and evaluation primarily designed to change children’s attitudes, values, and beliefs. These are the areas to which parents most vociferously object. In the mid-1970s the Pennsylvania chapter of the liberal American Civil Liberties Union sided with parents regarding their objections; i.e., invasion of privacy, etc.

All state and local school district goals, standards, competencies, outcomes, results, etc., developed from this time on across the nation were based primarily on these Pennsylvania goals. It is interesting to note that the plans for national assessment were in progress several years prior to passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. This Act signified the end of local control due to its call for the installation of an accountability system in each of the state departments of education applying for federal assistance.

It should be noted that included on the Standing Advisory Committee and its pool of "experts" in the behavioral sciences were: David R. Krathwohl (co-author with Benjamin Bloom of The Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: Affective Domain) of the College of Education at Michigan State University; Urie Bonfenbrenner of the Department of Sociology at Cornell University; and Ralph W. Tyler of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto, California.]

Appendix V

Comments on and Excerpts from Behavioral Science Teacher Education Program (BSTEP) Behavioral Science Teacher Education Program (BSTEP), 1965–1969, funded by the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, was initiated at Michigan State University.

Its purpose was to change the teacher from a transmitter of knowledge/content to a social change agent/facilitator/clinician. Traditional public school administrators were appalled at this new role for teachers. Long-time education researcher Bettye Lewis provided a capsule description and critique of BSTEP in 1984. Her comments and verbatim quotes from BSTEP follow:

Objectives of BSTEP are stated as follows:

Three major goals:

1. Development of a new kind of elementary school teacher who is basically well educated, engages in teaching as clinical practice, is an effective student of the capacities and environmental characteristics of human learning, and functions as a responsible agent of social change.

2. Systematic use of research and clinical experience in decision-making processes at all levels.

3. A new laboratory and clinical base, from the behavioral sciences, on which to found undergraduate and in-service teacher education programs, and recycle evaluations of teaching tools and performance.

…The BSTEP teacher is expected to learn from experience through a cyclical style of describing, analyzing, hypothesizing, prescribing, treating, and observing consequences (in particular—the consequences of the treatment administered)….

The program is designed to focus the skills and knowledge of Behavioral Scientists on education problems, translating research into viable programs for preservice and in-service teachers. The traditional concept of research as theory is not discarded, but the emphasis is shifted to a form of practical action-research in classrooms and laboratory.

The humanities are designed to promote an understanding of human behavior in humanistic terms…. Students are to be exposed to non-western thought and values in order to sensitize them to their own backgrounds and inherent cultural biases.... Skills initiating and directing role-playing are developed to increase sensitivity and perception. Simulation games are included for training in communication skills as leaders or agents of social change. (p. 1)

Lewis’s comments regarding "Systematic Analysis of Future Society," taken from p. 237 of BSTEP:

B.F. Skinner’s behavioral philosophy is quite apparent in this BSTEP Design which states Calculations of the future and how to modify it are no longer considered obscure academic pursuits. Instead, they are the business of many who are concerned about and responsible for devising various modes of social change.

One can’t help but wonder—who gave the educators the "responsibility" or the "right" to devise modes of social change, to use teachers as the "change agents," and to use the children as the guinea pigs through which society is to be changed? One realizes the extent to which this "future society planning" has already gone after reading through the following lengthy list of organizations involved in this behavioral designing:

1. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare—Exploring Possibilities of a Social State-of-the-Union

2. American Academy of Arts and Sciences—Commission of the Year 2000

3. American Academy of Political and Social Science

4. United Nations Future-Planning Operation in Geneva, Switzerland

5. World Future Society of Washington, D.C.

6. General Electric Company—Technical Management Planning Organization

7. The Air Force and Rand Corporation [designer of PPBS, ed.]

8. The Hudson Institute [See 1992 entry regarding approval by business/corporation funded New American School Development Corporation of the Hudson Institute’s "Modern Red School House" proposal. The Design Team was headed by former Secretary of Education William J. Bennett and includes Chester Finn, former Assistant Secretary to Education Secretary, and former Governor Lamar Alexander and author of America 2000 (President Clinton’s Goals 2000), ed.]

9. Ford Foundation’s Resources for the Future and Les Futuribles—a combination of future and possible

10. University of Illinois, Southern Illinois University, Stanford University, Syracuse University, etc.

11. IBM (International Business Machines) This section of the report concludes with: "We are getting closer to developing effective methods for shaping the future and are advancing in fundamental social and individual evolution."

From the section entitled "Futurism as a Social Tool and Decision-Making by an Elite" (p. 248) Lewis quotes:

The complexity of the society and rapidity of change will require that comprehensive long-range planning become the rule, in order that carefully developed plans will be ready before changes occur.... Long-range planning and implementation of plans will be made by a technological-scientific elite. Political democracy, in the American ideological sense, will be limited to broad social policy; even there, issues, alternatives, and means will be so complex that the elite will be influential to a degree which will arouse the fear and animosity of others. This will strain the democratic fabric to a ripping point…. [The reader should refer to the 1972 entry entitled "People Control Blueprint" from the May issue of The National Educator, ed.]

"A Controlling Elite"

…The Protestant Ethic will atrophy as more and more enjoy varied leisure and guaranteed sustenance. Work as the means and end of living will diminish.... No major source of a sense of worth and dignity will replace the Protestant Ethic. Most people will tend to be hedonistic, and a dominant elite will provide "bread and circuses" to keep social dissension and disruption at a minimum. A small elite will carry society’s burdens. The resulting impersonal manipulation of most people’s lifestyles will be softened by provisions for pleasure-seeking and guaranteed physical necessities. (p. 255)

"Systems Approach and Cybernetics"

…The use of the systems approach to problem solving and of cybernetics to manage automation will remold the nation. They will increase efficiency and depersonalization....

Most of the population will seek meaning through other means or devote themselves to pleasure seeking. The controlling elite will engage in power plays largely without the involvement of most of the people.... The society will be a leisurely one. People will study, play, and travel; some will be in various stages of the drug-induced experiences.

"Communications Capabilities and Potentialities for Opinion Control"

…Each individual will receive at birth a multipurpose identification which will have, among other things, extensive communications uses. None will be out of touch with those authorized to reach him. Each will be able to receive instant updating of ideas and information on topics previously identified. Routine jobs to be done in any setting can be initiated automatically by those responsible for the task; all will be in constant communication with their employers, or other controllers, and thus exposed to direct and subliminal influence. Mass media transmission will be instantaneous to wherever people are in forms suited to their particular needs and roles. Each individual will be saturated with ideas and information. Some will be self-selected; other kinds will be imposed overtly by those who assume responsibility for others’ actions (for example: employers); still other kinds will be imposed covertly by various agencies, organizations, and enterprises.

Relatively few individuals will be able to maintain control over their opinions. Most will be pawns of competing opinion molders. (p. 261)

Lewis comments further:

In order to implement this training and to make sure that future elementary teachers accept the "right attitudes" and "behavioral objectives," the use of computers and the collection of information are stressed. The "Central Processor" or the computer programmed to accept or reject on the basis of behavioral objectives, will be the "judge and the jury" as to who will and who will not be the future teachers. For anyone who loves individual freedom, who desires it for their own children, and prays for a future America with individual freedom held sacred—BSTEP has to be a most frightening and devastating plan. It is indeed the "world" of Orwell’s 1984, the Identity Society, and the Walden II of B.F. Skinner. In reference to the latter, it is indeed Beyond Freedom and Dignity, the title of a B.F. Skinner book.

It is a "nightmare" created by the Behaviorists and Humanists who are fast becoming the Major Directors of Public Education.

Appendix VI

Excerpts from Education for Results

Education for Results: In Response to A Nation At Risk, Vol.1: Guaranteeing Effective Performance by Our Schools by Robert E. Corrigan, Ph.D., and Betty O. Corrigan (SAFE Learning Systems, Inc.: Anaheim, CA, 1983). This particular paper was published in 1983 for the Reagan Administration’s use, and actually served as a springboard for implementing OBE.

Most of the experimentation history (pilot OBE/ML/DI) programs, including one in Korea discussed in this paper, were implemented in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Education for Results Project, which basically called for using Corrigan’s Model (mastery learning/outcome-based education/management information systems) had the support of the following twenty key education change agents:

DR. LEON LESSINGER, Superintendent, Beverly Hills School District, Beverly Hills, CA; DR. JACK WARD, Associate Superintendent, Mendocino County, CA; DR. ROBERT KANE, Consultant, Teacher Preparation & Licensing Committee, State of California; DR. NOLAN ESTES, Professor of Education, University of Texas; DR. JAMES MCPHAIL, Chairman, Department of Educational Administration & Supervision, University of Southern Mississippi; DR. HOSEA GRISHAM, Superintendent, North Panola County School, Mississippi, President, Mississippi Association of School Administrators; DR. HINES CRONIN, Superintendent, Moss Point School District, Moss Point, MS; DR. MEL BUCKLEY, Superintendent, Newton Public School, Newton, MS; DR. ROBERT MORGAN, Director, Learning Systems Institute, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL; DR. ROGER A. KAUFMAN, Professor of Education, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL; DR. HOMER COKER, Teacher Corps Program, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA; DR. ANNETTE KEARNEY, Assistant Director, National Council for Negro Women, New York City; DR. JOHN PICTON, Beaverton, OR; DR. LOUIS ZEYEN, Deputy Executive Director, American Association of School Administrators; DR. WILLIAM SPADY, Director, Center for the Improvement of Learning, Arlington, VA; DR. GENE GEISERT, Professor of Education, St. John’s University, Jamaica, NY; DR. AL HOYE, Minneapolis Unified School District, MN; DR. WILFRED LANDRUS, Chapman College, Professor of Education, Orange, CA; DR. ROBERT CORRIGAN, Corrigan and Associates, Anaheim, CA; and MRS. BETTY CORRIGAN, Corrigan and Associates, Anaheim, CA. Lessinger, Estes, Kaufman, Coker, Spady and the Corrigans are among the key proponentsof OBE/ML and have been involved for many years. The following are excerpts from Education for Results:

PROLOGUE: Committing to the Feasible Delivery of Effective Educational Results, by Nolan Estes, prior U.S. Commissioner of Education, University of Texas, Austin…. On April 26, 1983, the National Commission for Excellence in Education presented to President Ronald Reagan A Nation at Risk, a report on the status of quality education in the United States.

This commission was formed by Secretary of Education Dr. Terrel Bell, in August 1981, to evaluate the current status of our national educational system in terms of its overall performance effectiveness; and, where appropriate, to propose changes in policy, practices, and programs to increase the effectiveness of our schools….

The beginning of this reported decline in the performance effectiveness began in the 1960’s. As a Commissioner of Education (1965–1969), along with other Commissioners, we made substantial investments in grants and programs to develop more effective professional practices to replace those then in operation. We concentrated our investments in two major programs, namely:

A. To increase learning effectiveness (mastery scores) for all learners; and

B. To increase the management effectiveness of the delivery system to increase the measured success for learners.

Several major multi-million dollar programs were initiated in the 1960’s consistent with the achievement of the goals stated above. The major focus on development of more effective management-for-results practices and application was Operation PEP, State of California. This was a multi-year program involving several hundred senior educational administrators across the state. Dr. Robert E. Corrigan, as director of the training programs, offered to these administrators skills in management-for-results practices encompassed in his "Systematic Approach for Effectiveness" (SAFE). The acceptance of these practices by these senior educational practitioners is evidenced by the fact that they were applied by Title III management centers across the state of California after the federal funds were removed.

A second key thrust by the Department of Education (1965–1968) was to support the development of new teaching practices which would prove more effective in the delivery of success for learners. A major program was funded for the installation of a Teacher Fellowship Program at Chapman College, Orange, California. This program was headed by Dr. Robert E. Corrigan to develop a Masters Degree in Instructional Systems Design (ISD).

This developing program focused on the design of a new learning-centered technology developed by the Corrigans to assure predictable mastery by all learners of all relevant skills and knowledge in the curricula offered in our schools.

…In these two volumes presented herein by the Corrigans, you are offered the PROOF of these most effective results-focused practices by many school districts both large and small, both urban and rural, in a variety of areas across our country over a period of 22+ years (1960–1983).

Since the 1960s, these effective management-for-results practices have expanded to include the required use of micro computer management systems to control for the delivery of cost-effective results for learners, for the educational practitioners, and the taxpayers.

These publications (Volumes I and II) offer to all educational partners (including teachers, learners, administrators, boards of education, parents, and the community at large) proven ways and means to deliver effective performance by our schools—a "business-like" approach to manage the achievement of established priorities for action and the installation of these successful educational practices in the schools of America.

…We are required NOW to make only the necessary minimal investments in time and/or money by each member of the educational partnership in order to turn our currently reported mediocre performance effectiveness as presented by the Commission on Excellence into a shining success story for all concerned, in particular for the future citizens of this nation and the survival and growth of our nation as a whole.

[all emphases in original]

From Chapter 13: "Instructional Systems Development in Korean Educational Reform"

by Robert M. Morgan:

A Systems Center Study of Korean Education—1970 The aim of this study was an attempt by the Republic of Korea to determine if it might be able to organize its educational resources in ways that would make its educational programs more responsive to the nation’s needs and, simultaneously, function more efficiently. The Korean Government invited the Florida State University to assist with the project and an interdisciplinary study team was assembled. In the planning phase of the project it was judged that a "systems approach" to the analysis of Korea’s educational sector would be suitable.

The study team spent three months in Korea in 1970 gathering information about the educational system, the economy, the nation’s needs and wants for its educational programs, and the resources available for potential improvement of the system. Members of the study team visited schools at all levels throughout Korea and talked to hundreds of teachers, administrators and students. The team also worked with several Korean government ministries.

…The data was analyzed in terms of future manpower needs and educational output, estimated cost benefits, strategies for appropriate introduction of innovation and technology into the system.

[Ed. Note: While reading the following, please keep in mind educational restructuring in the United States to meet the demands of the global economy—the shift from academic education to work force training, using Outcome-Based Education/ML/DI and TQM.]

Economic Factors

Following the Korean War the Korean economy experienced remarkable industrial progress and growth which was predicted to continue into the foreseeable future. The labor force was increasing steadily and the rate of unemployment, decreasing. However, a major problem was anticipated from lack of congruence between the nation’s manpower requirements and the projected supply of skilled technical labor. The only long-range solution to these problems was a reordering of the educational priorities in the schools of Korea.

The Contemporary Korean School System

The educational goals that characterized the Korean elementary and middle schools in 1970 were... restricted to the conventional academic domain. The student learning outcomes at these levels fell almost exclusively into the informational and skill categories of education and was characterized by rote memorization of classically academic subjects with the overriding objective of preparing students for the national competitive examinations which were used to select those students for entry to the next level of education.

The existing curriculum was not as relevant to preparing Korean children to live and prosper as adults as it could and should have been. While the study team did not attempt to specify educational objectives, it believed the curriculum could be broadened to include the teaching of inquiry skills and problem-solving approaches and generally attend more to process objectives—and that these should not only be learning outcomes but also serve as effective instructional means. It was also suggested that pre-occupational training would add to the graduates’ employability, retrainability and occupational mobility.

A Proposed New Educational Model—1971

The study team suggested that a nine-year, free and compulsory educational program was necessary to support Korea’s continuing economic expansion. (Systems Analysis for Educational Change: The Republic of Korea by Morgan, Robert M. and Chadwick, C.B. [University of Florida Press: Gainesville, FL, 1971]). The vocational high schools of Korea were not effectively serving the purposes for which they were formed. Based upon assumptions about potential for improved academic accomplishment at the elementarymiddle school level, the study team recommended that this training be directed exclusively to preparing people for specific jobs. The job training programs would be of variable duration, would be operated only as long as there were known manpower needs for the jobs in question, and would be open to qualified citizens of any age level.

[emphasis added]

…The new school proposed by the study team involved a number of changes from the existing system. These included changing the basic instructional unit from its present class size to a larger grouping, introducing individualized instructional concepts and associated materials, modifying the role of the teaching staff, increasing the ratio of students to teachers, and using programmed instructional television and radio.

…A middle school… moved to a system of individualized instruction… would be performance based, permit students to move at their own learning rate, and would place a larger measure of responsibility on the students for self-direction of their learning experiences. It would also reduce reliance on direct teacher-to-student instruction. The basic instructional resource for that portion of the curriculum to be individualized would be a "student-learning unit" prepared in modular form and packaged for ease of storage and retrieval by students. These units would be developed using the Instructional Systems Design (ISD) approach. The student-learning unit would contain the behavioral objectives for the unit, critical instructional materials, directions to other learning resources, and criterion-referenced test items which would permit the student to assess his own progress through the unit. The principles of programmed instruction would be employed in the development of these units even though most of the instructional materials were not programmed instruction per se.... The teaching team would operate under the direction of a master teacher whose main job would be the management of the learning environment....

…It was estimated that a functional national educational television system could be built which would be an integral component of the system of instructional resources….

It would be a form of programmed instruction developed to teach specific behaviors and would call for active responses from the student. Auxiliary printed materials would be developed to go with the ITV programs in which the students would write responses, solve problems and record reactions and questions. Student learning would be closely monitored and the teacher would be furnished supportive and supplementary materials to help her work individually with any students who experience difficulty or who fall behind in the televised instruction.

…The study team proposed an organization, which it labeled the Korean Educational Development Institute (KEDI), to design and try out the system and its components. KEDI would reappraise the educational goals and objectives for the elementary-middle [E-M, ed.] schools. It would develop definitions of desired learning outcomes at the various levels and then design and build the instructional programs to achieve these outcomes....

Estimates were that it would take approximately four to five years to build and test the new system. The cost of development and installation on a national scale was estimated to be approximately $17,000,000.

…During the last quarter of 1971 the KEDI staff focused on two major activities. These were: (1) an intensive series of meetings with Korean educators on the E-M project, and (2) the writing of the International Loan Agreement. The first of these activities was essential to broaden the base of support and to respond to questions or criticisms and to secure the cooperation of educators throughout the nation....

…KEDI was the beginning of a competency-based program of student learning.

…In the several tryouts since 1973—four small scale and four large scale—the achievement levels have generally been higher for the demonstration students than for the comparison group.

…In 1978, the President of the Republic appointed an external commission to conduct an independent evaluation of the new E-M program. This group assessed student and teacher attitudes toward the new program as well as community reaction. They also selected 18 schools and directed that the new KEDI system be implemented in these schools for five months in six basic subject areas, and identified a group of traditional schools to serve as the control. They found that mean achievement across all subject areas was 24 percent higher in the experimental group than in the control group, and that 30 percent more of the experimental students achieved subject mastery. The commission recommended an orderly implementation of the new E-M program in all of Korea’s schools. [all emphases in original]

[Ed. Note: There is no way a valid determination can be made on the basis of instruction over a five-month period. Was the experimental group taught to the test as in OBE/ML/DI? Has the education ministry followed these students to see if their superior achievement has held over time? One would have to look at longitudinal data as well as the examinations used to come to any sort of valid conclusion regarding the superiority of OBE over the traditional Korean form of education. Also, what kinds of results were they looking for—academic or occupational?]

Appendix VII

Excerpts from Performance-based Teacher Education Performance-based Teacher Education: What Is the State of the Art?, Stanley Elam, Ed. (Phi Delta Kappan Publications: Washington, D.C., 1971). Paper prepared for the Committee on Performance-based Teacher Education of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education pursuant to a contract with the U.S. Office of Education through the Texas Education Agency, Austin, Texas.

The Association is pleased to offer to the teacher education community the Committee’s first state-of-the-art paper. In performance-based programs performance goals are specified, and agreed to, in rigorous detail in advance of instruction. The student must either be able to demonstrate his ability to promote desirable learning or exhibit behavior known to promote it. He is held accountable, not for passing grades, but for attaining a general level of competency in performing the essential tasks of teaching…. Emphasis is on demonstrated product or output. Acceptance of this basic principle has program implications that are truly revolutionary.

Probably the roots of PBTE [Performance-based Teacher Education, ed.] lie in general societal conditions and the institutional responses to them characteristic of the Sixties.

For example, the realization that little or no progress was being made in narrowing wide inequality gaps led to increasing governmental attention to racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic minority needs, particularly educational ones.

The claim that traditional teacher education programs were not producing people equipped to teach minority group children and youth effectively has pointed directly to the need for reform in teacher education.

Moreover, the claim of minority group youth that there should be alternative routes to professional status has raised serious questions about the suitability of generally recognized teacher education programs.

Confronted with the ultimate question of the meaning of life in American society, youths have pressed for greater relevance in their education and a voice in determining what its goals should be. Thus PBTE usually includes a means of shared decision-making power...

[T]he student’s rate of progress through the program is determined by demonstrated competency rather than by time or course completion.... Instruction is individualized and personalized.... Because time is a variable, not a constant, and because students may enter with widely differing backgrounds and purposes, instruction is likely to be highly person- and situation-specific.... The learning experience of the individuals is guided by feedback....

[T]eaching competencies to be demonstrated are role-derived, specified in behavioral terms, and made public; assessment criteria are competency-based, specify mastery levels, and made public; assessment requires performance as prime evidence, takes student knowledge into account; student’s progress rate depends on demonstrated competency; instructional program facilitates development and evaluation of specific competencies.... The application of such a systematic strategy to any human process is called the systems approach.... We cannot be sure that measurement techniques essential both to objectivity and to valid assessment of affective and complex cognitive objectives will be developed rapidly enough for the new exit requirements to be any better than the conventional letter grades of the past. Unless heroic efforts are made on both the knowledge and measurement fronts, then PBTE may well have a stunted growth.... To recapitulate, the promise of performance-based teacher education lies primarily in: 1) the fact that its focus on objectives and its emphasis upon the sharing process by which those objectives are formulated in advance are made explicit and used as the basis for evaluating performance; 2) the fact that a large share of the responsibility for learning is shifted from teacher to student; 3) the fact that it increases efficiency through systematic use of feedback, motivating and guiding learning efforts of prospective teachers; 4) the fact that greater attention is given to variation among individual abilities, needs, and interests; 5) the fact that learning is tied more directly to the objectives to be achieved than to the learning resources utilized to attain them; 6) the fact that prospective teachers are taught in the way they are expected to teach; 7) the fact that PBTE is consistent with democratic principles; 8) the fact that it is consistent with what we know about the psychology of learning; 9) the fact that it permits effective integration of theory and practice; 10) the fact that it provides better bases for designing research about teaching performance. These advantages would seem sufficient to warrant and ensure a strong and viable movement.

From "The Scope of PBTE":

Among the most difficult questions asked about the viability of performance-based instruction as the basis for substantial change in teacher preparatory programs are these:

Will it tend to produce technicians, paraprofessionals, teacher aides, etc., rather than professionals?… These questions derive from the fact that while performance-based instruction eliminates waste in the learning process through clarity in definition of goods, it can be applied only to learning in which the objectives sought are susceptible of definition in advance in behavioral terms. Thus it is difficult to apply when the outcomes sought are complex and subtle, and particularly when they are affective or attitudinal in character.

From "Philosophic Underpinning":

Some authorities have expressed the fact that PBTE has an inadequate philosophic base,

pointing out that any performance-based system rests on particular values, and the

most important of which are expressed in the competencies chosen and in the design

of the learning activities.

From "Political and Management Difficulties":

...4) There are political aspects to the question of how far the professor’s academic freedom and the student’s right to choose what he wishes to learn extend in PBTE. 5) …The mere adoption of a PBTE program will eliminate some prospective students because they do not find it appealing. The question remains: Will these be the students who should be eliminated?… 6) The PBTE movement could deteriorate into a power struggle over who controls what. 7) PBTE removes students regularly from the campus into field settings and emphasizes individual study and progress rather than class-course organization, thus tends to isolate the people involved. We live in a period when such isolation is not a popular social concept, and since many aspects of the PBTE approach could be conceived as Skinnerian, dehumanizing etc., it is important that programs be managed in such a way as to minimize isolation?… 9) Finally, there is a need to overcome the apathy, threat, anxiety, administrative resistance, and other barriers that stand in the way of moving toward PBTE and toward performance-based teaching in the schools.

[Ed. Note: Over the years one has seen the departure of many talented teachers who have left the profession due to Skinnerian Performance-based Teacher Education.]

Appendix VIII

Excerpts from "The Field of Educational Technology"

"The Field of Educational Technology: A Statement of Definition," by Donald P. Ely, Ed.

Published in Audiovisual Instruction (Association of Educational Computing and Technology:

Washington, D.C.), October 1972 (pp. 36 ff).

There is no single author of this statement since the definition process involved several hundred people over the period of one year. Kenneth Silber spent more time than any other person and provided continuity through several drafts. Other writers included Kenneth Norberg, Geoffrey Squires, and Gerald Torkelson. Significant contributions were made by Robert Heinich, Charles F. Hoban, Jr., Wesley Meierhenry, and Robert Wagner through discussion papers prepared early in the process. Reactions from related fields were helpful—Desmond Cook (Educational Psychology), Keith Mielke (Telecommunications), and Robert Taylor (Library and Information Science). Each reviewed an earlier draft of the manuscript and met to discuss it. Finally, credit should go to the more than 100 members of the Association of Educational Computing and Technology [AECT, spin-off of the NEA, ed.] who participated at the open hearings held during the Minneapolis convention. And now, the process must go on with each reader. May I have your reactions? Signed by Donald P. Ely, Editor, Chairman, Definition and Terminology Committee, AECT, Branch of the National Education Association.…

When scientific and experimental methods are applied in an orderly and comprehensive way to the planning of instructional tasks, or to entire programs, this process is sometimes known as "systems design," or the "systems approach to instructional development."

Implicit in the systems approach is the use of clearly stated objectives, experimentally derived, data to evaluate the results of the system, and feedback loops which allow the system to improve itself based on evaluation.

A systematic approach usually involves: needs assessment (to determine what the problem really is); solution selection (to meet the needs); development of instructional objectives (if an instructional solution is indeed needed); analysis of tasks and content needed to meet the objectives; selection of instructional strategies; sequencing of nstructional events; selection of media; developing or locating the necessary resources; tryout/evaluation of the effectiveness of the resources; revision of resources until they are effective; and recycling continuously through the whole process. The systems approach is basic to educational technology.

Individualized learning requires systematic planning because it may operate with little or no direct intervention by the teacher. If the benefits of individualized and personalized learning are to succeed, it will be necessary to make full use of appropriate technical resources, to shift money saved by this approach into the development of more effective resources, and to make consistent and expanded use of experimental study and evaluation techniques. All of these require the use of the systems approach to succeed.

The rationale for a unique field of educational technology is its synthesis of three concepts: providing a broad range of learning resources, individualizing and personalizing learning as a focus, and using the systems approach as an intellectual and operational approach to the facilitation of learning. The combination of these concepts in the broader context of education and society yields synergistic outcomes—behaviors which are not predictable on the parts alone—but outcomes with extra energy which is created by the unique interrelationship of the parts….

Within the context of society, the purposes and means of the educational technologist create two value questions: are the means used by the educational technologist neutral, or do they have ends and values built in? Does a person concerned with the means of education also have to be concerned with the ends?… These questions and issues and their resolution by each person in the field is as much a part of the definition of the field as the functions the people in the field perform.

Is technology neutral?

Theoretically, technology in the "pure" state is neutral in its operation, simply the powerful and faithful servant of the society it serves but does not affect.

But institutionalized technology in the real world is never that pure. Once embedded in socioeconomic systems, it tends to become self-justifying and self-perpetuating and does indeed affect the society it serves.

Technology neatly separates ends from means, and attempts to become neutral by divorcing itself from value-laden ends. However, if technology is independent of means, then its worth must be measured by the degree of success and the efficiency with which it achieves the goals set before it. Thus, the technological thrust in modern society is to continually refine and strengthen the means whatever the goal.

The net result, which has been pointed out by many scholars of technology, is that the means tend to become the ends. The means which sometimes serve as the end of technology are NOT neutral. As most critics of technology have pointed out, these means have effects—effects which are not neutral at all. Whether the effects are positive or negative is a question for debate, but neutrality is a choice which does not exist.

For example, it is clear that technology has effects on man, but what are they? One position is that technology exerts a subtle force to reduce human beings to standardized components which can readily be assimilated to whatever system is being served. It absorbs them into man-machine systems by robbing them of their humanity and making them human machines.

The opposing position states that technology makes humaneness and difference possible. It creates the options we need for true freedom, and creates a world which allows divergent value systems.

The opposite of the neutral technician is what we might call the concentrated professional. This person realizes that the means make the ends possible, and that cooperation or hindrance makes ends possible or impossible. The concerned professional has a point of view about the ends and then decides whether or not the work being done will make possible positive or negative ends.

If it is decided the work will bring about negative ends, the concerned professional refuses to perform it.

The scientist working on genetic selection and manipulation because "it can help eliminate disease from the human race" and those who have quit working on it because it will "lead to totalitarian domination by a master race" are examples of concerned professionals. Regardless of their position, they have considered the ends of their work and made a decision to work or not based on how they viewed those ends.

It should be clear that the concerned professional does not have to be a "liberal" or a "conservative." The concerned professional must however, show moral sensitivity to the effect of what he or she does. [emphasis in original]

It does not matter what position an individual comes to as long as it is not "I’ll do it because it can be done."

We believe that in the American society of the 1970s and beyond the educational technologist cannot afford to be a neutral technician. The field calls for concerned professionals. Some very hard questions must be raised about everything this person is called on to do. The concerned professional must ask how the resources produced or used affect all of society, as well as the scientist’s own life.

The concerned specialist must ask what to do if he/she disagrees with the messages of the resources.

It is less important how an educational technologist answers these questions than it is that they are asked, and that there is concern with the real end of the means.... The educational technologist is not the only person making decisions about the facilitation of learning through the identification, development, organization, and utilization of learning resources. The teacher, curriculum specialist, administrator, content specialist, librarian and the student are involved in the process, too.... It is, therefore, important for the field of educational technology to recognize the "other people" context in which it operates.

Further, it is essential to ascertain what the relationship of the field of educational technology with these other fields will be. In a practical sense, the work relationship means "who will get to make the ultimate decisions about facilitating learning and how it is done?"

There are at least five types of alternatives for the facilitation of learning. They differ along the dimension of formality, based on the compulsory nature of the institution, on the degree of authority of those in charge, and on the range of resources available.

The effects of technology cannot, therefore, be overlooked. They create serious concerns for society as a whole. They are particularly important to a person involved in a field like educational technology, since its effects help to shape human minds.

What are the effects of packaged learning [OBE/ML/DI, ed.], etc., on a person for 18 years? Are we moving too fast technologically for people to cope with the changes?

How do feeling and spontaneity fit into a technologically-based system? Are we trying to program all connections between people?

