Jan. 2008Edition 101

This is where we hope to keep you thinking.  The site does not focus on diversionary minutia.  You get enough of that  incessant spin coming from mainstream media.

Part 5: The Dynamics of Power

A Chronological Paper Trail

Appendix XXIII

"Soviets in the Classroom: America’s Latest Education Fad" "Soviets in the Classroom: America’s Latest Education Fad" by Charlotte T. Iserbyt is a pamphlet published in 1989 (America’s Future, Inc.: New Rochelle, NY).*

Education Agreements with the Soviet Union Is the repugnant act of burning the American flag more damaging to our nation’s political integrity than letting the Soviets into our classrooms, in person, on video, or through U.S.-Soviet jointly developed curricula?

One would think so, considering the extensive establishment media coverage given the flag decision compared to the wall of silence built around the Soviet invasion of American classrooms.

Maybe America needs a Supreme Court decision similar to the flag-burning decision saying it’s legal to let the Soviets teach our children and to "put up statues of well known Soviet cultural figures in our parks," as called for in the General Agreement between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. on Contacts, Exchanges and Cooperation in Scientific, Technical, Educational,

Cultural and Other Fields, signed in 1985 and 1988 at Geneva and Moscow, respectively. The media might find it impossible to "cover up" a Supreme Court decision.

Perhaps if Americans knew about and understood the deep significance of these agreements, their outrage might even exceed that demonstrated over the flag decision. They might even call for a fully televised Congressional investigation leading to cancellation of all education agreements with the Soviets—government-initiated agreements as well as those with tax-exempt private foundations.

The agreements call for "cooperation in the field of science and technology and additional agreements in other specific fields, including the humanities and social sciences; the facilitation of the exchange by appropriate organizations of educational and teaching materials, including textbooks, syllabi, and curricula, materials on methodology, samples of teaching instruments and audiovisual aids, and the exchange of primary and secondary school textbooks and other teaching materials... [and] the conducting of joint studies on textbooks between appropriate organizations in the United States and the Ministry of Education of the U.S.S.R."

What do the Soviets—who kidnapped 10,000 Afghan children and shipped them to the Soviet Union for "re-education" and in the spring of 1989 used poison gas and sharpened shovels to disperse a nationalistic demonstration in Soviet Georgia, killing at least twenty persons and injuring 200—have to offer our children in the way of school materials? What does a country have to offer our children in the way of school materials which, according to an 1987 "out-of-print" book by American Federation of Labor—Council of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) entitled Cruel and Usual Punishment: Forced Labor in Today’s USSR, holds tens of thousands of political prisoners in Soviet prisons, labor camps, and psychiatric hospitals, including between four and five million non-political prisoners in slave labor camps? What does a country which publishes children’s books for disinformation purposes overseas—and in the case of books distributed in India, portrays America as "rich, uncaring, and prejudiced," and compares us with the Brahmin caste, which is the ruling caste much resented by the disadvantaged in India—have to offer our children in the way of school materials?1

Contrary to the media’s portrayal of political change in the Soviet Union, the August 1986 issue of Comparative Education Review published an article entitled "Aspects of Socialist Education: The New Soviet Educational Reform" which states that the Soviet reform movement recommends the "intensification of ideological education." A June 2, 1986 Washington Times article entitled "Russian Education Obsolete" says in a discussion of education reform, "The specialist of today should have a thorough Marxist-Leninist training." Professor Adam Ulam, the distinguished director of Harvard’s Russian Research Center, reports that

[O]ne of the principal goals of military patriotic education is to counteract any pacifist tendencies, to teach all Soviet citizens, from the youngest children to pensioners, that they must be prepared at any moment to fight for socialism.... The determination to instill explicitly military values in the schools comes through with equally striking clarity in textbooks and manuals used by teachers.

Soviet General Popkov wrote in August 1986 in a regional military paper, Sovetskiy Voin, that [T]he schools are taking on ever increasing importance in military and patriotic indoctrination. Party documents on school reform define an extensive, scientifically based program for this work.2

In light of the above information, which contradicts Gorbachev’s glasnost/perestroika propaganda, why has our government signed education agreements calling for extensive cooperation with the Soviets in curricula development, exchanges of educational materials and the conducting of joint studies?

Why are Soviet educators permitted to do what U.S. Department of Education educators are forbidden by law to do: involve themselves in curricula development?

Why did the U.S. Department of State authorize the unelected, tax-exempt Carnegie Corporation, a long-time and well funded advocate of disarmament and "world interdependence," to negotiate with the Soviet Academy of Sciences, known to be an A–138 intelligence-gathering arm of the KJB, regarding "curriculum development and the restructuring of American education"? Is it because "privately endowed foundations can operate in areas government may prefer to avoid" as stressed by psychiatrist Dr. David Hamburg, President of the Carnegie Corporation and chief negotiator for the exchange agreement, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times on June 12, 1987? (Colonel Oliver North’s "operations in areas government preferred to avoid" resulted in a fully televised multi-million dollar Congressional investigation.)

Representative Lee Hamilton (D-IN) said during the Iran-Contra hearings that "The use of private parties to carry out the high purposes of government makes us the subject of puzzlement and ridicule." Shouldn’t he be asked why the use by our government (State Department) of private parties (tax-exempt Carnegie Corporation and other foundations) to carry out the high purposes of government does not similarly make Congress the subject of puzzlement and ridicule?

A Few Examples

A complete listing of the many shocking exchange activities taking place as a result of the 1985 and 1988–1991 agreements would require volumes. A few concrete examples should suffice to convince the reader that all proposals called for in the agreements are being faithfully and fastidiously carried out.

1. Cambridge-based Educators for Social Responsibility (ESR) project, "Educating for New Ways of Thinking: An American-Soviet Institute." Two such institute sessions have been held (one in Leningrad the summer of 1989) at which "Soviet and American educators examined classroom theory and practice in critical thinking about social and political issues and worked on recommendations and resources for improving the ways we teach about each other’s country, and on A Source-Book for New Ways of Thinking in Education: A U.S.-Soviet Guide for use by teachers and students in both countries."3

"Critical thinking" is the latest fad to hit our children’s classrooms. N. Landa’s Lenin:

On Educating Youth, published by the Soviet state-controlled Novosti Press, quotes Lenin on "thinking" as follows:

To pose a real question means to define a problem which demands a new approach and new research.... Sometimes accepted truth no longer answers as a solution for a serious and pressing problem. The school should cultivate in pupils the ability to perceive scientifically evolved truths as stages along the endless road of cognition—not as something stationary and set.

More recently, an article in Education Week (4–9–86) entitled "Are Teachers Ready to Teach Pupils to Think?" laments the fact that graduating college seniors show little evolution of alternative views on any issue, tending to treat all opinions as equally good, tending to hold opinions based largely on whims or unsubstantiated beliefs, and hesitating to take stands based on evidence and reason. Summing up a decade of research in the 1960’s, O.J. Harvey laments that very high percentages… [of educators] "operated in cognitive styles grounded in absolute assumptions—viewing reality in terms of good/bad, right/wrong, and either/or, while attributing goodness and truth to wise and all-knowing authorities."

One doesn’t have to have a Ph.D. to accurately predict what U.S.-Soviet jointly developed critical thinking curricula will look like. Do American parents want their children exposed to this type of education, especially when it will also be on computer where they can’t get their hands on it?

2. The Carnegie Corporation’s exchange agreement with the Soviet Academy of Sciences has resulted in "joint research on the application of computers in early elementary education, focusing especially on the teaching of higher level skills and complex subjects to younger children." ("Higher level skills" is often a euphemism for "critical thinking skills," or values, attitudes, etc.) Carnegie’s 1988 one-year, $250,000 grant is funding implementation of this program, coordinated on the American side by Michael Cole, Director of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition at the University of California, San Diego.4

3. The American-Soviet Textbook Study Project began in 1977, was suspended in 1979 when Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan, and resumed in 1985 under the Geneva Agreement. At a conference held in Racine, Wisconsin in November 1987, the U.S. representatives acquiesced to the Soviet insistence that American textbooks should present a more "balanced" (i.e., friendly) discussion of Lenin and should give the Russians more "credit" for their role in World War II. A.M. Rosenthal of the New York Times said in a December 8, 1987 editorial that American educators solemnly discuss with Soviet educators the mutual need for textbook revision, just as if the state did not censor every single book published in the Soviet Union and the Russians could write as they pleased. That is comedy, if you like it real black.

4. Scholars from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Ministry of Education of the Soviet Union met in the United States in 1986 and agreed to establish a Commission on Education that will be responsible for joint scholarly relations in pedagogy and related fields between the United States and the Soviet Union. Some major joint U.S.-Soviet project themes are: Methods of Teaching and Learning School Science and Math Subjects Using Computers; Theory of Teaching and Learning; Psychological and Pedagogical Problems of Teaching in the Development of Pre-School and School-age Children, and Problems of Teaching Children with Special Needs.5

5. The Copen Foundation/New York State Education Department/Soviet Academy of Sciences agreement "links students, teachers, administrators in U.S. and Soviet schools by computer and video-telephone lines." Mr. Copen declared Soviet officials are especially interested in studying the effects of telecommunications on intercultural understanding, teaching methods, and learning outcomes, and that the Soviets have assigned five scientists to monitor the project.6

This agreement should be challenged on constitutional grounds since Article I, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution says, "No State shall, without the consent of Congress,… enter into any agreement or compact with another State, or with a foreign power."

Under terms reached with the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the National Science Teachers Association will publish a Soviet science magazine in the United States. Copies of Quantum scheduled for publication in September 1989 will be distributed free of charge to gifted and talented children in this country.7

7. On December 8, 1987 the independent National Academy of Sciences pledged to help place more than a million computers in Soviet classrooms by the early 1990s.8 8. A $175,000 grant was made from the United States Information Agency (USIA) to the National Association of Secondary School Principals, the American Council of Teachers of Russian, and Sister Cities International. This grant will implement an expanded student exchange program, calling for up to 1500 American high school students to live and study in the Soviet Union each year and an equal number of Soviet students to come to the United States.9 Former Education Secretary William Bennett told the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce on January 21, 1986 that American students know little about their own history and heritage and we have forgotten that intellectual innocence is easily seduced and the price we pay is that some of our children can only nod their heads in agreement when confronted with standard Soviet propaganda.

They lack the knowledge to recognize it as propaganda, much less to refute it.

9. On March 4, 1989, fifteen Soviet teens and two adult teachers arrived in Aurora, Colorado as part of the Reagan-Gorbachev agreements. According to an article by Beth Peterson in the high school newspaper Raider Review A conflict arose when reportedly a Russian student, Farkhod (who was head of the Komsomol Young Communist League and spokesman for the group) told students in an honors history class, "You are all going to be Communists within fifty years. Just remember that every society must be ready for Communism—even America."

10. Students participated in the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts student exchange with an elite Soviet prep school deep in Siberia. The students "agreed one characteristic was more striking than any other: an indefatigable commitment to Soviet communism." One student, Horovath, said, "I think in general young people are ore committed to the Party’s ideology than to their parents." Another student, Tom Clyde,  said, "They seem to think there is going to be a world revolution any day now and the Communist Party will overtake America."10 The Soviet Union: The Only Benefactor Does our government really believe that the Soviet government is participating in these student exchanges so that their students can be de-programmed and become good little capitalists eager for peace at any price?

Michael Warder of the Rockford Institute says that "Exchanges are allegedly designed to promote peace." However, he points out that, as currently devised most exchanges are of benefit only to the Soviet Union. In the summer of 1985 a group

Appendix XXIV

"Our Children: The Drones"

"Our Children: The Drones" by Ann Herzer, M.A., Reading Specialist. This two-part article was written in 1984 and is reprinted here with permission of the author.

Part I

With taxpayers’ money through a National Science Foundation grant, in 1968 Richard I. Evans wrote B.F. Skinner: The Man and His Ideas. The philosophy stated in this book should be of critical interest to all people that are interested in education and value the individual.

Following are some direct quotes from Skinner included in Evans’s book:

I could make a pigeon a high achiever by reinforcing it on a proper schedule. (p. 10) When I say a concept is irrelevant, I mean that it has no bearing on the kind of analysis I am trying to develop. (p. 23)

For the purpose of analyzing behavior, we have to assume man is a machine. (p. 24) You can induce him to behave according to the dictates of society instead of his own selfish interest. (p. 42) It is conceivable that a technique of control will be developed which cannot be discovered.

The word "brainwashing" is dangerous. (p. 54)

We want him [the student] to come under the control of his environment rather than on verbal directions given by members of his family. (p. 64) I predict that the curriculum of the future will be designed around various capacities and abilities rather than subject. (p 72)

I don’t believe in mental discipline as such.... I’m much more concerned with the student’s

so-called personality traits. (p. 72)

I should not bother with ordinary learning theory, for example. I would eliminate most sensory psychology and I would give them [the students] no cognitive psychology whatsoever. (p. 91)

It isn’t the person who is important, it’s the method. If the practice of psychology [operant conditioning] survives, that’s the main objective. It’s the same with cultural practices in general; no one survives as a person. (p. 96)

It does bother me that thousands of teachers don’t understand, because immediate gains are more likely in the classroom than in the clinic. Teachers will eventually know—they must—and I am more concerned with promoting my theories in education [operant conditioning]. (p. 106)

I should like to see our government set up a large educational agency in which specialists could be sent to train teachers [in operant conditioning]. (p. 109) Have the radical psychologists achieved their goals? Let’s take a look at exactly what they believe.

The study of human emotions, feelings, and individual worth are of no concern to these psychologists. They believe that by shaping behavior one can produce any "human machine" that society needs. Skinner proposes to achieve this utopian goal through the American school system.

Evans asked Skinner what would happen if a "hostile government were to gain control and proceed to shape the development of children, putting such techniques totally into use."

Skinner replied, "There’s no doubt about it, but what are you going to do? To impose a moratorium on science would be worst of all." Would it?

A Nation at Risk states that "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves."

Did we? Did the American people really know what was happening in education and to their children? The answer is no.

A naive and great nation of freedom-loving people has been deceived by a "technique of control" that cannot be discovered by the average American. By subtle means of mind manipulation from clever propaganda techniques to out-and-out lies, the American people have been sold these radical ideas, methods, and techniques that truly place our nation and our children at risk.

Skinner said, "You will teach your student as he wants to be taught, but never forget that it is within your power to make him want what you want him to want." In other words, a teacher can program and shape a child into being anything the radicals decide he should be.

Parents and American citizens should be aware of the government-sponsored programs being disseminated throughout the United States by the National Diffusion Network. The Network was established in 1974 to promote government-approved educational programs.

Many of these programs are subtly designed with behavioral psychology techniques that could train young children to aim for limited goals of common labor. These programs prey on the poor and minority children in our nation. Many of these programs started in the 1960’s.

You might wonder who selects these programs. A panel of twenty-two so-called "experts" selects the programs and approves them for dissemination by the Network.

They are promoted in a book called Educational Programs That Work published by the U.S. Department of Education.

A great number of programs being promoted by the Network state in the book that "No evidence has been submitted to or approved by the Panel." It seems that even these great experts are not willing to accept the responsibility if these government programs fail or succeed.

The radical behavioral psychologists believe in a totally planned society with so many elite to rule, while the drones follow like programmed robots.

Very few college professors, teachers, school board members, or the news media have ever heard of the National Diffusion Network, and certainly the average American citizen is not aware of the Educational Programs That Work book or the programs therein.

Every American should obtain this book and take a long look at just what their children are being taught or not taught.

One experimental program after another has been placed in the American classroom over the last twenty years. Many of these programs have been brought into the classrooms over the objections of teachers and parents—those teachers and parents who understood what was happening. These programs have proliferated to such an extent that the school child has become a human guinea pig for these radicals who propose to bring about the good life for the whole world by "brainwashing."

When is the last time you heard your children speak of the "American dream"?

An unfriendly, "hostile government" in action? Well, maybe.

Part II

At taxpayers’ expense, preparation of B. F. Skinner’s dehumanizing book Beyond Freedom and Dignity was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (grant number K6–MH–21, 755–01). Skinner suggested that "what is called for now is a ‘technology of behavior’—a systematic and scientific program to alter the nature of man."

The major theme in Evans’s book is that because of the complexity of the modern world we can no longer afford freedom and dignity; therefore, the scientific method of operant conditioning should be used to control and shape mankind for the good of the world.

Man is considered a "human machine" with no soul, no free will, just a number like "K6–MH–21, 755–01" to be manipulated by change agents—a group of self-anointed, radical behavioral psychologists proposing to brainwash man into submission to whatever they determine to be the best for mankind.

This is not a new theme in history. It is older than the Inquisition. What is new in history is that a scientific method of brainwashing does exist. The American soldier in Korea and [the Jones cult in] Jonestown, Guyana are only two recent examples of this fact.

If one were to attempt this radical change, the most logical place to start this step-by-step "technology of control" would be to start in the schools and the free marketplace.

A planned curriculum and a planned economy could strangle a nation like the United States within a few short years, and help to bring about "equality" for the whole world. This is conceivable if a technique of control could be developed that could not be detected by the average American. Has it happened? Just look at our schools and the economy. How many small companies have gone broke recently? How many small farmers are being forced out of business? Who controls the schools, the industries, the media, the natural resources, and, more importantly, who will control the land in the United States?

For the unread and skeptics, I’m going to suggest several books that give a comprehensive overview of American education and the extensive use of classical and operant conditioning in our society. Of course, one must first read Skinner’s books to fully understand what he has proposed.

Perhaps the best and most comprehensive book written that truly gives historical documentation for the decline of our system was written by Augustine G. Rudd in 1957 and called Bending the Twig. Mr. Rudd was chairman of the Educational Committee for the New York Chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution. Far too much blame has been placed on John Dewey, in my opinion. At least his educational theories were child-oriented, but of course the radical psychologists were not in vogue in 1957.

A Report of the Comptroller General of the United States, dated April 15, 1977 (HRD–7749) should be obtained from government records and read by all Americans. The title is "Questions Persist about Federal Support for Development of Curriculum Materials and Behavior Modification Techniques Used in Local Schools." It appears that nothing has been done about the questions.

Other titles that everyone should read are:

The Psychological Society, Martin Gross Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, Robert Jay Lifton Mind Control, Peter Schrag The People Shapers, Vance Packard Change Agents in the Schools, Barbara M. Morris Behavior Mod, Philip J. Hils The Literacy Hoax, Paul Copperman Legal Challenges to Behavior Modification, Reed Martin Walden Two, B. F. Skinner The Suicide Cult, Marshall Kilduff and Ron Javers Snapping, Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman Below are direct quotes from Beyond Freedom and Dignity:

Why should I care whether my government, or my form of government, survives long after my death?...

Why should I be concerned about the survival of a particular kind of economic system?...

A remote personal good becomes effective when a person is controlled for the good of others, and the culture which induces some of its members to work for its survival brings an even more remote consequence to bear.... It is a matter of the good of the culture, not of the individual....

programmed sequence of contingencies may be needed. The technology has been most successful where behavior can be fairly easily specified and where appropriate contingencies can be constructed—for example, in child care, schools, and the management of retardates and institutionalized psychotics. The same principles are being applied, however, in the preparation of instructional materials at all educational levels, in psychotherapy beyond simple management, in urban design, and in many other fields of human behavior....

Such a technology is ethically neutral....

It is not difficult to see what is wrong in most educational environments, and much has already been done to design materials which make learning as easy as possible.

In Part I of "Our Children: The Drones" I quoted some of the change agents and how they proposed to bring about the change in society and education.

This next article will deal with actual enactment of the methods and programs, and how they are being promoted by the United States Department of Education through the National Diffusion Network.

The first program I’m going to tell you about is the one that started what I now refer to as my "search for freedom and dignity" for myself, children, and teachers. The first program is known as The Exemplary Center for Reading Instruction. The word "reading" is a misnomer.

This program is pure operant conditioning in the best tradition of B.F. Skinner.

In 1978, I was working in a Title I program in Phoenix, Arizona. Our program was one of forty that had been selected as outstanding programs in the United States. The government was doing a three-year study on forty programs. The study was called the "Sustaining Effects Study." I assumed that study was being done so our program and the other successful ones could be used as examples for the rest of the country.

Our program was based on an individualized diagnostic program for each child. The child’s reading and math needs were determined and we were taught to remediate the specific needs in each child’s area of weakness, while trying to build on the child’s strong areas as well. We were proud to have been selected as one of the innovative programs in the nation.

Part of our program also called for continuous training in our area of specialization. Mine was reading. I was also a member of the parent advisory committee.

In early 1978, our principal, Title I supervisor, and assistant superintendent of schools for the district met with the Title I teachers and proposed a week-long workshop based on a mastery teaching and learning theory. Quite a sales pitch was given for the method and the director. My principal said he had known her for several years and that she was a personal friend of a prominent church and business leader in our community. Since his daughter was a personal friend of mine and he is highly respected as a church and community leader, this was a good selling point from my point of view. Another selling point was the limited cost of the workshop, and the training would include the Title I aides and some of the classroom teachers as well.

The time arrived for the workshop, and substitute teachers were obtained for the teachers. The training session was held at the district office. Our trainer’s name was Mrs. Currington from Hawkins, Texas.

We were to meet from 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. every day, Monday through Friday. We were told that if we could not keep those hours and attend every day, not to attend the workshop.

A–148 I thought that was rather strange, but said nothing at the time.

One of our teachers, Sherri _____, had small children and was having a problem with adjusting the hours with baby sitters. Since her husband was a medical doctor, she could not depend on him for before and after school care. She asked if she could come late and leave early on some days. She was told no, and that it was her problem to work out. Somehow she did.

On Monday when we arrived at the district office, we found our tables arranged in a U shape with Mrs. Currington at the head. We were never introduced to her, nor were any words of welcome extended. She started to teach, and I started to take notes. My supervisor told me not to take notes, that all the information would be supplied later. I thought this was a very strange arrangement, but I stopped taking notes for the time being.

Two hours into the program I whispered to Sherri, "Just what in the [h— ] is this?"

By this time they had handed out a massive workbook that made no sense whatsoever. Sherri pointed out that no method or philosophy was stated in the book and asked me if I thought this was strange.

When we broke for lunch, I met one of our outstanding classroom teachers in the

restroom and she was in tears. She said, "Ann, I don’t know what is wrong with me. I have

never reacted to anything like this before." I said, "Deanna, this is the worst thing I have ever

been exposed to." She said, "Me too. I just thought it was me."

Several teachers had lunch together and we were all very alarmed about the workshop.

One old timer said, "This is just another program that we have to put up with—we have had one after the other for several years. We just learn one method and program, then they bring in another one. This will pass like all the rest."

Since two hours’ credit was being offered by UCLA at Davis, some of the teachers asked me if I was going to sign up for it. I said no, because I would not want such a thing on my transcripts. None of our teachers signed up for credit.

Daily, more and more of the teachers were raising their eyebrows and my friend Mary _____ was beside herself. Finally, I said, "Look, Mary, we bought a pig in a poke and none of the teachers are buying this."

We were pressured to memorize the word-by-word directives and pass the proficiency tests on a daily basis. Each teacher taking her turn, we were required to follow each directive exactly as the students would. Finally, the teachers and aides started asking questions.

Some became downright hostile toward the teacher-trainer. Our questions were deferred by intimidation. For example, when someone would question a portion of the teaching technique, the trainer would say, "Shame on you. Don’t you want to do what is best for children?"

When Deanna pointed out that the program did not take into consideration the learning styles of individual children, Mrs. Currington said, "The group is more important than the individual and we should raise our children to be people pleasers." That is when I really sat up to take notice. I recognized the philosophy right away, and I recognized this program as being political.

Children were required to master each and every small step before moving on, and only perfect penmanship was to be allowed from the child. Mary asked about small children whose fine motor skills had not developed. Mrs. Currington said, "All fine motor skills have developed by the age of one." Wow!

By this time Sherri was laughing. At one point an administrator from the district office came in and said, "We thought this was awful too when we attended the workshop last week, but it gets better as the week goes along." This was the first time we realized that the administrators had taken the workshop, also.

At one point in the training we were required to raise our arms to a 45-degree angle with our fingers pointed. The children were to do this whenever they completed an assignment and the teacher was to check for perfect penmanship, etc. If the work was not perfect, then the child had to start over. The rest of the class traced their word with their finger and said the word in unison while the others made the correction.

I kept asking, "What is this method?" I was somewhat more verbal than the rest. At one point my principal said they used this method in Germany. This is when I said to Sherri, "I recognize the salute: Sieg Heil! I’m not going to do this again."

At this point I sat with my arms folded and Sherri continued to chuckle. I was not laughing. This workshop was no longer funny. I was thinking that something was very amiss.

Sherri and I were sitting at the same table across from each other. Mrs. Currington came and moved our table out from the others and told us to work with the group across the room. Since this was impossible, I thought it was very strange. That’s when I noticed that our behavior was being monitored by the teacher-trainer, Mrs. Currington. I told Mary and Sherri to be careful of their actions because we were being monitored. They said, "Oh come on, Ann."

The next day our table had been moved to the end of the room, in direct view of the teacher-trainer.

On the last day of our workshop, Mrs. Currington said she had just returned from doing a workshop in Boston, and they drove her out of town with police escort. Someone asked her why, and she said it was because of a paper she had presented in the workshop. She said she would not present the paper again unless Dr. Reid (the program director) ordered her to. Deanna asked if she could see the paper and Mrs. Currington said yes if Deanna would return it right after lunch and promise not to show it to anyone.

The next day Deanna told me that the paper was the "Children’s Hour."1 I said, "I’m not surprised that they ran her out of Boston with police escort because that is where they threw the tea overboard!"

I am happy to report that I did not pass their fidelity or proficiency tests.

Endnote:

1. "The Children’s Hour" is a story by James Clavell which deals with the ability of a "new" teacher, brought to an elementary classroom as a result of a "hostile government’s takeover," who is able to completely subvert the values, beliefs and loyalties of the children in a half hour’s time. At the end of the story the children had cut up the American flag and thrown the flagpole

out of the window, and had been convinced that prayer was a waste of time because "what you receive always comes from soembody else," not God. (See pp. 70–71 of this book.)

Appendix XXV

(1) "The Truth about How We All Have Been Had" and

(2) "The Difference between Traditional Education and Direct Instruction" (1) "The Truth about How We All Have Been Had" by Charlotte T. Iserbyt was an alert sent out in late 1998, after the passage of Omnibus Budget Bill for 1999 which contained the Reading Excellence Act. (2) "The Difference between Traditional Education and Direct Instruction" by Tracey J. Hayes has been published in the January 1999 issue of The Education Reporter after having been distributed with Iserbyt’s alert.

(1) "The Truth about How We All Have Been Had"

Please bear with me. This alert is going to try to explain what happened on the slow road to teaching our children how to read. You may use this alert/article in any way you wish as long as you attribute it to the authors, Iserbyt and Hayes, and do not alter it or add to it in any way. The story is sad and should make American blood boil. Before you start reading, please take the time to read the last two pages of this alert containing an article entitled "The Difference between Traditional Education and Direct Instruction" by Tracey J. Hayes.

First, I want to thank the loop for alerting me about two years ago to the activities of Doug Carnine, director of the federally funded National Center to Improve the Tools of Educators (NCITE) at the University of Oregon. By the way, folks, that is a federally funded office which has dealt for a very long period of time with programs for special education children. Carnine’s name jumped out at me when mentioned in one of the loop’s communications supporting direct, systematic, intensive phonics (direct instruction), which, by the way, is NOT TRADITIONAL PHONICS INSTRUCTION.

I immediately thought, "Wait a minute. What’s going on here? Is this the same Doug Carnine who was involved with Siegfried Engelmann’s Follow Through DISTAR program (now known as Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons or Reading Mastery), about whom I had written in my 1985 book Back To Basics Reform or… OBE Skinnerian International Curriculum?" Of course it was, and from that time on I devoted much time trying to convince parents that "direct instruction," regardless of whether it is spelled with lower or upper case "d" and "i," is based on the operant conditioning experiments with animals carried out by the Russian Ivan Pavlov and the American professor B.F. Skinner.

In January of 1997 I wrote many memoranda on this subject which were included on the Internet Education Loop website, identifying Carnine and Engelmann with Ethna Reid’s learning program which Ann Herzer (a traditional phonics reading teacher opposed to Skinnerian operant conditioning) so valiantly fought in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. When Herzer objected to the training, she was asked, "Don’t you know we are training our children  to be people pleasers?" [See Appendix XVII of this book, ed.] I pointed out that my 1985 book Back To Basics Reform Or... discussed the ECRI/DISTAR method. Many of us have fought this method for twenty years and, sad to say, we have gotten nowhere. I suppose that is to be expected since we are not part of the national conservative leadership nor are we part of the education establishment leadership. No one listens to you unless you are well funded and have fancy letterhead. Follow the money, follow the money. We didn’t have the resources to make a difference.

However, all is not lost if those of you who read this alert will take the necessary action to stop the funding of the Reading Excellence Act at the local level. Millions of tax dollars will be gushing forth in your communities to implement this Skinnerian reading program under the guise of "scientific, research-based" phonics reading instruction.

Let me quote from an October 1997 letter Doug Carnine wrote to "concerned friends" asking them to support H.R. 2614, The Reading Excellence Act, which called for the use of "research-based" reading instruction programs; i.e., his and Engelmann’s program (ECRI/DISTAR). Obviously, use of these programs could be of financial benefit to those involved in the development of the program. Carnine’s letter encouraged the following:

As you know, significant reforms are in process in the bellwether states of California and Texas as well as in many other states. State lawmakers, education leaders, and concerned citizens are joining forces to ensure that the wealth of scientific research on reading conducted during the past three decades is fully transformed into effective classroom reading instruction.