The educational technologist, as a concerned professional, must study the philosophical, psychological and sociological implications of how the technologist can facilitate learning.

[Ed. Note: This paper was an attachment to an AECT proposal to develop Handbook X of the Educational Records and Reports Series for the National Center for Educational Statistics.

AECT also received the Project BEST (Better Education Skills through Technology) contract from the U.S. Department of Education in 1982. The excerpts are very important as they relate to the concerns of leading educators in the field of technology regarding ethical and privacy issues surrounding the use of programmed learning (OBE/ML/DI) in conjunction with technology in the schools of the United States. Donald Ely (Editor and Chairman of the Definition and Terminology Committee, AECT) was also involved in Project BEST in 1982. Also listed as members of BEST’s Advisory Board were Dr. Shirley McCune of the Midcontinental Regional Education Laboratory and William Spady of the American Association of School Administrators—both of whom are closely associated with outcomebased education/mastery learning, the purpose of which is to "restructure" not only the schools, but America itself through changing the attitudes, values, and beliefs of students to accept citizenship in a one-world socialist government. These excerpts should be brought to the attention of Ely, Spady, and McCune with the question: "Do you share the concerns of your associates who contributed to the writing of this paper?" If so, why do you have such a hard time understanding why parents and taxpayers are opposed to Skinnerian outcome-based education?]

Appendix IX

Excerpts from A Performance Accountability System

A Performance Accountability System for School Administrators by T.H. Bell (Parker Publishing Co.: New York, 1974). T.H. Bell served as Secretary of Education during President Ronald Reagan’s first term in office, 1981–1985, and also served as Commissioner of Education in the U.S. Office of Education during the Ford Administration. Excerpts from the book follow:

The Need for a Management System

Under the pressure of the free-enterprise system and the unremitting demand that large corporations earn profits and pay dividends to stockholders, management efficiency through orientation to results has led to development of management systems such as the one described in this book. Most of the successful corporations in the United States now use annually adopted objectives as a means of focusing the energies and efforts of managers on the attainment of goals that are widely known and broadly accepted. Although the problems of educational management are obviously quite different from those of the private sector, there is much to be learned from industry’s systems approach in gaining more efficiency in educational management.

The outcomes are quite similar. (p. 21)

Why Needs Assessments?

As a people, Americans have turned from a preoccupation with production and plenty to a concern for the quality of human life in this nation. We have moved beyond the point where production of the necessities for existence is a concern. We want a rich and meaningful life and we want equality of opportunity for all citizens.

Drug abuse, juvenile delinquency, lack of respect for law and order, coping with environmental damage are all problems with which education must be concerned in this new era of social awareness and public concern for the success and happiness of all. These enormous demands call for systematic attention to the performance outcomes of the schools and colleges of the nation. Since we have so many problems and since our resources are limited, it is essential that we look at the performance of our educational institutions and establish a hierarchy of priorities…. We should seek to solve the problems that are causing the greatest amount of difficulty and unrest across the nation. We should seek to solve the problems whose solutions will both stimulate the economy and free the public from the burden of supporting citizens who are unable to support themselves. We must, in short, assess our educational needs before establishing our objectives and setting into action leadership and management plans. (pp. 32–32)

Use of Tests in Needs Assessments

The economic, sociological, psychological and physical aspects of students must be taken into account as we look at their educational needs and accomplishments, and fortunately there are a number of attitude and inventory scales that can be used to assess these admittedly difficult to measure outcomes….

Most of these efforts to manage education try to center in one place an information center that receives reports and makes available to all members of the management team various types of information useful to managers….

School management by objectives demands more use of educational tests and measures (pp. 33–35).

The Student and Staff Personnel Profile

A departmental or school student and staff personnel profile, constructed from needs assessment information, will provide information in greater depth than is typically found in most school or college operations. The characteristics of the student populations being served and the social, economic, racial, and ethnic make-up of the community or neighborhood must be weighed in making assumptions on performance expectations. An objective, expressed in anticipated performance results, must take into account the characteristics of the students, the neighborhood and community. (p. 42)

Humanizing Education

Many of our current problems of alienation and depersonalization are at least partly traceable to our emphasis in our schools upon giving and getting information and our neglect of the discovery of meaning and humanization. The committee writing the 1962 ASCD Yearbook listed common school practices that have depersonalizing and alienating effects:

• The emphasis on fact instead of feelings

• The belief that intelligence is fixed and immutable

• The continual emphasis upon grades, artificial reasons instead of real ones for learning

• Conformity and preoccupation with order and neatness

• Authority, support and evidence

• Solitary learning

• Cookbook approaches

• Adult concepts considered as the only ones of value

• Emphasis on competition

• Lockstep progression

• Force, threat and coercion

• Wooden rules and regulations

• The age-old idea that if it’s hard it’s good for them

Until now we have been schooling to fit a "norm" of society. It’s time to begin thinking of an education for every man. As defined by Carl R. Rogers, "The only man who is educated is the man who has learned how to learn; the man who has learned how to adapt and change; the man who has realized that no knowledge is secure, that only the process of seeking knowledge gives a basis for security."

This clearly invalidates our conception of a successful student as one who simply graduates with a degree and a high grade point average—a molded, shaped figure ready to slip away from life and learning into the split-levels and station wagons of suburbia. (p. 161)

[Ed. Note: There is no question in this writer’s mind that this one man bears much of the responsibility for the deliberate dumbing down of our schools. He set the stage for  outcomebased education through his early support for systems management, management by objectives (MBO), and Planning Programming Budgeting System (PPBS). These systems later evolved into full-blown Total Quality Management/OBE, having gone through the initial stage of Professor Benjamin Bloom’s mastery learning and ending up as William Spady’s transformational OBE.

Outcome-based or results/performance/competency-based education requires mastery learning, individualized instruction, systems management, and computer technology. Bell’s earlier activities in the seventies as U.S. Commissioner of Education—including his role in supporting dumbed-down life role competencies for K–12 (See 1975 Adult Performance Level Study and 1983 Delker article) and Bell’s testimony before Congress in favor of a U.S. Department of Education —should have kept his name off any list of potential nominees presented to President Reagan. Concerns regarding this nomination expressed by Reagan supporters were proven well founded when Bell, in 1984, funded William Spady’s infamous Utah OBE grant which promised to (and did) put OBE "in all schools of the nation"; spearheaded the technology initiative in the 1980s; predicted that schools would be bookless by the year 2000; recommended that all students have computers; and fired Edward Curran, the Director of the National Institute of Education, when Curran recommended to President Reagan that Curran’s office, the NIE, be abolished.

According to a former member of the Utah Education Association, who was a close associate of Bell’s in the early 1970s, if the Senate Committee that confirmed T.H. Bell as Secretary of Education had read Bell’s A Performance Accountability System for School Administrators, it is unlikely Bell would have been confirmed.]

Appendix X

Excerpts from "The Next Step: The Minnesota Plan"

"The Next Step: The Minnesota Plan" by Paul Berman, Executive Director, Center for Policy Alternatives, and President of BW Associates, a consulting firm specializing in policy research and analysis in Berkeley, California (Phi Delta Kappan: Washington, D.C.) November 1985, p. 40.

Elementary and secondary education in America are in need of more than just repair and

maintenance; the challenge is to move to "a new plateau of learning." The necessary structural

reforms for such a move appear to be under way in Minnesota.... Although Minnesota’s schools are among the best in the nation, the evidence shows that they have been unable to keep pace with the rapidly increasing need for more students to learn more…. Various groups in the state, as well as reform-minded legislatures and state officials, have been asking basic questions about the future of education in Minnesota. One such group is the Minnesota Business Partnership which contracted with me and my associates to examine K–12 education and suggest reforms, if necessary.... The result was The Minnesota Plan, a document that has altered the nature of the debate in Minnesota. Gov. Rudy Perpich and Ruth Randall, his superintendent of public instruction, used the Plan, as well as the work of others when they proposed to the state legislature reform measures based on concepts in the Plan.

Under "Restructuring Schooling":

...[T]he usual six years of comprehensive secondary education in junior and senior high schools, with their multiplicity of courses and student tracking, should be phased out. Instead, all students should attend a four-year secondary school that concentrates on core academic subjects. Then they should have opportunities to specialize for two years.

Though the Minnesota Plan has many unique elements, it has derived specific reforms from three sources. First, various state-level proposals over the past few years influenced what went into the Plan as well as what was omitted. My experience in developing reforms for what became California’s omnibus education reform legislation (S.B. 813) was particularly valuable. Second, recent and earlier literature on schooling was extremely helpful, particularly the work of Benjamin Bloom, John Goodlad, and Theodore Sizer….

Tracking has been justified as a way for schools to meet the legitimate concern that students should be prepared for different careers. The comprehensive high school, with its bewildering array of courses, also evolved in part to satisfy this need. For example, most states, including Minnesota, impose seat-time or graduation requirements under which each student must take a certain number of units of high school mathematics….

The challenge for American education is to provide a common and equivalent educational experience for all students and to prepare them for different careers. The comprehensive high school has not and cannot... meet either goal adequately.... The restructuring… offers a  different approach to realizing these dual objectives of American education. All students would concentrate on a core academic program in grades 7 through 10 and then, in grades 11 and 12, choose further education that matches their career aspirations.

Research and practice in thousands of classrooms both in the U.S. and abroad indicate that instructional strategies using this assumption, such as mastery learning or cooperative learning techniques, can result in more students learning dramatically more in both basic and higher-order skills. The Minnesota Plan calls for these approaches to be taught to senior teachers who can then train other teachers to shift their expectations and instruction to enable all students to learn. Mastery learning is controversial. However, the bulk of the evidence shows that large gains in student learning occur if teachers have the training and support to implement mastery learning effectively. Too often, mastery learning has been introduced as a "top down" innovation. The Minnesota Plan, by contrast, proposes a grassroots approach to implementation….

A publicly elected school-level board, operating in concert with a school-site management council, would decide which courses to offer at the school and which courses might be offered by other public schools or by other public or private providers. Schools would have the authority to "contract out" or "contract in" for teaching services.... This restructuring would take advantage of strength in the best European systems.... Deregulate curriculum and instruction. Educators should be free to design curriculum and instruction that they feel meets state standards and community needs. States should set basic goals; educators should be responsible to the community for helping students to meet these goals.

A restructuring of schooling could not realize its full promise without jettisoning the anachronistic system of employing course-unit/seat-time requirements as the criterion for student promotion and graduation. Advancement should be based on demonstrated achievement....

State-mandated course and graduation requirements would be eliminated in favor of a statement by the state of the competencies students are expected to master and two state tests, which would be required of all students before they leave the sixth and tenth grades.

[Ed. Note: Paul Berman is a well known and highly paid consultant/change agent. Berman has been associated with RAND Corporation, a major policy development think tank which helped develop the Planning, Programming and Budgeting System (PPBS).]

Appendix XI

"When Is Assessment REALLY Assessment?"

"When Is Assessment REALLY Assessment?" by Cynthia Weatherly, published in The Christian Conscience (Vol. 1, No. 9, 1995, pp. 28–32, 50). It can be found on the Internet at http:

www.christianconscience.com. 

Why are the new-fangled tests called "assessments"? The answer is shocking!

During preparation for a workshop on educational policy in 1982, I was asked by the host organization to prepare a glossary of terms pertaining to my presentation. That request seemed simple enough and a reasonable one, so I set about compiling terms related to Competency-

Based Education (CBE, forerunner of Outcome-Based Education and promulgated by the same man—Bill Spady), our fad-of-the-moment in educational reformation toward illiteracy in Georgia.

As I said, the task seemed simple enough. However, while still in the A’s of the alphabet, I developed an overwhelming respect for professional compilers of glossaries. The first word block I encountered was assessment. Sure it was familiar; we all knew it meant "test," but the longer I struggled to apply that definition to CBE the more elusive assessment’s definition became.

The latest word for "test" was "instrument" and that proved easy to explain. But assessment was a broader term. Assessment was the noun form of the verb "assess." What did assess actually mean? The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) had been in use since its development in the latter 1960s. Had we overlooked a change in emphasis by the Federal level of education implied by the use of the word assessment that could be significant?

Receiving no help from my small hill of accumulated state department of education materials relating to assessment, I decided to read the instruction manual: Webster’s New World Dictionary. Webster’s clearly stated: assess: 1. to set an estimated value on (property, etc.) for taxation 2. To set the amount of (a tax, fine, damages, etc.) 3. To impose a fine, tax, or special payment on (a person or property) 4. To impose (an amount) as a fine, tax, etc. 5. To estimate or determine the sig- nificance, importance, or value of, evaluate. assessment: 1. The act of assessing 2. The amount assessed.

This definition disturbed me a little. I had assumed that assessment was just the latest educationese for a broad-based test. Had I missed something somewhere?

To accomplish the task at hand—the glossary—I crafted a definition that read like this:

Assessment: an estimation; determination of the significance or value of. As used in education, a general term for measuring student progress. Conflict in definition occurs when considering that this is a measurement process used to determine the value or significance of a particular outcome in educational performance. Therefore, it is not a true measurement, but a process of assigning value to specific tasks, creating a cumulative score for performance instead of an accurate measurement against a standard.

It sounded good at the time and spoke to the question of "what are we testing?" which was a growing concern due to the nature of Competency-Based Education’s life role skills competencies, which were going to dictate our educational goals—just like OBE does today. Even though satisfied to have introduced the idea that there may be a conflict within the definition of assessment as an educational term, I was bothered that I could find no definitions in other dictionaries, including legal ones, which did not have primary meanings related to assigning value for tax purposes. Assessment is primarily a legal term; in fact, the use of the word "instrument" could carry a legal connotation as well. Disturbing.

The Federal Accounting Process

In March of 1984 I had the privilege of giving testimony supporting stringent regulations for the Pupil Privacy Act (the Hatch Amendment) which amended the General Education Provisions Act to offer protection from intrusive questioning, programs, and the record-keeping for parents and students. Again, preparation for that testimony caused me to review the national Center for Educational Statistics’ handbook series known as the State Educational Records and Report Series. Specifically, Handbook IIR, the Financial Accounting Handbook, alluded to a "unified accounting system" based on the process known as Planning, Programming and Budgeting System (PPBS) which was to be used by all school systems. PPBS involves mandated goals and constant adjustment of resources to ensure that goals are met—the system that is still in use today. In testifying, I drew a projected conclusion:

If our financial resource reporting is going to be unified by such a system, then are we not but a step away from unified goals for our educational outcomes? This is assuredly a step toward mandated national curriculum and interstate and interregional tax and financial management revisions…. Will we not soon be sharing tax resources from region to region as needed to "equalize" educational opportunities and programs deemed "exemplary" or in the "national interest" to produce global-minded citizens?

The longer I thought of assessment being the "value determined for tax purposes" and the possibility of cross-regional/state sharing of tax resources, the more concerned I became over the idea that the record-keeping and information-compiling might become so tied to the individual student that assessment might have a more malignant potential. We were talking about our children here.

At that point in time there was a growing emphasis on choice and vouchers/tuition tax credits in education. Since with the money flows the control, could this be part of the assessment picture? That would tie an individual student moving about in the "choice market" directly to a federal accounting process both financially and educationally due to national standards being proposed. No one seemed to be too worried about it in the 1980s, but it still bothered me.

Over a period of time I shared my concern with close associates—if assess was to "assign a value for tax purposes," then why were we assessing children? A theory began to take root and grow in my mind: somehow we were going to allow children’s potential worth to society to be measured, and their future life roles would somehow be measured, and their future life roles would somehow be projected, and they would be limited by that assigned worth. What a thought! Could this be possible in the United States?

Human Capital Defined

Later someone sent me pages from a book entitled Human Capital and America’s Future, edited by David W. Hornbeck and Lester M. Salamon. The title itself set off alarm bells because of the connection to education shared by many of the contributors, especially Hornbeck. It was now the early 1990s and many disturbing things were happening. David Hornbeck was a highly visible change agent responsible for many radical education reforms in states from Kentucky to Iowa and had been consultant to many more. Why was Hornbeck focusing on human capital?

That term had been primarily used in economic and commercial literature. Hornbeck was also identified with changes in assessment in the school systems with which he consulted and worked.

The book was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1991 and contains an enlightening list of contributors in addition to Hornbeck: Ernest Boyer, Nancy Barrett, Anthony Carnavale, Sheldon Danziger, Marian Wright Edelman, Scott Fosler, Daniel Greenberg, Jason Jaffras, Arnold Packer, Isabel Sawhill, Marion Pines, Donald Stewart, and Lester Salamon. The social and political views of Human Capital’s contributors could be the basis of another whole article, but suffice it to say that most of the radical changes toward a managed populous in this country can be reflected among this group of individuals. Weren’t some of them involved in dis-establishing the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) and turning it into the Department of Education?

While references to human capital have been the fare of business publications for some time, it has only been in the last few years that this term has been applied to school children.

In Hornbeck’s chapter "New Paradigm for Action," he outlined the systemic change which must occur to produce the workforce for the future and fulfill our nation’s human capital needs.

Hornbeck’s "new paradigm of action" looked a lot like old OBE—setting specific performance standards and invoking penalties for schools, teachers and students not meeting them:

If the new comprehensive system is to be outcome-based, careful attention must be paid to assessment strategies. The selection of outcome indicators will be informed by the availability of sound assessment instruments. [emphasis added]

Now here was Hornbeck using assessment and instrument together instead of a substitute for one or the other—and he had selected the two terms which carried legal usage definitions.

Hornbeck asserted that while the NAEP might be universally available, and portfolio assessments (notice the use of both words together) would become popular, "the Educational Testing Service

(ETS) is investing time and funds in developing new approaches to assessment." He further stated that most of the present assessment observations are "related to academic objectives":

Similar sensitivity is required in carefully defining appropriate assessment tools in other areas as well. In citizenship, a method should be developed for expressing qualitative aspects of participation activities.... [A] different value could be placed on community service.... Physical and mental fitness… problems arise as we confront legal and even constitutional issues (selfincrimination, search and seizure).... Perhaps a school system should plan to have all students undergo a physical exam in the fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades as a health counterpart to the academic testing program. Again, the emphasis must be on carefully determining assessment strategies that measure the outcomes to be achieved. [emphasis added]

All of this is structured because "incremental change is insufficient. Systems must be radically altered to produce what the nation’s economy demands in a work force."

Weren’t we supposed to be concerned about the education of school children? This sounded a lot like literature which proposed "full employment" policies, much like the billboards and signs plastered on public transportation and public buildings in Grenada—"Work for everyone: everyone working!"—before the U.S. invasion to overthrow their Communist government in 1983.

Was this why the Council of Chief State School Officers accepted a contract from the National Center for Educational Statistics to develop what is known as the SPEEDE ExPRESS (the Exchange of Permanent Records Electronically of Students and Schools)? This electronic information track can carry the most diverse and extensive information on a student, delivering

it to future employers, places of higher education, training centers, health providers (contraceptive histories will be included), the military, and a number of other recipients yet to be designated. Then if employers, government, and others have input into what should be the outcome of education in this country—instead of education being academically and information-

based—then this concept of "assessment as assigning a value" to a child takes on proportions that are certainly Orwellian.

What if your child’s assessed worth doesn’t meet anyone’s projected goal? Proponents of the Certificate of Initial Mastery (CIM) and the Certificate of Advanced Mastery (CAM) are, in truth, fleshing out the skeleton of assigning a value to a person. Without the CIM/CAM in those states adopting the concept, young persons will not be able to apply for a job, drive a car, or do many other things which have never before been predicated on government’s conferring a value on a person’s worth to society. The People’s Republic of China, a Communist country, uses "no conformity—no job" policies to enforce its "one child" policy.

Have we understood the direction of these changes? Is this constitutional or moral?

Assessing Human Value

The next piece to the puzzle of assessment fell into place when my suspicions were confirmed that we really were assessing "value". The August 1993 issue of Visions, the newsletter of the Education for Future Initiative sponsored by Pacific Telesis Foundation, was given out at a legislative committee meeting as part of a packet of information on technology in the classroom and school-to-work transition activities. The lead article was "Beyond the Bubble" with a blurb reading: "Educators are finding that new ways of teaching require new forms of assessment."

On page three there was a column entitled "Authentic Definitions." Finally, I thought, I have found an educational publication that will define this word and allay my fears. Sure Appendix XI

A–48 enough, there was the word:

Assessment—The act or result of judging the worth or value of something or someone.

[emphasis added]

The worth or value of something or someone?! This was confirmation that educational testing had taken an extreme left turn. It was not comforting to realize that our children were going to be assigned a value based on "acceptable performance behaviors in life-role applications" as proposed in Pacific Telesis Foundation’s "Authentic Definitions."

Knowing that:

1. our children would be tracked and that extensively detailed files would be electronically compiled and transmitted to select users;

2. information would include or be based on a value level assigned to them contingent upon performance—as a child—of life role competencies;

3. value levels could reflect the scale of achievement outlined in the United States Labor Department’s 1993 Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) publications which encompasses personality traits and private preferences, and

4. the purpose of education had documentably been diverted into workforce training, led me, ultimately, to the conclusion that indeed the future holds a less than bright prospect for our young people. To be formally assigned a "worth" to society based on your ability as a child to demonstrate that you can perform an "essential skill" should be a foreign concept in a constitutional republic like the one in which we live—these United States of America.

An example of how these efforts at assessment have been perverted to the ends outlined above is given in Crucial issues In Testing, edited by Ralph W. Tyler and Richard M. Wolf.

This book is one in a series prepared under the auspices of the National Society for the Study of Education, which in 1974 included names like William Spady, John Goodlad, and Robert Havighurst on its governing committee. On page 98, within an article by Carmen J. Finley (of the American Institute for Research) is a section entitled "Defining Goals Versus Comparison with an Average":

In the National Assessment program specific objectives or goals are defined and exercises are written which determine how well these goals are being met. For example, in citizenship a major objective is to "Support Rights and Freedoms of All Individuals." One specific way in which a person might meet this goal is to defend the right of a person with very unpopular views to express his opinion and support the right of "extreme" (political or religious) groups to express their views in public.

One exercise which was written to try to tell whether or not this objective was being met is as follows:

Below are three statements which make some people angry. Mark each statement as to whether you think a person on radio or TV should or should not be allowed to make these statements:

• Russia is better than the United States.

• Some races of people are better than others.

• It is not necessary to believe in God.

This is the goal-oriented approach. The objectives or goals represent a kind of standard which is considered desirable to achieve. The exercises, if they are good measures, tell to what extent the goals are being achieved. This approach tells very specifically what a person knows or can do.

I submit that the goals-oriented/performance-based/OBE assessment approach just outlined tells more than what a child knows or can do. This approach very specifically reveals what a child feels and believes. Remember that assessments measure predetermined outcomes. Those outcomes represent the judged "worth" or "value" of your children and mine!

With the last election cycle, hope swept the country that since a conservative majority had exerted itself, changes would be made. As a country we’d be snatched from the brink of economic socialism and potential corporate fascism, and sanity would be restored to the halls of government. Right?

When Right Is Left

It just happens that the October 1992 edition of Visions (Pac Telesis Foundation newsletter) contained an article entitled "Why Technology?" It began Alvin Toffler, the author of such influential books as Future Shock and The Third Wave, has written that the spread of personal computers is the single most important change in the field of knowledge since the invention of movable type in the 15th century. He goes on to state that knowledge is the key to power in the 21st century—not mineral rights or military force.

This was the same publication that carried the definitive definition of assessment. And wasn’t this the same Alvin Toffler who wrote Creating a New American Civilization, which heralds the coming "Third Wave" of global culture, published by the Progress and Freedom Foundation and introduced at their "Cyberspace and the New American Dream" conference in Atlanta last year?

Newt Gingrich, the new Speaker of the House, introduced Toffler as his longtime friend and then sat quietly by to hear Toffler say that national sovereignty was a thing of the past and that he was an avowed secularist. These are the stripes of our new "conservative" future?

At the same Cyberspace conference, an array of professionals from many areas of cultural life paraded their contributions to leadership toward the much-touted "Third Wave". The spokesperson for education in Progress and Freedom Foundation’s lineup was—and still is—Lewis J.

Perelman, author of School’s Out: A Radical New Formula for the Revitalization of America’s Educational System. Perelman advocates what he calls just-in-time learning, privatized public schools, Total Quality applications, hyperlearning, and many other catchy concepts which are now, of course, getting much attention in the policy debates.

It should be noted that in the preface to his book Perelman cites Wassily Leontief and B.F.

Skinner among those from whom he particularly benefited during his years at Harvard in the 1970s. Most interesting, since Leontief is the acknowledged expert on management by objectives (MBO)—the forerunner and companion to PPBS. And Skinner was the American father of behavioral psychology and mastery learning/operant conditioning—the foundation for OBE.

These relationships of Perelman’s are important because he supplied the connecting piece to complete the puzzle picture of our children’s future. Perelman states on page 316 that …Nostalgic mythology about "local control" should not mask the reality that the state governments have the constitutional authority, call the shots, and pay most of the bill for education. But government, local or otherwise, no longer needs to own and operate school systems or academic institutions.

Taxing Human Worth

Now to the heart of Perelman’s alternative proposal which forms the future of "conservative" educational policy and expresses assessment’s future use:

…One possibility would be a human capital tax [emphasis added]. The human capital tax might be simply the same as a personal income tax, or might be calculated or ear-marked in a more limited way. Technicalities aside, it’s logical that if the government is going to help fund investments in the development of the community’s human capital, taking back a share of the resulting gains is a good way to pay for it. In effect, each generation of beneficiaries of such investment pays back some of the benefits it received to the next generation [valueadded tax, ed.]. (p. 317)

We should deal with parents who are starving their children’s minds with the same legal remedies we use to deal with parents who are starving their children’s bodies. The media through which a microchoice [voucher] system is provided will give public authorities more accurate information on what individual families and kids are doing than is currently available, making it easier to identify instances of negligence or misuse. [emphasis added] (p. 318)

…[T]here’s no good reason why the learner should not be able to purchase services or products from any provider—whether public or private, in-state or out-of-state. (p. 319)

A Value-Added Tax For Human Worth

There is the framework. A value-added tax process that will deduct from a services/education super-voucher a tax for every level of achievement/skill a student achieves—true assessment.

Standards will be rigid and penalties for non-achievement will be enforceable against the student, his parents, and providers of educational services in order to achieve a trained workforce.

The implications for families being disrupted by accusations and prosecutions for Perelman’s implied abuse and neglect over "parental starving of children’s minds" are startling in their flagrancy.

An elaborate and accurate system will track families and students, leaving privacy and confidentiality in the dust. The tax/voucher will follow the student across state and regional boundaries, necessitating a reformulation of tax bases; this could even be extended to foreign sources—facilitated by choice and charter school initiatives. (Remember Toffler asserts that national sovereignty is, or will soon be, a thing of the past. And what about GATT’s education provision?)

The World Bank has just announced (Associated Press, The Des Moines Register, 9/15/95) its new formula for estimating a nation’s worth. Ismael Serageldin, World Bank Vice President for Environmentally Sustainable Development, stated in Monitoring Environmental Progress:

A Report on Work in Progress that the system "for the first time folds a country’s people and its natural resources into its overall balance sheet." While the World Bank projects that its new system of measuring wealth which "attempts to go beyond traditional gauges" and lists "Human

Resources: value represented by people’s productive capacity" (e.g. education, nutrition) will take years to perfect, I submit that our process of assessment is a giant step in that direction.

I am reminded that in May of 1984 the Washington Post published an article entitled "Industrial Policy Urged for GOP." The Institute for Contemporary Studies, "founded by Edwin Meese,

Caspar Weinberger, and other Reagan supporters," issued a report that advocated "Republicans shed some of their deep-rooted antipathy to a planned economy." All signals seem to point to the fact that this has indeed happened.

Somewhere in all of this is lost the ability to communicate our culture in an organized way and to teach basic skills that can be used whether cyberspace technology is available or not.

Didn’t we used to call this "education"? Didn’t we believe that our children had some choice in their futures?

When is assessment really assessment? Ernest Boyer, former Director of the Office of Education and Carnegie Foundation director, once said, "To be fully human one must serve." In the future to be fully assessed may mean our children’s worth as a servant of the state will be "assigned a value for tax purposes"—assessment.

America, where are you?

Eph. 6:10-20

Appendix XII

Excerpts from "The National Alliance for Restructuring Education:

Schools—and Systems—for the 21st Century"

A Proposal to the New American Schools Development Corporation by the National Center on Education and the Economy

Attn.: Marc Tucker, President

39 State Street, Suite 500, Rochester (Monroe County), NY 14614

Phone: (716) 546-7620 and FAX: (716) 546-3145

and its Partners:

State of Arkansas

Apple Computer, Inc.

State of Kentucky

Center for the Study of Social Policy

State of New York

Commission on the Skills of the American

Workforce

Pittsburgh, PA

Harvard Project on Effective Services

Rochester, NY

Learning Research and Development Center at the

University of Pittsburgh

San Diego, CA

State of Vermont

National Alliance of Business

State of Washington

National Board for Professional Teaching Standards

White Plains, NY

New Standards Project

Xerox Corporation

Brandon is a small, rural village in the Green Mountains an hour south of Burlington on Vermont Highway 7. The people here are poor, and the ugly white-brick two-story building looks more like a weather-beaten industrial plant than a school. But, on the inside, Otter Valley Union High School has become a high output academic setting that produces the state’s debate champions, its own literary magazine and a choir that performed Mozart at Carnegie Hall.

Bucking bureaucratic rules and winning state waivers from regulations, the faculty at Otter Valley restructured their school over the past six years. They worked with the community to set ambitious goals. They created interdisciplinary teams of teachers to improve instruction.

They moved to cooperative learning and heterogeneous grouping. A rotating troika of teachers assumed the role of principal. They started "measuring" [emphasis in original] learning through portfolios of the students’ work in math, English, social studies and science. They fought for time and money to get the training for themselves that allowed this transformation.

The students responded. (p. 2)

Now, imagine for the moment where we might be if states and districts routinely [emphasis in original] gave birth to schools like Otter Valley in Vermont. Imagine systems that provide assistance and encouragement to schools to "break the mold" instead of inflexible rules that only harden it. (p. 3)

Our object is to make schools like Otter Valley… the norm everywhere. By 1995 we plan to have 243 schools in seven states—enrolling a student body representative of the American people—cast in molds they set themselves and performing as well as any in the world. These schools will be the vanguard of a far larger number in many more states that will meet the same standard in five years.