Much of the "scientific research" to which he refers is the Skinnerian dog-training method used in DISTAR and ECRI. Whenever you see the word "effective" related to education, realize that it relates to the late Ron Edmonds’s Effective School Research (Harvard and Michigan State). It says "almost all children can learn" when taught to the test, provided the necessary environment for that individual child and enough time for the child to "master"

whatever the content (or workforce skills) is made available. That’s Skinnerian/behavioral

terminology, for those who are not initiated. The new term for "environment" is now "positive

school climate," which takes the place of the behaviorist term "psychologically manipulative

environment." Effective School Research calls for the elimination of the Carnegie unit,

norm-referenced testing, grade levels, etc. Effective School Research calls for outcome-based

education, which is mastery learning and can include direct instruction. Both are closely related

to Total Quality Management and Planning, Programming, and Budgeting Systems.

Of course, for those who don’t have any problem with this type of education/training,

STOP: you need read no further. For those who may have questions, please bear with me.

First, you will want to be sure I am correct in my claim that this is, in fact, Skinnerian dog training. The final piece of the puzzle, which should be the clincher and for which many of us are most grateful (God works in wondrous ways!) came in the publishing of What Works in Education, edited by Crandall, Jacobson, and Sloane (Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1997).1 The Center’s activities and publications can be accessed on their website (http://www.behavior.org). Following are some excerpts related to two of the nine programs discussed in this book:

What Works in Education is the result of a collaborative effort between two organizations:

The Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies and Division 33 of the American Psychological Association.... We would like to extend our gratitude to Doug Carnine, Professor of Education at the University of Oregon, and Bonnie Grossen, Editor of Effective School Practices, for consulting on this project.

The chapter entitled "Mabel B. Wesley Elementary" states:

The Mabel B. Wesley Elementary School in Houston, Texas, has had a schoolwide Direct Instruction language arts curriculum since 1976, and has implemented other direct instruction programs and other programs based on related approaches in other subject matters.... Dr. Thaddeus S. Lott, Sr. is the Project Manager for the Northwest Charter District and Mrs. Wilma Rimes is the principal of Mabel B. Wesley Elementary School.

In 1975... in searching for a means of improving reading skills, Dr. Lott, then the new principal, visited a campus that was implementing the DISTAR reading curriculum (see Direct Instruction for Teaching Reading and Remediation, Carnine and Silbert, 1979), developed by Engelmann (reported in Becker, Engelmann and Thomas, 1975A and 1975B).

He was impressed by what he observed and began the implementation of DISTAR [now called Reading Mastery, ed.] in 1976.

The chapter entitled "Exemplary Center for Reading Instruction—ECRI" by Ethna R. Reid of the Reid Foundation states:

ABSTRACT: ECRI provides consulting and training for individual classrooms, grade levels, or entire schools in implementing a direct instruction model in language arts. The ECRI model is applied to and adapted for existing instructional materials. From these materials, structured lessons are developed to teach an integrated curriculum of phonics, oral and silent reading, comprehension, study skills, spelling, literature, and creative and expository writing. ECRI also includes rate building, mastery learning, and behavior management components.

ECRI identified effective teaching strategies later corroborated in the Follow Through Program (Stebbins, L.B., St. Pierre, R.G., Proper, E.D., Anderson, R.B., & Cerva, R.T., 1977) and now known as Direct Instruction (Jenson, Sloane & Young, 1988, pp. 335–336, 350–362). ECRI adopted a general direct instructional approach and expanded it... in ways that allowed application to existing subject material in any content area.

Can you not see that this is the necessary Skinnerian method for application to workforce training? Skinner said, "I could make a pigeon a high achiever by reinforcing it on a proper schedule."

The above ECRI connection with DISTAR (Reading Mastery), the direct instruction program being pushed all over the country (Thaddeus Lott’s Houston site is the best known) should come as no surprise since the developer of DISTAR, Siegfried Engelmann, has his work in Skinnerian operant conditioning cited several times in Ethna Reid’s Teacher Training Manual. Of interest is the fact that the U.S. Department of Education in 1981, when Ann Herzer tried to have ECRI shut down, lied in writing when it said ECRI did not use operant conditioning. I have all the correspondence regarding this controversy. A class action suit should be filed against the U.S. Department of Education for its role in promoting this type of training/ conditioning under the guise of "education" and for lying about the method.

In other words, ECRI and DISTAR are not just close cousins; they are, in fact, fraternal twins. The only difference between them is their name. They were both funded during the War on Poverty, Great Society 1960s, and since that time have been used on the most helpless members of our society, the underprivileged and minority children. Professors Benjamin Bloom and Lee Shulman’s 1968–1981 Chicago Mastery Learning Program was, according to a March 6, 1985 article in Education Week a tragedy of enormous proportions with almost one-half of the 39,500 public school students in the 1980 freshman class failing to graduate, and only one-third of those graduating able to read at or above the national 12th grade level.

Of interest is the fact that claims of effectiveness similar to those made regarding the Houston DISTAR program were made by the elitist change agents during the 1970s and early 1980s.

The Chicago Program crashed in 1981.

What happened to the students who participated in Chicago’s Skinnerian experiment?

What happened to Lee Shulman, who was involved in the Chicago Mastery Learning disaster?

Lee Shulman went on to become the Director of the Carnegie Foundation’s Board for Professional Teaching Standards, which is the architect of the performance-based (Skinnerian) teacher training model. Shulman, who had been a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and a Fellow of the Center for the Advancement of Behavioral Sciences, later became President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The reader should refer to the fact that the book What Works in Education is a result of a collaborative effort between the American Psychological Association and the Cambridge Center for

Behavioral Studies. What rewards for such a disaster! The lives of the children involved in the experiment are not so decorously documented.

One simple question should be asked which should put this whole matter to rest:

Why haven’t the underprivileged, the minorities, etc., had more academic success if these programs (which have been used in most of our inner cities under the guise of effective schooling practices) are in fact so "effective"? Why is it that some very good anti-OBE people out there don’t even realize that this method is OBE? It is based on Bloom’s and Spady’s contention (which, by the way, is embraced by the Soviets in their polytechnical training as well) that "all except the most seriously handicapped" children can learn, if they work at their own pace with an individualized education plan, are taught to the test, do not have to compete with classmates, are subject to criterion-referenced testing rather than norm-referenced testing, and have as long as they want to "master" the controllers’ outcomes, results, or competencies. Outcome-based mastery learning/direct instruction is what the United Nations is talking about when it refers to Lifelong Learning. Everyone can take as long as needed to "master" what the corporate and international planners want as long as everyone "masters" it, even if it takes a lifetime. God forbid that you may not want to master certain things. And don’t forget, it’s not just students but all of us who will be involved in this lifelong learning—unless, of course, Americans wake up and do something.

Whether either program has produced the gains proponents of the "method" suggest is questionable. The basic skills test results from Mission, Texas, which used ECRI for a period of twenty years, certainly are dismal. Much more documentation is required in this regard.

By the time we have the sad truth regarding longitudinal test studies, including information on where the DISTAR-educated students are now or 10 years from now, and what they are doing, if anything, it will be too late. Norm-referenced testing will be a thing of the past.

Performance-based testing (portfolios, demonstrations, etc.) will be standard, and we will have highways plastered with "My Son/Daughter Is an Honor Student." We will never know how dumbed down our children are except when, instead of saying "Please, may I have the ketchup?" they simply grunt a certain number of times for ketchup and a certain number of times for butter, etc.

The basic question, however, aside from test scores, remains: Is it moral to use this method on children in the classroom without their informed consent, even if results show small and temporary gains? There are laws on the books which give prisoners protection against such behavior modification methods. Medical research is available showing that operant conditioning causes psychological, neurological, and medical problems. Children in the ECRI program have exhibited such symptoms. There are doctors’ statements to this fact.

For those who still don’t believe that DISTAR (Reading Mastery) is the same as ECRI, let me quote from a few pages of a dissertation by a top state department of education official who does not wish to have it attributed to him. The paper, written in 1986, entitled "The Exemplary Center for Reading Instruction—ECRI," states in part:

One of the major goals was to do a cost-effectiveness study to ascertain the most beneficial time to introduce academic skills to students. The only break the children had during their instruction was a snack time which was used as a language experience to discuss the various foods the children were eating. The main instructional unit was the SRA DISTAR Program. The results showed an increase in pupil IQ of approximately 20 points in the first year of the program and elimination of a great many behavioral problems. [emphasis added]

Facts Established

1. ECRI and DISTAR are fraternal twins, and both use Skinnerian operant conditioning.

2. Operant conditioning is based on Pavlov’s experiments with slobbering dogs.

3. The Right to Read Foundation, formerly headed by Robert Sweet, supports Teaching Your Children to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, which is SRA’s DISTAR (Mastery Reading). Sweet recently became a consultant to the House Education and Workforce Committee and helped draft and promote the Reading Excellence Act. Several years ago when Tracey Hayes, a researcher, brought her concerns regarding the Carnine/Engelmann program to his attention,

Sweet told her he saw nothing wrong with mastery learning. Good parents looking for traditional phonics-based reading instruction for their children have been had by the master manipulators’ use of the Hegelian dialectic. They (the internationalist change agents) created the whole language disaster (or took advantage of it) in order to get parents to scream so that parents could be offered the predetermined solution: the direct instruction Skinnerian program which can be applied to any other disciplines, including WORKFORCE TRAINING!

And the desperate parents have bought into this shameful scam, thinking that the educational establishment really cared about their children learning to read. The corporate sector, which supports direct instruction, does not really want educated workers. Thomas Sticht, a member of the Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) said as much when he was quoted in an August 17, 1987 Washington Post article as follows:

Many companies have moved operations to places with cheap, relatively poorly educated labor. What may be crucial, they say, is the dependability of a labor force and how well it can be managed and trained—not its general educational level, although a small cadre of highly educated creative people is essential to innovation and growth. Ending discrimination and changing values are probably more important than reading in moving low-income families into the middle class.

Sticht was also at one time associated with the "Hooked on Phonics" program. Oh, what a tangled web we weave! Harvard’s Professor Anthony Oettinger, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, which is bringing us STW, Free Trade and Global Governance, said in 1981:

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 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?

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.

[emphasis added]

All that one must do to smell one big rat is ask the following questions:

1. Why would former California Commissioner of Education William Honig (who was at one time someone parents loved to hate) support something supposedly good for our children (DISTAR/ECRI) after years of implementing the progressive, humanistic agenda?

Why would the leadership of the two major teacher unions support a method which supposedly is in the best interests of your children unless all of them have been walking down the road to Damascus?

A–156 2. Why do the multinational corporations support ECRI/DISTAR? Ann Herzer lost her bid for Superintendent of Instruction in Arizona due to the corporate elite supporting the incumbent Carolyn Warner when they found out Herzer was opposed to the Skinnerian Mastery Learning method. Herzer had won the Republican nomination in a landslide and was on her way to victory over Warner, the Democrat.

3. Why did the U.S. Department of Education schedule President Reagan to go to the Bronx, New York to visit an ECRI classroom and to meet with Ethna Reid in 1981?

It’s up to the reader to answer these questions.

For those who are interested in additional in-depth research on this problem, Ann Herzer is putting her files on CD-ROM. My book the deliberate dumbing down of america will be out in 1999, and my 1985 Back to Basics Reform Or... OBE Skinnerian International Curriculum? is still available for those who want the history of this mess. Back to Basics Reform spells out clearly the Herzer story and how the U.S. Department of Education lied about ECRI in order to keep the Skinnerian method afloat. The Department knew it was necessary for global workforce training. Don’t forget: mastery learning/direct instruction is the preferred UNESCO method of instruction.

And for those who are opposed to OBE, please do not forget for one moment that OBE is mastery learning/direct instruction. The only difference between OBE and Direct Instruction is that OBE had very bad, outrageous (to use the words of the late Al Shanker) outcomes, and direct instruction (DISTAR/ECRI) has, for the moment, those peanut butter-and-jelly-sounding phonics outcomes. Remember how former Secretary of Education and "Mr. Virtues" William Bennett opposed OBE? He gave 4.5 million dollars to provide Skinnerian Effective School Training (OBE) while Secretary of Education. Do you also remember that he said, "I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water"? What he meant was that he didn’t want the "method" (ML/DI) to go down the drain with the "bad" outcomes. He ultimately headed up the Modern Red School House Charter School, which uses the "baby" (mastery learning/direct instruction).

And so, folks, that’s how we all were had.

Let me let you in on a personal secret:

Even I, who had written fourteen years ago on ECRI and who was knowledgeable about the Follow Through program and DISTAR being Skinnerian, fell for Siegfried Engelmann when he complained about whole language. The article I had published in the Congressional Record, October 23, 1989 entitled "Reading: The Civil Rights Issue of the 1990’s," which attacked whole language, even quoted Engelmann! I had forgotten he was the developer of DISTAR, and I was not at that time aware that DISTAR was ECRI.

I tell you this so you will understand that not just you, but I, also (until very recently)

was conned on this issue. I, too, fell for the words "direct, systematic, intensive phonics." I used those words in my article. I thought that was good stuff! Let’s stop the phonics wars, think about our children’s futures as free people, not trained animals, and work together to stop the funding of the inhumane Skinnerian method to teach reading and everything else, including workforce training skills.

Thanks for listening.

P.S.: Samuel Blumenfeld, in the Foreword to my new book, has taken a stand against direct instruction. He’s a very principled fellow! I hope this alert will get a lot more principled people to take a stand against this method before it’s too late.

Endnote:

1. What Works in Education can be ordered from the Cambridge Center by calling 1–978–369–2227.

(2)"The Difference Between Traditional Education and Direct Instruction" by Tracey J. Hayes The major difference between Traditional Education and Direct Instruction (DI) is the method in which the content is taught.

Traditional education focuses on content-rich curriculum in which a particular subject is "introduced, taught, and reviewed," moving from simple to complex, spiraling back to refresh and retain previously learned material while progressing in that subject. Some publishing companies make recommendations on what content is to be taught, but in most traditional education classrooms, the teacher decides "how" the "what" is to be taught.

To help determine student achievement in traditional education, weekly quizzes and end-of-chapter tests are administered. One hundred percent mastery is, however, not expected. The teacher knows that with time and review, retention of knowledge and test scores will improve. The object of traditional education is to offer students a broad foundation of information, based on facts and figures, that will be retained for future application on high stakes assessments, education and career objectives, and life-long wisdom.

Traditional education is sometimes described as "direct instruction." In traditional education the teacher stands in front of the classroom "directly instructing" the students in the subject matter. Direct instruction and teacher-directed instruction (used in traditional education) are examples of how words in our language can be perceived as being one and the same, when in fact they are very different from one another. Deceptive semantics has created much confusion among many educators as well as parents.

With traditional education, on Monday the teacher assigns her class a chapter to read on the subject of George Washington crossing the Delaware. She tells them they will be tested on this subject on Friday, but she doesn’t tell them exactly on what they will be tested. In other words, they must learn as much as they can about everything in the chapter—including the name of George Washington’s horse. When tested, the students might receive a 75% or 80% grade and some parents may be upset with what they consider a "low" grade. However, in fact, the students have done far better than students using mastery learning or direct instruction who are taught to the test, only learning that material on which the teacher tells them they will be tested and receiving a grade of 90–100%. The students in the traditional education class have actually learned many, many times more than the students in a mastery learning or direct instruction class, even though they did not have to use all they learned on their test. Professor Benjamin Bloom, the father of mastery learning, was certainly correct when he asserted that students could reach 85% mastery—of a limited or dumbed down curriculum.

Direct Instruction focuses on a narrow curriculum in which a particular subject is introduced via a stimulus, expecting a particular response from the student. Based on behavioral psychology and the work of B.F. Skinner, DI requires the teacher to use operant conditioning and behavior modification techniques. In a DI classroom the teacher must follow a prescribed set of lesson plans, sometimes in script form, and use certain cues such as clapping with the intent to incite a certain reaction such as unison chanting from the students. In many classrooms, rewards and tokens are also used to generate a predetermined response (S-R-S).

Direct Instruction is a teaching method that bypasses the brain and instigates a reflex that is not natural, but rather controlled and programmed. This kind of manipulation causes some students to become so stressed that they become sick or develop nervous tics. Many DI programs are designed for the computer with built-in bells and whistles to "control and pace the learning outcomes." With outcome-based education (OBE) already in many schools, Computer Assisted Learning (CAL), programmed with the ML/DI method, is also promoting affective/subjective goals.

Direct Instruction expects mastery (ML) to be achieved in each area of instruction before moving onto the next level. There are frequent tests, cramming, cranking, and drilling the skills to perfection, so test scores are usually high in the early years. Typical classrooms, however, consist of students with varying abilities, so the amount of content is decreased to accommodate the slowest learner. In some schools cooperative learning is used to appease the high achiever. Since review of previously learned materials is not encouraged, overall retention is less. SAT scores are low, and ultimate application is not achieved and in some cases stifled.

Direct Instruction has been used for decades in areas where poverty is prevalent because the method of teaching promotes order and discipline in the classroom. Since many parents want to discard whole language and implement phonics, schools across the nation are adopting DI programs without truly understanding the method behind the content. At the expense of destroying one’s free will, these schools are training students to become passive drones rather than educated citizens. As students plateau at a certain level because they cannot make sense of the knowledge they once were expected to recall on command, one must wonder if the pressure to perform like barking dogs is what students really need or what we really want.

Appendix XXVI

"Shamanistic Rituals in Effective Schools*"

"Shamanistic Rituals in Effective Schools*" by Brian Rowan, Senior Research Scientist, Far West Laboratory for Educational Research and Development. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, LA, April, 1984.

Asterisk in title is notation on bottom of title page which states, "Work on this paper was supported by the National Institute of Education, Department of Education, under Contract No. 400–83–003. The contents do not necessarily reflect the view or policies of the Department of Education or the National Institute of Education." Brian Rowan was involved in Bill Spady’s Far West Lab grant to the Utah State Department of Education to "put OBE in all schools of the nation."

This paper develops a theoretical perspective for analyzing the non-scientific uses of research in educational policy debates. A central focus is educational researchers’ use of shamanistic rituals to affect organizational health (cf., Miracle, 1982). A number of shamanistic rituals derived from research on "effective" schools are described here, and an analysis demonstrates the circumstances under which these rituals can be used to divine the unknown, cure ills, and control uncertain events.

Background

Miracle (1982) suggested that shamans and applied social scientists perform a number of similar functions in society. Shamans, the powerful medicine men of premodern societies, worked mainly to cure ills, divine the unknown, and control uncertain events, and they performed these functions by using a specialized craft obtained after a long period of formal initiation and training. Similarly, applied social scientists acquire a specialized craft after initiation and training, and they too are called upon to alleviate the vague ills of corporate groups, divine the unknown for organizational strategists, or bring order to the uncertain events that plague institutional affairs.

The analogy raises a number of important issues for applied social science. First and  foremost, shamans practice magic, whereas applied social researchers are thought to practice "science." To liken scientists to magicians raises interesting questions about the relationship of science to pragmatic action. An additional problem is that shamans are but one of the many practitioners of magic in societies, and they can be distinguished from others who employ magic in their rituals, for example, sorcerers, witches and wizards. This observation raises questions about the uses of research in modern policy analysis. If educational "science" functions as magic, who are the shamans, witches, and sorcerers of educational research?

Forms of Pragmatic Action

We begin with the problem of whether applied educational scientists practice magic.

A number of anthropologists have observed that magic is used for pragmatic purposes in premodern societies, but that magic is not the only form of pragmatism available to premodern practitioners. For example, both Malinowski (1948) and Evans Pritchard (1965) argued that premodern societies possessed sound technical logics that practitioners could use to successfully accomplish most work tasks. In addition, premodern people were able to sharply distinguish between these working, practical logics and magic. In premodern societies, when tasks were going well, the technical logic of everyday work dominated action. But as uncertainties increased, or as conflict and stress became more problematic premodern practitioners began to supplement technique with magic. Thus, Malinowski (1948) observed the fishing practices of Trobriand islanders and found that, in the safety of lagoons, practitioners made little use of magic and relied primarily on established technical routines to ensure good fishing. But as activities moved into the more dangerous open seas, magic was increasingly invoked as a supplemental technical aid.

Similar points can be made about the modern educational practitioner’s use of research.

It seems clear that schools have an established series of technical routines (Goodlad, 1983).

But these practices are not grounded in the highly stylized logics of modern science. Rather,

they exist in the more subtle and largely unarticulated logic of teachers and administrators (Jackson, 1968). Although some educational observers have likened this unarticulated logic to magic (e.g., Lortie, 1975), Malinwoski’s (1948) [sic] discussion suggests that it is more appropriate to think of educational research as magic. The educational practitioner appears to make wide use of the subtle and unarticulated logic of schooling, and this logic appears to have the desired technical effect on a large number of students (Hyman, Wright and Reed, 1975). Practitioners make much less use of the stylized "scientific" knowledge of applied social scientists. Indeed, like Malinowski’s Trobrianders, they appear to reserve the use of "science" for those sectors of schooling which are problematic or in "crisis."

Other arguments also suggest that educational "science" functions much like magic.

As Miracle (1982) noted, both applied social scientists and shamans utilize a "force" that derives from an other world (Mauss and Hubert, 1961). Shamans, for example, often travel to other worlds to communicate with spirits or accompany the dead to their supernatural resting places. As a result, they are said to inhabit both the real world and a spirit or supernatural world. Similarly, applied scientists appear to inhabit two distinct worlds, one the "real" world, the other the proverbial "ivory tower." It is widely recognized that knowledge gained in the ivory tower is not the same as that gained in the "real" world, an observation that endows "scientific" knowledge with a certain otherworldly nature. Thus, like shamans, applied educational scientists inhabit two worlds and practice a craft that has a special legitimacy in social affairs.

Types of Magic

If we perist [sic] in the analogy between educational "science" and magic, it becomes useful to classify various types of magic and magicians. In premodern societies, for example, there were numerous practitioners of magic, including not only shamans, but also various witches, wizards and sorcerers. Distinctions among these practitioners can be made on the basis of their actual magic practices. Wizards and witches often practiced forms of "black magic" that were used as weapons to defend interests or harm enemies, whereas the shaman’s magic was most often employed for benevolent purposes, including the curing of ills. There is also a need to look carefully at the rituals practiced by different groups. For example, shamans often engage in a common "spitting and sucking cure," but they also use other rituals from their "bag of tricks."

Educational researchers can also be classified by the types and functions of the rituals they perform. For example, policy analysts sometimes use the rituals of research to confound and weaken political or scientific opponents, a form of research that appears similar to the "black" magic of witches. But there are also research shamans who can be called upon by policy analysts to perform healing rituals. All types of research ritualists select from a common and well-known bag of research tricks, although in recent years there has been a rise of ritual specialists who exclusively work either qualitative or quantitative magic on policy audiences.

Shamanism and School Effectiveness Research

In this paper, we limit attention to a single type of research ritualist—the research shaman—and to a few related magic tricks used within a narrow policy domain. Our interest is in describing research rituals that heal and revitalize sectors of education and not in research that fans controversy, inflicts harm on ideological enemies, or demoralizes existing constituencies in a policy domain. Moreover, the analysis will be narrowed to a few research rituals used in one policy domain to better illustrate how research shamans operate.

Shamanism and Crisis

It is commonly observed that working practitioners in education remain detached from, even ignorant of, the findings and applications of applied research. Yet this observation is not entirely true. Educational policy makers and their research ritualists continue to generate research, and this research continues to play a role in certain sectors of educational practice.

Thus, a question emerges: in what sectors of educational institutions are the rituals of research shamanism most utilized?

Anthropological studies suggest some answers to this question. It has been argued that magic assumes its highest importance in institutional sectors plagued by three conditions: (a) high levels of technical uncertainty; (b) structural cleavages that create great stress among social groups; and (c) social disorganization that creates problematic mood states among participants (Malinowski, 1925; Gluckman, 1952; Wallace, 1956). The argument here is that research shamanism is most valued in sectors of education that contain these characteristics.

Thus, research in education is most numerous in areas where there is high technical uncertainty (do schools/programs/teachers make a difference to educational outcomes?). The rituals of research also take on great importance in areas where there is conflict among social groups (are new educational initiatives needed to redress past social inequities?).

And finally, research is increasingly directed at problems related to disorganization and dissatisfaction in institutional sectors of education (are urban/high schools better or worse than in the past?).

Research on Effective Schools

Research on effective schools has its origins in these problems. The research deals with a sector of educational institutions—the instructional core—which has long been the subject of uncertainty, conflict, and pessimism, and where the use of myth and ritual has been common (Meyer and Rowan, 1977; 1978). What is distinctive about "effective schools" research, in contrast to much past scientific work, is that it has taken a shamanistic approach to the problems of schooling. It has not fanned the flames of discontent and uncertainty like previous scholarly work (e.g., Coleman et al., 1966; Averch et al., 1972; Jencks et al., 1972), but instead has held out hope that the pervasive ills of modern urban schooling can be cured.

Edmonds (1979a), the most powerful of all effective schools shamans before his untimely death, seemed accutely [sic] aware of the need for healing in modern educational institutions, and a careful reading of his works reveals his strategy for effecting a cure for the problems confronting urban education. He argued that research must be used to counter the pessimistic view that schools have weak effects on student outcomes, and that as this occurred, practitioners could attain new expectation states that facilitated, rather than hindered, the achievement of disadvantaged children (see, especially, Edmonds, 1978; 1979b).

Thus, Edmonds saw that "science" could be used to confront the conflicts, uncertainties, and problematic mood states afflicting modern schooling.

That Edmonds’ [sic] approach possessed a special "force" in educational policy arenas is indisputable. Like the revitalization movements that swept the great plains during the period of indian [sic] decline (Wallace, 1966), the rituals of effective schools research diffused widely and rapidly. They were adopted by other shamans, who brought them to state departments of education and local school systems, and there these rituals were used as the cornerstone of ambitious revitalization ceremonials (see, e.g., Ogden et al., 1982; Shoemaker, 1982; Clark and McCarthy, 1983).

It is worth noting that the perspective being developed here does not necessarily imply that these shamanistic rituals are hoaxes. Indeed, just as many modern medical practitioners have come to recognize the wisdom and efficacy of shamans, there is at least some reason to think that the arguments of effective schools proponents possess some scientific merit (see, e.g., Rowan, Bossert and Dwyer, 1983). Nevertheless, for the moment, it is useful to suspend our empirical curiousity [sic] about whether these initiatives really "work," [sic] and to examine instead some of the concrete ritual practices that characterize this new educational movement.

Important Shamanistic Rituals

It has already been suggested that shamanistic rituals are designed to cure ills, divine the unknown, and control uncertain events. In this section of the paper, three prominent effective schools rituals are discussed and their relationship to the central functions of magic are illustrated.

Curing Ills with Literature Reviews

We begin with one of the most common shamanistic rituals in the effective schools movement, the glowing literature review that promises relief from the currently pervasive sense that educational institutions are in poor organizational health. Miller’s (1983: 1) review illustrates the general form of this ritual: "Not so long ago the conventional wisdom regarding American schools was that ‘schools do not make a difference.’ ...Yet today... the message of... research is primarily postive [sic] and upbeat: schools can make a difference" (Miller, 1983: 1).

A closer look illustrates the consistent dramatic form used by reviewers to affect the promise of a cure. First, the authors contrast the dismal tradition of school effects research with "more recent" and more positive studies of effective schools. This is followed by the citation of a host of previously unpublished and obscure studies which are often nothing more than other positive literature reviews. The final step is a grandiose concluding statement, which most often calls on practitioners to adopt the new discoveries.

We speculate that these rituals have their most dramatic effect on naïve individuals who have little time or inclination to follow-up footnotes or read works cited in the text, or on those who have little tolerance for the ambiguity that marks true scientific debate. Lacking a systematic understanding of the scientific pros and cons of effective schools research, naïve individuals are left only with the powerful and appealing rhetoric of the reviewers. Thus it is that research on effective schools has come to be seen as a "cure" for educational ills the less it has been published in scholarly journals and the more it has been disseminated in practitioner magazines. The experiences shaman knows to avoid the scrutiny of scholars,

for this can raise objections to the "scientific" basis of ritual claims and divert attention away from the appealing rhetoric. Instead, the shaman cultivates the practitioner who needs a simple and appealing formula.

Divining the Unknown Using Outliers

While the literature review ritual can be observed equally well by both qualitative and quantitative specialists, a second ritual, designed to divine the unknown, is the exclusive domain of quantitative ritualists. The ritual uses residuals from a regression analysis to identify "effective" schools and to contrast them with "ineffective" schools. The purpose is to divine an answer to two nagging questions in school effectiveness research: which are the effective schools in a system and what are these schools doing that makes them different?

The techniques involved in this ritual have been described before (see, Rowan et al., 1983). A regression equation predicting school achievement from school socioeconomic composition is tested, and errors of prediction are calculated. The errors (or residuals) are used to identify "effective" and "ineffective" schools and form samples for contrasted groups studies. The ritual almost always strongly supports the rhetorical posture of the ritual literature review. Since predictor variables never account for all of the variance in school-level achievement, an analysis of residuals will always demonstrate that schools differ in achievement even after controlling for socioeconomic composition. Thus any experienced shaman can find "effective" schools. Second, if a shaman asks a large number of questions, a number of structural and cultural differences between effective and ineffective schools can be found. Thus, the outliers ritual not only identifies the previously unrecognized "effective" schools, it also reveals for the first time why these schools attain effectiveness.

From a magician’s standpoint, this ritual’s power can be increased in a number of ways.

First, the worse the specification of the initial regression model, the more persuasive the ritual. For example, by failing to include all measures of school socioeconomic composition, a shaman can increase the residual achievement differences between schools. This, in turn, enhances claims that "effective" schools make a difference to achievement. Moreover, to the extent that school characteristics are correlated to omitted socioeconomic predictors, misspecification [sic] enhances the liklihood [sic] that differences in school characteristics will be found between "effective" and "ineffective" groups of schools. Thus, the worse the initial regression model, the more powerful the shamanistic ritual.

A related tactic is to use aggregate models. By using schools rather than individuals as the unit of analysis, proportions of variance in achievement explained by school management and culture are increased. In between-school analyses, schools can be seen to account for nearly 30% of the variance in achievement. But in between-individual analyses, this is reduced to about 5%. Thus, effective schools ritualists have been able to inflate their claims of school effects through a simple aggregation trick (see Alexander and Griffin, 1976).