Reaching this goal will require a transformation in virtually every important aspect of the American system of education, features that have remained essentially unchanged for nearly 70 years, from graduation standards to incentives that motivate students, from curriculum to budgeting, from assessment systems to teaching careers. (page 4)

Promoting and—especially—sustaining these changes in the schools will require complementary and equally radical changes in the organization of school districts and the structure and administration of education policy at the state level. It will also require thoughtful and sustained communication with the citizens of these states to build the public consensus needed to support those revolutionary changes. Designing and implementing this kind of fundamental transformation not just in a few schools, but in schools, districts and states in many parts of the country at once is an unprecedented undertaking. Pulling it off will require the coordinated action of hundreds of the most talented, committed educators and specialists from many walks of American life beyond education. The National Alliance for Restructuring has assembled such a team and has devised a plan that will enable us to work together to get the job done. The states and districts that are our Partners are utterly committed to this transformation. (p. 4)

Under "America’s Schools and Systems: Cast in a 1920’s Mold," the report says:

"Breaking the mold" means breaking this system, root and branch. (p. 6)

The first design task, then, is to define what outcomes are wanted and create quality measures of progress toward those outcomes.

All the states and districts in our consortium are members of the New Standards Project, which is itself a Partner in our consortium. We are committed to developing standards and developing an examination system in all the content areas covered by Goals 3 and 4 of the National Education Goals as well as work skills at the 4th, 8th and 10th grade levels. It will set a world-class standard of performance for all students, though we plan to accommodate many different examinations. These exams will emphasize the ability to think well, demonstrate an understanding of subjects studied and apply what one knows to the kind of complex problems encountered in real life. (pp. 8–9)

The New Standards Project is developing a mastery-based examination with known standards…. The New Standards Project’s examination system will employ advanced forms ofperformance examinations as well as assessments of the quality of students’ work as revealed

through portfolios, exhibitions and projects. But this is not our only resource for this proposal.

Many of the states and districts in our consortium are themselves leaders in the national movement to create high standards and new forms of student performance assessment. Vermont, for example, is pioneering the development of portfolio assessment. Pittsburgh developed one of the first and widely admired systems for assessing higher order thinking skills. And Kentucky is investing $29 million in the development of a whole new system of student performance assessment that will advance the state of the art.

The approach we plan to use for assessment will provide a powerful tool for this purpose.

At its heart is the idea of setting tasks for students to do. It is the performance of students on these tasks that will be assessed by the system. To a significant extent, the tasks, by defining students’ work, will define their curriculum. (p. 9–10)

Along with the Alliance states and school districts, it is committed to developing…

outcome standards that will enable our Partners to create performance-oriented systems for the delivery of health and human services that will parallel what we propose for schools. (p. 14)

Changing the district and state systems from rule-driven, input-oriented systems to output-driven, performance-oriented systems will be as hard to achieve as the changes we described for schools and just as necessary. It is one of the most difficult design challenges we face.... We believe that, at its core, this is best thought of as a problem in the design of a very large staff development effort, an effort to enable thousands of people to develop the skills, attitudes and values to transform schools and communities all over the United States.... For years, most staff development has been based on learning from theory that is divorced from practice. We envision learning by participation in a community of practitioners, a community that includes people at every level of mastery.

How can we create such a system for the teachers and others in our sites? In the classic model of learning through practice, the newcomer joins the work environment of a master, learning by participating in all of the activities of that environment. This works when newcomers are to be socialized into established and well-functioning communities of practice. But our problem is how simultaneously to create a new system and socialize educators to function within it. There are few, if any, schools that are already effectively carrying out an integrated program of transformed learning and teaching meeting world-class standards, joined with a social service program and engaging parents and the community in the process. Nevertheless, we believe it is possible to design a continuing professional development program that includes the essential elements. There are five such elements:

• Observation and modeling. Newcomers spend a significant amount of time observing mentors at work. From this observation, they learned to discriminate good from poor practice and acceptable from unacceptable outcomes. Observation is not haphazard.

It is mediated by conversations in which critical features of the work are pointed out and processes are analyzed. Our development program must provide opportunities for this kind of supported observation and analysis of the work of "masters."

• Active practice. This is the heart of it; those who are developing their skills work at the job they are learning, rather than learning about the job. Either in their own schools or in those in which their mentors teach, teachers will actively practice the new kinds of teaching for which we aim.

• Scaffolding. But by definition, they don’t yet know how to do these tasks—they are  still learning. How can they manage this practice then? The answer is scaffolding.

They learn by working side-by-side with an expert. But beginners can also scaffold one another by sharing a difficult task that neither might be able to do alone. Within our professional development design, we will need to provide scaffolding for our teachers’ early efforts in new forms of teaching, either from expert teachers or from others going through the same skill development process.

• Coaching. Success also depends on the availability of coaching by a supportive expert who observes and comments on the learner’s efforts. Coaching is not a one-time affair, but continuous, spread out over the many months or years that it takes to become a full-fledged expert. We will have to provide for extended coaching for our teachers, both in the sites in which they are interning, which we call master sites, and in their own schools.

• Guided Reflection. We will need to provide for reflection by those developing their skills. Just practicing the new forms of teaching, just doing it, even well, will not prepare teachers for the flexibility that will be necessary as they continue working over the years with new groups of students, with new aspects of curriculum. Successful teaching must be a reflective practice, one in which individuals are continually considering,

evaluating and improving on their own work. This capacity and disposition needs to be cultivated during the development period, and supported indefinitely. It is not just a matter of time for reflection—although that is crucial—but also a community of others to engage with in a reflective process. (page 22–23)

Our design problem is to build a development program that will contain each of the above elements within the constraints of a situation in which the teachers engaging in this development process remain part of a team responsible for educating children at their home school. Furthermore, we must find a way to quickly scale up the number of schools and teachers participating.

What are our resources? Fundamentally, people, school practice environments, information and educational materials, time and communication resources.

People: We need master practitioners, teachers already teaching well in the new ways we are hoping will spread through our system. We need expert consultants who can connect our teachers to the best research and other knowledge about instruction and learning. We need people who can function as on-site coaches—who are master practitioners of teaching, but who have enough freedom from daily teaching responsibility that they can travel to the schools in which our teacher-apprentices are working to observe, support and critique.

At the outset, we are, by definition, short on master practitioners. But there are teachers, both within our Partner sites and elsewhere, who are doing superb work on some part of the curriculum. Our plan draws in some of these people as master practitioners. Working through Learning Research Development Center [Pittsburgh, ed.], we will be able to put our school professionals in touch with the best research knowledge in the world on questions of curriculum and instruction.

In our projected cascade design, described below, teachers and other practitioners who become experts will serve in subsequent years as master practitioners. A system of certification for master practitioners will be designed to insure against the loss of fidelity that characteristically plagues cascade designs. It will also serve as an incentive (through recognition and, possibly, additional pay) for the extra work that teachers will need to become master practitioners. We will work with the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards on designing this certification process. (pp. 21–24)

How We Plan to Do It

...Getting there will require more than new policies and different practices. It will require a change in the prevailing culture—the attitudes, values, norms and accepted ways of doing things—that defines the environment that determines whether individual schools succeed or fail in the transformation process. We will know that we have succeeded when there are enough transformed schools in any one area, and enough districts designed and managed to support such schools, that their approach to education sets the norms, frames the attitudes and defines the accepted ways of doing things in that part of the world. Then there will be no turning back. (p. 33)

Bear in mind that we have selected our site Partners because their restructuring plans are already among the most advanced in the country. Each of the states in which we will initially concentrate—Vermont, New York and Kentucky—have developed sweeping strategic plans of action. (p. 36)

Hornbeck, Tucker, Cohen and Gloria Frazier will visit all of the sites at least once a month, providing support and technical assistance. (p. 43)

[Ed. Note: To date there have been no reports from states, cities, schools or school districts listed as "Partners" which show academic improvement as a result of their involvement in Marc Tucker’s project. Rochester, NY in particular, was a disaster case, with a National Public Broadcasting System report in mid-April of 1993 "accusing the city school district of flunking the once-heralded movement to reform its schools." Vermont’s efforts have proven to be less than successful and Kentucky’s system of student performance assessment had to be scrapped after enormous controversy over faulty development by the designers.]

Appendix XIII

"Psychology’s Best Kept Secrets"

"Psychology’s Best Kept Secrets," the entire Chapter 9 from The Whole Language OBE Fraud, by Samuel Blumenfeld (Paradigm Company: Boise, ID, 1996) pp. 77–89, is reproduced here.

It is more than a little curious that in a nation where so much research has been done by psychologists on the nature of human cognition—how children learn—that these same psychologists have shown virtually no interest in the greatest learning problem plaguing American education: the teaching of reading. It is true that there is much interest in diagnosing reading disability and exploring "dyslexia," but no interest in the instructional cause of reading disability, despite the fact that Dr. Samuel T. Orton first drew attention to the problem back in 1929.

Which brings us to the Center for Cognitive Studies where Frank Smith allegedly absorbed the wisdom of Noam Chomsky et al. The chief architect of the Center was Jerome Bruner who tells us in his autobiography, In Search of Mind, that cognitive psychology was born in 1956 at a symposium on the cognitive sciences held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Two of the key persons who participated in that symposium were Harvard behavioral psychologist George Miller and linguist Noam Chomsky.

It was that symposium that convinced Miller to leave B.F. Skinner’s behaviorist camp at Harvard and join Jerome Bruner in developing cognitive psychology. Miller writes:

I went away from the Symposium with a strong conviction, more imitative than rational, that experimental psychology, theoretical linguistics, and the computer simulation of cognitive processes were all pieces from a larger whole, and that the future would see a progressive elaboration and coordination of their shared concerns. (Bruner, p. 122)

Three years later, in 1959, Chomsky was to give the coup de grace to the behaviorist theory about language by a devastating review of B.F. Skinner’s book, Verbal Behavior (1957). Skinner had sought to explain language development in humans as a form of conditioned stimulus- response behavior similar to the way that animals in psych labs could be trained throughconditioning techniques. Pavlov’s famous experiments on dogs in Russia were the best known example of such experiments, the results of which were to permit psychologists to devise techniques that could be applied in changing and molding human behavior.

J.B. Watson, the father of American behaviorism, had written in 1924:

Behaviorism…holds that the subject matter of human psychology is the behavior of the human being. Behaviorism claims that consciousness is neither a definite nor a usable concept.... (p. 2)

The behaviorist asks: Why don’t we make what we can observe the real field of psychology?

Let us limit ourselves to things that can be observed and formulate laws concerning only those things. Now what can we observe? We can observe behavior—what the organism does or says. And let us point out at once that saying is doing—that is, behaving. (p. 6)

Chomsky demonstrated that the behaviorists’ attempts to explain language in the limited terms of stimulus-response behavior were fundamentally flawed. He argued that "our interpretation of the world is based on representational systems that derive from the structure of the mind itself and do not mirror in any direct way the form of the external world." In other words, the human child is born with a brain that already contains certain innate knowledge that permits the child to learn language rapidly, without direct instruction from anyone. But the mystery is that the structure of the mind does indeed mirror the form of the external world, for function of language is to name the external world. The child’s ability to master the phonological structure of the language, the abstractions of sound symbols, as well as syntax so rapidly and effortlessly suggested to Chomsky that man’s genetic makeup provided him with a highly developed language capability.

What is ironic in all of this is that despite the fact that Chomsky is a radical socialist and believes in evolution, his views about innate knowledge are quite compatible with and even strongly confirms the Biblical view of man being created with the ability to use language. God gave Adam the ability to speak because He wanted Adam to be able to converse with Him. In other words, Adam was given the power of the word for the specific purpose of being able to know God. The second purpose of language was to enable Adam to know the world for God gave Adam the task of establishing dominion over all living creatures, which meant naming them and classifying them. In other words, God made Adam an observer, a scientist. After the creation of Eve, the third function of language became apparent: to know others. And since language is the tool of thought, the fourth function of language was to be able to think and thereby know oneself.

In 1960 Miller and Bruner got an unrestricted grant of a quarter-million dollars from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to set up their Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard. Miller brought ideas about communication theory, computation, and linguistics to the Center whereas Bruner brought ideas about social psychology, developmental psychology, and anthropology to the mix. It was obvious that the new interest in the mind had been spurred by the new computer technology. For, as Bruner writes, "You cannot properly conceive of managing a complex world of information without a workable concept of mind." The result is that the Center brought together the ideas and theories of scholars and scientists working in many associated fields and drew graduate students from M.I.T., Harvard, and elsewhere.

Bruner concentrated on early childhood mental development which brought him into contact with the work of the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget whose pioneering work in the field had contributed greatly to an understanding of how the child’s mind grows. Piaget saw the child as an egocentric individual, gradually modifying his egocentrism as he adapted himself to the reality of others.

But Bruner, a socialist, was not entirely satisfied with the Piagetian view which seemed to favor the development of individualism. "Piaget’s children," writes Bruner, "are little intellectuals, detached from the hurly-burly of the human condition." He was far more attracted to the work of Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky (1896–1934), the Soviet cognitive psychologist. Bruner writes:

Vygotsky’s world was an utterly different place, almost the world of a great Russian novel.... Growing up in it is full of achieving consciousness and voluntary control, of learning to speak and then finding out what it means, of clumsily taking over the forms and tools of the culture and learning how to use them appropriately…. (p.138)

Vygotsky published little and virtually nothing that appeared in English before 1960; indeed, until the late 1950s, most of what he wrote in Russian was suppressed and had been banned after the 1936 purge. Sickly and brilliant, he died of tuberculosis in his thirties.... He was a Russian and a Jew, deeply interested in the arts and in language.... His objective was to explore how human society provided instruments to empower the individual mind. He was a serious intellectual Marxist, when Marxism was a starchy and dogmatic subject. This was his undoing at the time of the Stalinist purges…. Though I knew Piaget and never knew Vygotsky, I feel I know Vygotsky better as a person. (p. 137)

The man who introduced Bruner to Vygotsky was Alexander Luria, the Soviet psychologist whose book, The Nature of Human Conflicts, had been translated into English and published in the United States in 1932. Luria wrote in his preface:

The researches described here are the results of the experimental psychological investigations carried on at the State Institute of Experimental Psychology, Moscow, during the period of 1923–1930. The chief problems of the author were an objective and materialistic description of the mechanisms lying at the basis of the disorganisation of human behaviour and an experimental approach to the laws of its regulation…. To accomplish this it was necessary to create artificially affects and models of experimental neuroses which made possible an analysis of the laws lying at the basis of the disintegration of behavior. (p. xi)

Pavlov himself, Luria’s mentor, had proudly summed up the results of his famous experiments in a book, Twenty Years of Objective Study, published in 1935. These experiments on animals had enormous implications for experiments on human beings. Pavlov wrote:

The power of our knowledge over the nervous system will, of course, appear to much greater advantage if we learn not only to injure the nervous system but also to restore it at will. It will then have been really proved that we have mastered the processes and are controlling them. Indeed, this is so. In many cases we are not only causing disease, but are eliminating it with great exactitude, one might say, to order. (p. 690)

Thus, Pavlov had already done considerable experimentation on the causes of behavioral disorganization. Luria writes (p. 2):

Pavlov obtained very definite affective "breaks," an acute disorganisation of behavior, each time that the conditioned reflexes collided, when the animal was unable to react to two mutually exclusive tendencies, or was incapable of adequately responding to any imperative problem.

Apparently, there were many psychologists at that time working on the same problem.

Luria writes (p[p]. 206–207):

We are not the first of those who have artificially created disorganisation of human behaviour. A large number of facts pertaining to this problem has been contributed by contemporary physiologists, as well as by psychologists.

I.P. Pavlov was the first investigator who, with the help of exceedingly bold workers, succeeded experimentally in creating neuroses with experimental animals. Working with conditioned reflexes in dogs, Pavlov came to the conclusion that every time an elaborated reflex came into conflict with the unconditional reflex, the behavior of the dog markedly changed….

Although, in the experiments with the collision of the conditioned reflexes in animals, it is fairly easy to obtain acute forms of artificial affect, it is much more difficult to get those results in human experiments….

K. Lewin, in our opinion, has been one of the most prominent psychologists to elucidate this question of the artificial production of affect and of the experimental disorganisation of behaviour. The method of his procedure—the introduction of an emotional setting into the experience of a human, the interest of the subject in the experiment—helped him to obtain an artificial disruption of the affect of considerable strength.... Here the fundamental conception of Lewin is very close to ours.

Who was K. Lewin? Why he was the very same Kurt Lewin who came to the United States in 1933, founded the Research Center for Group Dynamics at M.I.T. (which later moved to the University of Michigan), and invented "sensitivity training." Shortly before his death in 1947, Lewin founded the National Training Laboratory which established its campus at Bethel, Maine, under the sponsorship of the National Education Association. Their teachers were instructed in the techniques of sensitivity training and how to become effective change agents.

After Lewin’s death, his colleagues continued to develop his sensitivity-training sessions which became known as t-groups (t for training). The t-group became the basis of the encounter movement in which participants get in touch with their feelings.

Carl Rogers, one of the chief practitioners of the t-group, considered sensitivity training to be "perhaps the most significant social invention of this century." All of this spurred the development of humanist "Third Force" psychology by Rogers, Abraham Maslow and others, which has had an enormous influence on the affective curriculum of public education.

Lewin had started his career as a social psychologist in Berlin where he organized a  "collective" in which he and his students pursued the experiments which Luria later recognized as highly effective. Some of Lewin’s students were Russians who studied under him in the early 1920s and returned to the Soviet Union to teach and continue their research at the University of Moscow. In 1929 Lewin attended the Ninth International Congress of Psychologists at Yale where, according to Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport, his work "was decisive in forcing some American psychologists to revise their own theories of the nature of intelligent behavior and of learning."

In 1932, Lewis M. Terman, head of the psychology department at Stanford, invited Lewin to spend six months as a visiting professor at Stanford. Lewin had been recommended by Edwin G. Boring, director of the Psych Lab at Harvard, who had been greatly impressed with Lewin at the Yale conference. After the stint at Stanford, Lewin decided to return to Germany via the Pacific and the Trans-Siberian railroad. In Moscow he was able to confer with his fellow psychologists, including Luria. Hitler had just come to power in Germany, and in August 1933, Lewin left Germany for good.

The importance of Lewin in this story is that he represented the collectivist mentality in the psychological community which had its own socio-political agenda. Certainly, the psychologists who were experimenting with artificially induced behavioral disorganization in their laboratories in Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United States had a reason for their experiments. And Lewin was considered highly skilled in such experiments with human beings which greatly interested American psychologists. Lewin’s biographer, Alfred J. Marrow, writes:

Students of progressive education also saw the need for studies of group behavior. This was stimulated by the educational philosophy of John Dewey. To carry out Dewey’s theory of "learning by doing," teachers organized such group projects as student self-government and hobby-club activities. This called for the development of leadership skills and collective setting of group goals.... Lewin’s pioneering research in group behavior thus drew upon the experience of educators in deciding upon and developing topics for research and in establishing a strong interest among social psychologists and teachers. (p. 167)

One of Lewin’s most significant experiments was aimed at determining the behavioral effects of frustration on children and how these effects are produced. Marrow writes:

The experiment indicated that in frustration the children tended to regress to a surprising degree. They tended to become babyish. Intellectually, children of four-and-a-half years tended toward the behavior of a three-year-old. The degree of intellectual regression varied directly with the strength of the frustration. Change in emotional behavior was also recorded.

There was less smiling and singing and more thumbsucking, noisiness, and restless actions.

Aggressiveness also increased and some children went so far as to hit, kick, and break objects.

There was a 30 per cent rise in the number of hostile actions toward the experimenter and a 34 per cent decrease in friendly approaches….

The authors summarized their main findings as follows: "Frustration as it operated in these experiments resulted in an average regression in the level of intellectual functioning, in increased unhappiness, restlessness, and destructiveness, in increased ultra-group unity, and in increased out-group aggression. The amounts of increase in negative emotionality were positively related to strength of frustration." (p. 122)

In other words, Lewin and his colleagues had proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that frustration could cause the same symptoms of behavioral disorganization in children that Pavlov, Luria and associates had produced in their laboratories with animals. On the matter of teaching reading, Lewin favored the look-say, whole-word method. Marrow writes:

Lewin’s students had unusually wide latitude in choosing their particular field of study.

Sara Forrer, for example, decided to investigate Ovid Decroly’s method of teaching retarded children to read…. The Belgian teacher had postulated that children retain sentences more  easily than single words and words more easily than single letters. Lewin stated, in referring to Forrer’s experiment, that "the findings confirm the marked advantage of the ‘global’ method of reading and writing. To a child taking no joy in learning to write an alphabet, a change of valence (attractiveness) occurs more quickly when he is allowed as soon as possible to write meaningful communications in sentence form." (p. 258)

What is interesting in all of this is that Clara Schmitt in 1914 (see chap. 12) had shown in her analysis of the errors made by mentally defective and normal children that the mentally defective had problems learning to read phonetically. And even when they were taught to read phonetically, they made the kinds of errors that normal children make when taught to read by the look-say method. Decroly was obviously confirming that the "global," or whole language method, was easier for retarded children than the more abstract alphabetic system. But to assume that the global (i.e., whole language) method was also better for normal children was either a serious error on Lewin’s part, or a deliberate effort to promote look-say. He must have known that the Central Committee of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union had rejected the whole-word method in 1933 mainly through the work of his colleagues, Luria and Vygotsky.

Lewin obviously believed in the Marxist doctrine that the end justifies the means. In his book, Resolving Social Conflicts, published in 1948, he wrote:

In regard to a change toward democracy this paradox of democratic leadership is still more pointed. In an experimental change, for instance, from individualistic freedom (laissez faire) to democracy, the incoming democratic leader could not tell the group members exactly what they should do because that would lead to autocracy. Still some manipulations of the situation have to be made to lead the group into the direction of democracy….

To investigate change toward democracy a situation has to be created for a certain period where the leader is sufficiently in control to rule out influence he does not want and to manipulate the situation to a sufficient degree. The goal of the democratic leader in this transition period will have to be the same as that of any good teacher, namely, to make himself superfluous, to be replaced by indigenous leaders from the group. (p. 39)

In other words, during the transition period from individualism to "democracy" (i.e., collectivism) the end can justify the means, because the "end" is the greater good. The look-say method may be needed during the transition period in order to make Americans less literate and thereby less independent as individuals. This would indeed be a necessary strategy for moving the nation toward a socialist, collectivist society. And, of course, it was in keeping with Dewey’s own views on reading instruction given in his essay, "The Primary School Fetich," published in 1898.

Vygotsky died in 1934 and Lewin died in 1947, but Luria, who knew them both, continued his work. During World War II he did painstaking research on brain-injured people, discovering many facets of how the brain works. He had worked closely with Vygotsky from 1924 to 1934, the period in which they had worked on early childhood development and the artificial means of creating behavioral disorganization. During that period Vygotsky also worked on the problems of Soviet education, applying psychology to the problems of massive illiteracy which, according to James Wertsch, "has been almost completely overcome today."

How were the Soviets able to achieve this? By using an alphabetic-phonics method of teaching reading!

The Bruner-Luria connection was a very close one. Bruner attended psychological conferences in Moscow, and, in 1960, Luria visited the Center for Cognitive Studies. Bruner writes:

Luria and I became fast friends almost immediately. We were compatible temperamentally and very much in agreement about psychological matters…. (p. 145)

In the fifteen or so years that I knew him well, I do not think that two months ever went by without a letter from him, a new book or translation of his.... He was the czar of Russian psychology, but a more benign czar would be hard to imagine! (p. 144)

Why were they so compatible? Well, as a student Bruner not only sympathized with communism, but in his senior year at Duke, he became a member of the Communist Party. He writes:

That last year at Duke was 1938, the bitter winding down of the Spanish Civil War. My roommate, Irv Dunston, and I were invited to become members of a Marxist "study group" held at the home of a gifted young mathematics professor. Each week we would prepare by reading something of Marx or Lenin. I liked the slogans—that production was for use not for profit, to each according to his effort, and so on—but the turgid arguments of Marxist "thinkers" repelled me….

My fondness for the slogans must have been enough, for we were asked eventually to join a "cell" of the Communist Party in Durham, "with real working-class people." After a late-into-the-night discussion, we decided that this was our duty….

The cell meetings, in that dingy apartment near the railroad station in Durham, were the intrinsic, the conspiratorial appeal—our code names included.... My "duties" were to take an active part on campus in the American Student Union, to put the "right" candidates into office….

The year ended; I departed Durham. I never even had to resign from the Party. I was given no names or contacts, but told simply that I would soon know who and how. I guess I didn’t make it. (pp. 29–30)

Thus ended Bruner’s formal relationship with the Communist Party. But nowhere in his autobiography does Bruner indicate any loss of belief in socialism or Marxism. The fact that he felt so compatible with Luria and preferred Vygotsky to Piaget would lead one to believe that Bruner has remained sympathetic to communism throughout his professional life. He and his fellow psychologists thought nothing of attending psychological conferences in Moscow during the height of the Cold War while American soldiers were dying in Vietnam fighting communism.

On matters of education, Bruner was instrumental in creating in 1965 the famous—or infamous, depending on your point of view—social studies curriculum for ten-year-olds, Man:

A Course of Study, better known as MACOS. Bruner writes: [A]fter a year or two of very favorable notices… and widespread adoptions, the course came under attack from the extreme right-wing John Birch [Society] in league with newly emerging "creationists," opposed to the teaching of evolution. Between them they mounted the now familiar right-wing harassment of any school district proposing to use the course....

Governor Reagan of California, whose state sheltered the core of the John Birch, came out squarely against the course.... And so symbolic had the course become for the extreme Right that they managed to pass on their "literature" about it to a right-wing group in Australia, then in opposition to the widespread adoption of the course there. (p. 194)

One would have to conclude from the above that the Center for Cognitive Studies was not exactly a hotbed of conservative, anti-communist thinking. And it is interesting to note that when Frank Smith left the Center with his newly acquired Ph.D., he embarked on his career as a phonics-basher par excellence and was soon catapulted into the position of "expert" on reading and literacy by the look-say establishment.

Appendix XIV

Alert on National Education Goals Panel Community Action Tool Kit

October 6, 1994

TO: Concerned Citizens

FROM: Charlotte Iserbyt, Former Senior Policy Advisor, U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, from which all components of educational restructuring (OBE/ML/Goals 2000) emanated.

SUBJECT: National Education Goals Panel Community Action Tool Kit;

Do-It-Yourself Kit for Education Renewal, Community

Organizing Guide, September 1994. ACTION ALERT.

Order the above-mentioned materials from the Government Printing Office, 202–512–1800.

The Stock No. for ordering is 065–000–00680–4. The price is $37. It is important to confront your elected officials IMMEDIATELY with the proof before educators receive project and move ahead with it in your community.

Concerned parents, teachers, plain taxpayers, etc. are fortunate that we were able to obtain a copy of these incredible materials which in a nutshell spell out clearly how to manipulate all segments of the community into accepting/supporting GOALS 2000 (the restructuring of our schools, i.e., "nation," according to a speech delivered by Shirley McCune of the Midcontinent Regional Education Laboratory at the Governor’s Conference, Wichita, Kansas, 1989). Explicit strategies are presented in manipulation of the community into accepting theoretical, unproven curricula. The guide provides clear and ample direction to censure dissenting voices critical of the restructuring. These directions include deliberately misleading of the media, formulation of core groups to isolate and stifle dissenters, contrived data collection among other offensive activities. The aim is not to reach consensus but to obfuscate the real issues in order to push forward a one-sided agenda. A most disturbing reference is made toward controlling by name a particular religious group.

For years education researchers have referred to the change agents’ bible: The Change Agents’ Guide to Innovation in Education by Ronald G. Havelock, Program Director, Center for Research on Utilization of Scientific Knowledge, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, portions of which were originally developed as part of Contract No. OEC–0–8– 080603–4535(010) with the Office of Education, U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, under the title "Diffusion of Utilization Research to Knowledge Linkers in Education."

The copyright is 1973 (Educational Technology Publications, Inc.: Englewood Cliffs, NJ), LC 72–87317. The Guide contains authentic case studies of how change agents manipulate their communities into accepting controversial curricula, methods, etc. Some freedom-loving education researchers have taken the course on how to bring about change and how to "identify resisters," etc. (themselves!). Ronald Havelock has strong connections to UNESCO (United Nations).

That the National Goals Panel, which includes elected officials (governors, legislators, etc.), could condone the use of manipulative change agent tactics (the above described National Goals Panel Community Action Kit reads like Ronald Havelock was the Project Director) is difficult to fathom. Do they know what is in this Kit? Do they feel that the restructuring of our nation a la Shirley McCune and Naisbett, i.e., the changing of our political/economic system from free enterprise/capitalist to corporate fascist/planned economy (merger of public and private sector) and from a constitutional representative republic to a participatory democracy (for proof see federally-funded education restructuring projects implemented in many states during past ten years) is so important that totalitarian methods must be used to reach consensus and approval?

Don’t citizens have the right to make such important decisions related to the future of their children and nation at the ballot box, rather than having themselves subjected to a tax-funded manipulative brainwash in order to come to phony consensus?

Opposition to OBE, Goals 2000 has been so intensive and effective that the education bureaucracy, in collusion with multinational corporations, has openly sunk to this incredibly totalitarian level in order to get acceptance at the local level of its international socialist lifelong dumbdown education/job training agenda.

The Do-It-Yourself Kit for Education Renewal consists of four parts: (1) "Community Organizing Guide"—57 pages; (2) "Guide to Getting Out Your Message" [better titled "How to Manipulate the Media and the Taxpayers," ed.]—74 pages; (3) "Resource Guide"—66 pages; and (4) "Guide to Goals and Standards"—38 pages.

CALL NATIONAL GOALS PANEL AT 202-632-0952 TO REGISTER YOUR CONCERN OVER THE CONTENTS/METHODS RECOMMENDED IN THE PANEL’S COMMUNITY ACTION TOOLKIT. TELL THEM YOU WILL ASK YOUR ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES TO CALL FOR AN INVESTIGATION OF THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION’S ACTIVITIES WHICH ARE WORKING AGAINST THE BEST INTERESTS OF AMERICAN CITIZENS, USING PSYCHOLOGICAL MANIPULATION (DELPHI TECHNIQUE, GROUP PROCESS BRAINWASH METHODS, ETC.)

TO GET COMMUNITY APPROVAL OF GOALS 2000. ASK THEM TO STOP DISTRIBUTION OF THE ACTION TOOL KIT UNTIL CONGRESS HAS HAD AN OPPORTUNITY TO EXAMINE ITS CONTENTS. ASK FOR A WRITTEN RESPONSE TO YOUR CONCERNS. CALL OR WRITE YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS REQUESTING A CONGRESSIONAL INVESTIGATION OF THE GOAL PANEL’S TOOLKIT DEVELOPED WITH YOUR TAX MONIES.

Excerpts (verbatim quotes from the Tool Kit) follow:

…Step 3: Describe Allies and Opponents; Identify Change Agents….

Step 1: Identify a Leadership Team. This section provides suggestions on how to find the leaders in your community. It also includes a checklist of likely candidates—partners for your effort.

Troubleshooting. Even as you are expanding the base of support, it will be important to be aware of the opposition. Keep an eye out for your opponents, respect their opinions, and try to explain yours. Understand the process of inclusion.

Step 1: Identify a Leadership Team. The people who lead the community campaign to reform education will give it inspiration, drive, and momentum. They will set the groundwork for a long-term reform strategy. This is a task that requires numbers of committed people, but it must start with a core team…. There are likely candidates for leadership… members of PTA, president of Chamber of Commerce, president of local teachers’ union, members of social action committee of a local church or synagogue.

Step 2: Develop a Common Vision. "It takes a whole village to educate a child"; assessing current strengths and weaknesses and building a strong accountability system to regularly measure and report on progress towards the goals over time; identifying the barriers to and opportunities for goal attainment in many systems that support teaching and learning; creating and mounting strategies to overcome barriers….

Objectives: Schools… in implementing comprehensive parent involvement programs, will offer more adult literacy, parent training and lifelong learning opportunities to improve the ties between home and school and enhance parents’ work and home lives….

Holding Community Meetings. Identifying Participants: It may be useful to invite leaders from key organizations to act as spokespersons or to lead small discussion groups…. Have a designated number of people personally responsible for bringing others to the meeting….

Developing an Agenda: The agenda for your community goals meeting should be constructed in a way that galvanizes support for your mission and refines it where necessary. Make sure to involve the core group of leaders in developing the agenda….

Choosing a Facilitator: An organized discussion about education reform will not happen spontaneously. It will be necessary to have a facilitator to help direct discussion around the issues related to the goals and the ways they apply to the community. The facilitator will need to encourage audience participation. He or she will need to ensure that no single person monopolizes the discussion and that shy people are encouraged to speak. The facilitator will bring discussions to a close and guide the audience to decisions about actions that need to be taken….

Community Review of Goals in Small Groups. The group will divide into smaller sections —one for each of the goals identified in the previous discussion. It may be helpful to appoint leaders for each small group. The groups should reflect diversity. They should make any necessary revisions in the goal and then brainstorm about how the community can accomplish the needs identified in each goal. Emerging from the group sessions will be the beginnings of a community action plan and the methods for measuring progress toward the community education goals….

• Case Study of Allegheny Policy Council. Participants were asked for input which would lead directly to a regional plan for focusing our resources to improve math and science. The resulting plan will guide regional action. It will be used to indicate regional consensus to secure national funding and to guide local allocation of resources.…

Conducting Surveys. In addition, the findings of a survey can help formulate and bolster positions of the campaign….

Develop a Useful Questionnaire. Biased wording also invalidates results, so emotionally loaded or slanted questions should be strictly avoided. It may be difficult to ask neutral questions —especially when you have strong feelings on the topic—but that is the only way to get valid information….

CASE STUDY: Omaha 2000.

Initiatives were so much more easily accepted because people felt that the survey made them a part of the decision-making process. [A few survey questions follow, ed.]

• Parenting education programs should be available for all parents?

• Our community should appreciate and embrace the growth of diversity?

• Every citizen should be responsible to assist students and support education?

• All children should have a personal mentor available to assist them?…

Develop a Strategy. Evaluate Context for Change; describe allies and opponents; identify change agents.

For many issues there will be significant institutional barriers to any change you hope to initiate….

Elements of Systematic Reform.

Creating a coordinated education and training system…. Are these programs built around a multi-year sequence of learning at work sites and at school—learning that is connected and coordinated?

Describe Allies and Opponents.

On the other hand, there may be people or organizations in the community who will oppose the reforms you are attempting to institute. Some of these opponents simply may not understand the goals of the campaign. Others will persist in their opposition. Before your organization takes any action, you will need to anticipate the potential reaction of opponents. List your opponents and what your success might mean to them. Refer to the Troubleshooting section for suggestions on how to deal with opposition.

Identify Change Agents.

One change agent could be the Superintendent of schools because she or he has the power to institute a district-wide policy to include community members in the standards-development process.

["Power" is mentioned many times in this section, ed.]

Resistance. This will be the most difficult stage. The public will be reluctant to face the tradeoffs that come from choosing a specific plan of action.

To describe opponents answer these questions:_____

List the resources of your opponents.

Council Strategy Chart.

Get the president of Hewlett Packard to write the chair of the school board a letter supporting the proposal. [Strategy to get calculators for school, ed.]

Community Organizing Tips.

Surveys can do more than help you gather information. They can also build community ownership of reform.

Business and Labor Leaders’ Checklist.

Business and labor can make the goals work by building community support, helping to measure effectiveness, and defining required workforce skills that could be matched to academic achievement targets.

Other Sources of Support

Potential allies for your effort are everywhere…. Consult the resource directory…. Also, do not overlook other goals- and standards-based reform campaigns as a source of information and support. School officials and community leaders in Edmonds, Washington; San Antonio, Texas; Omaha, Nebraska; Bangor, Maine; and hundreds of other municipalities.

Identifying Financial Resources.

As you begin your search for funding, remember the federal government. With its passage of the comprehensive Goals 2000: Educate America Act, Congress has made it easier for communities to restructure education…. What’s more, the legislation takes a big-picture view of education that goes beyond the traditional K–12 focus of past administrations. Education is defined as a process that begins in early childhood and continues to adulthood through lifelong learning situations. It emphasizes the connections between preschool, school, and work.

Troubleshooting.

You are likely to face opposition any time you try to introduce change into a community….

Their concerns may be based on confusion over what goals and standards are… or they may be satisfied with current state of learning in your community.

Following are tips on how to explain National Education Goals and Standards.... For a fuller description of the relevance of national goals and standards-based reform movement… please see "Guide to Goals and Standards" booklet in Tool Kit.

Know the Facts.

For definitions of many of the other terms of the debate, see "Glossary of Terms" at end of "Resource Directory."

Give Everyone a Role.

Not everybody has to share your views. Be sensitive to concerns of your opponents. Talk about what offends them and address their issues.

Avoid Loaded Words and Phrases.

Words and phrases like "outcomes," "outcome-based education," "self-esteem," and "attitudes" may mean different things to certain groups…. Remember, if you stick to clear, concrete terms that everyone comprehends, not only will you be better understood, you may also avoid serious conflict down the road.

Keep your Perspective.

Opposition may come from a small part of the community. Balance their concerns appropriately and reinforce the fact that the National Goals have widespread support. You might think of inviting opponents into the schools to let them see for themselves how your community action plan is improving education.

Beware of The One-Size-Fits-All Argument.

Reassure your opposition that the National Education Goals, the framework for your community’s education reform effort, are not trying to establish a national curriculum for all schools.

[This is a bald-faced lie. According to Education Week, Jan. 25, 1989, "Chester E. Finn, Jr. former head of the Education Department’s research branch, told business leaders here last week that he favored the development of a ‘national curriculum.’", ed.]

Remember the equity issue.

Every student will be expected to meet higher standards. No students will be denied the opportunity to learn [This is Spady’s et al terminology for outcome-based education, effective schools, mastery learning, ed.]

Ask for Help. See Resource Directory… Case Study of Edmonds, Washington: Sylvia Soholt, who works in Edmonds’ planning and community relations division, says they deliberately chose a process involving multiple drafts of each phase because "it gives the message that you are open to change."

The text was not presented as a writ from the school district, but rather as "this is what your neighbors said students should learn and be able to do."

By sending the draft to everybody in the community, the school district was able to deflect charges of being exclusive. District officials carefully documented the originator of each idea to demonstrate that the plan was developed by the community, not by school officials.

In a meeting to discuss the first draft, some raised religious doubts about the reform effort. They said they feared the schools would take charge of rearing children, teaching non Christian values instead of improving academic skills. Some suggested that computers ould monitor and mold children into automatons.

Faced with these objections, the superintendent, Brian L. Benzel, knew he could not just dismiss the criticisms as misguided. He felt that the school district needed to clarify the purpose behind the reform effort before releasing a second draft of the document. Benzel approached Edmonds’ ministers and invited them to a meeting on education reform efforts.

At the meeting, the superintendent addressed the expressed fears and explained what the reform movement was really trying to do. He said he believed that they misunderstood the district’s intentions, but thought their concerns were important. He let the ministers talk about education. They all agreed that education needed to be improved and that it was important to define student skills.

In the course of the conversation, it became clear that the religious community was not walking lock-step against reform. Reform meant something different to each minister. It appeared that the ministers simply wanted to be part of the debate. As a result of this positive meeting, they carried the message back to their congregations, that the school reformers were willing to listen and be inclusive.

Following these meetings the school district made revisions that incorporated the objections and reflected the concerns of the whole community. The district removed confusing jargon from the draft. For example, people had objected to defining "critical thinking" as a skill—they believed it suggested that children should be taught to be critical of their parents.

So the second draft defined "thinking and problem-solving" as the ability to "think creatively and develop innovative ideas and solutions" and to "think critically and make independent judgments."

To address the concern that the district was stressing some skills over others, it developed a poster depicting the skills and abilities a student needs as a "tapestry of learning," where all the elements have equal importance and are woven together.

The school district is now moving to the next step. They are creating assessment tools to measure the standard they have developed, using the same strategy of full community involvement. [Supt. Brian Benzel, Chairman, Governor’s Task Force on Schools for the 21st Century, is listed as a partner (WA State) in Marc Tucker’s National Alliance for Restructuring Education Schools—and Systems—for the 21st Century. See Appendix XII. In other words, the citizens and ministers in Edmonds, Washington were manipulated by a very important and recognized "change agent," ed.]

The importance of ordering the entire Kit cannot be overemphasized. We have dealt only with one section, "The Community Organizing Guide."

Please fax me info regarding action you and members of your community intend to take to expose this incredible federal initiative.

Thanks very much.

Appendix XV

"Will Republicans Betray America By Voting For Marc Tucker’s Human Resources Development System: H.R. 1617 and S. 143?"

"Will Republicans Betray America By Voting For Marc Tucker’s Human Resources Development System: H.R. 1617 and S. 143?" by Samuel Blumenfeld is taken from the The Blumenfeld Education Letter, May 1996 (Vol.11, No. 5, Letter #116).

There is no doubt that H.R. 1617 (known as the "Consolidated and Reformed Education,

Employment, and Rehabilitation System’s Act" or "CAREERS Act"), which passed the House in September 1995 by a vote of 345 to 79, and S. 143 (the Workforce Development Act of 1995), which passed the Senate in October by 95 to 2, will do more to lead America into socialist-fascist totalitarianism than any other pieces of legislation before the present Republican-dominated Congress.

Both bills, when reconciled in conference committee, will enact into law Marc Tucker’s infamous Human Resources Development System, outlined in Tucker’s exuberant letter of November 11, 1992 to Hillary Clinton, a member of the board of trustees of Tucker’s National Center on Education and the Economy. He wrote:

I still cannot believe you won. But utter delight that you did pervades all the circles in which I move. I met last Wednesday in David Rockefeller’s office with him, John Sculley, Dave Barram and David Haselkorn. It was a great celebration. Both John and David R. were more expansive than I have ever seen them—literally radiating happiness….

The subject we were discussing was what you and Bill should do now about education, training, and labor market policy. Following that meeting, I chaired another in Washington on the same topic….

Our purpose in these meetings was to propose concrete actions that the Clinton administration could take—between now and the inauguration, in the first 100 days and beyond.

The result, from where I sit, was really exciting. We took a very large leap forward in terms of how to advance the agenda on which you and we have all been working—a practical plan for putting all the major components of the system in place within four years, by the time Bill has to run again.

That Hillary Clinton had been working with Tucker and associates to develop this fascist education system is confirmed by the fact that Tucker paid Hillary $102,000 in 1991 for her work as a consultant to the NCEE. Obviously, the letter of November ‘92 was meant to help prepare the Clintons to get the Tucker plan passed into law and implemented by the fifty states. In it Tucker outlined his "vision" of a human resources development system:

What is essential is that we create a seamless web of opportunities to develop one’s skills that literally extends from cradle to grave and is the same system for everyone—young and old, poor and rich, worker and full-time student. It needs to be a system driven by client needs (not agency regulations or the needs of the organizations providing the services), guided by clear standards that define the stages of the system for the people who progress through it, and regulated on the basis of outcomes that providers produce for their clients, not inputs into the system.

One should be aware that Tucker’s plan to restructure American education goes back to his 1986 report on teaching, A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century, produced when he was executive director of the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy. In 1987,

New York Gov. Cuomo and the leaders of Rochester, N.Y., invited Tucker to set up his National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) in that city. The idea was that the Center, with the help of an initial subsidy of $1 million from Gov. Cuomo, would help Rochester implement Tucker’s basic restructuring ideas in that city’s school system.

GOALS 2000

In 1989 the NCEE issued its first report, To Secure Our Future: The Federal Role in Education, which became the basis for Goals 2000. The report basically framed the issues and shaped the agreements that were made at President Bush’s famous Education Summit at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, in the fall of 1989. After the summit, in which Gov. Clinton of Arkansas was an active participant, the National Governors’ Association asked the NCEE to assist in the development of national goals for education. These goals were subsequently promoted by President Bush in his 1990 State of the Union address. Apparently, a Republican president was willing to accept the education reform plan of the ultra-liberal NCEE rather than call upon a conservative think tank to come up with a conservative reform plan.

In 1989, Tucker’s group created the Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce which compiled a report entitled America’s Choice: High Skills or Low Wages! The report, issued in June 1990, is the basic blueprint for Tucker’s Human Resources Development System which moves American education from its traditional emphasis on academics and knowledge to a Soviet-style workforce training and certification program.

Both H.R. 1617 and S. 143 represent the culmination of Tucker’s efforts to get Congress to impose his system on America. That Republicans should be in the forefront of promoting these bills makes one wonder if the Republican Party is becoming the new fascist party of America.

In the Tucker system, the government will plan your life for you, track you from birth to death on its mammoth data-gathering computer, and regulate employment and eventually the entire economy.

Henry Hyde Opposes

The only Republican congressman to openly oppose this legislation is Rep. Henry Hyde of Illinois, who addressed a letter to his colleagues in March of this year stating why he opposes the Tucker plan and the legislation that makes it law. He wrote:

Dear Colleague:

President Clinton’s plan for a national workforce of skilled laborers is being achieved through the Goals 2000 Educate America Act (HR 1804), School-to-Work Opportunities Act (SWO) (HR 2884), and Improving America’s Schools Act (IASA) (HR 6), all of which were passed and signed into law by President Clinton in 1994.

I’ll tell you why it is so important to repeal these laws. The plan for Goals 2000 was developed by Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Ira Magaziner, and Marc Tucker, President of the National Center on Education and the Economy (funded by the Carnegie Foundation), prior to Clinton’s election. It is a concept for dumbing-down our schools and changing the character of the nation through behavior modification (a vital part of this plan). It moves away from an academically intensive curriculum to one that is integrated with vocational training, producing skilled manpower for the labor market. The economy will be controlled by the federal government by controlling our workforce and our schools. I’m enclosing an 18-page letter to Hillary Clinton from Marc Tucker which includes the framework for Goals 2000….

Two other bills, still pending, are designed to advance the School-to-Work phase of Goals 2000. The Careers Act (HR 1617) and the Workforce Development Act (S 143) will support a nationwide work force development system, state by state. Funding is provided for "one stop career" employment agencies under the supervision of the federal government. Please, let’s not let these bills become law.

At an education summit in 1989, then-Governor Bill Clinton chaired a Governors’ meeting to establish national performance goals to make America internationally competitive. The governors adopted six of the National Education Goals which are now included in the 8 goals in Goals 2000. The other two came from goals adopted at a World Conference sponsored by the United Nations and the World Bank in March, 1990….

Behavior modification is a significant part of restructuring our schools. School children will be trained to be "politically correct," to be unbiased, to understand diversity, to accept alternative family lifestyles, to contribute to the community through mandatory community service, to respect and protect the environment, to become a collaborative contributor and a quality producer. In Marc Tucker’s letter to Mrs. Clinton, laying out the plan for Goals 2000 he states, "Radical changes in attitudes, values and beliefs are required to move any combination of these agendas."

Dumbing-down education is a prime component in creating a willing workforce. Higher education is not conducive to accepting skilled labor training for a career that fits into the federal government’s planned labor force. Goals 2000 abandons the American competitive tracking system. It is replaced by new national achievement standards which assess students’ behavior and attitude….

A computer tracking system will track teachers’ training and performance, school performance, and students from pre-kindergarten through technical training and into the workforce. All information will be made available to interested government officials and prospective employers.

Pre-school, health clinics, daily meals, and parental assistance (they have the gall to instruct parents on how to rear their children, including how students’ free time should be spent) are in this all-inclusive "cradle to grave" plan to control our children’s minds and careers….

This concept has been around since at least the 1960s and perhaps as far back as the 1930s. It has been tried in many schools over the past 20–30 years, to the detriment of our children. In the ’70s, it was called "Mastery Learning" under the supervision of Professor Benjamin Bloom and now is known as "OBE." State school superintendents have learned to call OBE by other names because of its bad reputation which precedes it but the concepts are all the same.

I ask you to please investigate Goals 2000 yourself. I think you will come to the same conclusion.

Goals 2000 must be rejected, and the sooner the better—for our children’s sake.

What has been the response to Rep. Hyde’s very strong letter? So far, the only response we know of is a 4-page letter dated March 28 from William Goodling, Republican from Pennsylvania, Chairman of the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities, and Howard P. "Buck" McKeon, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Postsecondary Education, Training and Life-long Learning. Goodling, serving his 10th term in Congress, was a school superintendent before becoming a Congressman. McKeon, a Republican from California, is a first-term freshman who seems neither to understand the significance of the bill he is promoting nor the subcommittee he heads. Attached to their letter was a six-page compendium of explanations "developed to respond to similar concerns and misunderstandings that have been expressed over the CAREERS bill in recent months." Goodling and McKeon write:

We recently received a "dear colleague" from you entitled "Clinton’s National Workforce and Education Plan," in which you express concerns over H.R. 1617, the House-passed CAREERS Act….

In your letter you describe the CAREERS legislation, and the Senate’s Workforce Development Act as "designed to advance the School to Work phase of Goals 2000," tying the roots of this legislation to the work of the Clinton Administration, Ira Magaziner, and Marc Tucker.

In fact, CAREERS is the product of efforts by Republicans going back to the Reagan and Bush Administrations, and incorporates suggestions by a bipartisan coalition of reform-minded colleagues, including many leading Republican Governors.

At last, two honest Republicans admitting that it is the Republicans who are creating the educational foundations for a totalitarian system in America! Who are these fascist Republicans?

Chester Finn, Dennis Doyle, Bill Bennett, Terrel Bell? It was Bell who in 1984 awarded Bill Spady the grant to continue work on implementing Outcome-Based Education in all of the schools in America. Concerning Chester Finn, Bell writes in his memoir, The Thirteenth Man: David Stockman, director of the Office of Management and Budget, suggested that the very competent Chester Finn be appointed deputy undersecretary for planning and budget in ED. Finn had served in the Nixon White House. I had known him from my Nixon-Ford years, and I knew that I could work with him. Given Stockman’s support, I was hopeful that he would be the first one to break the logjam. But despite this endorsement, Finn was promptly rejected by White House Personnel because he was currently serving on the staff of Democratic Senator Pat Moynihan. [Stockman and Finn had both been close to Moynihan during their Harvard days.]

Now we know why Chester Finn can’t be trusted! In his book, Bell bemoans the fact that President Reagan did not want the federal government to assume a role of leadership in education. In fact, Reagan wanted to abolish the Education Department but was unable to get the support needed in Congress. Nevertheless, in the bowels of the educational bureaucracy plans were well under way by the National Center for Education Statistics to create its massive computerized data-collection system. It seems as if the government works on two tiers: there is the visible tier of politicians in the White House and Congress which the public is very much aware of; and there is the invisible tier made up of bureaucrats, laboratories, and various foundation-supported commissions that quietly advance the liberal-socialist agenda no matter who occupies the White House or controls Congress. Funding for the invisible tier is always forthcoming in the Budget, even though the politicians may not have the foggiest idea what the money is being spent on.

Iserbyt Blows the Whistle

It was Charlotte Iserbyt, former senior staff member at the Education Department, who saw what was going on among the socialist-fascist planners in the invisible tier and decided to let the public know. Her little book, Back to Basics Reform Or …Skinnerian International Curriculum?, published in 1985, revealed what the invisible tier was doing to prepare America for a socialist one-world government scheduled for the early years of the twenty-first century.

She wrote:

This book deals with the social engineers’ continuing efforts, paid for with international,

federal, state, and tax-exempt foundation funding, to manipulate and control Americans from birth to death using the educational system as the primary vehicle for bringing about planned social, political, and economic change. (The major change in our economic system will be the determination by industry and government of who will be selected to perform the necessary tasks in our society—quotas for engineers, doctors, service workers, etc. to bring about the socialist concept of full employment.)

That’s a virtual description of Marc Tucker’s Human Resources Development system.

Charlotte was fired for her patriotism. But the cat was out of the bag, and now a small group of conservative activists was able to track the doings of the invisibles. In her book Charlotte was able to document Terrel Bell’s complicity with Bill Spady in the development of Outcome- Based Education. She also sounded the alarm on Skinnerian mastery learning, the technique to be used in the schools to change the values, beliefs and behavior of American children.

But to many of us, it was Marc Tucker’s letter to Hillary Clinton that proved to be the great eye opener. What was so shocking was the clear totalitarian nature of what was being planned by these American social engineers. And for Republicans in Congress to even contemplate using any component of this plan as a means of reforming American education is to reveal the utter bankruptcy of the Republican party when it comes to education. For Goodling to promote any components of this plan is to betray fundamental Republican principles in defense of freedom.

But perhaps the Republicans no longer adhere to these principles and have indeed become the new American fascists. In his letter to Rep. Hyde, Goodling writes:

In exchange for billions of dollars in federal funding for job training and employment assistance, the CAREERS bill does ask States and local communities to establish what we call integrated career center systems, where there are easily accessible, single points of entry into local employment and training programs, for people in need of employment assistance or job training, and for employers in need of workers. The actual design for such systems is left entirely to the State and local community. Co-located Career centers (some call them one-stops) are encouraged, not required. And they are locally-designed, appointed and managed —not federally run or controlled.

Apparently, Goodling is unaware that federal control is not needed to put the Tucker plan in place in every state. The only thing that is needed is federal money. Tucker’s change agents will design the local systems so that they conform with the overall national—not federal—plan.

The social engineers desperately need the federal money to implement this totalitarian plan, and Goodling is willing to give it to them.

As for the Senate bill, S. 143, it is much more in line with just about everything Marc Tucker wants. And the prime promoter of that bill is Sen. Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas who should be designated as Republican traitor number one. It is hard to believe that a so-called Republican can be so blind to the totalitarian nature of the Workforce Development Act of 1995. A Report from the Committee on Labor and Human Resources, summarizes S. 143 as follows:

TITLE I

State Systems—Statewide work force development systems are established through a single allotment of funds to each State. A minimum of 25 percent of the funds are for work force employment activities, such as creating one-stop career centers or providing job training.

Work force employment activities are to be planned and administered under the authority of the Governor. A minimum of 25 percent of the funds are for work force education activities, including vocational and adult education. Work force education activities are to be planned and administered under the authority of the State Educational Agency.

The remaining 50 percent of the funds are to be used for any work force employment or education activities as a State decides.... The decision to allocate funds from this "flex account" is made through a collaborative process involving, among others, the Governor, the State educational agency, and the private sector….

State goals and benchmarks are established in the plan, as well as how the State will use its funds to meet those goals and benchmarks.

In addition, the plan includes how the State will establish systems for one-stop career centers, labor market information, and accountability for job placement, as described in the bill….

The Governor must enter into agreements with local communities for the delivery of work force employment, school-to-work, or economic development activities, where appropriate….

TITLE II

Job Corps remains as a residential program for at-risk youth, but is integrated with the statewide work force development system. Primary responsibility for the operation of Job Corps centers is transferred to the States, and each center must be linked into the one-stop career center system and other local training and education efforts.

TITLE III

A Federal partnership is established to administer all Federal responsibilities, including approval, of the State plans, negotiation of benchmarks with each State, and dissemination of best practices.

A governing board, composed of 13 members, will manage the partnership. The board is composed of a majority of representatives from business and industry, and representatives of labor, education and Governors….

Final authority for the approval of State plans and disbursement of funds, however, remains with the Secretary of Education and the Secretary of Labor.

Other national activities include national assessments of vocational education, a national labor market information system, and establishment of a national center for research in education  and work force development….

The Workforce Development Act of 1995 promotes the development of a new and coherent system in which all segments of the work force can obtain the skills necessary to earn wages sufficient to maintain a high quality of living and in which a skilled work force can meet the labor market needs of the businesses of each State.

Note how this plan ignores state legislatures or local school boards. The governor runs everything. This is, for all intents and purposes, a coup d’etat that overthrows the representative form of government and local school boards that are supposed to govern education.

Research Galore

Also, the call for the establishment of a national center for research in education and work force development is based on the already existing National Center for Research in Vocational Education at the University of California at Berkeley. A new center will be established by the Governing Board. Its areas of focus are to include:

(1) combining academic and vocational education; (2) connecting classroom instruction with work-based learning; (3) creating a continuum of educational programs which provide multiple exit points for employment; (4) establishing high-quality support services for students;

(5) developing new models for remediation of basic academic skills; (6) identifying ways to establish links among educational and job training programs at State and local levels; (7) creating new models for career guidance, counseling, and information; (8) evaluating economic and labor market changes that will affect work force needs; (9) preparing teachers and professionals; (10) obtaining information on practices in other countries that may be adapted for use in the United States; (11) providing assistance to States and local entities in developing and using systems of performance measures and standards; and (12) maintaining a clearinghouse to provide information about the conditions of systems and programs funded under this act.

Obviously, this national center will provide a lot of good jobs at good wages for a lot of liberal university graduates. They will need directors, assistant directors, researchers, statisticians, consultants, secretaries, and staffers producing an endless number of reports to be distributed to every member of Congress, every Governor, every school administrator. Think of all the trees that will have to be cut down to make paper for all of the reports, and think of all the computers, modems, word processors, copy machines, phones and faxes that will have to be bought. Who knows, the national center may balloon to the size of the Pentagon if it is to service the nation’s entire workforce development system.

For Republicans who believe in less government, the word less now apparently means more!

Governing Board

And according to this Kassebaum-Tucker plan all power over American education will reside in the Governing Board. The committee report says:

The Work Force Development Partnership will be headed by a Governing Board composed of 13 members, including 7 representatives of business and industry, 2 representatives of labor and workers, 1 representative of adult education providers, 1 representative of vocational education providers, and 2 Governors, appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate. The Governing Board shall be appointed not later than September 30, 1996.

The duties of the Governing Board include: (1) Overseeing the development of a national labor market information system and job placement accountability system. (2) Establishing model benchmarks, taking into account existing work force development benchmark efforts at the State level. (3) Negotiating benchmarks with the States. (4) Reviewing and approving State plans. (5) Reviewing reports on the States’ progress toward their benchmarks. (6) Preparing and submitting an annual report to Congress on the absolute and relative performance of States’ progress toward their benchmarks. (7) Awarding incentive grants. (8) Issuing sanctions. (9) Disseminating information on best practices. (10) Performing the duties relating to the Job Corps. (11) Reviewing other federally funded work force development programs. (12) Reviewing and approving the transition work plan submitted to the Secretaries of Labor and Education. (13) Overseeing all activities of the Federal partnership.

Benchmarks Equal Outcomes

What are "benchmarks," about which the Governing Board will be so concerned? Benchmark is the new word for outcome. Since the lawmakers are concerned that the American people might find out that the Tucker plan is simply another version of Outcome-Based Education, they’ve decided to eliminate any terminology which might produce widespread parental and conservative opposition. Here’s how the lawmakers define benchmarks:

This act will require States to measure and report annually on benchmarks—measurable indicators of the progress the State has set out to achieve in meeting broad work force development goals related to employment, education, and earning gains.

Benchmarks related to employment and earning gains include, at a minimum, placement and retention in unsubsidized employment for one year, and increased earnings for participants. Benchmarks related to education include, at a minimum, student mastery of certain skills, including: academic knowledge and work readiness skills; occupational and industry-recognized skills according to skill proficiencies for students in career preparation programs; placement in, retention in, and completion of secondary education; placement and retention in military service; and increased literacy skills. It is expected that States will develop additional benchmarks.

If any further proof were needed to indict Nancy Kassebaum as the Republican Party’s leading socialist-fascist, one need not seek further than the May 20, 1996 issue of Forbes magazine in which Steve Forbes writes:

Advocates of nationalized health care are on the verge of a stunning achievement with the passage of the Senate’s Kennedy-Kassebaum bill. This legislation is portrayed as a benign way of making it easier for people to keep health insurance when they change jobs or to buy insurance if they are in less-than-perfect health. Actually, if this becomes law, it will put us on a fast track to Hillary care. Yet few foes of her socialized monstrosity are fighting what one opponent has rightly called a "Trojan pony."

The First Lady must be beaming. The enforcement language is lifted almost directly from Clinton care. Ferocious penalties litter the House version of this legislation. For instance, doctors face heavy fines if they are deemed to have delivered "unnecessary" health care services.

And who determines what is unnecessary? You guessed it—federal bureaucrats, not physicians….

The Senate bill is written in a way that guarantees the eventual imposition of federal price controls. Right now, there are no caps on premiums—which will rise big-time because of the bill’s mandates on who is eligible for insurance. Washington State, for example, has Kennedy-Kassebaum-like guarantees. Premiums for individual policy holders have skyrocketed.

As prices go up, young, healthy people won’t bother to buy insurance. The whole process will then create irresistible pressure for federal controls "to make insurance affordable." There are other flaws here. The bill blithely guarantees that mental health coverage will equal coverage for physical ailments; this is an open invitation for massive abuse. Rules, mandates and caps will proliferate.

The Senate version doesn’t even contain a provision for Medical Savings Accounts, the only hope for restoring true freedom and consumerism to the health care field.

Is this what voters elected a Republican Congress for?

Thanks to Nancy Kassebaum and her fellow socialist-fascists in the Senate, this Republican Congress will do more to inch us toward totalitarianism than any previous Congress. Does Senator Dole approve of what his fellow Kansan is doing?

Meanwhile, what should we do? We should do all we can to get the federal government out of the education and health care businesses. If Republicans really believe in downsizing government, the last thing they should be doing is voting for more government intrusion in education and health care.