The experienced shaman also avoids certain practices. For example, it is wise not to repeat the residuals ritual in the same population, for this highlights the low correlation of residuals over time and raises questions about measurement reliability. It is much wiser to demonstrate reliability by using the conventional, and cross-sectional, "split/half" procedure of psychometricians (see, Forsythe, 1973). Similarly, after a few performances of the residuals ritual and the associated contrasted group study, it becomes possible to ignore problems of validation. Thus, as time moves on, the wise shaman avoids achievement data and the residuals ritual entirely, and instead assesses schools on the degree to which their structures match those of previously identified "effective" schools.

Controlling Uncertainty through Measurement

A final shamanistic ritual in the effective schools movement requires the shaman to have advanced training in the art of psychometrics. The ritual is particularly suited to application in urban or low performing school systems where successful instructional outcomes among disadvantaged students are highly uncertain but where mobilized publics demand immediate demonstrations of success. The uncertainties faced by practitioners in this situation can easily be alleviated by what scholars have begun to call "curriculum alignment."

This ritual begins with an analysis of what is actually being taught in schools. The shaman conducting the ritual assembles a group of local practitioners and together they list instructional objectives for each grade level. The next step is to find achievement tests that ask questions related to these objectives. To the extent that test items matching local objectives are found, either in commerically [sic] prepared tests or in locally constructed ones, and to the extent that these items are used in achievement testing rather than the haphazard collection of items contained in most commerically [sic] prepared tests, the curriculum and testing systems of the local school are said to be "aligned."

Since it is known that at least some variance in student achievement is a function of students [sic] opportunity to learn what is tested in criterion measures (Cooley and Leinhardt, 1980), the alignment ritual can have immediate effects on perceptions of effectiveness. For example, a school system moving from an unaligned commercially prepared achievement test to an aligned one can expect that it will score higher on national norms than before. But this increased "effectiveness" does not occur because students are learning more or different things. In the typical alignment ceremony, only test items—not instruction—are changed.

Nevertheless, while student learning remains unchanged, alignment allows students to practice criterion measures and achieve higher test scores, thus giving them an advantage over comparable students in unaligned school systems.

An even more powerful demonstration of instructional effectiveness can be achieved if shamans avoid the standard psychometric practice of designing norm-referenced achievement tests and move instead toward criterion-referenced tests. As Popham and Husek (1969) discussed, the typical norm-referenced achievement test eliminates items that nearly all students in a population can answer correctly, since norm-referenced tests are designed to produce between-student variance in achievement scores. But if one neglects this practice and allows items that almost everyone can answer correctly to be included in achievement tests, a larger number of students will appear to be performing more successfully in their academics.

Thus, the art of measurement can be used as an aid to shamanism, espcially [sic] in urban schools plagued by the uncertainties of student performance. Student variability in performance can be reduced, and relative performance increased, not by changing  instructional objectives or practices, but simply by changing tests and testing procedures.

Conclusion

The analysis of specific shamanistic rituals in the effective schools movement raises a number of important questions about the relationship of applied science to pragmatic action.

Most importantly, it suggests that future studies of "science" as magic are needed. There is a need to begin to chart other rituals used by applied scientists to disarm enemies, cure ills, and divine the unknown. Moreover, there is a need to study the conditions under which these magical practices spread through practitioner populations. Using this perspective, much of the literature on organizational change and applied research can be rewritten from an institutional perspective (Meyer and Rowan, 1977).

At the same time, there is a need to carefully analyze the science of magic. There can be little doubt that Malinowski’s (10 ...when the sociologist approaches the study of magic... he finds to his disappointment an entirely sober, prosaic, even clumsy art, enacted for purely practical reasons, governed by crude and shallow beliefs, carried out in a simple and monotonous technique.

Yet this "clumsy" art sometimes achieves great effects in practitioner communities and may even have some empirical merit, and this raises the appealing promise that applied social scientists can someday develop shamanistic rituals that empirically "work."

References

Alexander, K. and L. Griffin. School district effects on academic achievement: a reconsideration. American Sociological Review, 1976, 41, 144–151.

Averch, H.A. et al. How effective is schooling? A critical review of research. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Educational Technology Publications, 1972.

Coleman, J.S. et al. Equality of educational opportunity. Washington, D.C., U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, 1966.

Cooley, W.W. and G. Leinhardt. The instructional dimensions study. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 1980. 2, 1–26.

Clark, T.A. and D. McCarthy. School improvement in New York City: the evolution of a project. Educational Researcher, 1983, 12. 17–24.

Edmonds, R. A discussion of the literature and issues related to effective schooling. St. Louis:

CEMREL, Inc., 1978 [sic].

Edmonds, R. Effective schools for the urban poor. Educational Leadership, 1979a, 37, 15–24.

Edmonds, R. A conversation with Ron Edmonds. Educational Leadership, 1979b, 37, 12–15.

Evans Pritchard, E. Theories of primitive religion. London: Cambridge Press, 1965.

Forsythe, R.A. Some empirical results related to the stability of performance indicators in Dyer’s student change model of an educational system. Journal of Educational Measurement, 1973, 10, 7–12.

Gluckman, M. Rituals of rebellion in S.E. Africa. London: Oxford Press, 1954.

Goodlad, J.I. A Place called school. New York: McGraw Hill, 1983.

Hyman, H.H., C. Wright and C. Reed. The enduring effects of education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975.

Jackson, P.W. Life in classrooms. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968.

Jencks, C.L. et al. Inequality: a reassessment of the effects of family and schooling in America.

New York: Basic Books, 1972.

Lortie D. Schoolteacher. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975.

Malinowski, B. Magic, science and religion. Glencoe: Free Press, 1948.

Mauss M. and H. Hubert. On magic and the unknown. In, Parsons, T. et al (eds.). Theories of society, II. Glencoe: Free Press, 1961.

Meyer, J. and B. Rowan. Formal structure as myth and ceremony. American Journal of Sociology, 1977, 83, 340–363.

Meyer, J. and B. Rowan. The structure of educational organizations. In M. Meyer et al, Environments and organizations. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.

Miller, S. A history of effective schools research: A critical review. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational research [sic] Association, Montreal, April, 1983.

Miracle, A.W. The making of shamans and applied anthropologists. Practicing Anthropology, 1982, 5, 18–19.

Ogden, E., W. Fowler and D. Kunz. A study of strategies to increase student achievement in low achieving schools. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research

Association, New York, March, 1982.

Popham, W. and H. Husek. Implications of criterion referenced measurement. Journal of Educational

Measurement, 1969, 6, 1–9.

Rowan, B., S. Bossert and D. Dwyer. Research on effective schools: a cautionary note. Educational Researcher, 1983, 12, 24–31.

Shoemaker, J. What are we learning? Evaluating the Connecticut school effectiveness project.

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association,

New York, March, 1982.

Wallace, A. Revitalization movements. American Anthropologist, 1956, 58, 264–281.

[Ed. Note: We shall forever be grateful to Brian Rowan for crafting such an eye-opening  presentation of the process used by the change agent "shamans" to sell the damaged goods of Effective Schools Research—and many other programs, like OBE, mastery learning and direct instruction—through manipulated or "massaged" research data. His exposé of the use of alignment of curriculum to testing to create an illustion of improved performance of schools is quite phenomenal for someone so involved in the spread of OBE to "all schools in the nation."]

"Big Bad Cows and Cars:

Green Utopianism & Environmental Outcomes"

"Big Bad Cows and Cars: Green Utopianism & Environmental Quality," by Sarah Leslie from the Free World Research Report (Vol. 2 No. 6), June 1993. Reprinted in its entirety with permission of author.

The problem with cows and cars, it seems, is with their... well, er... emissions. Both are supposedly responsible for wreaking havoc on the planet Earth (spelled with a capital "E" to suggest respect and "reverence") because of their CO2 output—for one a matter of life, for the other a manner of mechanization.

They both have to go. This means tractors, too, of course. The goals for sustainability, according to the latest environmental craze (which we have dubbed "Green Utopianianism"), require an abandonment of modern material affluence, a transfer of wealth to third world countries and, unmistakably, a return to the manual plow accompanied by a vegetarian diet.

Where can one find such utopian nonsense? It is popping up with increasing frequency in mainstream publications and credible-sounding scientific documents. Jeremy Rifkin’s "Beyond Beef" campaign and Al Gore’s recent book, Earth in the Balance, have lent the necessary pizazz to launch a massive public relations campaign about the environmental hazards of these CO2 emissions (that’s "gas" for the folks in Rio Linda, California).

The education establishment, prone to jumping on the latest bandwagon, is going great guns for environmental education. Educators are frequently puzzled and amazed when parents object to environmental and global curricula and outcomes. What could be wrong with that? they ask. We recommend they read the literature.

The Rave Review

We found the abolishment of the cow and car through reading an Iowa Department of Education document. Several years ago, in a publication entitled Social Studies Horizons (Fall 1990), just such a utopian book was given a rave review. This book, originally entitled The

Future as If It Really Mattered, was recently re-issued under a new title—Toward A Sustainable Society: An Economic, Social and Environmental Agenda for Our Children’s Future by James Garbarino. The title says it all. It is quite an agenda!

Here is the rave review:

Excerpts from a book that is a class of practical wisdom on what a sustainable society is, why we need to move to a sustainable society, and what a sustainable society might look like. It is this kind of thinking we need to consider as we move toward transforming the social studies. It seems to me that teaching the "transformational economics" of sustainability would be a much more empowering and enlivening process for our students than the textbook-mires "dismal science" approach to economics that has been the norm.

(Social Studies Horizons, p. 4)

If you think sustainability is just a nice new term to describe more environmentally responsible farming methods, think again. Sustainability, at least to the new Green Utopians, is an entire restructuring of the way humans live on the planet, and is the new prime directive for the survival of species (man only somewhat included).

The Iowa DE publication quoted Garbarino:

This enjoyment of owning, having, spending, buying, and consuming is a serious threat. It threatens our relationship with the Earth and our relationships with each other, particularly in our families and in our efforts to preserve the resources necessary for social welfare systems. It cannibalizes the planet, undermines the spiritual order, and leaves us scrambling to fill the social and spiritual void with positions. It is an addiction pure and simple... and our chances of making the transition to a sustainable society depend upon our overcoming it. (p. 4)

The major chore for humans on Garbarino’s anthropomorphic Earth is to make the transition to sustainability. But, just what does HE mean by this? What is the agenda of the new Green Utopians?

Utopian Sustainability

Garbarino’s transition to sustainability is a process long on ideology and short on specifics, in typical utopian fashion. Garbarino states:

Our goal, remember, is the creation of a more sustainable human community based on competent social welfare systems, just and satisfying employment, reliance on the nonmonetarized economy for meeting many needs, and a political climate that encourages cultural evolution and human dignity. (p. 162) [emphasis added] Garbarino identifies himself as a utopian throughout the book. His optimistic view of the future is dependent upon his faith that the human race will accept stringent population control measures, severely limited transportation and trade, earth-friendly housing, local neighborhood food and energy production, and government-regulated health and social welfare services. The seriousness of "our common future" is enough to warrant this massive overhaul of the Western lifestyle.

Our Not-So-Rave Review

The preface of Garbarino’s book (page ix) gives credit to Aurelio Peccei and the Club of Rome for the "wealth of ideas and information about the prospects for a sustainable society."

The Club of Rome is best known for its earth-shattering GLOBAL 2000 report, Limits to Growth (1972), calling for massive world-wide population control measures and many other controversial plans. The Club of Rome is one of those international organizations that the extreme left esteems (including the national media) and the extreme right views as one of "those" conspiratorial groups.

The Club of Rome does not advocate for a mainstream, reasonable approach to environmental stewardship. Not by any stretch of the imagination. It is an indisputable fact that the Club of Rome is tied closely to the wacky international New Age groups known as Planetary Citizens. Planetary Citizens sponsored a "1990 World Symposium on Interspecies & Interdimensional Communication." (This means communicating with species not of this world!) Aurelio Peccei’s name has appeared on Planetary Citizens letterhead.

A Return to the Plow

Tractors will go the way of the car and the cow. Manual high-tech plows are the wave of the new utopian future.

The plow developed by the Schumacher-inspired Intermediate Technology Group is a good example [of appropriate technology]. It relieves the backbreaking burden of working an oxen-powered plow, but it is not a conventional tractor. In their clever arrangement, a small engine pulls a plow across a field using a wire, while two farmers use their skill and strength to guide it. The result is better plowing with a less expensive tool and provision of meaningful work. (p. 223)

This utopian vision of a new society includes agricultural cooperatives, a cashless economy, and women working at home at gardening chores to provide food for their households and communities. "Household and community gardens can successfully produce fruits and vegetables, and in some cases even grain." (p. 231–2) Concurrent with these recommendations is the elimination of most trade because of its relationship to transportation (which produces CO2). Everything must be produced locally.

Eating meat is not included in the book. "The massive concentrations of cattle excrement produce large amounts of methane," claims Garbarino in Rifkin-like fashion. Presumably the cow is regulated to a position of prominence in society, perhaps even veneration. If the cow isn’t good for food, and not an "appropriate" technological substitute for the tractor for use with plows, then perhaps the Green Utopians of the future will hang garlands of flowers about their necks!

Car Crimes

"Using a car to accomplish daily tasks that could be done without one is a misdemeanor against the Earth and posterity. Social policies that encourage driving and discourage walking are crimes against the planet." (p. 221) The term for this new kind of crime in Green Utopia is "bioeconomic crime" according to Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, who is further quoted on the matter of automobiles:

Every time we produce a Cadillac, we irrevocably destroy an amount of low entropy that could otherwise be used for producing a plow or a spade. In other words, every time we produce a Cadillac, we do it at the cost of decreasing the number of human lives in the future. (p. 135)

This type of logic, which ties Western consumption to the future destruction of the Earth, is the drumbeat of Garbarino’s book. It explains the reasoning behind the original version of the Iowa Global Education curriculum manual (Catalogue of Global Education Classroom Activities, Lesson Plans, and Resources), which contained a Social Studies exercise for grades 4–6 which linked eating red meat to the destruction of the tropical rainforest:

Calculate the amount of meat eaten by a person in the U.S. per year; translate to number of animals. How much energy and grain are used to produce this meat? How many trees in the tropical rainforest are destroyed to produce this meat? (p. 26)

For Garbarino and the Green Utopians, automobile-based urbanization is a major culprit in the anti-sustainable modern lifestyle. "Suburbs are not conducive to sustainable patterns." (p. 166) Suburbs allow people to live far away from where they work and shop. Suburbs depend upon the car, or other forms of transit. Suburbs are not an acceptable alternative. So what, then, is the utopian alternative?

The Abolition of Patriarchy

Garbarino would like to redefine the family in the context of community, what he terms social welfare systems for a sustainable society. His ideas parallel those of the social engineers.

He would make community be parent: "Communities should share joint custody of children with parents.... We can require ‘registration and inspection’ of young children so that the community can monitor child development and not lose track of the children for which it is responsible." (p. 245) Garbarino also calls for a parenting license.