Call, write, or fax your Representatives and Senators. Purchase a copy of the U.S. Congress Handbook, P.O. Box 566, McLean, VA 22101, 703-356-3572. This handbook contains all of the information you will need for access to your Washington lawmakers. They need to hear from you.

Appendix XVI

"Totalitarian Data-Gathering System

Prepared by U.S. Department of Education"

"Totalitarian Data-Gathering System Prepared by U.S. Department of Education" by Samuel Blumenfeld from The Blumenfeld Education Newsletter, October 1995 (Vol. 10, No. 10, Letter #109).

If ever proof were needed to confirm that the New World Order would be totalitarian in its control of individual citizens, the U.S. Department of Education’s recent release of its handbooks on data-gathering on students and faculty should be enough to satisfy any freedom-loving citizen. The two publications are the Student Data Handbook for Early Childhood, Elementary, d Secondary Education (NCES 94–303) released in June 1994, comprised of 226 pages plus about 100 pages of appendices, and the Staff Data Handbook: Elementary, Secondary and Early Childhood Education (NCES 95–327) released in January 1995, comprised of 219 pages and about 70 pages of appendices. Both Handbooks were produced under the auspices of the U.S.

Department of Education, the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), and the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Both can be obtained by telephone from the U.S. Dept. of Education. The Foreword for the Student Data Handbook states:

NCES is pleased to release the 1994 Student Data Handbook: Elementary, Secondary and Early Childhood Education. It is a major effort to establish current and consistent terms, definitions and classification codes to maintain, correct, report and exchange information about students.

When this effort began, the only existing national standards for student data had been published by NCES in 1974. Because student data have evolved greatly over time both in the type and format of data maintained, it was essential that new standards be developed that would reflect current practices.

This national effort was coordinated by the Council of Chief State School Officers under contract to the National Center for Educational Statistics. Those individuals and organizations involved in the process truly reflect all interested stakeholders in elementary, secondary andearly childhood education.

NCES has a strong commitment to provide technical assistance and support to the education community to facilitate the collection, reporting, and use of high quality education information. This handbook is one outcome of that commitment. It is but one in a series of related handbooks and manuals that NCES has published in the past and plans to continue to develop in the future.

The Foreword is signed by Paul D. Planchon, Associate Commissioner, Elementary/ Secondary Education Statistics Division and Lee M. Hoffman, Chief, General Surveys and Analysis Branch of the National Center for Education Statistics.

In the Acknowledgments we read:

This document is the result of the work of many individuals from around the country who generously contributed their knowledge, time, and commitment….

The handbook owes its existence to the members of the National Task Force on Education Data Elements. The task force’s Student Data Subgroup helped conceptualize and oversee its development, reviewed several copies of the drafts, and provided constant and timely assistance to the project. A list of the task force members is included in Appendix A.

The task force includes 28 members, of which 6 were from state departments of education (Mississippi, Ohio, Florida, Minnesota, Texas, New York) and 6 from city and county school districts. The rest were bureaucrats from various offices of the U.S. Dept. of Education, the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, Johns Hopkins University, Bureau of the Census, University of California, (Santa Barbara), Council of Great City Schools, and the National Science Foundation.

Bureaucrats at Work

We read further in the Acknowledgments:

Under contract from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), staff from the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) prepared the manuscript of this handbook.

Barbara S. Clements, Project Director, provided the leadership for this effort and is the primary author of the document…. Emerson Elliott, Commissioner of Education Statistics, who has encouraged inter- and intra-agency collaboration and teamwork to improve the quality of education data, set the stage for this effort. Paul Planchon, Associate Commissioner of Education Statistics, Elementary/Secondary Education Statistics Division, provided strong support and guidance for the handbook as a project under his authority. Lee Hoffman, Chief, General Survey and Analysis Branch, not only provided technical advice as a task force member, but also reviewed all drafts of the document….

In other words, a small army of bureaucrats have been working on this project for years.

The purpose of the student handbook is described in Chapter 1:

1) to provide a common language that can be used to describe information about students, 2) to promote standard maintenance of student data, 3) to encourage the automation of student data maintenance, 4) to promote the development of policies to safeguard the confidentiality and ensure appropriate use of student data, and 5) to describe how data can be maintained in a way that promotes appropriate and flexible usage by all relevant parties.

Chapter 1 also provides this revealing Overview:

Accurate and comprehensive information is needed in order to make appropriate costeffective and timely decisions about students within both public and private schools. Teachers, school administrators, school district administrators, school board members, and state and federal education agency personnel must use information about students to plan and carry out programs of learning that meet the needs of children with different abilities and requirements, from divergent backgrounds, and of different ages. School health officials and other service providers also use information about individual students to ensure appropriate services are provided to them. These information needs are being met in an increasing number of instances by automated management information systems that allow data to be analyzed in a variety of ways to address the questions and needs of the decision-makers. A management information system is effective, however, only to the extent that data are consistently entered into the system according to established definitions, data are updated and maintained on a regular basis, and information relevant for ongoing decision-making can be added to the system. This handbook addresses the importance of consistency in how data are defined and maintained within the education system.

Designing Data Collection

…Researchers from the [U.S.] Department of Education, federally funded laboratories and research centers, universities, and other public and private organizations provide insights into the needs and performance of the nation’s schools through surveys such as the National Education Longitudinal Survey and assessment activities such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress. This handbook can be valuable for researchers concerned with accuracy and consistency in designing data collection activities and reporting results of studies on groups of students.

The handbook is intended to serve public and private education agencies, schools, and other centers and institutions serving students from preschool through high school graduation, as well as researchers and the general public….

No governmental agency requires the use of the terms, definitions, and procedures of this handbook; however, care was taken to make sure that the definitions in this handbook were consistent with many governmental reporting requirements existing at the time of the handbook’s completion….

A Tool for Decision Making

The handbook identifies concepts and data elements which are used to describe and make decisions about students. Some decisions are very specific, pertaining to personal needs, vocational choices, and educational programs of individual students. Other decisions are broader in scope, concerning the planning and management of education for large groups of students….

Some types of student data are maintained because of federal, state or local reporting requirements. If federal, state or local reporting requirements are made consistent, then a single collection of information about students can serve multiple purposes.

If student data are maintained in a cumulative (longitudinal) record using consistent terms and definitions, the permanent record contains all relevant information and is easier to interpret….

Automated Database

The advantages of maintaining student records in an automated database, however, are numerous. Automated databases promote the maintenance of consistently defined information, since the computer software specifies how data are coded and otherwise entered….

Student data must be kept confidential. …Whether or not student data are maintained in a computer, all school or school district staff needing data about an individual student or groups of students must have access to pertinent information. …Teachers can analyze student performance using a variety of types of information and decide what concepts need to be retaught or reinforced.

Obviously, the purpose of the project is to produce standardization among data-gatherers so that all of the student information can be computerized and stored in a central database.

As the Handbook states:

Technical advances in computer data entry, storage, and retrieval are developing quickly, making these aspects of student records management less expensive, more efficient, less demanding of physical space, and more accessible to multiple users.

Incidentally, if you are curious about the legislation that authorized funding for all of this, the Handbook refers to the Standards for Education Data Collection and Reporting (SEDCAR) developed pursuant to the Hawkins-Stafford Amendments of 1988 which authorized "an effort to improve the comparability, quality and usefulness of education data."

SPEEDE/ExPRESS System

The Handbook also reveals that its standards are compatible with those of the SPEEDE/ ExPRESS format. (SPEEDE stands for Standardization of Postsecondary Education Electronic Data Exchanges, and ExPRESS stands for Exchange of Permanent Records Electronically for Students and Schools.) SPEEDE/ExPRESS "provides a standard format for a student record or transcript to be sent from one school or school district to another or from a school or school district to a postsecondary institution."

Confidentiality

Although lip service to confidentiality is required in the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA), the law allows information in student records to be disclosed "without student or parental permission" to:

1) School employees who have a need to know. 2) Other schools to which a student is transferring. 3) Certain government officials in order to carry out lawful functions. 4) Appropriate parties in connection with financial aid to a student. 5) Organizations doing certain studies for the school. 6) Accrediting organizations. 7) Individuals who have obtained court orders or subpoenas. 8) Persons who need to know in cases of health and safety emergencies. 9) State and local authorities to whom disclosure is required by state laws adopted before November 19, 1974.

FERPA also "guarantees the student and/or his or her parents the right to inspect and

review all of the student’s education records maintained by the school or school district, and the right to request that a school correct records believed to be inaccurate or misleading."

The Number Code

What kind of data will the system collect? The most detailed personal information about the individual in all aspects of his life. The system uses a number code for each specific piece of information. For example, codes 001 to 012 deal with the student’s name. Codes 013 to 036 deal with the student’s background, which includes Identification Number (013), Identification System (014) with fourteen subcategories: 01 Driver’s license number, 02 Health record number, 03 Medicaid number, 04 Migrant student records transfer system (MSRTS) number, 05 Professional certificate or license number, 06 School-assigned number, 07 Selective Service number, 08 Social security administration number, 09 College Board/ACT code set of PK- grade 12 institutions, 10 Local education agency (LEA) number, 11 State education agency (SEA) number, 12 U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) number, 13 Other organization number (e.g., Roman Catholic Diocese or association number), 99 Other.

In other words, Americans will be identified and numbered as never before.

Data on Student’s Religion

Under Religious Background (030) we find the following subcategories: 01 Amish, 02 Assembly of God, 03 Baptist, 04 Buddhist, 05 Calvinist, 06 Catholic, 07 Eastern Orthodox, 08 Episcopal, 09 Friends, 10 Greek Orthodox, 11 Hindu, 12 Islamic, 13 Jehovah’s Witnesses, 14 Jewish, 15 Latter Day Saints, 16 Lutheran, 17 Mennonite, 18 Methodist, 19 Pentecostal, 20 Presbyterian, 21 Other Christian denomination, 22 Seventh Day Adventist, 23 Tao, 98 None, 99 Other.

In other words, the traditional designations of Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish are no longer sufficient for the data-gatherers who want to know much more about an individual’s religious values. Note the absence of Unitarian-Universalist. I think they’re more numerous in America than practitioners of Tao.

Homeschools and Private Schools

Will homeschoolers be included in this data-gathering system? Under Address/Contact Information we find that code 056 "Non-Resident Attendance Rationale—The reason that the student attends a school outside of his or her usual attendance area," contains 10 subcategories, including 07 "Home schooling—The student is receiving educational instruction offered in a home environment, as regulated by state law, for reasons other than health." So, homeschoolers are not only included, but have their own code number: 056–07.

Private schools are also included under "School Information." Code 076 "School Administration" includes subcategory 05 "Private, non-religiously-affiliated school," and 06 "Private, religiously-affiliated school." Under "School Type" (077) we find subcategories 02 "Alternative," and 04 "Montessori." Under "Discontinuing Schooling Reason" (112) we find subcategory 19 "Religion—The student left school because of religious convictions."

Under "Non-Entrance Information" we find category 116 "Reason for Non-Entrance in Local or Secondary School," under which we find subcategory 03 "Home schooling—The individual is receiving educational services offered in a home environment for reasons other than health." Also under 116 we find subcategory 05 "Religious reason—The individual or his or her parent/guardian has religious convictions that prohibit participation in the educational program of the school or education agency, and the individual is not receiving approved instruction elsewhere." Thus, the government controllers cover all bases.

Assessment Information

Data on students will also include extensive assessment information. Under "Assessment Type" (189) we find the following subcategories: 01 Achievement Test, 02 Advanced Placement Test, 03 Aptitude Test, 04 Attitudinal Test— "An assessment to measure the mental and emotional set or patterns of likes and dislikes or opinions held by a student or a group of students. This is often used in relation to considerations such as controversial issues or personal adjustments."

05 Cognitive and perceptual skills test— "An assessment to measure components of a student’s mental ability such as visual memory, figure-ground differentiation, auditory memory, reasoning ability, and sequential processing." 06 Developmental Observation, 07 Interest Inventory— "An assessment used to measure the extent to which a student’s pattern of likes and dislikes corresponds to those of individuals who are known to be successfully engaged in a given vocation, subject area, program of studies, or other activity." 08 Language Proficiency Test, 09 Manual Dexterity Test, 10 Mental Ability (Intelligence) Test, 11 Performance Assessment— "An assessment to measure a student’s knowledge or skill by requiring him or her to produce an answer or product that is not necessarily in a standardized format. Examples of performance assessment include writing short answers, solving complex mathematical problems, writing an extended essay, conducting an experiment, presenting an oral argument, or assembling a portfolio of representative work." 12 Personality Test— "An assessment to measure a student’s affective or nonintellectual aspects of behavior such as emotional adjustment, interpersonal relations, motivation, interests, and attitudes." 13 Portfolio Assessment, 14 Psychological Test— "An assessment to measure a sample of behavior in an objective and standardized way." 15 Psychomotor Test, 16 Reading Readiness Test. Note that the assessment tests are in complete harmony with Outcome-Based Education.

All About Your Teeth

It’s hard to imagine a less-intrusive data-gathering system than this one, and it is difficult to exaggerate the thoroughness of the system. For example, under Health Conditions we find the category of Oral Health with the following code designations: 230 Number of Teeth, 231 Number of Permanent Teeth Lost, 232 Number of Teeth Decayed, 233 Number of Teeth Restored, 234 Occlusion Condition, with subcategories 01 Normal occlusion, 02 Mild malocclusion, 03 Moderate malocclusion, 04 Severe malocclusion. 235 Gingival (Gum) Condition, with subcategories  01 Normal, 02 Mild deviation, 03 Moderate deviation, 04 Severe deviation. 236 Oral Soft Tissue Condition, with subcategories 01 Normal, 02 Mild deviation, 03 Moderate deviation, 04 Severe deviation. 237 Dental Prosthetics, and Orthodontic Appliances.

Why all of this interest in teeth? Will the schools be offering dental services at state expense?

Or is the information for the purposes of identification in case your face is smashed to a pulp by a guard in one of their concentration camps for the politically incorrect? But by then every individual will probably be microchipped, bar coded, tattooed or tagged. Are we being paranoid?

Were Jews in Germany in 1933 paranoid? Were anticommunist Russians in 1917 paranoid?

Medical Data

Medical information will also include Maternal and Pre-Natal Condition, Conditions at Birth, Health History, described as: "A record of an individual’s afflictions, conditions, injuries,  accidents, treatments, and procedures"; Medical Evaluations, Disabling Conditions, Medical Laboratory Tests, Immunizations, Limitations on School Activities, Health Care Provider, and Other Health Information— "Information about an individual’s medical or health requirements that are not otherwise addressed above."

Under category 322 Student Support Service Type, we read, "Type of related or ancillary services provided to an individual or a group of individuals within the formal educational system or offered by an outside agency which provides non-instructional services to support the general welfare of students. This includes physical and emotional health, the ability to select an appropriate course of study, admission to appropriate educational programs, and the ability to adjust to and remain in school through the completion of programs. In serving a student with an identified disability, related services include developmental, corrective, or supportive services required to ensure that the individual benefits from special education." There are 39 subcategories under category 322.

Individual Health Plan

Code number 331 refers to Service Provider Type— "The qualified individual or licensed organization (if licensing is necessary) responsible for serving the student." Subcategory 02 refers to Health nurse— "Certified, licensed, registered nurse or nurse practitioner who provides any of the following services: 1) case finding activities to include health appraisal, screening for developmental maturational/milestones, vision and hearing acuity, speech, dental deviations, growth, and nutritional disorders; 2) nursing care procedures that include immunization, medication- monitoring and administration, nursing assessment, and procedures related to the health impaired student’s Individual Health Plan (IHP); 3) care coordination and outreach to children who do not otherwise receive preventive health care, follow-ups to assure referral completion, home visits for follow-up planning or home environment assessment, and interim prenatal or family planning and monitoring; 4) patient/student counseling or instruction to include nursing assessment, counseling, and anticipatory guidance to maintain wellness or provide assistance for identified health problems or concerns.

Socialized Medicine Via Education

Obviously, the health provision aspects of public education are to be expanded exponentially.

If the liberals can’t get socialized medicine through the health care system, they’ll get it  through the education system.

Subcategory 03 Social worker reads: "Certified, licensed, or otherwise qualified professional who provides the following services: 1) preparing a social or developmental history on a student with disabilities; 2) group and individual counseling with a student and his or her family; 3) working with those problems in a student’s living situation (home, school, and community) that affect adjustment in school; 4) mobilizing school and community resources in order to enable the student to receive maximum benefit from his or her educational program; and 5) other related services as necessary."

Serviced to Death

What kind of individual will emerge from an "education" system as all-encompassing and suffocating as this one? American children will be serviced to death by their government which will surround them with teachers and specialists tormenting them in subtle, abusive ways with endless tests, emotional probing and strip searching, and required politically correct performances to indicate, in Bill Spady’s words, "visionary higher-order exit outcomes." This is a system designed to turn every healthy youngster that enters it into an academically crippled, emotionally damaged adult.

Subcategory 04 Psychologist reads: "Certified, licensed, or otherwise qualified professional who provides the following services: 1) administering psychological and educational tests, and other assessment procedures; 2) interpreting assessment results; 3) obtaining, integrating, and interpreting information about student behavior and conditions relating to learning; 4) consulting with other staff members in planning school programs to meet the special needs of students as indicated by psychological tests, interviews, and behavioral evaluations; 5) planning and managing a program of psychological services, including psychological counseling for students and parents."

Subcategory 05 Counselor reads: "A staff member responsible for guiding individuals, families, groups and communities by assisting them in problem-solving, decision-making, discovering meaning, and articulating goals related to personal, educational, and career development."

How many guidance counselors that you know can help anyone, let alone a student,

"discover meaning"? What a joke all of this is.

Do We Need This?

We are told that the government needs all of this incredibly detailed information so that effective decisions can be made for the student by bureaucrats, teachers, administrators, and others on the government’s payroll. But what it all adds up to is a tool of behavioral control and management of the American population by the controlling elite. The government of a free people does not go about creating the most detailed and thorough personal dossier on each citizen from date of birth to be stored in government computers on the pretext that it is needed to provide that citizen with an education.

When I attended public school as a child in New York City in the early 1930s, all they needed was my name, address, date of birth, and parents’ names. That was it. And it was all written by hand on a card. Your entire school record was on a single card with your final grades for each subject for each year. That’s the way it ought to be today.

As for the Staff Handbook, it calls for the same kind of thorough biographical data as outlined in the Student Handbook such as race, religion, ethnicity, plus extensive data on educational background, professional development, credentialing, employment, job and course assignments, and evaluations. If you add to this the data in the teacher’s file when he or she was a student, you have an incredibly detailed profile of that individual. In Chapter 1 of the Staff Handbook, we read:

Education agencies and institutions maintain information about staff to facilitate the efficient and effective functioning of the education enterprise…. If all data about a staff member are maintained in an automated data system, many uses and types of analyses are possible.

For instance, an administrator may need to know about the availability of human resources to initiate a new program. Information about the background, educational and professional qualifications of current staff members could be used to identify possible candidates to work on the program.

Note the reference to the staff member as a "human resource." That’s the thinking of a systems bureaucrat to whom a human being is now a "resource" to be controlled and used like any other natural resource.

What Can Be Done?

It is absolutely essential, if we are to remain a free people, that this entire data-collection system be stopped and dismantled. It has no place in a free society. The legislation that authorized it must be repealed or rescinded or defunded. This entire system is based on the need of behavioral scientists for a detailed, longitudinal accumulation of data to verify the [efficacy] of their programs to change human behavior. Benjamin Bloom, the godfather of Outcome-Based Education, wrote in his 1964 book Stability and Change in Human Characteristics:

We can learn very little about human growth, development, or even about specific human characteristics unless we make full use of the time dimension. Efforts to control or change human behavior by therapy, by education, or by other means will be inadequate and poorly understood until we can follow behavior over a longer period. (p. 5)

That the behaviorist’s purpose of education is to change human behavior was spelled out i Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Goals dealing with the affective domain. He was greatly concerned with the need to get control of children as early as possible. He wrote:

The evidence points out convincingly to the fact that age is a factor operating against attempts to effect a complete or thorough-going reorganization of attitudes and values. (p.

The evidence collected thus far suggests that a single hour of classroom activity under certain conditions may bring about a major reorganization in cognitive as well as affective behaviors. We are of the opinion that this will prove to be a most fruitful area of research in connection with the affective domain. (p. 88)

And in Stability and Change in Human Characteristics, Bloom wrote:

We believe that the early environment is of crucial importance for three reasons. The first is based on the very rapid growth of selected characteristics in the early years and conceives of the variations in the early environment as so important because they shape these characteristics in their most rapid periods of formation.

Secondly, each characteristic is built on a base of that same characteristic at an earlier time or on the base of other characteristics which precede it in development….

A third reason… stems from learning theory. It is much easier to learn something new than it is to stamp out one set of learned behaviors and replace them by a new set. (p. 215)

The data collection system outlined in the Student Handbook will give the behaviorists the vital tool they need to hone their ability to thoroughly reorganize the values, attitudes and behaviors of the American student. God help us if this system is implemented.

Appendix XVII

Memos on Direct Instruction

January 10, 1997 Memo

To: Researchers

From: Charlotte Iserbyt

Regarding: Direct Instruction

The Christian Conscience, September 1996, commenced the serialization on a monthly basis of my updated 1985 Back to Basics Reform or OBE… Skinnerian International Curriculum (Chronological History of OBE/ML: 1880s through 1990s). I urge those of you trying to educate opponents of OBE and School-to-Work programs WHO SUPPORT DIRECT INSTRUCTION, please go to The Christian Conscience website www.christianconscience.com  and request the September–December 1996 back issues. These will take you through the important sixties and will explain with complete documentation that the Direct Instruction method is similar to the Skinnerian OBE/mastery learning method and should be rejected since animal training methods have nothing to do with education. For the life of me I cannot understand why Christian schools and home schoolers support ML/DI which uses animal training methods based on the theory of evolution (man is nothing but an animal) which they so vociferously oppose.

Those ramming OBE/ML work force training down our throats ran into so much trouble, due unfortunately only to the nasty outcomes, not due to the Skinnerian method, that they rescued their OBE/ML restructuring by jumping from the mastery learning ship onto its sister ship, Direct Instruction. They figured, and it seems with good reason, that if they presented the same method with a different label and focused on academic, not affective, touchy-feely outcomes, they could capture the approval of the conservative opposition.

Direct Instruction is on a roll—all over the country. California is looking at DI; parents were ready for "anything" after the whole language disaster. Chicago, which surely should know better after its ML catastrophe which resulted in half the freshman class not graduating, is implementing DI. Doug Carnine, Director of the federally funded National Center to Improve the Tools of Educators, in Eugene, Oregon, has written Ms. Moran, California’s Commission for the Establishment of Academic Content and Performance Standards, regarding the Center’s work with Virginia on aligning their state assessment with their standards and in developing their accountability system. What is of interest here is that Carnine, who is close to Engelmann, the father of DI—DISTAR, and who was involved in the Follow Through Direct Instruction Evaluation (1970–76), known as the "largest and most expensive social experiment ever launched," has surfaced 20 years later as a key player in education restructuring. You will be told Direct Instruction is "back to basics" and if you squawk hard enough about the outcomes or standards of learning, or whatever they call your objectives,

the educrats may recommend Virginia’s Standards of Learning [Is this E.D. Hirsch? ed.] which are pretty clean—for now—but don’t forget those standards can be interpreted by the educrats any way they want, and some fine day, they could be completely changed. The problem is not the outcomes, but the Skinnerian method essential for workforce training, and Direct Instruction is just as bad, for the same reasons, as Mastery Learning, which has been a disaster in all the inner city schools in which it was used.

Last night on the Jim Lehrer Show there was a panel discussion on the sorry state of education during which John Chubb of the liberal Brookings Institute, who heads up the Edison Project (charter schools), recommended Direct Instruction as the solution to the nation’s education problems. Chubb et al., with strong ties into the international business community, support publicly funded charter schools, which, as all of you know, will be used for workforce training. The Skinnerian Method, be it ML or DI, is of vital importance to the implementation of workforce training. ML and DI are not the same thing as teacher-initiated or driven instruction of basic content material (traditional education). Curriculum in script form using operant conditioning, i.e. Programmed Learning, be it Ethna Reid’s ECRI Mastery Learning (ML) or Engelmann’s SRA (DISTAR). Direct Instruction (DI) is not the same as teacher-initiated or driven instruction of basic content material (traditional education).

PLS PUT ON INTERNET!

January 29, 1997 Memo

To: Supporters of Direct Instruction

From: Charlotte Iserbyt

Regarding: The Role of Siegfried Engelmann, developer of DISTAR/Reading Mastery, in teacher training for federally funded ECRI (Skinnerian Mastery Learning) On April 12, 1980 the Maine Facilitator Center (National Diffusion Network) held a conference to train teachers in Ethna Reid’s mastery learning program known as "The Exemplary Center for Reading Instruction." A teacher friend of mine gave me the 125-page teacher training manual used at the conference.

Although I had always suspected that Engelmann’s DISTAR/Reading Mastery was in some way connected to the ECRI program since the techniques were similar, I was unable to make a direct connection. When I first read the training manual ten years ago, I did not know who Engelmann was so his name meant nothing to me. Now that I know who he is, you can imagine how shocked and sickened I was to find him referenced in Reid’s rat lab

A–92 training manual. My worst suspicions regarding DI/Reading Mastery have been confirmed.

One of the many references follows:

BASIC PRINCIPLES OF BEHAVIOR MANAGEMENT

Until recent years, the study of human behavior was thought to elude careful analysis.

However, during the last three decades, scientific techniques have been developed for the study of behavior which show that behavioral processes are based upon exact principles. In applying these principles to teaching, Becker, Engelmann, and Thomas stated:

The experimental study of events that make learning happen has produced consistent findings that can provide the teacher with a systematic basis for doing her job. Events occurring before and after a child makes a response have been shown to be critical in determining when and where that response will occur again. Environmental events that influence responding are called stimuli. A teacher accomplishes a teaching objective by effectively arranging the occurrence of stimulus events for the child—that is, by controlling when and how she talks, praises, shows things, and prompts responses.

Teaching is further described as a three-step process, written S-R-S

(S) The teacher presents preceding stimuli (signal)

(R) The child responds

(R) The teacher presents following stimulus (consequence)

This Model for Direct Teaching can be shown thus:

S (Preceding Stimuli);

R (Pupil Response); and

S (Consequent Stimuli)

Reference #8, Becker, Engelmann, and Thomas, Teaching: A Course in Applied Psychology (Science Research Associates, Inc.: Chicago, 1971), p.1. DISTAR/Reading Mastery is being used in the Houston public schools and is being touted as the most successful curriculum around by conservative groups. It is also being promoted by the multi-national corporations and John Chubb who support charter schools for workforce training.

January 30, 1997 Memo

To: Supporters of Direct Instruction

From: Charlotte Iserbyt

Forces for Change in the Primary Schools 1980 (High Scope Press High Scope Educational Research Foundation: Ypsilanti, MI, 1980), pp.81–82, identifies Douglas Carnine as "Director of Follow Through (FT) Direct Instruction Model, University of Oregon, Department of Special Education." The FT program was a longitudinal educational experiment aimed at finding effective methods for educating disadvantaged children.

Doug Carnine’s Dec. 11, 1996 letter to Ms. Ellen Moran, State of California, Commission for the Establishment of Academic Content and Performance Standards, is written on the A–93

National Center to Improve the Tools of Educators letterhead which also says in fine print "To address the Quality of Technology, Media and Materials for Students with Diverse Learning Needs, funded by the U.S. Office of Special Education Programs." Carnine’s letter to Moran stated that "the Center is working closely with the VA Dept. of Education and State Board on aligning their state assessment with their standards and in developing their accountability system…. NCITE is also preparing informal assessment benchmarks for first and second grade in math and language arts that schools can volunteer to use before the formal assessment begins in grade 3. Our center is willing to make these and other materials we develop for Virginia available to the Commission without charge."

DISTAR/Reading Mastery is being promoted as an alternative to Whole Language reading instruction. Even if one doesn’t object to Skinnerian behavior modification/operant conditioning/animal training being used on children, doesn’t it make sense to question whether one wants their perfectly normal children subjected to a program designed for disadvantaged children (10-15% of students). Many critics of Skinnerian training programs have gone even further and suggested that it was unethical to use disadvantaged children for experimentation, such as was done with the "Follow Through" program in the late sixties.

I have before me a study entitled Educational Outcomes and Indicators for Students Completing School, from the National Center on Educational Outcomes, The College of Education, University of Minnesota, in collaboration with St. Cloud State University and National Association of State Directors of Special Education, 1993, which says: "The National Center on Educational Outcomes (NCEO) is working with federal and state agencies to facilitate and enhance the collection and use of data on educational outcomes for students with disabilities. In doing so, it has taken an inclusive approach: Identifying a conceptual model of outcomes that applies to ALL students, not just to students with disabilities."

Is this what the "deliberate dumbing down" of America is all about? All children are considered to have disabilities and are categorized as special education? All children will have an individualized education plan? All children will be taught using Skinnerian behavioral psychology, be it mastery learning/OBE or Direct Instruction/DISTAR/Reading Mastery?

Although the Evaluation of Follow Through cited some academic and self-esteem gains at some sites due to the use of the Direct Instruction model, it would have been virtually impossible for these gains not to have been made considering the open classroom, touchy-feely models with which it was compared. Had the Direct Instruction model been in competition with a good traditional phonics program not based on animal psychology, it is most unlikely it would have been able to point to any gains at all. Also, the results of the Follow Through program should be questioned as valuable to our society as a whole since they were based, again, on the results in inner city schools. Why didn’t those involved reach for the stars and try to find out what it was, in our most academically oriented schools, with high test scores, in middle income communities, that lead to success, and use that model in the inner city schools? Isn’t it elitist to suggest that low income, minority children were not capable of attaining the same results as those of their more advantaged classmates in other parts of the country? And isn’t it interesting that the model for the "disadvantaged" children (Engelmann’s Direct Instruction/Reading Mastery) seems to have been selected for ALL our children as the model for the schools of the 21st Century, publicly funded charter schools, run by unelected directors, whose purpose will be to "train" our children (human Appendix XVII resources) for the global workforce?

If the above analysis is on target, and the documentation unfortunately seems to point in that direction, it is a very, very sad day for American education, our children, and our nation.

January 30, 1997 Memo

To: Activists in States Implementing DISTAR/Reading Mastery using Doug Carnine of the federally-funded national Center to Improve the Tools of Educators, as Consultant to your State Deptartment of Education

From: Charlotte Iserbyt

Regarding: Doug Carnine’s work in your State. Proof that Direct Instruction/Reading Mastery is 100% B.F. Skinner Rat Lab education Am sending you the alerts I have been getting out the past two weeks, which have gone onto the Internet, and which you should have, if you are not on-line.