Family roles are redefined, too. "We need to end masculine domination both in the family and in society, so that we can create a cultural climate in which the sustainable society can exist." (p. 66) Patriarchy is a threat to the planet, according to Garbarino. He devotes an entire chapter to this subject because he believes we need to have a more feminine ethic to survive. His book has probably never been fully embraced by the feminists, however, because he believes women should be out working in the gardens and fields producing the household’s food!

Garbarino’s design for sustainable social welfare systems for families are nearly identical to the education reform efforts, including parents as "partners," a "community level organization... for transportation systems, formal education, industrial enterprise, and the like." (p. 222) Although he does not specifically identify the school as the "hub" of the community structure (as we have seen in other education reform writings), it is clear that the new environmentally-correct society will be managed by grouping people into small neighborhood communities—almost completely self-sufficient in food production and other life needs, but requiring intimate governmental managing of their personal and family lives.

Mandatory Population Controls

Garbarino writes:

To achieve a stable population, countries will have to establish a comprehensive and pervasive family planning program and carefully monitor immigration. At minimum, accomplishing this will require incentives for keeping family size at the replacement level, penalties for exceeding that level, and complete access to contraception. It will mean that family size will be limited to two children. (p. 228)

Family planning, the obligatory two children, is the cornerstone of Garbarino’s sustainable society. He lauds the Chinese example, despite its oppressiveness (penalties) and slaughter (mandatory abortions). In fact, rewards and penalties for ecologically responsible procreation are a key component to Garbarino’s ideal society. He views children as consumers of scarce resources, more mouths to feed on a crowded planet.

Garbarino consistently speaks of children in terms of economics (human capital?):

Children are an economic benefit in the households, neighborhoods, and communities that rely upon human labor rather than non-renewable energy and materials to produce food and provide utilities. (p. 79)

Limiting the size of specific families may turn children into an economic commodity, if people can sell their rights to bear them. (p. 84)

Children are the currency of family life." (p. 180) Cashless Economics

A radical new economic order is interwoven throughout the entire text of the book.

Garbarino’s economics calls for a cashless society and a new kind of economics that accurately accounts for the damage done to the environment. The price of every item must calculate the cost in terms of environmental destruction, especially nonrenewable resources like gasoline and oil.

Free enterprise is the villain to the world’s environmental woes. It is responsible for the destruction of the planet according to Garbarino and he utterly dismisses it as an option or a solution. The current "economic order and its cultural baggage are major obstacles in the transition to a sustainable society." (p. 116) Reading Garbarino does not make one feel comfortable about Gorbachev heading up the new world effort for this Green Utopia (his international Green Cross environmental effort). The abolishment of free enterprise has always been at the forefront of the communist agenda.

Severe limits to world trade are called for by Garbarino: "In a sustainable system, world trade would be limited to two domains. The first is ideas, technology, and artistic creations and the people necessary to communicate them. The second is material goods needed to meet basic human needs or to dramatically enhance human experience in ways unavailable locally. Most world trade today fails to meet either criterion." (p. 152) It is not clear why artistic creations are given such a high priority for trade! The National Endowment for the Arts will appreciate this recommendation.

Voluntary Poverty

A total and complete reduction in the modern American affluent lifestyle is called for.

"A relatively poor American family typically uses less of the world’s resources than an affluent American family, but it still consumes much more than an Indian family that lives at subsistence level." (p. 85) Therefore, Garbarino concludes, that only reasonable solution is this: "As the world’s leading consumer... [the United States] has a special obligation to reduce its demands for resources to a level that is domestically sustainable." (p. 89–90)

Garbarino’s ideas about what constitutes "sustainable" and the average American’s are radically different. He links American consumerism to every threat to the planet. It is not unlike the Iowa Global Education exercise for Home Economics students grades 9–12: "Seek connections between U.S. consumer and eating habits and the presence of malnutrition worldwide." (Catalogue, p. 36)

A Riceville, Iowa sophomore English class was given a "Simplicity Survey" as part of "The Thoreau Project." The test sheds considerable light on the extent to which Garbarino’s radical ideas about sustainability have infiltrated classroom curriculum. Here are a few sample "commitments" that students had to make on the survey:

• I and/or my family will own no more than three sets of clothes and three pairs of shoes per person.

• I and/or my family will own only one automobile.

• My family and/or I will eat less meat, more vegetables and fruits, and no white sugar.

• My family and/or I will make our own simple personal products—such as, deodorant, soap, toothpaste—from old historical recipes.

• My family and/or I will learn to do almost everything for ourselves: cleaning, baking, repairing, building, etc.

• My family will have no more than two children.

This survey is a good indication of how outcome-based education will function. If the child does not score at a high enough "committed" level, the "teacher may ask you to retake this survey in order to see if the unit changes your commitment." In other words, if the child doesn’t display the correct attitudes about this radical form of sustainability, they may have to re-take the test to see if their attitudes were changed!

The New Religion

To break our addiction to free enterprise, material consumption, and freedom in general,

Garbarino calls for some new values. It is here that we begin to see the link between his Green Utopian view of a sustainable society and the strange-sounding ethical values contained in the new educational outcomes being promoted across the country. Garbarino cites Amitai Etzioni, saying that he "links consumerism, the work ethic, and cultural patriotism. This is a linkage we must break, replacing it with a combination of passionate commitment to a humane social environment and rejection of materialism as an end rather than a very limited means." (p. 100) The old values have to go, to be replaced by a new ethic. These new values necessarily entail a new religion.

You may have guessed it—we need to form a relationship with the Earth. We are not told exactly HOW one goes about forming this new "relationship." Hugging trees is good for a start—we need to "speak to the trees and listen to the birds." (p. 226) Presumably, this new anthropomorphic view of Mother Earth is the new religion. Garbarino describes it this way:

"A reformed human family emphasizing equity and harmony... is a good model to follow in establishing our relationship with the Earth." (p. 99)

Like many of the other new Green Utopians (Al Gore, especially), Garbarino denigrates Christianity because it elevates man above nature: "Christianity was an ecological regression compared with the primitive animist impulse that emphasized the spiritual integrity of existence, the commonality of being, which demanded respect for the trees, the waters, the plants, the animals—for the Earth as a whole." (p. 98) Garbarino would replace big, bad Christianity with Eastern mysticism. "Buddhism teaches that material goods are only a means of achieving personal well-being. Consuming for its own sake has no value." (p. 99)

And, here is a big admission: "Primitive animism has more in common with emerging ecological science, although other religious traditions can also accommodate it." (p. 98–99)

This admission may serve to explain the recent upsurge of religious indoctrination in environmental and global education curricula. It also explains the including of native American Indian ritualistic rites in children’s curricula.

Garbarino advocates for this new (old) earth-centered religion. But what of other religions? What will happen to freedom of religion under this utopian system? "Freedom will be absolute in the realm of ideas and expression but minimal in the domains of environmentally threatening behavior." You can believe whatever you like, but your actions cannot harm the environment, however that comes to be defined. In fact, the environment reigns supreme in Green Utopia. The Earth’s needs (real or perceived) are paramount to human needs and human rights.

The New Green "Outcomes"

To achieve this Green Utopia requires that human beings accept a new system of ethics, one that values the Earth. Garbarino suggests that if "we can forge this link between personal and public concerns, we will be able to harness the motivating power of the family in transforming Spaceship Earth." (p. 67) The current classroom emphases on environmental and global education are prime examples of this. Making small children feel responsible for the survival of the planet is one of the mechanisms for forging this link. "Children... need... to develop a sense of kinship with nature." (p. 169)

Reversing biases "that currently discourage reusability, manual labor, and self reliance" (p. 205) is one of the goals for educating the public. This means that it is absolutely essential that public attitudes and values be altered to fit the new environmental crisis worldview of the future, complete with utopian solutions.

Amazingly, Garbarino’s book contains language almost identical to an outcome seen state by state across America in the new push for outcome-based education. "Socialization to adulthood means acquiring the skills and attitudes necessary to assume full responsibility in the work place, the home, and the community." (p. 206) An Iowa World Class Schools document states: "A world-class education will equip students to live, work and compete as successful citizens in a global society." (p. 5)

In light of Garbarino’s Green Utopia, state by state comparisons of nearly identical outcome-based language takes on new significance. The language that educators are struggling to define is easily managed by the environmental fringe. In fact, William Spady, the father of modern OBE, has written: "A fragile and vulnerable global environment... requires altering economic consumption patterns and quality of life standards, and taking collective responsibility for promoting health and wellness." (Spady and Marshall, 1990)

In the new Green Utopia, social abilities are of prime importance. Garbarino gives primacy to social development rather than technological issues: "[s]ocial changes, not technological fixes, are the primary vehicle for averting disaster and placing humanity on sustainable ecological and socioeconomic footing." (p. 21) Because of this de-emphasis on technology, he believes that children "must become adept at language, body control, morality, reasoning, emotional expressiveness, and interpersonal relations. Unless they do, they become a burden—to their families, to our society, and even to themselves." (p. 105)

The belief system of the Green Utopians explains the national pressure to have attitudinal, behavioral and value-laden outcomes. It also explains the vacuum of solid academics.

Reading, writing and arithmetic will no longer solve the world’s problems. The crisis is too complex. Humans must be taught to adjust and adapt instead. Garbarino does not stake his future hopes in technological development and man’s potential to develop scientific solutions for the complex environmental crisis. The only hope that he sees is sustainability.

Another nationally popular outcome has to do with diversity. Garbarino explains why this is so necessary: "Cultural diversity is as important as biological diversity in enhancing evolutionary resilience and human progress." At least for some, "diversity" has much more to do with their religious beliefs in evolution of mankind than it has to do with protecting the human rights of religious and ethnic groups. Cultural diversity, in the form of multicultural education, often promotes ritualistic pagan practices that enhance a feeling of connectedness with the Earth.

Those who oppose the teaching of this new religion of interconnectedness with nature are labeled "racists." When Davenport, Iowa school board member Elaine Rathmann challenged a "Multi-Cultural Week" as mere "political indoctrination and social reform" she was publicly charged in the local press with racism.

The New Green Utopian Classroom

A recent article by Barbara Melz of the Boston Globe appeared in the Des Moines Register (6/6/93, p. 3E). Melz details the vulnerability of children to emotional manipulation in areas of environmentalism. She quotes from a book by Lynne Dumas (Talking with Your Child about a Troubled World, Fawcett Columbine): "Everything becomes a personal issue for kids, everything gets related in their minds to their own safety."

The article goes on to give a poignant example of how vulnerable children can be to this type of education:

This is especially true of environmental issues, she says. From the earliest ages, children relate to animals and nature in a kind of magical way. "TV shots of oil-soaked birds and seals, whales trapped on a beach, endangered dolphins all these kinds of things can be very upsetting to them. They can react with an intensity that surprises parents," she says... [S]olid waste disposal is an issue many school-age children glom on to in a very concrete way. "They see how much trash they produce in their own house. So here’s their worry: If everyone’s house makes this much trash, what will happen? Will there be enough room for me to live in the world?"

Are children being educated or indoctrinated? Is it fair to burden them with feelings of guilt and responsibility based on the perceived crisis of the Green Utopians?

Only One Choice

A thorough reading of Garbarino’s book, especially in the context of other works by the new Green Utopians, creates the crisis and then presents the solution. His crisis is an out-of-control world population problem compounded by scarce resources. His world view is clearly founded on the Club of Rome Global 2000 report. Garbarino has a limited view of human potential, technological innovation, the value of free enterprise, or ingenuity. However, there are serious questions about the scientific and rational validity of the entire so-called species.

The only politically-correct technology for the Green Utopians is apparently the computer, probably because of its ability to control human behavior through the charting of actions and attitudes. The greater good of society and the seriousness of the threat against the planet would likely justify a central data bank to monitor each citizen according to the logic of Green Utopians.

Garbarino’s solution is a return to third-world subsistence living. Garbarino doesn’t say this directly. One must read between the lines and come to understand that abolishing cows and cars, transportation and trade, free enterprise and a market economy, and certain basic human freedoms in matters related to religion and procreation can only mean an international totalitarian society. Granted, Garbarino, the consummate Green Utopian, objects to this (totalitarianism) and feigns to distance himself from the nastiness of it all. Yet his proposals can mean nothing else.

The New Green World View

To explain sustainability, Garbarino gives an extensive quote from Voluntary Simplicity by Duane Elgin, in which Ram Dass—"a Western-style intellectual turned Eastern-style mystic"—tells a story about an ideal society. It sheds much light on what Garbarino means by a "sustainable" society. Here are a few highlights:

I look out over a gentle valley in the Kumoan Hills at the base of the Himalayas. A river flows through the valley, forming now and again manmade tributaries that irrigate the fertile fields. These fields surround the fifty or so thatched or tin-roofed houses and extend in increasing narrow terraces up the surrounding hillsides.

In several of these fields I watch village men standing on their wooden plows goading on their slow-moving water buffalo who pull the plows, provide the men’s families with milk, and help to carry their burdens. And amid the green of the hills, in brightly colored saris and nose rings, women cut the high grasses to feed the buffalo and gather the firewood which, along with the dried dung from the buffalo, will provide the fire to cook the grains harvested from the fields and to warm the houses against the winter colds and dry them during the monsoons. A huge haystack passes along the path, seemingly self-propelled, in that the woman on whose head it rests is lost entirely from view.

It all moves as if in slow motion. Time is measured by the sun, the seasons, and the generations. A conch shell sounds from a tiny temple, which houses a deity worshiped in these hills. The stories of this and other deities are recited and sung, and they are honored by flowers and festivals and fasts. They provide a context—vast in its scale of aeons of time, rich with teachings of reincarnation and the morality inherent in the inevitable workings of karma. And it is this context that gives vertical meaning to these villagers’ lives with their endless repetition of cycles of birth and death. (p. 36–37)

The Other Side of the Story

This scene is seductive, rich with description of people living in a sustainable society close to the Earth. However, there is another side to this story. It would burst the bubble of the utopians to hear it. Further, it would give great credence to Christianity as a potent force for personal freedom in the world. This alternative account comes from a humble missionary story, The Bamboo Cross, by Homer Dowdy:

Just over beyond the mountains which surrounded the Sixteen Peaks lived the Tring.

They were the most difficult of all the mountain tribes that Sau had tried to reach. They were shy. When strangers approached they scurried into the forest. The Tring were the poorest, most fear-ridden tribe of all. If Sau’s people often went hungry, the Tring lived always on the edge of starvation.

They did not live in villages.

The spirits that ruled them forbade one family to dip water from another’s source; one of them could not even live across the stream from an in-law. So Tring houses were spotted sparsely for long distances along the mountain rivers, each a desolation picture of isolation.

Clinging to the steep, stony sides of mountains for mere existence, the Tring shivered in the ceaseless cold of the wind. Often gusts broke down the corn before it could come into ear. The wet monsoon blew when they needed it to be dry, and when it was dry for too long they suffered from the drought.

The demons, too, kept them hungry. If a man went to his field in the morning and found dew on the ground, he returned home without working that day to avoid a curse.