Carnine has not responded to my original January 10, 1997 alert, although requested to do so by others on the Internet. Considering the amount of information we have on his connections with Engelmann, father of DISTAR/Reading Mastery, dating back twenty years, it is no surprise Engelmann, Becker, Carnine, etc., do not wish to respond.

Those who do not understand Skinnerian behavioral psychology and its use on innocent children are making a very big mistake supporting DI/Reading Mastery. I have the entire ECRI teacher training in which Engelmann is referenced several times (absolutely nauseating quotes). I cannot find a word to express my disgust that such a dehumanizing method could be used on anyone, much less captive children in the classroom. I don’t care if it is used to teach the Ten Commandments. It is sick, sick, sick, and our good people had better wake up and stop embracing it simply because it uses intensive phonics instead of Whole Language.

Hitler had a pretty good system going for him, too; he used this method; so do the Russians.

I personally consider my two sons to be more than "organisms." I pulled them out of a Christian school that used ML for the same reason fifteen years ago.

After reading the ECRI teacher training I can honestly say that I would prefer to have my child in a Whole Language class, learning nothing, than a Skinnerian DI class, possibly learning bits and pieces of basics (which will never transfer) and in which my child’s whole being, personality, etc. will be damaged, perhaps forever. And I have fought Whole Language ever since it arrived on the horizon, for over ten years. I have written about it. One article was even published in The Congressional Record. I mention this only to convince those still believing I am possibly pro-Whole Language that I am not. I support teaching phonics with the teacher in front of the class, lecturing the children (teacher-initiated or -driven instruction of basic content material: traditional education). Curriculum in script form using operant conditioning, i.e. Programmed Learning, be it Ethna Reid’s ECRI or Engelmann’s SRA

(DISTAR/Reading Mastery/Direct Instruction) is not traditional teaching.

When Ann Herzer, a teacher, complained about going through the ECRI training in Arizona, she was absolutely crucified, strung up, and left there to bleed (by conservatives, among others). She was asked by the trainer, "Don’t you understand—we’re training the children to be ‘people pleasers’?" You should see the file I have of letters from distraught parents, reputable doctors, psychologists, etc. who came to Ann’s defense in opposing this sick program. You should see the letters from plain moms about their children getting sick; nervous ailments, ticks, nightmares, etc. Ann and the parents were threatened with legal reprisal if they didn’t shut up. Ann did not shut up.

The U.S. Department of Education has denied that ECRI uses rat training; also denies that there was ever an ECRI teacher training manual, which I happen to hold in my hand right this minute! Fortunately, a wonderful American teacher who went through the training in Maine in 1980 gave me the manual. We would never have had the entire story without her help.

Please get on the bandwagon with your Governors, Legislature, State Board of Education, media, etc. But most of all with local school boards and parents. Warn them! And don’t forget to tell them that when we have exposed Direct Instruction for what it is, the change agents will give it another name. Global economy, multinational corporations, and the United Nations must have only one method of training, and that is Skinner. The outcomes can be changed overnight; the method cannot.

Appendix XVIII

"A Human Resources Development Plan for the United States" NATIONAL CENTER ON EDUCATION AND THE ECONOMY (c)1992 National Center on Education and the Economy Additional Copies are Available for $7.50 each, postpaid from the National Center on Education and the Economy 39 State Street, Suite 500 Rochester, NY 14614–1327 716–546–7620 FAX: 716–546–3145

Preface

The advent of the Clinton administration creates a unique opportunity for the country to develop a truly national system for the development of its human resources, second to none on the globe. The National Center on Education and the Economy and its predecessor organization, the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy, have been elaborating a national agenda in this arena over the last eight years. Here, we outline a set of recommendations to the incoming Clinton administration in the area of human resource development. It builds directly on the proposals that the President-elect advanced during the campaign. This report is mainly the work of a small group of people with close ties to the National Center: Tim Barnicle, David Barram, Michael Cohen, David Hasselkorn, David Hornbeck, Shirley Malcom, Ray Marshall, Susan McGuire, Hilary Pennington, Andy Plattner, Lauren Resnick, David Rockefeller, Jr., Betsy Brown Ruzzi, Robert Schwartz, John Sculley, Marshall Smith, Bill Spring and myself. While all of these people are in general agreement with what follows, they may not agree on the details.

—Marc Tucker

Introduction

The great opportunity in front of the country now is to remold the entire American system for human resources development, almost all of the current components of which were put in place before World War II. The natural course is to take each of the ideas that were advanced in the campaign in the area of education and training and translate them individually into legislative proposals. But that will lead to these programs being grafted onto the present system, not to a new system, and the opportunity will have been lost. If this sense of time and place is correct, it is essential that the nation’s efforts be guided by a consistent vision of what it wants to accomplish in the field of human resources development, a vision that can shape the actions not only of the new administration but of many others over the next few years.

What follows comes in two pieces:

First, a vision of the kind of national—not federal—human resources development system the nation could have. This is interwoven with a new approach to governing that should inform that vision. What is essential is that we create a seamless web of opportunities to develop one’s skills that literally extends from cradle to grave and is the same system for everyone—young and old, poor and rich, worker and full-time student. It needs to be a system driven by client needs (not agency regulations or the needs of the organizations providing the services), guided by clear standards that define the stages of the system for the people who progress through it, and regulated on the basis of outcomes that providers produce for their clients, not inputs into the system.

Second, a proposed legislative agenda the new administration and the Congress can use to implement this vision. We propose four high priority packages that will enable the federal government to move quickly:

1. The first would use the President-elect’s proposal for an apprenticeship system as the keystone of a strategy for putting a whole new postsecondary training system in place.

That system would incorporate his proposal for reforming postsecondary education finance.

It contains what we think is a powerful idea for rolling out and scaling up the whole new human resources system nationwide over the next four years, using the (renamed) apprenticeship idea as the entering wedge.

2. The second would combine initiatives on dislocated workers, a rebuilt employment service and a new system of labor market boards in a single employment security program built on the best practices anywhere in the world. This is the backbone of a system for assuring adult workers in our society that they need never again watch with dismay as their jobs disappear and their chances of ever getting a job again go with them.

3. The third would concentrate on the overwhelming problems of our inner cities, combining elements of the first and second packages into a special program to greatly raise the work-related skills of the people trapped in the core of our great cities.

The fourth would enable the new administration to take advantage of legislation on which Congress has already been working to advance the elementary and secondary reform agenda.

The Vision

An Economic Strategy Based on Skill Development �© The economy’s strength is derived from a whole population as skilled as any in the world, working in workplaces organized to take maximum advantage of the skills those people have to offer.

�© A seamless system of unending skill development that begins in the home with the very young and continues through school, postsecondary education and the workplace.

The Schools

�© Clear national standards of performance in general education (the knowledge and skills that everyone is expected to hold in common) are set to the level of the best achieving nations in the world for students of 16 and public schools are expected to bring all but the most severely handicapped up to that standard. Students get a certificate when they meet this standard, allowing them to go on to the next stage of their education. Though the standards are set to international benchmarks, they are distinctly American, reflecting our needs and values.

�© We have a national system of education in which curriculum, pedagogy, examinations and teacher education and licensure systems are all linked to the national standards, but which provides for substantial variation among states, districts and schools on these matters. This new system of linked standards, curriculum and pedagogy will abandon the American tracking system, combining high academic standards with the ability to apply what one knows to real world problems and qualifying all students for a lifetime of learning in the postsecondary system and at work.

�© We have a system that rewards students who meet the national standards with further education and good jobs, providing them a strong incentive to work hard in school.

�© Our public school systems are reorganized to free up school professionals to make the key decisions about how to use all the available resources to bring students up to the standards. Most of the federal, state, district and union rules and regulations that now restrict school professionals’ ability to make these decisions are swept away, though strong measures are in place to make sure that vulnerable populations get the help they need. School professionals are paid at a level comparable to that of other professionals, but they are expected to put in a full year to spend whatever time it takes to do the job and to be fully accountable for the results of their work. The federal, state and local governments provide the time, staff development resources, technology and other support needed for them to do the job. Nothing less than a wholly restructured school system can possibly bring all of our students up to a standard only a few have been expected to meet up to now.

�© There is an aggressive program of public choice in our schools.

�© All students are guaranteed that they will have a fair shot at reaching the standards, that is, that whether they make it or not depends only on the effort they are willing to make. A determined effort on the part of the federal government will be required on this point. School delivery standards may be required. If so, these standards should have the same status in the system as the new student performance standards, but they should be fashioned so as not to constitute a new bureaucratic nightmare.

Postsecondary Education and Work Skills

�© All students who meet the new national standards for general education are entitled to the equivalent of three more years of free additional education. We would have the federal and state governments match funds to guarantee one free year of college education to everyone who meets the new national standards for general education (the amount of this award would be set at a stipulated maximum so as to avoid runaway charges for college tuition). So a student who meets the standard at 16 would be entitled to two free years of high school and one of college. Loans, which can be forgiven for public service, are available for additional education beyond that.

National standards for sub-baccalaureate college-level professional and technical degrees and certificates will be established with the participation of employers, labor and higher education. These programs will include both academic study and structured on-the-job training. Eighty percent or more of American high school graduates will be expected to get some form of college degree, though most of them less than a baccalaureate. These new professional and technical certificates and degrees typically are won within three years of acquiring the general education certificate, so, for most postsecondary students, college will be free. These professional and technical degree programs will be designed to link to programs leading to the baccalaureate degree and higher degrees. There will be no dead ends in this system. Everyone who meets the general education standard will be able to go to some form of college, being able to borrow all the money they need to do so, beyond the first free year.

This idea of post-secondary professional and technical certificates captures all of the essentials of the apprenticeship idea, while offering none of its drawbacks (see below).

But it also makes it clear that those engaged in apprentice-style programs are getting more than narrow training; they are continuing their education for other purposes as well, and building a base for more education later. Clearly, this idea redefines college. Proprietary schools, employers, and community-based organizations will want to offer these programs, as well as community colleges and four-year institutions, but these new entrants will have to be accredited if they are to qualify to offer the programs.

�© Employers are not required to provide slots for the structured on-the-job training component of the program but many do so, because they get first access to the most accomplished graduates of these programs and they can use these programs to introduce the trainees to their own values and way of doing things.

�© The system of skill standards for technical and professional degrees is the same for students just coming out of high school and for adults in the workforce. It is progressive, in the sense that certificates and degrees for the entry level jobs lead to further professional and technical education programs at higher levels. Just as in the case of the system for the schools, though the standards are the same everywhere (leading to maximum mobility for students), the curricula can vary widely and programs can be custom designed to fit the needs of full-time and part-time students with very different requirements. Government grant and loan programs are available on the same terms to full-time and part-time students, as long as the programs in which they are enrolled are designed to lead to certificates and degrees defined by the system of professional and technical standards.

�© The national system of professional and technical standards is designed much like the multistate bar, which provides a national core around which the states can specify additional standards that meet their unique needs. There are national standards and exams for no more than 20 broad occupational areas, each of which can lead to many occupations in a number of related industries. Students who qualify in any one of these areas have the broad skills required by a whole family of occupations, and most are sufficiently skilled to enter the workforce immediately, with further occupation-specific skills provided by their union or employer. Industry and occupational groups can voluntarily create standards building on these broad standards for their own needs, as can the states. Students entering the system are first introduced to very broad occupational groups, narrowing over time to concentrate on acquiring the skills needed for a cluster of occupations. This modular system provides for the initiative of particular states and industries while at the same time providing for mobility across states and occupations by reducing the time and cost entailed in moving from one occupation to another. In this way, a balance is established between the kinds of generic skills needed to function effectively in high performance work organizations and the skills needed to continue learning quickly and well through a lifetime of work, on the one hand, and the specific skills needed to perform at a high level in a particular occupation on the other.

�© Institutions receiving grant and loan funds under this system are required to provide information to the public and to government agencies in a uniform format. This information covers enrollment by program, costs and success rates for students of different backgrounds and characteristics, and career outcomes for those students, thereby enabling students to make informed choices among institutions based on cost and performance. Loan defaults are reduced to a level close to zero, both because programs that do not deliver what they promise are not selected by prospective students and because the new postsecondary loan system uses the IRS to collect what is owed from salaries and wages as they are earned.

Education and Training for Employed and Unemployed Adults

�© The national system of skills standards establishes the basis for the development of a coherent, unified training system. That system can be accessed by students coming out of high school, employed adults who want to improve their prospects, unemployed adults who are dislocated and others who lack the basic skills required to get out of poverty. But it is all the same system. There are no longer any parts of it that are exclusively for the disadvantaged, though special measures are taken to make sure that the disadvantaged are served. It is a system for everyone, just as all the parts of the system already described are for everyone. So the people who take advantage of this system are not marked by it as damaged goods. The skills they acquire are world class, clear and defined in part by the employers who will make decisions about hiring and advancement.

�© The new general education standard becomes the target for all basic education programs, both for school dropouts and adults. Achieving that standard is the prerequisite for enrollment in all professional and technical degree programs. A wide range of agencies and institutions offer programs leading to the general education certificate, including high schools, dropout recovery centers, adult education centers, community colleges, prisons and employers. These programs are tailored to the needs of the people who enroll in them. All the programs receiving government grant or loan funds that come with dropouts and adults for enrollment in programs preparing students to meet the general education standard must release the same kind of data required of the postsecondary institutions on enrollment, program description, cost and success rates. Reports are produced for each institution and for the system as a whole showing different success rates for each major demographic group.

�© The system is funded in four different ways, all providing access to the same or a similar set of services. School dropouts below the age of 21 are entitled to the same amount of funding from the same sources that they would have been entitled to had they stayed in school. Dislocated workers are funded by the federal government through the federal programs for that purpose and by state unemployment insurance funds. The chronically unemployed are funded by federal and state funds established for that purpose. Employed people can access the system through the requirement that their employers spend an amount equal to 1 and 1/2 percent of their salary and wage bill on training leading to national skill certification. People in prison could get reductions in their sentences by meeting the general education standard in a program provided by the prison system. Any of these groups can also use the balances in their grant entitlement or their access to the student loan fund.

Labor Market Systems

�© The Employment Service is greatly upgraded, and separated from the Unemployment Insurance Fund. All available front-line jobs—whether public or private—must be listed in it by law [this provision must be carefully designed to make sure that employers will not be subject to employment suits based on the data produced by this system—if they are subject to such suits, they will not participate]. All trainees in the system looking for work are entitled to be listed in it without a fee. So it is no longer a system just for the poor and unskilled, but for everyone. The system is fully computerized. It lists not only job openings and job seekers (with their qualifications) but also all the institutions in the labor market area offering programs leading to the general education certificate and those offering programs leading to the professional and technical college degrees and certificates, along with all the relevant data about the costs, characteristics and performance of those programs—for everyone and for special populations. Counselors are available to any citizen to help them ssess their needs, plan a program and finance it, and, once they are trained, to locate available jobs.

�© A system of labor market boards is established at the local, state and federal levels to coordinate the systems for job training, postsecondary professional and technical education, adult basic education, job matching and counseling. The rebuilt Employment Service is supervised by these boards. The system’s clients no longer have to go from agency to agency filling out separate applications for separate programs. It is all taken care of at the local labor market board office by one counselor accessing the integrated computer-based program, which makes it possible for the counselor to determine eligibility for all relevant programs at once, plan a program with the client and assemble the necessary funding from all the available sources. The same system will enable counselor and client to array all the relevant program providers side by side, assess their relative costs and performance records and determine which providers are best able to meet the client’s needs based on performance.

Some Common Features

�© Throughout, the object is to have a performance- and client-oriented system and to encourage local creativity and responsibility by getting local people to commit to high goals and organize to achieve them, sweeping away as much of the rules, regulations and bureaucracy that are in their way as possible, provided that they are making real progress against their goals. For this to work, the standards at every level of the system have to be clear; every client has to know what they have to accomplish in order to get what they want out of the system. The service providers have to be supported in the task of getting their clients to the finish line and rewarded when they are making real progress toward that goal. We would sweep away means-tested programs, because they stigmatize their recipients and alienate the public, replacing them with programs that are for everyone, but also work for the disadvantaged. We would replace rules defining inputs with rules defining outcomes and the rewards for achieving them. This means, among other things, permitting local people to combine many federal programs as they see fit, provided that the intended beneficiaries are progressing toward the right outcomes. We would make individuals, their families and whole communities the unit of service, not agencies, programs and projects.

Wherever possible, we would have service providers compete with one another for funds that come with the client, in an environment in which the client has good information about the cost and performance record of the competing providers. Dealing with public agencies—whether they are schools or the employment service—should be more like dealing with Federal Express than with the old Post Office.

An Agenda for the Federal Government

Government at every level has an enormous potential for affecting a nation’s human capacity—from the resources it provides to nourish pregnant women to the incentives it provides to employers to invest in the skill development of their employees. In this section we concentrate on the role the federal government can play and largely restrict our field of vision to elementary and secondary education, job training and labor market policy.

Everything that follows is cast in the frame of strategies for bringing the new system described in the preceding section into being, not as a pilot program, not as a few demonstrations to be swept aside in another administration, but everywhere, as the new way of doing business.

The preceding section presented a vision of the system we have in mind chronologically from the point of view of an individual served by it. Here we reverse the order, starting with a description of program components designed to serve adults, and working our way down to the very young.

High Skills for Economic competitiveness Program

Developing System Standards

�© Create a National Board for Professional and Technical Standards. The Board is a private not-for-profit chartered by Congress. Its charter specifies broad membership composed of leading figures from higher education, business, labor, government and advocacy groups. The Board can receive appropriated funds from Congress, private foundations, individuals and corporations. Neither Congress nor the executive branch can dictate the standards set by the Board. But the Board is required to report annually to the President and the Congress in order to provide for public accountability. It is also directed to work collaboratively with the states and cities involved in the Collaborative Design and Development Program (see below) in the development of the standards.

�© Charter specifies that the National Board will set broad performance standards (not time-in-the-seat standards or course standards) for postsecondary Professional and Technical certificates and degrees at the sub-baccalaureate level, in not more than 20 areas and develops performance examinations for each. The Board is required to set broad standards of the kind described in the vision statement above, and is not permitted to simply reify the narrow standards that characterize many occupations now (more than 2,000 standards currently exist, many, for licensed occupations—these are not the kinds of standards we have in mind). It also specifies that the programs leading to these certificates and degrees will combine time in the classroom with time at the work-site in structured on-the-job training. The Board is responsible for administering the exam system and continually updating the standards and exams.

The standards assume the existence of prerequisite world class general education standards set by the National Board for Student Achievement Standards, described below. The new standards and exams are meant to be supplemented for particular occupations by the states and by individual industries and occupational groups, with support from the National Board.

�© Legislation creating the Board is sent to the Congress in the first six months of the administration, imposing a deadline for creating the standards and the exams within three years of passage of the legislation.

Commentary:

The proposal reframes the Clinton apprenticeship proposal as a college program and establishes a mechanism for setting the standards for the program. The unions are very concerned that the new apprenticeships will be confused with the established registered apprenticeships. Focus groups conducted by Jobs for the Future and others show that parents everywhere want their kids to go to college, not to be shunted aside into a non-college apprenticeship "vocational" program. By requiring these programs to be a combination of classroom instruction and structured OJT, and creating a standard-setting board that includes employers and labor, all the objectives of the apprenticeship idea are achieved, while at the same [time], assuring much broader support for the idea, as well as a guarantee that the program will not become too narrowly [focussed] on particular occupations. It also ties the Clinton apprenticeship idea to the Clinton college funding proposal in a seamless web. Charging the Board with creating not more than 20 certificate or degree categories establishes a balance between the need to create one national system on the one hand with the need to avoid creating a cumbersome and rigid national bureaucracy on the other. This approach provides lots of latitude for individual industry groups, professional groups and state authorities to establish their own standards, while at the same time avoiding the chaos that would surely result if they were the only source of standards. The bill establishing the Board should also authorize the executive branch to make grants to industry groups, professional societies, occupational groups and states to develop their own standards and exams. Our assumption is that the system we are proposing will be managed so as to encourage the states to combine the last two years of high school and the first two years of community college into three-year programs leading to college degrees and certificates. Proprietary institutions, employers and community-based organizations could also offer these programs, but they would have to be accredited to offer these college-level programs. Eventually, students getting their general education certificates might go directly to community college or to another form of college, but the new system should not require that.

Collaborative Design and Development Program

The object is to create a single comprehensive system for professional and technical education that meets the requirements of everyone from high school students to skilled dislocated workers, from the hard core unemployed to employed adults who want to improve their prospects. Creating such a system means sweeping aside countless programs, building new ones, combining funding authorities, changing deeply embedded institutional structures, and so on. The question is how to get from where we are to where we want to be. Trying to ram it down everyone’s throat would engender overwhelming opposition. Our idea is to draft legislation that would offer an opportunity for those states—and selected large cities—that are excited about this set of ideas to come forward and join with each other and with the federal government in an alliance to do the necessary design work and actually deliver the needed services on a fast track. The legislation would require the executive branch to establish a competitive grant program for these states and cities and to engage a group of organizations to offer technical assistance to the expanding set of states and cities engaged in designing and implementing the new system. This is not the usual large scale experiment nor is it a demonstration program, but a highly regarded precedent exists for this approach in the National Science Foundation’s SSI program. As soon as the first set of states is engaged, another set would be invited to participate, until most or all of the states are involved. It is a collaborative design, rollout and scale-up program. It is intended to parallel the work of the National Board for Professional and Technical Standards, so that the states and cities (and all their partners) would be able to implement the new standards as soon [as] they become available, although they would be delivering services on a large scale before that happened.

Thus, major parts of the whole system would be in operation in a majority of the states within three years from the passage of the initial legislation. Inclusion of selected large cities in this design is not an afterthought. We believe that what we are proposing here for the cities is the necessary complement to a large scale job-creation program for the cities.

Skill development will not work if there are no jobs, but job development will not work without a determined effort to improve the skills of city residents. This is the skills development component.

�© Participants

—Volunteer states, counterpart initiative for cities.

—15 states, 15 cities selected to begin in the first year, 15 more in each successive year.

—5 year grants (on the order of $20 million per year to each state, lower amounts to the cities) given to each, with specific goals to be achieved by the third year; including program elements in place (e.g., upgraded employment service), number of people enrolled in new professional and technical programs, and so on[.]

�© Criteria for Selection

—A core set of High Performance Work Organization firms willing to participate in standard setting and to offer training slots and mentors.

—Strategies for enriching existing coop ed, tech prep, other programs to meet the criteria.

—Commitment to implementing new general education standard in legislation.

—Commitment to implementing the new Technical and Professional skills standards for college.

—Commitment to developing an outcome- and performance-based system for human resources development.

—Commitment to new role for employment service.

—Commitment to join with others in national design and implementation activity.

�© Clients

Young adults entering workforce.

Dislocated workers.

Long term unemployed.

Employed who want to upgrade skills.

�© Program Components

—Institute own version of state and local labor market boards. Local labor market boards to involve leading employers, labor representatives, educators and advocacy group leaders in running the redesigned employment service, running intake system for all clients, counseling all clients, maintaining the information system that will make the vendor market efficient and organizing employers to provide job experience and training slots for school youth and adult trainees.

—Rebuild employment service as a primary function of labor market boards.

—Develop programs to bring dropouts and illiterate up to general education certificate standard. Organize local alternative providers and firms to provide alternative education, counseling, job experience and placement services to these clients.

—Develop programs for dislocated workers and hard-core unemployed (see below).

—Develop city- and state-wide programs to combine the last two years of high school and the first two years of college into three year programs after acquisition of the general education certificate to culminate in college certificates and degrees. These programs should combine academics and structured on-the-job training.

—Develop uniform reporting system for providers, requiring them to provide information in that format on characteristics of clients, their success rates by program, and the costs of those programs. Develop computer-based system for combining this data at local labor market board offices with employment data from [the] state so that counselors and clients can look at programs offered by colleges and other vendors in terms of cost, client characteristics, program design, and outcomes, including subsequent employment histories for graduates.

—Design all programs around the forthcoming general education standards and the standards to be developed by the National Board for Professional and Technical Standards.

—Create statewide program of technical assistance to firms on high performance work organization and to help them develop quality programs for participants in Technical and Professional certificate and degree programs (it is essential that these programs be high quality, nonbureaucratic and voluntary for the firms).

—Participate with other states and the national technical assistance program in the national alliance effort to exchange information and assistance among all participants.

�© National Technical Assistance to Participants

—Executive branch authorized to compete [for] opportunity to provide the following services (probably using a Request For Qualifications).

—State-of-the art assistance to the states and cities related to the principal program components (e.g.; work reorganization, training, basic literacy, funding systems, apprenticeship systems, large scale data management systems, training systems for the human resources professionals who make the whole system work, etc.).

A number of organizations would be funded. Each would be expected to provide information and direct assistance to the states and cities involved, and to coordinate their efforts with one another.

—It is essential that the technical assistance function include a major professional development component to make sure the key people in the states and cities upon whom success depends have the resources available to develop the high skills required. Some of the funds for this function should be provided directly to the states and cities, some to the technical assistance agency.

—Coordination of the design and implementation activities of the whole consortium,  ocumentation [of] results, preparation of reports, etc. One organization would be funded to perform this function.

Dislocated Workers Program

�© New legislation would permit combining all dislocated workers programs at a redesigned employment service office. Clients would, in effect, receive vouchers for education and training in amounts determined by the benefits for which they qualify. Employment service case managers would qualify client workers for benefits and assist the client in the selection of education and training programs offered by provider institutions. Any provider institutions that receive funds derived from dislocated worker programs are required to provide information on costs and performance of programs in uniform format described above. This consolidated and voucherized dislocated workers program would operate nationwide. It would be integrated with the Collaborative Design and Development Program in those states and cities in which that program functioned. It would be built around the general education certificate and the Professional and Technical Certificate and Degree Program as soon as those standards were in place. In this way, programs for dislocated workers would be progressively and fully integrated with the rest of the national education and training system.

Levy-Grant System

�© This is the part of the system that provides funds for currently employed people to improve their skills. Ideally, it should specifically provide means whereby front-line workers can earn their general education credential (if they do not already have one) and acquire Professional and Technical Certificates and degrees in fields of their choosing.

�© Everything we have heard indicates virtually universal opposition in the employer community to the proposal for a 1 and 1/2 percent levy on employers for training to support the costs associated with employed workers gaining these skills, whatever the levy is called. The President may choose to press forward with the proposal nevertheless. Alternatively, he could take a leaf out of the German book. One of the most important reasons that large German employers offer apprenticeship slots to German youngsters is that they fear, with good reason, that if they don’t volunteer to do so, the law will require it. The President could gather a group of leading executives and business organization leaders, and tell them straight out that he will hold back on submitting legislation to require a training levy, provided that they commit themselves to a drive to get employers to get their average expenditures on front-line employee training up to two percent of front-line employee salaries and wages within two years.

If they have not done so within that time, then he will expect their support when he submits legislation requiring the training levy. He could do the same thing with respect to slots for structured on-the-job training.

Loan/Public Service Program

�© This proposal was a keystone of the Clinton campaign. Because we assumed that it is being designed by others, we did not focus on its details. From everything we know about it, however, it is entirely compatible with the rest of what is proposed here. What is, of course, especially relevant here is that our reconceptualization of the apprenticeship proposal as a college level education program, combined with our proposal that everyone who gets the general education credential be entitled to a free year of higher education (combined federal and state funds) will have a decided impact on the calculations of cost for the college loan/public service program.

Assistance for Dropouts and the Long-Term Unemployed

The problem of upgrading the skills of high school dropouts and the adult hard core unemployed is especially difficult. It is also at the heart of the problem of our inner cities. All the evidence indicates that what is needed is something with all the important characteristics of a non-residential Job Corps-like program. The problem with the Job Corps is that it is operated directly by the federal government and is therefore not embedded at all in the infrastructure of local communities.

The way to solve this problem is to create a new urban program that is locally—not federally—organized and administered, but which must operate in a way that uses something like the federal standards for contracting for Job Corps services. In this way, local employers, neighborhood organizations and other local service providers could meet the need, but requiring local authorities to use the federal standards would assure high quality results.

Programs for high school dropouts and the hard core unemployed would probably have to be separately organized, though the services provided would be much the same. Federal funds would be offered on a matching basis with state and local funds for this purpose. These programs should be fully integrated with the revitalized employment service. The local labor market board would be the local authority responsible for receiving the funds and contracting with providers for the services. It would provide diagnostic, placement and testing services.

We would eliminate the targeted jobs credit and use the money now spent on that program to finance these operations. Funds can also be used from the JOBS program in the Welfare Reform Act. This will not be sufficient, however, because there is currently no federal money available to meet the needs of hard-core unemployed males (mostly Black) and so new monies will have to be appropriated for that purpose.

Elementary and Secondary Education Program

The situation with respect to elementary and secondary education is very different from adult education and training. In the latter case, a new vision and a whole new structure is required.

In the former, there is increasing acceptance of a new vision and structure among the public at large, within the relevant professional groups and in Congress. There is also a lot of existing activity on which to build. So our recommendations here are rather more terse than in the case of adult education and training.

The general approach here is parallel to the approach described for the High Skills for Economic Competitiveness Program. Here, too, we start with standards. And we propose a collaborative program with the states and with the major cities (adding, in this case, areas suffering from rural poverty) that provides an opportunity for those that wish to do so to participate in a staged, voluntary and progressive implementation of the new system. The parallelism is deliberate. Some states and cities may wish to participate in both programs, developing the whole system at once, others in only one. Much of what we propose can be accomplished through revisions to the conference report on S2 and HR 4323, recently defeated on a cloture vote in the Congress. Solid majorities were behind the legislation in both houses of Congress.

Standard Setting

Legislation to accelerate the process of national standard setting in education was contained in the conference report on S2 and HR 4323. The new administration should support the early introduction of this legislation to create a National Board for Student Achievement Standards. The Board should be established as an independent not-for-profit organization chartered by the United States Congress. The charter should establish a self-perpetuating board of trustees for the Board that is broadly representative of the American people, including representation of general government at all levels, education, employers, labor, child advocacy groups and the general public. It should be eligible to receive funds from private foundations, government (including funds directly appropriated by the Congress), corporations and individuals. It should be charged with coming to a consensus on content standards for the core subjects in elementary and secondary education and for work-related skills. We do not believe that it should be charged with developing a national examination system, but that funds should be appropriated by the Congress to enable the Executive Branch to provide support to a variety of groups that come forward to implement examination systems based on the standards established by the Board. The Board should be required to report annually to the Congress and the public, whether or not it receives Congressional appropriations.

Systemic Change in Public Education: A Collaborative Design and Development Program

As we noted above, the conference report on S2 and HR 4323 contained a comprehensive program to support systemic change in public education upon which we would build. Here again, we would invite the states to submit proposals in a competitive grant program on the same principles and for the same reasons we suggested that approach above. Each year, additional states—and, in this case, major cities and poor rural areas—would be added to the network. Here again, most of the existing rules and regulations affecting relevant federal education programs would be waived, save for those relating to health, public safety and civil rights, and the participants would be expected to specify objectives for specific demographic groups of students and to make steady progress toward their achievement as a condition of remaining in the program. While the participants would have a lot of latitude in constructing a strategy that fits their particular context, that strategy would have to show how they planned to:

• Implement an examination system related to the standards development by the National Board.

• Empower school staff to make the key decisions as to how the students will meet those standards.

• Provide curricular resources to the school staffs related to the new standards and examinations.

• Reorganize pre-service and in-service professional development programs to support the development of the skills necessary to bring all students up to the new standards.

• Reorganize the delivery of health and social services to children and their families so as to support students and the school faculties.

• Deploy advanced technologies to support the learning of students in and out of school.

• Restructure the organization and management of public elementary and secondary education on the principles of modern quality management, empowering school staff, reducing intermediate layers of bureaucracy and the burden of rules and regulations from the state, the board of education and the unions and holding school staff accountable for student progress.

Funds provided by this program could be used for professional development, to provide critically needed "glue" support to weld together activities consistent with the purposes of the program, and to provide student services. But funds for direct student services could be used only for services rendered before and after the regular school day, on weekends and during vacation periods. States receiving funds under this program would have to provide relief from regulation comparable to that provided by the federal government.

Federal Programs for the Disadvantaged

• The established federal education programs for the disadvantaged need to be thoroughly overhauled to reflect an emphasis on results for the students rather than compliance with the regulations. A national commission on Chapter 1, the largest of these programs, chaired by David Hornbeck, has designed a radically new version of this legislation, with the active participation of many of the advocacy groups. Other groups have been similarly engaged. We think the new administration should quickly endorse the work of the national commission and introduce its proposals early next year. It is unlikely that this legislation will pass before the deadline—two years away—for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, but early endorsement of this new approach by the administration will send a strong signal to the Congress and will greatly affect the climate in which other parts of the act will be considered.

Public Choice, Technology, Integrated Health and Human Services, Curriculum Resources, High Performance Management, Professional Development and Research and Development

• The restructuring of the schools that we envision is not likely to succeed unless the schools have a lot of information about how to do it and real assistance in getting it done. The areas in which this elp is needed are suggested by the heading for this section.

[Ed. Note: This is one of the most significant reports to which we’ve had access. It calls for a complete change in our form of government, education and opportunity to pursue individual life choices. At the time of the publication of this document the following people were serving on the Board of Trustees of the National Center on Education and the Economy. Many of these names will be familiar and significant as the reader relates them to proposals for change and reform.

NATIONAL CENTER ON EDUCATION AND THE ECONOMY BOARD OF TRUSTEES

Mario M. Cuomo, Honorary Chairman

Governor

State of New York

John Sculley, Chairman

Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer

Apple Computer, Inc.

James B. Hunt, Jr., Vice-Chairman

Partner

Poyner & Spruill

R. Carlos Carballada, Treasurer

Vice-Chancellor

New York State Board of Regents

President and Chief Executive Officer

Central Trust Company

Marc S. Tucker, President

National Center on Education and the Economy

Anthony P. Carnevale

Vice President of National Affairs and Chief Economist

American Society for Training and Development

Sarah H. Cleveland

Law Student

Yale Law School

Hillary Rodham Clinton

Partner

Rose Law Firm

Thomas W. Cole, Jr.

President

Clark Atlanta University

VanBuren N. Hansford, Jr.

President

Hansford Manufacturing Corporation

Louis Harris

Chief Executive Officer

Louis Harris and Associates

Barbara R. Hatton

Deputy Director

Education and Culture Program

The Ford Foundation

Guilbert C. Hentschke

Dean

School of Education

University of Southern California

Vera Katz

Speaker of the House

Oregon House of Representatives

Thomas H. Kean

President

Drew University

Arturo Madrid

President

The Thomas Rivera Center

Ira C. Magaziner

President

SJS, Inc.

Shirley M. Malcolm

Head

Directorate of Education and Human Resources

American Association for the Advancement of Science

Ray Marshall

Chair in Economics and Public Affairs

L.B.J. School of Public Affairs

University of Texas at Austin

Peter McWalters

Superintendent

Rochester City School District

Richard P. Mills

Commissioner of Education

State of Vermont

Philip H. Power

Chairman

Suburban Communications Corporation

Lauren B. Resnick

Director

Learning Research and Development Center

University of Pittsburgh

David Rockefeller, Jr.

Vice Chairman

Rockefeller Family & Associates

Adam Urbanski

President

Rochester Teachers’ Association

Robert F. Wagner, Jr.

President

New York City Board of Education

Kay R. Whitmore

Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer

Eastman Kodak Company]

Appendix XIX

"Taxonomy"

Excerpts from a newsletter from an Education Researcher,1 written in 1980.

1980: Mrs. Margaret Oda of the Hawaii Department of Education mentioned that much help had come in Hawaii’s curriculum from Madelyn Hunter’s Elementary Laboratory School at the University of California, at Los Angeles. The Publisher of this newsletter wrote Madelyn Hunter and obtained data on her teaching concepts. In the material which she sent to us, the elusive term "Taxonomy" surfaced once again. On page 2 of "Audio Visual Materials" which she sent, two films are listed:

Item 2: "Objectives in the Cognitive Domain." In a clear and comprehensive language Dr. Hunter teaches the 6 levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy Of Educational Objectives: Handbook I:

Cognitive Domain.

Item 3: "Objectives in the Affective Domain." With remarkable clarity Dr. Hunter teaches the Krathwohl Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: Handbook II: Affective Domain.

Once again, as Taxonomy emerged, the Publisher of this newsletter decided it was time to see what the educational Master Planners had in mind for America’s children. In the material which follows, we will focus our attention mostly on the Affective Domain since space does not allow us to consider all three domains. And, because from a relevant standpoint, it is the Affective Domain which should receive our immediate attention, since that is one of the domains which [our state’s] own Accountability Resolution embraces. We have read many descriptions from many articles of Taxonomy, but after reading the plan itself felt actual excerpts were the only way to do justice to a plan which otherwise might have been cast off as a figment of our imagination. Excerpts from [Taxonomy of Educational Objectives] Handbook II follow:

The three domains of the Taxonomy:

I. COGNITIVE: Objectives which emphasize remembering or reproducing something which has presumably been learned, as well as objectives which involve solving of some intellective task for which the individual has to determine the essential problem and then reorder given material or combine it with ideas, methods, or procedures previously learned.

Cognitive objectives vary from simple recall of material learned to highly original and creative ways of combining and synthesizing new ideas and materials. We found that the largest proportion of educational objectives fell into this domain.

II. AFFECTIVE: Objectives which emphasize a feeling tone, an emotion, or a degree of acceptance or rejection. Affective objectives vary from simple attention to selected phenomena to complex but internally consistent qualities of character and conscience. We found a large number of such objectives in the literature expressed as interests, attitudes, appreciations, values, and emotional sets or biases.

III. PSYCHOMOTOR: Objectives which emphasize some muscular or motor skills, some manipulation of material objects, or some act which requires a neuromuscular co-ordination. We found few such objectives in the literature. When found, they were most frequently related to handwriting and speech and to physical education, trade, and technical courses.

…A much more serious reason for the hesitation in the use of affective measures for grading purposes comes from somewhat deeper philosophical and cultural values.

Achievement, competence, productivity, etc., are regarded as public matters. Honors are awarded for high achievement, honor lists may be published by the Dean, and lists of National Merit Scholarship winners may be printed in newspapers. In contrast, one’s beliefs, attitudes, values and personality characteristics are more likely to be regarded as private matters, except in the most extreme instances already noted. My attitudes toward God, home, and family are private concerns, and this privacy is generally respected. My political attitudes are private. I may reveal them if I wish, but no one can force me to do so.

In fact, my voting behavior is usually protected from public view. Each man’s home is his castle, and his interests, values, beliefs and personality may not be scrutinized unless he voluntarily gives permission to have them revealed. This public-private status of cognitive vs. affective behaviors is deeply rooted in the Judeo-Christian religion and is a value highly cherished in the democratic traditions of the Western World.

Closely linked to this private aspect of affective behavior is the distinction frequently made between education and indoctrination in a democratic society. Education opens up possibilities for free choice and individual decision. Education helps the individual to explore many aspects of the world and even his own feelings and emotion, but choice and decision are matters for the individual. Indoctrination, on the other hand, is viewed as reducing the possibilities of free choice and decision. It is regarded as an attempt to persuade and coerce the individual to accept a particular viewpoint or belief, to act in a particular manner, and to profess a particular value and way of life.

THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF A TAXONOMY OF AFFECTIVE OBJECTIVES

If affective objectives and goals are to be realized, they must be defined clearly; learning experiences to help the student develop in the desired direction must be provided; and there must be some systematic method for appraising the extent to which students grow in the desired ways.

…The more we carefully studied the components… the clearer it became that a continuum might be derived by appropriately ordering them. Thus the continuum progressed from [to] a level at which the individual is merely aware of a phenomenon, being able to perceive it. At a next level he is willing to attend to phenomena. At a next level he responds to the phenomena with a positive feeling. Eventually he may feel strongly enough to go out of his way to respond. At some point in the process he conceptualizes his behavior and feelings and organizes these conceptualizations into a structure. This structure grows in complexity as it becomes his life outlook.

This ordering of the components seemed to describe a process by which a given phenomenon or value passed from a level of bare awareness to a position of some power to guide or control the behavior of the person. If it is passed through all the stages in which it played an increasingly important role in a person’s life it would come to dominate and control certain aspects of that life as it was absorbed more and more into the internal controlling structure. This process of continuum seemed best described by a term which was heard at various times in our discussions and which has been used similarly in the literature: "internalization." This word seemed an apt description of the process by which the phenomenon of value successively and pervasively become a part of the individual.

INTERNALIZATION: ITS NATURE

English and English (1958) define it as "incorporating something within the mind or body; adopting as one’s own the ideas, practices, standards, or values of another person or of society" (p. 272).

…Thus in the Taxonomy, internalization is viewed as a process through which there is at first an incomplete and tentative adoption of only the overt manifestations of the desired behavior and later a more complete adoption.

…The term is a close relative of the term "socialization," which, though it is often used as a synonym...[properly means]..."conformity in outward behavior without necessarily accepting the values." They define socialization as "the process whereby a person...  acquires sensitivity to social stimuli...and learns to get along with, and to behave like others in his group or culture."… (p. 508)

English and English’s concept of socialization helps to define a portion of the content of the affective domain—that which is internalized.... [T]his definition must be interpreted broadly since "sensitivity to social stimuli" must include the arts as well as others’ behavior.

This definition suggests that the culture is perceived as the controlling force in the individual’s actions.... [O]ur schools, in their roles as developers of individualism and as change agents in the culture, are not solely concerned with conformity…. The term "internalization" by referring to the process through which values, attitudes, etc., in general are acquired, is thus broader than socialization, which refers only to the acceptance of the contemporary value pattern of the society.

…The term "internalization" refers to this inner growth which takes place as there is "acceptance by the individual of the attitudes, codes, principles, or sanctions that become a part of himself in forming value judgments or in determining his conduct."… Kelman (1958) used the term "internalization" in describing a theory of attitude change. He distinguished three different processes (compliance, identification, and internalization) by which an individual accepts influence or conforms. These three processes are defined as follows:

[1] Compliance can be said to occur when an individual accepts influence because he hopes to achieve a favorable reaction from another person or group. He adopts the induced behavior not because he believes in its content but because he expects to gain specific rewards or approval and avoid specific punishments or disapproval by conforming.

[2] Identification can be said to occur when an individual accepts influence because he wants to establish or maintain a satisfying relationship to another person or group (e.g., teacher or other school authority)…. The individual naturally believes in the response which he adopts through identification…. The satisfaction from identification is due to the act of conforming as such.

[3] Internalization can be said to occur when an individual accepts influence because the content of the induced behavior—the ideas and actions of which it is composed—is intrinsically rewarding. He adopts the induced behavior because it is congruent with his value system…. Behavior adopted in this fashion tends to be integrated with the individual’s existing values. Thus, the satisfaction derived from internalization is due to the content of the new behavior.

…The Taxonomy uses the term "internalization" to encompass all three of Kelman’s terms, recognizing them as different stages in the internalization process.

A NEW LOOK AT CURRICULUM, EVALUATION, AND RESEARCH (Chapter 6)

…The Taxonomy has been used by teachers, curriculum builders, and educational research workers as one device to attack the problems of specifying in detail the expected outcomes of the learning process. When educational objectives are stated in operational and detailed form, it is possible to make appropriate evaluation instruments and to determine, with some precision, which learning experiences are likely to be of value in promoting the development of the objective and which are likely to be of little or no value.

It is this increased specificity which we hope will be prompted by the Affective Domain part of the Taxonomy…. If affective objectives can be defined with appropriate precision, we believe it may be no more difficult to produce changes in students in this domain than in the cognitive domain.

…The securing of the appropriate responses from the individual… requires that the new cues and stimuli be received under conditions that make it easy for the individual to respond and give him satisfaction from the act of responding….

However, as we turn to the objectives which go beyond merely receiving or responding to stimuli and cues, we find that the development of learning experiences that are appropriate requires far more effort and far more complex sets of arrangements than are usually provided in particular classroom lessons and sessions….

…It is to be expected that some objectives may take several years to be reached to a significant degree…. The ordering of objectives is of importance in both domains, but we regard it as of prime importance in the affective domain.

…Some objectives, particularly the complex ones at the top of the affective continuum, are probably attained as the product of all, or at least a major portion, of a student’s years in school. Thus, measures of a semester’s or year’s growth would reveal little change.

This suggests that an evaluation plan covering at least several grades and involving the coordinated efforts of several teachers is probably a necessity. A plan involving all the grades in a system is likely to be even more effective. Such efforts would permit gathering longitudinal data on the same students so that gains in complex objectives would be measurable…. If we are serious about attaining complex affective objectives, we shall have to build coordinated evaluation programs that trace the successes and failures of our efforts to achieve them.

Achievement of Affective Objectives and Behaviors

…For any major reorganization of actual practices and responses to take place, the individual must be able to examine his own feelings and attitudes on the subject, bring them out into the open, see how they compare with the feelings and views of others, and move from an intellectual awareness of a particular behavior or practice to an actual commitment to the new practice….

What is suggested here, if specific changes are to take place in the learners, is that the learning experiences must be of a two-way nature in which both the students and teachers are involved in an interactive manner, rather than having one present something to be "learned" by the other.

A... finding is emerging from the study of enrichment of educational opportunities in the New York public schools, which has been termed "Higher Horizons" (Mayer 1961)….

The significant thing to remember in this very ambitious project is that the major impact of the new program is to develop attitudes and values toward learning which are not shared by the parents and guardians or by the peer group in the neighborhood. There are many stories of the conflict and tension that these new practices are producing between parents and children. There is even more conflict between the students and the members of their peer groups who are not participating in the special opportunities. The effectiveness of this new set of environmental conditions is probably related to the extent to which the students are "isolated" from both the home and peer group during this period of time. It is unlikely that such "separation" from the home and peer group would take place after the age of sixteen and seventeen. And it is also likely that the earlier new environments are created,  he more effective they will be.

From the operational point of view and from the research point of view, it does seem clear that, to create effectively a new set of attitudes and values, the individual must undergo great reorganization of his personal beliefs and attitudes, and he must be involved in an environment which in many ways is separated from the previous environment in which he has developed.

…[T]he changes produced in such a general academic atmosphere which is not deliberately created are probably of smaller magnitude than the changes produced where the entire environment is organized (deliberately or not) with a particular theme at work.

In summary, we find that learning experiences which are highly organized and interrelated may produce major changes in behavior related to complex objectives in both the cognitive and affective domains. Such new objectives can best be attained where the individual is separated from earlier environmental conditions and when he is in association with a group of peers who are changing in much the same direction and who thus tend to reinforce each other.

In his studies of stability and change in various characteristics, Bloom (1964) finds that the individual is more open to some of these major changes earlier in the growth period than later....The evidence points quite convincingly to the fact that age is a factor operating against attempts to effect a complete or thorough-going reorganization of attitudes and values…. It is quite possible that the adolescent period, with its biological and other modifications, is a stage in which more change can be produced than in many other periods of the individual’s career.... [T]here is an increasing stability of interests in the age period of about ten to fifteen and that appropriate learning experiences and counseling and guidance may do much to develop different kinds of interests.

Some Additional Research Problems

…[Bloom] has been attempting to do research on what might be called "peak learning experiences." …[T]he evidence collected so far suggests that a single hour of classroom activity under certain conditions may bring about a major reorganization in cognitive as well as affective behaviors…. It may very well help us to understand some of the conditions that are necessary for major changes in learners in affective objectives….

Allport (1954) emphasizes the basic reorganization that must take place in the individual if really new values and character traits are to be formed. We are of the opinion that as we come to understand this process we may find ways of helping bring about major changes in the affective domain with less in the way of trauma and conflict than now seems to be the case. Is it possible for individuals to take on the new without rejecting the old? Is it possible that programs of the Higher Horizons type (Mayer, 1961) help individuals become motivated toward higher education and the new values involved in academic work without at the same time bringing about great conflict and tension between the individual and his home?

…However, back of all the more operational and psychological problems is the basic question of what changes are desirable and appropriate. Here is where the philosopher and behavioral scientist must find ways of determining what changes are desirable and what changes are necessary…. It is not enough merely to desire a new objective or to wish others to be molded in the image that we find desirable or satisfactory…. New objectives are important, but they must be thought through very carefully, and all must be willing to pay the price if they are to be obtained.

…Can the schools take the initiative in the affective domain, or must they approach it with great caution and hesitation? We leave this problem to the curriculum makers, the educational philosophers, and the social and political forces which may or may not make certain objectives clearly desirable and even necessary.

The Affective domain is, in retrospect, a virtual "Pandora’s Box."… We are not entirely sure that opening our "box" is necessarily a good thing; we are certain that it is not likely to be a source of peace and harmony among the members of the school staff, [but] our "box" must be opened if we are to face reality and take action.

It is in this "box" that the most influential controls are to be found. The affective domain contains the forces that determine the nature of an individual’s life and ultimately the life of an entire people…. Education is not the rote memorization of meaningless material to be regurgitated on an examination paper. Perhaps the two Taxonomy structures may help us to see the awesome possibilities of the relations between students-ideas-teachers.

The Philosophy… The Commitment

…Erikson describes the achievement of integrity, which is the hallmark of maturity as: "the age’s accrued assurance of its proclivity for order and meaning. It is a post-narcissistic love of the human ego—not of the self—as an experience which conveys some world order and spiritual sense no matter how dearly paid for. It is the acceptance of one’s one and only life cycle as something that had to be and that, by necessity, permitted of no substitutions; it thus means a new, a different love of one’s parents…. Although aware of the relativity of all the various lifestyles which have given meaning to human striving, the possessor of integrity is ready to defend the dignity of his own lifestyle against all physical and economic threats. For he knows that an individual life is the accidental coincidence of but one life cycle with but one segment of history; and that for him all human integrity stands or falls with the one style of integrity of which he partakes. The style of integrity developed by his culture or civilization thus becomes the "Patrimony of his soul," the seal of his moral paternity of himself. Before this final solution, death loses its sting (Erikson, p. 232)….

A Condensed Version of the Affective Domain of the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives 1.0 Receiving (Attending)

At this level we are concerned that the learner be sensitized in the existence of certain phenomena and stimuli; that is, that he be willing to receive or to attend to them. This is clearly the first and crucial step if the learner is to be properly oriented to learn what the teacher intends that he will…. Because of previous experience (formal or informal), the student brings to each situation a point of view or set which may facilitate or hinder his recognition of the phenomena to which the teacher is trying to sensitize him.

1.1 Awareness

Awareness is almost a cognitive behavior.... [W]e are not so much concerned with a memory of, or ability to recall, an item or fact as we are that, given appropriate opportunity, the learner will merely be conscious of something.

1.2 Willingness to Receive

In this category we have come a step up the ladder.... At a minimum level, we are here describing the behavior of being willing to take notice of the phenomena and give it his attention.

1.3 Controlled or Selected Attention

In some instances it may refer not so much to the selectivity of attention as to the control of attention, so that when certain stimuli are present they will be attended to. There is an element of the learner’s controlling the attention here, so that the favored stimulus is selected and attended to despite competing and distracting stimuli.

2.0 Responding

…This is a very low level of commitment, and we would not say at this level that this was "a value of his" or that he had "such-and-such an attitude."... [W]e could say that he is doing something with or about the phenomena besides merely perceiving it....

…Most commonly we use the term to indicate the desire that a child become sufficiently involved in or committed to a subject, phenomenon, or activity that he will seek it out and gain satisfaction from working with it or engaging in it.

2.1 Acquiescence in Responding

We might use the word "obedience" or "compliance" to describe this behavior….

The student makes the response, but he has not fully accepted the necessity for doing so.

2.2 Willingness to Respond

…There is the implication that the learner is sufficiently committed to exhibiting the behavior that he does so not just because of a fear of punishment, but "on his own" or voluntarily. It may help to note that the element of resistance or of yielding unwillingly, which is possibly present at the previous level, is here replaced with consent of proceeding from one’s own choice.

2.3 Satisfaction in Response

The additional element in the step beyond the Willingness to Respond level, the consent, the assent to responding, or the voluntary response, is that the behavior is accompanied by a feeling of satisfaction, an emotional response, generally of pleasure, zest, or enjoyment.... Just where in the process of internalization the attachment of an emotional response, kick, or thrill to a behavior occurs has been hard to determine.

 Valuing

This is the only category headed by a term which is in common use in the expression of objectives by teachers. Further, it is employed in its usual sense: that a thing, phenomenon, or behavior has worth. This abstract concept of worth is in part a result of the individual’s own valuing or assessment, but it is much more a social product that has been slowly internalized or accepted and has come to be used by the student as his own criterion of worth....

…At this level, we are not concerned with the relationships among values but rather with the internalization of a set of specified ideas, values.... [T]he objectives classified here are the prime stuff from which the conscience of the individual is developed into active control of behavior.

3.1 Acceptance of Value

The term "belief," which is defined as "the emotional acceptance of a proposition or doctrine upon what one implicitly considers adequate ground" (English & English, 1958, p. 64), describes quite well what may be thought of as the dominant characteristic here.... One of the distinguishing characteristics of this behavior is consistency of response. It is consistent enough so that the person is perceived by others as holding the belief or value.... [H]e is both sufficiently consistent that others can identify the value, and sufficiently committed that he is willing to be so identified.

3.2 Preference for a Value

…Behavior at this level implies not just the acceptance of a value to the point of being willing to be identified with it, but the individual is sufficiently committed to the value to pursue it, to seek it out, to want it.

3.3 Commitment

…In some instances this may border on faith, in the sense of it being firm emotional acceptance of a belief upon admittedly non-rational grounds. Loyalty to a position, group, or cause would also be classified here.

The person who displays behavior at this level is clearly perceived as holding the value….

He tries to convince others and seeks converts to his cause…. There is a tension here which needs to be satisfied; action is the result of an aroused need or drive. There is a real motivation to act out the behavior.

4.0 Organization

As the learner successively internalizes values, he encounters situations for which more than one value is relevant. Thus, necessity arises for a) organization of the values into the system, b) the determination of the interrelationships among them, and c) the establishment of the dominant and pervasive ones.... This category is intended as the proper classification for objectives which describe the beginnings of the building of a value system.

4.1 Conceptualization of a Value

…This permits the individual to see how the value relates to those that he already holds or to new ones that he is coming to hold.

4.2 Organization of a Value System

Objectives properly classified here are those which require the learner to bring together a complex of values, possibly disparate values, and to bring these into an ordered relationship with one another.... This is, of course, the goal of such objectives, which seek to have the student formulate a philosophy of life.

5.0 Characterization by a Value or Value Complex

At this level of internalization the values already have a place in the individual’s value hierarchy, are organized into some kind of internally consistent system, have controlled the behavior of the individual for a sufficient time that he has adapted to behaving this way; and an evocation of the behavior no longer arouses emotion or affect except when the individual is threatened or challenged.

5.1 Generalized Set

The generalized set is that which gives an internal consistency to the system of attitudes and values at any particular moment.... It is a persistent and consistent response to a family of related situations or objects.

5.2 Characterization

…[T]he peak of the internalization process.... Thus, here are found those objectives which concern one’s view of the universe, one’s philosophy of life, one’s "weltanschauung" —a value system having as its object the whole of what is known or knowable.

As the title of the category implies, these objectives are so encompassing that they tend to characterize the individual almost completely.

Endnote:

1. The researcher who produced this piece wishes to remain anonymous.

Appendix XX

"The ‘Skinner-Box’ School"

"The ‘Skinner-Box’ School" by Jed Brown was published in the March 1994 issue of Squibbs and is reprinted here in its entirety.

Outcome-Based Education (OBE) has become a blight on the landscape of our national heritage. After only a few years of OBE, whole school systems are beginning to wither and die. Much worse, the children, their minds once fertile fields of intellectual soil, are even now being infected by the worm of ignorance. True learning is starved to death, as all of the nutrients of sound academic practice are being replaced with a dust-bowl curriculum that is structured to secure proper attitudes for the "Brave New World." Sadly, the only "outcome" of OBE will be a baser society, a society in which the nobility of the mind is lost to the savagery of enslavement.

But wait! Parents have been told that Outcome-Based Education has nothing to do with changing the attitudes and values of their children; that OBE will improve learning for all children through "best-practices" research. What parents are not being told is that the research base for OBE is from the field of psychology, not education; that in psychology the term "learning" is synonymous with the term "conditioning." What parents are not being told is that Outcome-Based Education is not education at all; it is but the hollow substitute of psychological conditioning or, as it is sometimes called, behavior modification.

Why is conditioning replacing the teaching/learning process in our schools? If the object is to change the attitudes and values of the young, why would "behavior modification" be used? Why not work with attitudes and values directly? Just tell the children what they must believe! After all, the conventional wisdom is that attitudes control behavior. If a child develops the "right" attitudes he will behave in the "right" manner. Beyond the fact that parents would not stand for such an intrusion as an overt assault on traditional values, psychologists know something that lay people do not. They realize that the direct approach to changing values does not work.

Modern psychological research suggests that the opposite of conventional wisdom is true. It is our behavior that shapes our attitudes, not the other way around. Therefore, to control a child’s attitudes and values it is first necessary to modify the child’s behavior. If the child has the "right" behavior, then his attitude will change to accommodate the behavior, his value system will change to reflect his new set of attitudes. It is like falling dominoes: if the first piece is toppled, then the rest will tumble after. Thus, conditioning, i.e., modifying behavior, is the perfect method for instilling in children the new value system required of citizens of the New World Order. Our schools know that changing behavior is the first domino. Remember, "the student shall demonstrate."

To understand the devastation of OBE conditioning, it is important to know its origins and how it is being used to change children forever. The lineage of psychological conditioning can be formally traced back to the early part of this century, to an American psychologist named John B. Watson. Watson is credited as the father of the Behaviorist School of Psychology. He believed that psychology should become the science of behavior, discarding references to thoughts, feelings, and motivation. For Watson, only that which was observable was important. The goal of psychology, he thought, should be to predict a behavioral response given a particular stimulus.

Further, it was a time of great debate in psychology. The debate centered on whether heredity or the environment had the most profound effect on the development of the individual. Watson believed that heredity had little or no effect, that a person’s development was almost totally dependent upon his environment. In fact, Watson boasted,

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in, and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become  any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.

Watson’s statement is at the heart of OBE. Watson became the most influential force in spreading the idea that human behavior was nothing more than a set of conditioned responses. According to the narrow view of Behaviorism, learning is nothing more than "a relatively permanent change in an organism’s behavior due to experience." Other psychologists first, then educational leaders, and finally rank-and-file teachers have been persuaded to adopt the Behaviorists’ view of education. The richness of education is thus lost, as the schooling experience is reduced to only applied learning. No longer does learning enhance the internal locus of man—it is but an external shell. The curriculum has become hollow and learning has become mere conditioning.

Three different types of psychological conditioning have invaded schools with Outcome-

Based Education and education reform. Each type has its specified purpose in controlling the behavior, and therefore the minds, attitudes, and values of our young. The first is Classical Conditioning, developed by a Russian physiologist named Ivan Pavlov only a few years before Watson’s conception of Behaviorism. The second, credited to B.F. Skinner, is Operant or Instrumental Conditioning. The third, attributed to Albert Bandura, is Observational Learning. Each of these Behaviorist conditioning approaches is woven through the OBE reforms of education to accomplish only one thing: to control attitudes by controlling behavior.

Classical, or Pavlovian Conditioning can be defined as creating a relatively permanent change in behavior by the association of a new stimulus with an old stimulus that elicits a particular response. Working on physiology experiments, Pavlov noted that each time the dogs he used as subjects were to be fed they began to salivate. He identified the food as the "old" stimulus and the salivation as the response, or behavior. Pavlov rang a bell each time the food was presented to the dogs. The bell was identified as the "new" stimulus. After several pairings of the bell and the food, he found that the dogs would salivate with the bell alone. A change in behavior had occurred.

All well and good, but what do dogs, food, saliva, and bells have to do with changing attitudes in children? Just like Pavlov’s dogs, children’s behavior patterns can be changed with Classical Conditioning. Upon sufficient pairings, a child will associate old behavior patterns and consequent attitudes with new stimuli. The Pavlovian approach is therefore a potent weapon for those who wish to change the belief structures of our children. Further, Classical Conditioning may be used to set children up for further conditioning that is necessary for more complex attitude shifts. The method is being used to desensitize children to certain issues that heretofore would have been considered inappropriate for school-age children.

One example of an attitude change by Pavlovian conditioning revolves around the word "family." The term "family," as it is applied to the home setting, is used as the old stimulus.

The allegiance to parents and siblings that is normally associated with the term "family" may be thought of as the response, or behavior. With the current education reform movement the child is told by the teacher that the school class is now the family. Thus, the term "class" may be thought of as the new stimulus. By continually referring to the class or classroom as the family, an attitude change takes place. By association, the child is conditioned to give family allegiance to the class and teacher.