If fortune kept him away from his field beyond the planting season—well, it was evident that the spirits did not want him to find his food in such an easy way.

And if he did plant, he was careful not to plant enough to satisfy his needs. The spirits always demanded of him that he search in the forest for roots and leaves to eke out his diet. For this reason he was inclined to plant just enough mountain rice to keep his alcohol jars full. (p. 72)

The Bamboo Cross is a descriptive account of how people’s lives in this tribe and others were truly transformed when they were released from the spiritual bondage to their demons and fat sorcerers (who exacted large amounts of material goods from their subjects to relieve them of supposed curses).

New Green Utopia

Green Utopia, then, may be a place—several generations hence—where people living in a "sustainable" society strongly resemble more primitive cultures with one notable exception. There will be a little box that does things, and people talk on it, and you have to push the correct buttons for food and medicine. No one knows the complicated math and science required to program this box because shopkeeper math and logic are not taught anymore. The little box .is, therefore, an object of great superstition and magic. It accurately predicts the weather and seems to know almost everything.

The little box is the computer.

Garbarino’s book was probably never a best-seller. But for those who are seeking to understand the rationale, worldview and justification for such a radical education reform proposal, it just might provide a few unexpected answers.

AFTERWORD

It is agreed by many Americans that the United States is living on "borrowed time," but how many of us are willing to reflect seriously on what has happened and how the situation can be reversed? In 1985 this writer, in her slim booklet Back to Basics or OBE… Skinnerian International Curriculum?, warned:

Whether or not the United States of America—through citizen preoccupation with fashion,

TV, sports, gourmet cooking, jogging, making a living, etc., all of which are perfectly legitimate and worthwhile activities in a "free society," coupled with lack of understanding of the internationalists’ use of gradualism and Hegelian philosophy to attain their goals—slides into the totalitarian black hole of a socialist one world government, with the resulting loss of freedoms our ancestors fought and died for, depends on whether YOU, the reader, are convinced the problems described in this book are serious enough for you to spend a few minutes writing to your elected officials.... If the present situation continues unchecked, by the year 1998: children now in kindergarten will have been through thirteen years of Skinnerian world government brainwash under the deceptive guise of the "New Basics"; you and I may no longer be around to vote; and the 18-year-olds may well be on their way to vote what historians have referred to as the greatest experiment in human freedom straight down the tubes.

Well, this writer is still around, and fortunately, so are many other concerned Americans who in 1985 were in their fifties. What this writer predicted has for the most part happened, although it is difficult for the average American to identify or to nail down since the loss of our freedoms at the ballot box—and more importantly through regional government which uses unelected officials to make decisions—has been introduced very gradually.

The most serious problem resulting from the "deliberate dumbing down" is that important decision making is increasingly being delegated to unelected Americans. Citizens 456 are being called upon to participate in the political process through communitarian group management procedures (site-based school management, task forces, blue-ribbon commissions, town meetings, group consensus, call-in talk shows, polling, etc.) and public policy is being made using the "uninformed" opinions of those who have, through no fault of their own, been dumbed down by being either mis-educated or not educated at all in the traditional sense. Many cannot even read a newspaper and depend on TV for their knowledge and understanding of current events.

Part of the solution to this problem could be to return all decision making to duly-elected officials. That, of course, would not assure that those who are elected would be any better qualified to make decisions than those presently calling the shots in Delphi circles and the numerous unelected decision-making venues at work in our country. However, accountability would be restored, and citizens could once more, as free individuals—and,

I repeat, individuals—vote these people out of office and elect persons who are educated in the traditional disciplines of history and government (the U.S. Constitution), economics and basic academics. Eventually, if the public education system can be restored to its former excellence, our nation would be able to get back on track.

Seldom, if ever, does one hear the following fairly simple solution suggested when the question is posed regarding how to restore our public education system to its traditional (pre-1930’s) state of excellence:

Elected officials at the local level have the authority to re-establish public education according to the wishes of the taxpayers in each local community. Teachers with degrees in specific subject matter could be hired without requiring that they have state or national certification which subjects them to seemingly ruinous training courses which do not deal with academic material. However, the funding of the schools must remain local if citizens wish to re-create truly academic institutions. There can be no tuition tax credits, vouchers, charter schools, or laundered state tax monies (monies co-mingled with federal money) if citizens wish to be 100% in charge of the education philosophy; i.e., curriculum, hiring of teachers, teaching methods, etc. Americans forget too easily the old saying, "He who pays the piper calls the tune." For those who find such a solution unworkable due to the discrepancies in local community tax bases, I say refer to the beginning of this book regarding the ability to educate on a shoestring. Education costs little: brainwashing and social services are very, very expensive.

Granted, the above "solution" may sound simplistic, and in this day and age would not be easy to implement in urban areas, where many of the needs are the greatest. However, when one surveys the urban education landscape as presently constituted, there are few bright spots. Billions of dollars in tax money, which should have gone into true academics, have been siphoned off into the operation of huge and unnecessary bureaucracies. As one has seen after reading this book, community services and changing students’ values have been judged more essential than teaching a child to read, to understand his historical setting, the essentials of science, and how to calculate. Basic academics, in most inner city schools under the umbrella of Effective Schools Research, have been taught using Skinnerian mastery learning programs which have resulted in producing low test scores. Discipline has broken down to such an extent that the prescription of the drug Ritalin is commonplace, retired military officers are running urban schools, uniforms are mandated in many public schools, and the police are being called upon to keep order in the former halls of academe.

There is no question that much careful and sensitive thought must go into planning for the urban schools, keeping in mind at all times that most of the problems facing these schools and communities have been a result of what you have read about in this book and the willingness of elected officials to accept the "carrot" along with the big stick (the money with all the federal and state controls on how it is to be used).

It is never too late to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Nothing positive can be accomplished, regardless of how much money and good will exist, unless we Americans learn again to stand on our own two feet, as individuals, not as members of the "group" using Total Quality Management, but as individuals with God-given intellects; as individuals who accept their responsibility to be contributing participants in our constitutional republic instead of being observers in a so-called "participatory" democracy where only those who agree with the status quo will be allowed to have a voice. Our nation did not become great through group action. It became great in every way due to individual Americans thinking and acting independently, caring for one another and not expecting the government to care for them or their neighbors, and accepting responsibility for their actions without blaming the "environment" for all their misdeeds—from broken marriages, smoking and drinking to violent behavior.

To repeat the theme of this book: We are human beings, not animals. We have free will.

We can choose and build our futures, something animals are not capable of doing. Animals are justified in blaming their environment for their behavior! We, as human beings, with intellect, soul and conscience, do not have such justification.

Very recent history, being made as this book is written, should serve as a wake-up call. We, as citizens, seem increasingly unable to make the important connections between individual personal behavior and its effect on the nation/world as a whole. There can be no stability in our world if common decency (morality) is shunted aside and considered a "personal matter" not affecting the entire body politic (personal behavior vs. public morals).

Our children deserve more from those adults who bemoan the sorry state of this nation while making excuses for public officials’ immoral conduct, and who are poor examples of good behavior themselves. How can we expect our children to grow up and become responsible citizens and future leaders if we sanction immorality at all levels of personal life and government? How can our children accept our criticisms and correction when caught lying or stealing when they see us making excuses for such behavior at the highest levels of government and leadership?

Truly, the "non-absolutist value vaccine" (extensively documented in this book) has taken and can be expected to further sicken our nation in the absence of a return to dependence on very clear and simple moral standards, such as the Ten Commandments which used to hang on the walls of every school and public building in this nation.

Of utmost importance for all Americans at this critical juncture in American education is for us not to accept a solution that may in the long run turn out to be more harmful than the present unsatisfactory state of American public education. Some solutions being floated around sound good, such as the complete abandonment of public education in favor of a privately operated system in which parents ostensibly could choose the school to which they send their children. It is important to take a very hard look at such solutions. First, who is going to run those schools? Are parents aware that the New American School Development Corporation and its charter schools for workforce training were set up precisely for the purpose of replacing the deliberately "crashed" public schools? Where would children in the low-income urban areas end up? What private and/or "publicly-funded private" entities are waiting in the wings to orchestrate and relegate these students into dead-end workforce training institutions?

As explained in the preface and at the end of this book, the global workforce training system is being put in place as I write. For example, on June 28, 1999, Gene Sperling, the director of the President’s Economic Council, in an interview with CNN’s "Moneyline" said that some of the $100 billion "surplus" could be used to make sure "children are ready to be the workers of the next century." What real "choice" will parents have when it comes to where their children will be so-called "educated" (trained) to be the "workers of the next century"? The powers-that-be must be pretty sure of themselves to so blatantly refer to education’s primary goal as creating little workers. Are American parents really so dumbed down that they find such comments coming from the highest office in the land acceptable?

Even if those operating charter schools had the best of motives, what is going to happen to the majority of children who come from homes where both parents work, where there is only one parent, where there are numerous societal problems which would impinge upon the freedom of parents to be a part of the privately-supported system—sell their children into serfdom?

"Choice in education" is an appealing concept until put under the microscope of 1990s reality. At this point in time, "true choice" with no strings attached exists only for homeschoolers and private (independent and religious) schools that have not in any way compromised their freedom to do exactly as they wish. By that, the author means that such an entity has never: (1) accepted one single penny which has at any time, in any fashion, been a source of government—at any level—revenue (tax money; i.e., vouchers, tax credits, or funding from private sources subsidized in any way by the government); and or (2) availed themselves of any services provided by local, state, or federal governments or private sources subsidized in any way by the government (i.e., extracurricular school activities including music, art, sports, field trips, computer use, etc., or health and mental health services which may have been provided when the student was enrolled in the public school system). "True" choice is an option for the minority of children whose parents had better be on guard when offered free computers and software to learn the curriculum required in order to obtain the certificate in mastery necessary to obtain a job or be accepted in college.

"True" choice is not an option for the majority of children whose parents are not in a position to avail themselves of it.

A massive national effort to restore true local control of our public schools seems to this writer to be the only "real" long-term solution which will guarantee freedom and upward mobility for all our children. Such a solution is no more difficult to implement than solutions presently being offered by those who wish to "use" America’s youth for their own profit-seeking motives-resulting in the loss of economic and political freedom.

In order for such a solution to be implemented, elected officials must understand from whence came the problems in education. It is for that reason, for the true understanding of public officials, that this book was written. The author hopes and prays that the greatest number of elected officials will read this book and take the necessary courageous action to reverse the situation which, if left unattended, represents a grave threat to the continued freedom of our nation.

—CHARLOTTE THOMSON ISERBYT

 

GLOSSARY

Accountable/Accountability. See Behaviorist Terminology section at end of Glossary.

Affective Domain. The area of learning that deals with feelings, beliefs, values, attitudes, and motives—all those inner factors that determine behavior and responses to stimuli. By changing or modifying the affective domain, educators can control behavior, or so they believe. (See Direct Instruction, Mastery Learning, Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, and Appendix XIX)

Assessment. Has come to be accepted as a means of measuring student progress toward international, national, and state goals. It should be noted that there is no dictionary definition which defines "assessment" in this way. The education establishment has co-opted this word over time. (See Authentic Assessment and Appendix IV and XI)

At-Risk Student. Any "student who is at risk of not meeting the goals of the educational program... or not becoming a productive worker" (Iowa State Standards which match the National Goals). Programs such as Parents as Teachers (PAT), 21st Century Schools,

Healthy People 2000, and others define at-risk categories. (See 1992 Parents as Teachers articles by Laura Rogers)

Authentic Assessment. Measures a student’s behavior; alternative performance measure of a student’s ability to solve problems and perform tasks under simulated "real life" situations.

It measures student responses which demonstrate what students think, do, and have become. These outcomes are recorded during normal classroom involvement such as recess, lunch, field trips, and at other unexpected times. Teachers may use hand-held computer scanners that scan the students’ bar-coded names and responses, then transfer the information into a computer at a later time. (See Appendix XVI)

Behavior Theory, Behavior Modification, Behaviorist, Behaviorism. (Refer to Behaviorist Terminology section of the Glossary and Appendix II, III, V and XIX).

Benchmark. The following definition is taken from "A Report from the Committee on Labor and Human Resources, Summary of S. 14" and is also included in Appendix XV:

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; occupa- tional 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.

Block Grants. Part of the New Federalism movement of the early eighties, block grants send federal assistance, with all its federal regulations, directly to the local level, bypassing the traditional constitutional oversight of the state legislature. Block grants are a necessary part of unconstitutional regional government. They are sold to the citizens as enhancing local control when in fact they do just the opposite by removing an important elected official check at the state level. The 105th Congress (1998) Republican-backed Dollars to the Classroom Act is a good example of how this state legislative bypass is effected.

Career Transcript. The SCANS 2000 Center at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore has developed something called a "career transcript," the purpose of which is to provide quick, more accurate summaries of applicants’ education and work experiences. A career transcript "can be thought of as a certified resumé of lifelong learning," SCANS 2000 Chairman Arnold Packer wrote in a recent paper on the proposal. "The problem with academic transcripts," Packer said, "is that they’re designed for students going on to other schools; they have little currency in the workplace." The career transcript "sort of fits between" resumes and school records, Scott Brainard, a SCANS/2000 program evaluator, said. It would contain a job applicant’s scores on standardized tests such as the SAT or tests from national vendors like Microsoft.

The transcript also would include an assessment of workplace performance based on supervisors’ evaluations, and an assessment of school performance based on benchmarked classroom tasks. The common language of the career transcript would be provided by SCANS (Labor Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills), a 1991 panel that identified skills workers need in such areas as planning, communicating, working with others and using technology.

[The above information was excerpted from a report of the Association for Career and Technical Education, which was downloaded from the Internet, January 24, 1999 www.avaonline.org/Weekly.html),ed. 

Carnegie Unit. A system developed in 1905 for standardizing the high school curriculum. Traditionally, students were required to complete a certain number of Carnegie Units (seat time in a specific subject area) in order to graduate (i.e., 4 units of English, 4 of math, 4 of history, 4 of science, etc.). The restructuring of American education from inputs to outputs (outcome-based education) requires the removal of the Carnegie Unit as an indicator of academic exposure in order to graduate.

Certificates of Initial and Advanced Mastery (CIM and CAM). These certificates are a result of the 1990 report America’s Choice: High Skills or Low Wages! produced by a commission appointed by the National Center on Education and the Economy. This group, led by Marc S. Tucker, was co-chaired by former U.S. Secretaries of Labor and chaired by Ira C. Magaziner, close friend and advisor to the Clintons. [Marc Tucker’s organization holds trademark ownership of "Certificate of Initial Mastery" and "Certificate of Advanced Mastery." That being the case, why are states and localities issuing what amounts to a privately validated diploma? ed.]

The following excerpts regarding School-to-Work (STW) and CIM and CAM have been taken from The School-to-Work Revolution by Lynn Olson (Perseus Books: Reading,

Massachusetts, 1997), pp. 191–193. [The writer recommends Olson’s book for those interested in the history of school-to-work activities in the United States, without necessarily endorsing her views, ed.]