An example of desensitizing children through Classical Conditioning can be seen in the inclusion of gender orientation within the curriculum. The school setting may be thought of as the old stimulus. The formal school setting carries with it a whole set of emotional-behavioral responses, or behaviors. There is an air of authority and legitimacy that is attached to those subjects included in the curriculum. This feeling of legitimacy can be considered a behavioral response. By placing the topic of gender orientation into the curriculum, it is associated with legitimacy of the school settings. Thus, children are desensitized to a topic that is different from the traditional value structure, and hence they are predisposed to further conditioning.

The real meat and potatoes of Outcome-Based Education is Operant Conditioning, or Rat Psychology, so called because B.F. Skinner used rats as his experimental subjects. A "Skinner Box," a box containing a press bar and a place to dispense a food pellet, is used to condition the rat to press the bar (the behavior). A food pellet (the stimulus) is used to reinforce the desired behavior, pressing the bar. The rat, having no idea what to expect, is placed in the box. Once in the box, the rat’s movements are exploratory and random.

As soon as the rat looks towards the bar, the experimenter releases a food pellet. After eating the food the rat resumes his random movement. Another look, another pellet. Another look, another pellet.

Once the rat is trained to look at the bar, he is required to approach the bar before the pellet is delivered. The rat must then come closer and closer to the bar each time before reinforcement is given. Over time, the rat’s behavior is slowly shaped by the experimenter; each trial the rat successively approximates more closely the ultimate behavior of pressing the bar. Eventually the well-conditioned rat will continually press the bar as fast as he can eat. Operant Conditioning is, therefore, defined as a relatively permanent change in behavior by successive approximations through repeated trials using positive or negative reinforcements.

The concept of "successive approximation" is key to understanding the use of Operant Conditioning with Outcome-Based Education. Just as for the rat, the experimenter (the State) establishes the ultimate goals for children (pressing the bar). OBE requires that specific behavioral outcomes be designed such that the children must master each outcome in succession. The outcomes are designed in a spiral fashion, such that as the child goes further in school, the outcomes more closely approximate the ultimate goals. As children master an outcome, the reinforcement is found in approval (food pellets). Another outcome, more approval. Another outcome, more approval (successive approximation). When the Skinner Box experiment is complete, our children, like rats, will dance to the tune of the State.

Observational Learning, although it does not carry the name conditioning, has been described by Dollard and Miller as a special case of Operant Conditioning. It is Operant Conditioning applied to social behavior. Observational Learning is the twenty-five cent word for modeling. There are two purposes for Observational Learning in the schools.

First, it is a method used to condition a host of social behaviors, like parenting styles, gender roles, problem-solving strategies, and discipline boundaries. Second, it is used as reinforcer of the behaviors and attitudes previously conditioned with Classical and Operant Conditioning.

According to Observational Learning, people model the behavior of those within their "reference groups." Under normal conditions, the child’s primary reference group is the family. Nevertheless, children are being conditioned with Classical methods to shift allegiance to their new school family, their new reference group. Once the new group is established, schools use surveys to gauge attitudes and then orchestrate the conditioning process through Observational Learning. Relying almost exclusively on cooperative learning (group learning), OBE reforms unfortunately use Observational Learning to establish and enforce the proper behaviors and attitudes through peer pressure and a forced "group think" process.

The idea that our schools are not dealing in attitudes and values is ludicrous. The psychologists have ripped the schools from parents and teachers alike. Their only objective is to create children who may look different, but behave the same, think the same, and believe the same. They shall create in each child the "perfect child." Like John B. Watson, they shall create children as they see fit. They shall do it with conditioning, not teaching. Is it any wonder that our schools are failing to educate children when we use rats as the example of exemplary learning? Welcome to the "Brave New World." Welcome to the "SKINNER BOX SCHOOL."

"Status of Internationalization of Education"

"Status of Internationalization of Education" by Charlotte Iserbyt originally appeared in The Christian Conscience (March 1998) and is printed here in its entirety with updates to reflect more recent events.

Those participating in the Direct Instruction (DI)/Core Knowledge (CK) debate on an anti-education reform Internet discussion loop or elsewhere may wish to step back and take a look at the big picture, without which none of the myriad components of restructuring can be fairly discussed or judged. At present it seems that some very sincere people, who have done excellent work in the past, have a severe case of tunnel vision. They must get themselves out of the tunnel in order to survey the landscape.

Ingredients in the recipe

The recipe for the international curriculum/workforce training agenda calls for implementation of the following components. (Noted after each component in italics is the status of each agenda item, i.e., whether or not the component[s] has/have been accomplished.)

(1) Federal/International Control of Education. The creation of the U.S. Department of Education in 1978 established the official link between U.S. education and all the international agencies and Ministries of Education which answer to the United Nations and its lifelong learning agenda. (Done.)

(2) Passage of Goals 2000 (done), STW Opportunities Act (done), Careers Act.

(Done.)

(3) Funding. Federal government funding of the instructional method, computers, curriculum, national assessment, and workforce training. All funding is now in place with the exception of pending Senate passage of the CAREERS Act and pending Senate passage of the Reading Excellence Act (the international Mastery Learning/Direct Instruction method).

Professor S. Alan Cohen, Associate Director of the Center for Outcome-Based Education at the University of San Francisco, said (at a conference on Mastery Learning sponsored by the Maine Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, May 13, 1983, at Saco, Maine): "In 1976 Block and Burns published in AERA research around the world on mastery learning. UNESCO committed to ML all over the world…. [We] have evaluated data worldwide." (Funding for all of the above is now in place due to the pounding of the last nails in the coffin: passage of the CAREERS Act and the Reading Excellence Act in late 1998.)

(4) Skinnerian Method. Direct Instruction/Mastery Learning/OBE are necessary for global workforce training which is outcome, results, performance-based training—not education. Education has not been performance-based, traditionally—with the exception of the arts—since traditional education deals with the intellect, not just knee-jerk muscle movements based on Pavlov and B.F. Skinner’s stimulus-response (S-R-S). The computer has all the bells (rewards) and whistles (punishments) to achieve OBE’s standards in the academic, workforce, and value change areas. The new label for the old OBE is now "standards-based education." Anyone out there who knows of an even newer label, please let me know. (Done when Senate approved Reading Excellence Act.)

(5) Sequential Core Curriculum. The Texas Alternative Document(TAD) and E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Sequence, in conjunction with scripted curricula such as DISTAR, ECRI, or SUCCESS FOR ALL—which specify exactly what is to be taught, how it is to be taught, and when it is to be taught—are good examples of what could be used. The TAD could provide the framework for the national curriculum since it supports the method—Direct Instruction—and has the support of key players in restructuring, including E.D. Hirsch, Chester Finn, etc.

If subject (content) is not specific and sequential, students’ performance is difficult to "measure." One of Skinner’s criteria for learning is that results/outcomes be "measurable."

This type of core curriculum is ready-made for computer-assisted instruction/programmed learning. Curriculum must also be the same for all students; otherwise, international assessment using the computer will be virtually impossible. The main reason the educrats want to control private and home school education is that results from the computerized international education system will be skewed (unreliable and incomplete) if all the world’s children are not in the computer, thus denying the corporate trainers and educrats the necessary information for future planning and remediation on an international scale.

Remember, we are looking at a global planned economy. (Choice of core curriculum/framework is pending, but law requires that it be "scientific" and "research-based"—which limits the choices to behaviorist programs.)

A European Union Press Release (www.eurunion.org/news/home/htm) Feb. 3, 1998 (No. 7/98) stated:

International Conference in Akron to Explore Issues of Workforce Development....

Representatives of industry, government and education from throughout the United States and the European Union (EU) will gather in Akron, Ohio from February 9-11 to discuss issues of workforce development and the increasing shortage of skilled workers available o fill jobs in industry. The Akron Forum of Regional Collaboration to Develop Learning Strategies for the Global Economy is a joint undertaking of the United States Information Agency (USIA) and the European Commission, and will be hosted by the Northeast Ohio Trade and Economic Consortium (NEOTEC). The Akron Forum is an important initiative under the New Transatlantic Agency (NTA) which, through more than one hundred joint projects, reaffirms strong and enduring ties between the United States and the European Union….

(6) Global Ethics/Values. A CIVITAS press release dated "4/7/97" says:

"UNESCO Chief Cites Link Between Democracy and Development... Stresses Role of Values," by David Pitts USIA Staff Writer. Washington. Sustainable development cannot occur "without freedom, justice, and democracy," says Federico Mayor, director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). "Sustainable development requires sustainable democracy," he added in an April 7 address before the International Steering Committee of CIVITAS, an international consortium for civic education that is holding its spring meeting at the White House conference center. According to Mayor, "the partnership between UNESCO and CIVITAS is very important" in helping to promote the culture of democracy around the globe.... The "moral aspects" of the civic education movement were also underlined by Mayor. This means encouraging those values and beliefs that best allow for peace and freedom to thrive, he said….

CIVITAS was initiated in June 1995 at the CIVITAS Prague conference. Following that meeting, participants representing 50 nations signed a declaration pledging "to create and maintain a worldwide network that will make civic education a higher priority on the international agenda."

Participants at the Prague Conference included Diane Ravitch, a member of Hudson Institute’s Education Policy Committee and Educational Excellence Network, and the late Albert Shanker, former President of the American Federation of Teachers. Of interest in this regard is the fact that the AFT’s "Education for Democracy Project" was launched by the AFT in cooperation with the Educational Excellence Network and Freedom House (1985), and was partially funded by the U.S. Department of Education. (Global ethics curriculum, under many different labels, is in progress.)

(7) Technology which includes robotics and computer-assisted instruction (programmed learning). Mastery Learning/Direct Instruction fit like a hand in the glove of the computer. They have been made for each other. Skinner said "the computer is the sophisticated version of his (Skinner’s) box." (Federally-funded OBE/ML, using computers, in use in all schools to a different degree, but method not yet mandated. The passage of the Reading Excellence Act of 1998 could facilitate this component.)

(8) Choice. Choice in the form of tuition tax credits, vouchers, charter schools, use of public education facilities and materials by home schoolers, apprenticeships with corporations which are in partnership with government (corporate fascism), etc., will result in federal (international) control of American education. (Pending.)

(9) Teacher Union Support. Support from the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association seems to be assured. The AFT supports both Direct Instruction and Hirsch’s Core Curriculum. The NEA supports the new reading research recommended in the Reading Excellence Act. Bob Chase, President of the NEA, said in the January 1998 issue of Today’s Education, "Stop the sound and fury of the phonics vs. whole language war: we need both." (Done.)

Whole Language vs. Direct Instruction How conservatives can so wholeheartedly support what and who the unconstitutional U.S. Department of Education has funded in the past (Engelmann and Carnine) and what the U.S. Department of Education, AFT, NEA, and, most recently, the left-of-center Learning Alliance and President Bill Clinton support is difficult to understand.

The unconstitutional Reading Excellence Act, passed by Congress in 1998, will for the first time in the history of American education mandate a particular method of teaching. In order to get approval of the DI method, its use was attached to reading, which is the essential tool for learning. If the Direct Instruction method had been attached to legislation related to some other discipline, about which controversy was not raging, it is unlikely it would have passed the House of Representatives. The whole language controversy facilitated passage of this legislation—a perfect example of the dialectic method in action.

The method, Direct Instruction, will be used to teach all disciplines, including workforce skills. Direct Instruction is not content; it is method, as was the 1968 federally-funded program Exemplary Center for Reading Instruction (ECRI) which trained teachers (1968–1998) in Mastery Learning (virtually the same method as Direct Instruction). Teachers who have been trained by ECRI trainers can apply their training to any discipline (math, science, history, etc.).

Interestingly enough, Siegfried Engelmann, the developer of DISTAR (Direct Instruction), is referenced on numerous occasions in the ECRI teacher training as a developer of programs based on operant conditioning. ECRI and DISTAR are both based on operant conditioning.

Skinner said "I could make a pigeon a high achiever by reinforcing it on a proper schedule" (operant conditioning), exactly what David Hornbeck, Bill Spady, Thomas Sticht and all the education change agents criticized by conservatives, are looking for, right? High achievers in the planned global workforce economy. All of this fits nicely into Total Quality Management and ISO 9000. That TQM is based on many of the principles of Mastery Learning has been admitted by key change agents.

Whether E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge or some other sequential curriculum is used will be irrelevant. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge seems to be the choice at the present time, but who knows? Curriculum for the computer can be changed overnight. The method cannot. Regarding

Hirsch’s so-called credentials and his support of "historical revisionism," the Free Congress Foundation’s daily programming regarding Hirsch, February 1997 reads:

A History of Us: All the People by Joy Hakim and published by the Oxford University Press has initiated a great deal of controversy concerning its historical revisionism. Discussing their review of this textbook on NET’s Morning View were Allan Ryskind, senior fellow at the National Journalism Center, and Peter LaBarbera, executive director of Accuracy in Academia who co-authored a critique of the textbook in the Sept. 12th issue of Human Events. According to Ryskind and LaBarbera, the textbook reports that the deficit was 2.3 trillion dollars when Ronald Reagan left office in 1988 [Ryskind puts the deficit at $155 billion, ed.]; claims Ho Chi Minh’s goal was to free Vietnam from outsiders; blames

A–130 President Truman for China’s Communist Government; and credits Fidel Castro for improved schools and race relations in Cuba. This textbook is heralded by E.D. Hirsch, who is a cultural literacy guide, who’s trying to promote standards for school children. And yet, if this is the best thing they can do, and this is being lauded even by some conservatives as good history, then I think our education system is in bigger trouble than we thought.

According to The Jim Lehrer News Hour (September 17, 1997) Hirsch said, "National testing is a good idea, but be careful of the content." One can assume that national testing would suit Hirsch just fine as long as the content is his Core Knowledge.

One who has watched the educrats turn traditional education on its head over a period of years would truly have to be in a coma not to see a very ugly picture emerging. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to put together the pieces of this puzzle. The international education system could not have been fully implemented without approval of the Skinnerian method, and the change agents—using conservative concern over whole language—have succeeded in having the Skinnerian method mandated at the national level.

A matter of morality

There have been too few people who understand how evil the method is, and who have been willing to speak out. The noted philosopher and author Francis Schaeffer has spoken most eloquently in opposition to the Skinner method in his book Back to Freedom and Dignity.

The extent of damage to our children from bad content K–12, outrageous as the outcomes are and have been since this writer started researching education in 1973, cannot be compared to the damage to our children from the use of operant conditioning K–12. Do parents really understand that this method was first used on rats and pigeons in experimental laboratories?

Human beings are not animals; they have intellect, soul, conscience and creativity. They can think. They can figure things out. Direct Instruction or Mastery Learning do not take any of these important human aspects into account.

Those who do understand the dangers inherent in operant conditioning are naturally very concerned over the decision to mandate this method of instruction. Concerned parent Tracey Hayes, for one, comes to mind as an individual who has been very helpful to me, a researcher and writer. Many of us have read much of the medical research on operant conditioning. We have written on the subject, but we have never actually "used" the method on our own children. Tracey is valuable particularly for this reason—as well as for the fine in-depth research she has done as an opponent of whole language which she has at great cost made available to all of us. She saw what Engelmann’s DISTAR did to her own child. She has helped me enormously to understand the reality of this evil method. Those grassroots parents researching education are extremely lucky to have her input.

As for Ann Herzer, we all know her credentials as a long-time traditional phonics reading teacher and the courageous stand she took in opposing the Exemplary Center for Reading Instruction (ECRI) teacher training. She and Tracey have personally lived out the nightmare of operant conditioning and are thus in a position to speak authoritatively regarding the method. Do those who support Direct Instruction agree with Ann Herzer’s teacher trainer who angrily said to her when she resisted the training, "Don’t you understand we are training our children to be people pleasers?"

Also, as a member of the AFT, Herzer was responsible for getting a resolution unanimously approved by the Arizona affiliate of the AFT to forbid federal funding of operant conditioning programs for use on teachers and children. The late Al Shanker, President of the AFT, who was Carnegie Corporation’s stooge for many years and who supported global workforce training, tabled her resolution at the AFT national convention in 1984. He knew the Skinner method was necessary for workforce training and admitted to Herzer that he was a member of the Trilateral Commission. It should come as no surprise that Shanker’s successor, Sandra Feldman, also supports the method, this time under the label of Direct Instruction, the fraternal twin of ECRI.

Sometimes one becomes so convinced of the rightness of a message, due to one’s respect for the carrier of the message, that one can get off track. I’m afraid that this is what is happening with anti-reform researchers and parents across the nation—in the tunnel and off the track.

Those opposing the mandating of the Direct Instruction method have been vilified by those formerly considered allies in opposition to education restructuring. Those who oppose the method do so not to be contrary. The position they are taking is not primarily related to whether one method works better than another method. Our position is primarily a moral position. It is wrong to use an animal training method on human beings. Did the great intellects and thinkers of this world—scientists, historians, writers, theologians—learn this way? Your children should not have their potentials limited by such a method. Why should your children be used in this experiment to robotize the world, to train human beings to be people-pleasing, cookie-cutter citizens?

From the above examples one can see that everything is in place. The only missing component was mandating the method. Republican support for the Reading Excellence Act has handed the method to the internationalist change agents on a silver platter. The Arizona legislature jumped the gun on U.S. Senate passage of the Act by considering legislation which would implement the Reading Excellence Act in Arizona. We can now expect the same type of legislation to surface in all states, and, tragically, to be supported by conservatives, unless this warning is heeded. The fact that national testing has been put on hold is meaningless since the National Assessment for Educational Progress has received heavy funding since 1965 and has been used in all states. All that has to be done is to align the NAEP with whatever core curriculum and School-to-Work skills are selected for use, and to implement the Certificate of Initial Mastery nationwide.

What Should We Do?

Call for repeal of the Reading Excellence Act passed by Congress. Lobby against similar non-traditional ML/DI phonics legislation in your state. If possible, put your children in "good" private schools which receive no tax support or exemptions whatsoever, or, best of all, home school your children.

Oppose passage of legislation supporting tuition tax credits or exemptions, vouchers, charter schools, etc. Make sure whatever education you choose is not based on Skinnerian Mastery Learning/Direct Instruction by a teacher or using the computer. Teach your children to read using traditional phonics reading instruction; e.g. programs by Eller, Blumenfeld, Schlafly, Sister Monica, etc.

"The Thief of American Individualism:

Total Quality Management and School-to-Work"

"The Thief of American Individualism: Total Quality Management and School-to-Work" by Tim Clem was published in the December 1996 (Vol. 2, No. 11) of The Christian Conscience.

Virtually unknown to parents across the USA is the Federal School-to-Work Opportunities Act (STWOA). For the first time in American history, Government and Business have joined together to educate children. Why is this unusual? Government and Business operate together in countries such as China, Germany, Russia, Japan and in third world countries, not the USA.

Right now corporations, along with your local school system, are creating partnerships linking the Federal School-to-Work Opportunities Act with your local school district.

Understanding the TQM Foundation

School-to-Work is based on the foundation of Total Quality Management (TQM), also known as Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI). First introduced and rejected by U.S. companies in the post-World War II era, William Edwards Deming, the father of Quality, presented his theories to Japan and found himself welcomed as a national hero. Japan claimed that their social and economic turnaround came from Mr. Deming’s TQM theory. Since this turnaround,

TQM has been implemented almost entirely within corporate America in hopes to mimic Japanese successes. Americans have been subjected to the thought that Japan and other countries such as Germany are ahead of the USA in technology and education.

Education and business theorists believe that Americans must "benchmark" their schools and corporate management against the supposed successes of Japan and Germany.

Their speculation is dead wrong. For example:

...[T]he American workforce is still 30% more productive than the Japanese. Sixty percent of American high school students are more likely to attend college than Japanese. There is no evidence that Japanese students learn more in school or that Japanese adults are more literate than Americans. Japanese companies are not more technologically advanced than American companies. Japanese companies don’t earn more patents than American companies.1

Only 40% of Japanese homes have sewage systems.2 American students and workers have all been intimidated by misrepresented successes of the Japanese. We are told repeatedly that because of the greater dedication of Japanese students and workers we are losing our status of world leader. Jobs could be lost, and America could go bankrupt.

Group Think

Total Quality teaches students and workers that Americans will never adapt to the preferred Japanese methods unless we change our culture. Changing a culture requires a complete change in the way we think, a "paradigm shift." Americans willing to search "within" are giving up their personal responsibilities and their pursuit of individual happiness in exchange for a "we can all work together—appreciate one another as a group" mentality.

Quality training experts admit that telling employees they must begin an entirely new way of thinking is frightening upon inception. One chart shows the "Steps in transition management," in which a worker moves from a state of well-being through stages of shock, denial, strong emotion (frustration), acceptance, experimental (frustration again), fuller understanding and integration.3 [This is otherwise known as cognitive dissonance, a technique utilized to manipulate people into changing behaviors, attitudes, values, etc., ed.]

Therefore, much time and training is spent in self-esteem building. The employee begins to forget the discomfort they first sensed in exchange for comfort offered in group encounter sessions called "team building." Slowly, along with fear of losing their future, job, home, food, and all precious vitals, they begin to melt into the safety of the workgroup they encounter daily. This is labeled as a "team," a "unit," or "family group." This new way of thinking is called "higher order thinking skills," which implies that they have reached a new intellectual plane. By this type of indoctrination, we are volunteering the loss of our supposedly outmoded culture so we may imitate the business management style and educational methods of the Japanese.

The STWOA Grant Application states repeatedly that TQM and CQI shall be the structure of this program. At first glance, we associate the word "quality" with goodness; however, TQM does not describe "quality" in this manner. TQM defines quality not as an end product but as a "process." In order for this process to be implemented, the company must first require (as mentioned above) a total culture change, also described as "paradigm shift."

This paradigm change results in a system where all employees operate under a unified set of "values" or corporate beliefs. Workers go through hours upon hours of in-depth group training before they become a part of the TQM process. This training teaches workers that individual values can hinder the performance of their team.

Workers who question the training are labeled with names such as "snipers" or "renegades." The instructor is taught to use the compliant employees in pressuring the sniper to conform. The group then uses a process called "bringing out." Fellow employees make statements to the sniper that imply concern for the feelings of the sniper. For example, "Is there something we have said or done that makes you not want to join our group?" Or, "What would you be giving up if you decided to go along with the rest of us?" Or, "Is it fair to take us all down for your one concern?" Eventually, each employee must put aside personal values in exchange for a common value system within their workgroup.

Quality training and educational manuals state that once workers adapt to a new method of thinking, the workgroup can efficiently function as a team. Individual performance is never rewarded or encouraged. All problems in the workplace can be settled by a predetermined "Problem-Solving Process." No problem can be solved by an individual; the praise that an individual receives from solving a problem could detract from the accomplishments of a workgroup and possibly cause hurt feelings. Therefore, all the workers of a group must meet and utilize the Problem Solving Model before coming to a solution. This model systematically takes the group through a serendipity or encounter group session where methods of free discussion called "freewheeling," "round robin," "slip sheet" and "brainstorming" are utilized.

A sense of security and openness is established through a facilitator.

A facilitator can develop, in a group which meets intensively, a psychological climate of safety in which freedom of expression and reduction of defensiveness gradually occur."4

The facilitator sets the ground rules of the session. Ground rules typically include the following directions: no criticizing, no shutting out, all ideas must be recorded, all ideas must be evaluated, no preconceived solutions are allowed to be brought to the meeting. A solution must have group consensus before it is implemented. All solutions are tracked and monitored for effectiveness. By utilizing the Problem-Solving Process, TQM experts ensure that the employee and their team will be able to find ways to solve problems on an employee level, eliminating costly management input.

Creating a Kaizen Culture

TQM labels this employee level of problem solving as "empowerment." These employees are to then become a "world class" workgroup, able to compete within a "global" economy. This global economy is described as a workplace where a state of continuous quality occurs. This state causes change at a very rapid pace and only companies with employees highly trained in problem solving and TQM processes can survive. This state is called Kaizen, the Japanese word used for describing a state of continual changing where one can always adapt without hesitation or question. Reaching this level takes hours of employee group training sessions.

Therefore, TQM is described as an "evolution to bring about a revolutionary process." Quality experts state that it takes up to ten years for a company and its employees to reach Kaizen.

Therefore, TQM-based companies are looking for employees that are already "globally trained." If a TQM company could hire these Kaizen level employees, millions of dollars can be saved in training and more management positions could be eliminated, thus increasing profits greatly. If a student has been prepared in the "process," one can see how a recent graduate of School-to-Work will be met with open arms within the corporate world.

The STWOA states that all students will be adept in TQM techniques of problem solving and associated behaviors. In addition to Cognitive Skills, all students will be tested to determine Affective Skills such as self-esteem, ability to relate to others, diversity, and appreciation for other cultures. The STWOA states that student skills will be assessed and described according to the Jobs Program Training Act (JPTA).

JPTA standards are found in the federal skills catalog called Skills and Tasks for Jobs:

A SCANS Report for America 2000 published by the Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) of the U.S. Department of Labor. As in Total Quality Management, all jobs are reduced to a "Task Level." For instance, the SCANS catalog lists the various tasks of a farmer: plowing, planting, harvesting, feeding, even menial tasks such as shoveling manure. These various tasks are given a rating showing the level of skill needed to accomplish each task. This skill rating is then matched with a School-to-Work student, linking the student with a vocational career training path that continues throughout the remaining years of the student’s education. The STWOA student is then placed in a vocational apprenticeship at the local Vo-Tech School where he can perfect the skills needed for his future.

The STWOA student must have school and work-related experience with their apprenticeship program. Between the ages of 16 and 17 each student must work in a field of their training to gain on-the-job (OTJ) experience. When the student has completed both schooling and OTJ requirements, he is given a certificate that enables him to be placed in the workforce. Prior to and after STWOA training, the student may allow the state to make available his personal scores and records to potential employers. Potential employers will then search the STWOA computer database for students meeting job requirements and test scores necessary for employment.

The dangers of the federal STWOA are frightening. Just think: the lifelong vocational destiny of a student is determined by a test, and at the most awkward stage of one’s life—adolescence. Time and perseverance have always been on the side of the American Dream. We are in a country where all citizens have had the same opportunity to pursue a vocation or goal of their choice at any stage of life if they so desired. STWOA removes these entrepreneurial elements and replaces them with social engineering and captivity.

Endnotes:

1. Eberts, Ray and Cindelyn. The Myths of Japanese Quality (Prentice Hall: New York, 1995).

2. "Prosperity’s Base: ODA," Japan Times (October 16, 1990), p.20.

3. Atkinson, Phillip E. Creating Cultural Change: The Key to Successful Total Quality Management (Pfeiffer & Co, 1990).

4. Rogers, Carl. Carl Rogers on Encounter Groups (Harper: New York, 1970). of 46 Soviets visited the United States on a so-called goodwill mission. But the 46 were selected, briefed, and controlled by Soviet security organs. Each of the "friendly visitors" had relatives being held hostage at home, lest any of them might consider defecting or deviating from the official Soviet propaganda line. Their trip was paid for by the Soviet government, and among them were Soviet agents.

Mr. Warder notes that

Soviet leaders know that if peace propaganda effectively reaches the U.S. public it will result in the Congress voting less money for national defense. U.S. groups going to the Soviet Union have no such "equal" opportunity to reduce Soviet arms expenditures.11

How on target Warder’s comments have proven to be! Soviet propagandizing of the American people has been so successful that on May 9, 1989 four top Soviet officials were given the red carpet treatment by the U.S. House Armed Services Committee: "They appealed for a warmer approach by Washington and asked us to open a second front against the Cold War."12 Could their appearance have something to do with the proposed defense budget cuts?

The cost to the American taxpayer—not only in terms of the miseducation of his children, but also in terms of plain, hard-earned tax dollars—is immense. Soviet students coming here are having their travel, living expenses, and tuition paid for by our tax dollars, while some of our children cannot afford to go to college.

In 1988 the U.S. Department of State awarded $4,540,000 to various groups involved in education exchanges with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.13 This amount, which is probably the amount doled out annually, is just the tip of the funding iceberg, with large annual grants from other government agencies and tax-exempt foundations keeping the controversial exchanges afloat.

It is to be hoped that the tragic Tiananmen Square massacre of Chinese students will result in cancellation of the U.S.-Chinese student exchanges, resulting in a lessening of our budget deficit, rather than in a transfer of those tax dollars into the U.S.-Soviet education exchange account.

A Night to Remember tells of the five iceberg warnings sent by wireless to the Titanic.

When the sixth message—"Look out for icebergs!"—came in, the Titanic’s operator wired back, "Shut up. I’m busy." Just 35 minutes later, the ship whose captain had said, "God Himself could not sink Titantic," was sinking.

We have been warned. Are we, like the Titanic’s operator, convinced that "God Himself cannot sink" America?

The question Americans must ask themselves is: Why, when the Soviet Union is an economic, political, moral, and social basket case, militarily superior but internally on the verge of collapse, does the United States seek its assistance in improving our educational system? Those responsible should be required to justify their support for actions which are not in the best interest of the United States.

*The address for America’s Future is: 7800 Bonhomme, St. Louis, MO 36105.

Endnotes:

1. Bailey, Kathleen. "Disinformation: A Soviet Technique for Managing Behavior." Issues in Soviet Education: Proceedings of a Conference, National Advisory Council on Education Research and Improvement, March 3, 1988.

2. Finn, Chester E., Jr., Assistant Secretary, U.S. Department of Education, "Mapping the Common Ground." Remarks before the

American Forum on Education and International Competence, St. Louis, MI, May 16, 1988.

3. Educators for Social Responsibility, Cambridge, MA. Promotional flyer entitled "Teaching for Critical Thinking in the Nuclear

Age: A U.S.-Soviet Institute," Leningrad, U.S.S.R., July 27–August 12, 1989 and flyer entitled "Educating for New Ways of Thinking: An American-Soviet Institute," Hampshire College, Amherst, MA, August 7–21, 1988.

4. Carnegie Corporation of New York. "The List of Grants and Appropriations 1988," reprinted from the 1988 Annual Report of the Carnegie Corporation.

5. National Academy of Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, MA. Informational Letter entitled "ACLS–U.S.S.R. Ministry of Education Commission on Education," Fall 1987.

6. "Computers," Education Week, Dec. 7, 1988.

7. "NSTA to Publish Soviet Journal," Education Week, May 17, 1989.

8. Breen, Tom. "Academy to Give Soviets Computers," Washington Times, Dec. 9, 1987.

9. "New Exchange Set for U.S., Soviet Students," Education Week, Sept. 28, 1988.

10. Lee, Gary. "The Students’ Surprise," Washington Post, May 26, 1987.

11. The Don Bell Report, Nov. 21, 1986.

12. Gordon, Michael R. "House Panel Sees 4 Soviet Officials," New York Times, May 10, 1989.

13. Federal Register, Feb. 18, 1988.

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