The report advocated creating an Americanized version of the European systems, beginning with a radical restructuring of the American high school. All students would have to demonstrate that they had met a high standard of academic achievement during the first stage of their secondary school education. Those who did would earn something called a "certificate of initial mastery," typically at around age 16. [The CIM also requires mastery in the various attitudes and citizenship skills declared necessary for employment and citizenship, ed.] During the upper stage of secondary school, students could either enter college directly, spend additional time preparing for the more competitive colleges and universities, or begin to pursue a professional and technical certificate, which most likely would require some postsecondary education.

At the time, Vera Katz was vice chairman of the House Education Committee in Oregon and a member of the National Center’s board of directors. Katz saw an opportunity to apply the adage that "all politics is local." From her offices in Salem, she decided to put the commission’s recommendations to the test. The bill that she sponsored in the Oregon legislature mirrored many of the recommendations in America’s Choice. It passed in 1991 with little opposition and with the strong backing of both the governor and the state’s business community. It called for all students to earn a certificate of initial mastery [CIM] in the core academic subjects by grade 10. After that, all students would pursue a "certificate of advanced mastery" (or CAM) in one of six career pathways for their last two years of high school. Within each pathway (in arts and communications, business and management, health services, human resources, industry and technology, and natural resources) students could earn either a college-preparatory endorsement or a professional-technical endorsement, or both.

Supporters of the new law hailed it as the end of tracking in the high schools.

Because all students would have to meet a common academic standard to receive a certificate of initial mastery, all would have to demonstrate command of highlevel academic content.

Opponents of the new law depicted it as tracking writ large. They claimed that because students at the age of 16 would have to select a career pathway and decide whether they were pursuing entry in a four-year college or not, their opportunities would be limited. They also worried that the law would encourage students to drop out of high school once they had earned the certificate of initial mastery.

The Oregon Education Association, the state’s largest teachers’ union, came down hard against the new law. "Schools should not be forged as a service industry for business, nor should we be misdirected by the assumption that our economic ills are somehow the fault of the public schools," the union protested.

The majority of parents and students surveyed also opposed having to choose a career focus by the middle of high school, particularly if young people could not change their minds. However, they liked the idea of providing both college- bound and non-college-bound students with a sense of how their academic courses applied to the real world, and they thought high schools should provide  students with some career preparation.

Change Agent. A term used by many people, including President Clinton, leading educators, and social engineers, to identify individuals, highly trained in the group process and in the Delphi Technique. These people are designated to bring about controversial change in education, in the operation of our local and state governments, and at the federal and international levels. (See Preface regarding Iserbyt training to become a change agent, 1947 regarding establishment of National Training Laboratory, 1973 Ronald Havelock Change Agent Guide, 1993 letter from Lawrence Lezotte, and Appendix XIV) Character Education. Programs which are offered under the following labels of: "values education," "citizenship education," "civic education," and similar titles. The purpose of these courses is to teach students global, core, humanist, no right/no wrong values. The process of identifying the core values involves the entire community, often bypassing the views of elected school boards. The first attempt at devising such a curriculum was made in 1964 when the American Humanist Association began its involvement in "ethical education."

The roots of humanistic moral/character education lie in the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Association (UNESCO). As a school board director trying to remove values clarification from the curriculum in 1977, I was informed by a Congregational minister at a public school board meeting that parents did not have a right to determine their children’s values—that it was up to the government schools to do so!

Many well-meaning groups have attempted to implement "character education" programs with the intention of instilling biblically supported values. It should be noted that attempting to instill Bible-based virtues without spiritual understanding or instruction will always result in less-than-successful results. Also, to base "commonly-held" character qualities on prevailing law does not take into consideration possible changes in the law. Another important consideration with character education is who will teach it.

School boards have been consistently hamstrung by civil rights statutes when it comes to hiring teachers whose lifestyles exhibit desirable character qualities and who are good role models for students.

(See 1933 Humanist Manifesto I, 1933 Onalee McGraw pamphlet Secular Humanism in the Schools, 1941 Education for Destruction by Philadelphia, Pennsylvania public school teacher Bessie Burchett, 1946 Brock Chisholm speech, 1964 "Ethical Education" published in Free Mind [the journal of the American Humanist Association], 1970 Leonard S. Kenworthy "Background Paper," Core Values/Virtues, and Appendix V and XIX)

Charter School. A public school created by a partnership between the private sector and government for the purpose of providing additional academic and other choices for students.

Charter schools must comply with federal and state laws in order to receive funding. However, these schools have no elected board, making them an excellent example of taxation without representation. Charter Schools are supported by conservative Republicans as well as liberal Democrats, including President Clinton. (See 1991 NASDC article, Magnet Schools, and Appendix XII)

Choice. Allowing parents to enroll their children in any public school within the district or inter-district, or, depending on the scope of the choice program, providing tax credits that can be applied toward tuition in private schools. All schools receiving federal funding must adopt "voluntary" national standards which force students to conform to government- defined and dictated core beliefs, values, and attitudes. "Such choices should include all schools that serve the public and are accountable to public authority," asserted America 000: An Education Strategy (U.S. Department of Education: Washington, D.C., 1991), p. 31, which was developed under Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander.

Presently, parents have the choice to enroll their children in public schools, private or religiously affiliated schools, or home school them. To adopt "choice" solutions will bring government regulation to all choices because public money cannot be expended or credited without accountability; it is illegal to do so. The recent move to support privately funded vouchers by giving tax deductions for them is a backdoor approach which will boomerang because even a tax deduction has to be accountable. A study of the gradualism involved in regulation of the child care industry is a case in point. As parents were allowed tax deductions for child care, regulations were suddenly drawn up and imposed, in many cases forcing the home-based child care providers out of business or into an underground operating mode. Family members who were providers of child care were excluded from the exemption, etc. Another result has been the regulation of private and government child care providers to the point that even the food they offer the children must meet a standard. Beware of "choice" proposals, no matter who is offering them. (See 1991 Virginia Birt Baker’s "Educational Choice—The Education Voucher, Tax Credits, and the Nonpublic Schools," and Resource List)

Citizenship Education. The following definition comes from "School-to-Work and Ralph Tyler" by Dean Gotcher in Institution for Authority Research Newsletter (April 1998):

Education which produces a socialist (dialectic-minded) citizen who is not concerned with unalienable rights (given by a higher authority) but with human rights (determined by the group in consensus, guided by social engineers). With the former, one is innocent until proven guilty, since facts determine one’s guilt; with the latter, one is guilty until proven innocent, since feelings (personal, social felt needs) determine one’s guilt or innocence.

(See Character Education, Citizenship Education, and Values Clarification)

Climate. See Environment.

Cognitive Dissonance. Disorganization of thoughts, mental confusion, and emotional tension caused by behavior modification which conflicts with one’s values. Such manipulation causes many to rethink and modify their values in order to conform to expected behavior.

(See 1991 "Paradigm Change: More Magic than Logic" by John C. Hillary, and Appendix XIII and XIX)

Cognitive Domain. (See Taxonomy of Educational Objectives and Appendix XIX)

Common Ground. A place of compromise; a pleasant-sounding strategy developed by change agents for silencing opposing voices and winning community support. The adjective "bipartisan" is used more and more in a positive way as elected officials accept the perceived "need" to come to consensus in order to avoid conflict. (See Consensus Building,

Delphi Technique, Group Process, Synthesis, and Appendix XXII)

Community Education. A process, not a program, by which the total community is involved in decision making by consensus, using the group process and the Delphi Technique.

The original purpose of Community Education was and still is to put all services (health,

leisure, senior citizen, recreation, etc.) under the umbrella of the school district. Community Education literature states that the purpose of Community Education is to change the attitudes and values of community residents. Community Education seeks to eliminate elected officials, replacing them with politically correct, unelected members of a community council who will not challenge controversial new programs. Government officials who promote Community Education have likened it to the Chinese Communist communal system. "Group process," "participatory democracy," and "sustainable development" are other terms associated with Community Education. (See 1979 October article on schoolbased clinics, 1994 November Iserbyt article in Education Week and Appendix I)

Consensus Building. The process by which students, schools, communities, or groups of people learn to give up individual beliefs and ideas in order to work for "common goals."

These may be dictated from the top down (international to local), yet be promoted as grassroots ideologies. Consensus building changes beliefs through pressure to conform to group thinking. (See Common Ground, Delphi Technique, Group Process, Synthesis and Appendix XXII)

Core Values/Virtues. The late Ernest L. Boyer, former president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, defined "The Core Virtues" in his book The Basic School:

A Community for Learning—An Introduction to the Basic School as The Basic School is concerned with the ethical and moral dimensions of a child’s life. Seven core virtues—honesty, respect, responsibility, compassion, selfdiscipline, perseverance, and giving—are emphasized to guide the Basic School as it promotes excellence in living, as well as in learning.

He goes on to say under a section called "Living with Purpose" that The core virtues of the Basic School are taught both by word and deed.

Through curriculum, school climate, and service, students are encouraged to apply the lessons of the classroom to the world around them.

On face value, who could question the above seven core virtues? A problem arises when a student interjects his religion’s definition of any of these core virtues. That is when values education becomes sticky and when that student will be put down with a retort from the teacher similar to "That’s your definition." Unless the core virtues have a solid religious or philosophical base which does not allow for situational ethics, instruction in this controversial area becomes useless, confusing, and a waste of time. (For Example: the culture of the Netsilik Eskimo Tribe, discussed in Man: A Course of Study [MACOS], the controversial B.F. Skinner/Jerome Bruner social studies program, considered the putting of elderly people out on the ice to die the "compassionate" and "responsible" thing to do.

(See 1975 MACOS entry and Appendix IV, V, and XIX)

Critical Thinking. Professor Benjamin Bloom defines good teaching as "challenging students’ fixed beliefs." Critical thinking does exactly that using Bloom’s Taxonomy and values clarification to bring about attitudinal and value change. (See Appendix XIX and XXIII) Delphi Technique. The social scientists’ label for a communication technique used to get a Glossary diverse group to arrive at a predetermined consensus position through circulating information for comment in several rounds, synthesizing the responses until all agree. If a participant’s view cannot be synthesized with the group’s view after repeated rounds, then the premise must be declared invalid and abandoned. More recently, the foregoing original definition has evolved into allowing the participant’s opposing view to be abandoned in order to achieve consensus. (See Common Ground, Consensus Building and Group Process)

Dialectic, Hegelian. Common ground, consensus, and compromise/thesis-antithesis-synthesis.

(See Preface, Common Ground, Consensus Building and Group Process)

Direct Instruction (DI). Developed by Siegfried Engelmann in the 1960s and known as DISTAR (Direct Instruction System for Teaching and Remediation) or SRA’s "Reading Mastery,"it was one of the models used in Project Follow Through. Direct Instruction is based on Skinnerian operant conditioning and has traditionally been used with special education students. DI requires teachers to teach from a script and to use hand signals and sounds to punctuate the "learning" process. The following excerpts taken from the research of those deeply involved in the development and promotion of Direct Instruction provide important information about this Skinnerian "scientific, research-based" method of instruction.

(1) "The Direct Instruction Model emphasizes group face-to-face instruction by teachers and aides using carefully sequenced lessons in reading, arithmetic, and language. These programs were designed by Siegfried Engelmann using modern behavioral principles and advanced programming strategies (Becker,

Engelmann, & Thomas, 1975), and are published by Science Research Associates under the trade name DISTAR." ("Sponsor Findings from Project Follow Through," Wesley C. Becker and Siegfried Engelmann, University of Oregon, Effective School Practices, Winter, 1996, page 33)

(2) "Direct Instruction: A behavior-based model for comprehensive educational intervention with the disadvantaged." Paper presented at the VIII Symposium on Behavior Modification, Caracas, Venezuela, February, 1978. Division of Teacher Education, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon. Reference Notes at the end of the article include: "A Constructive Look at Follow Through Results" by Carl Bereiter, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, and Midian Kurland, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, originally published in Interchange (Vol. 12, Winter, 1981), which was reprinted, with permission, in Effective School Practices (Winter, 1996).

(3) "First, he (Engelmann) hypothesized that children would generalize their learning in new, untaught situations, if they could respond perfectly to a smaller set of carefully engineered tasks. He also favored a rapid instructional pace and choral group response, punctuated by individual student responses, believing that this would heighten student engagement and allow teachers to perform regular checks for student mastery," from "Making Research Serve the Profession" by Bonnie Grossen, Research Associate with the University of Oregon’s National Center to Improve the Tools of Educators, a project funded by a grant from the U.S. Office of Special Education, and publisher of Effective School Practices, published in the Fall 1996 issue of American Educator, journal of the American Federation of Teachers.

(See Effective Schools, Mastery Learning, and Appendix II, III, XVII and XXI)

Effective Schools. The following definition is taken from an article entitled "Effective Schools for Results" published in The Effective School Report (July 1984):

Over the past 30 years there have been three primary programs related to the design and implementation of Effective Schools and successful learning results.

Each effort focused on different aspects: behavioral change and application of learning theory to produce successful learning results; identification of sociological factors operating in Effective Schools; teaching strategies to effect learning; and the combination of these variables and practices in a systematic approach to achieve learning and management results. The results of these research programs offer proven practices which, when combined in an interdisciplinary approach, can deliver "predictable excellence" in educational results, the ultimate criterion of an Effective School program.

The following professionals and groups have been involved in this research and development: Wilbur Brookover, Ron Edmonds, Effective Schools Research Movement; B.F. Skinner, Norman Crowder, Robert E. and Betty O. Corrigan (1950– 1984), Mastery Learning Practices; R.E. Corrigan, B.O. Corrigan, Ward Corrigan, and Roger A. Kaufman (1960–1984); Project entitled "A Systematic Approach for Effectiveness (SAFE) for District-wide Installation of Effective Schools."

(See July 1984 Effective School Report and Appendix VI and XXVI )

Environment. A key term used in behavior modification. Changing one’s environment can be utilized to bring about behavioral change. The term "psychologically facilitative climate" means the same thing as "positive school climate."

Facilitate, Facilitator. A change agent who chairs handpicked committees or groups to direct discussion toward the "right," predetermined conclusions or consensus. This process is called "managed change." Facilitators are highly trained to deal with "resisters," those opposed to the predetermined change. (See Change Agent and Appendix XIV)

Global Education. Education for the purpose of creating "global citizens." Also known as "world class" education, "holistic" education or the "transformation" of education. A pilot global education curriculum in Iowa (Catalogue of Global Education Classroom Activities, Lesson Plans, and Resources, 1991) emphasized topics such as environmentalism, vegetarianism, pantheism, pacifism, population control and global government. In holistic fashion, it was designed to be "integrated" and "infused" throughout the academic curriculum. The Global Alliance for Transforming Education (GATE) in Education 2000: A Holistic Perspective (1991) defines holistic (global) education as follows:

We call for wholeness in the educational process, and for the transformation of educational institutions and policies required to attain this aim. Wholeness implies that each academic discipline provides merely a different perspective on the rich, complex, integrated phenomenon of life. Holistic education celebrates and makes constructive use of evolving, alternative views of reality and multiple ways of knowing. It is not only the intellectual and vocational aspects of human develpment that need guidance and nurturance, but also the physical, social, moral, aesthetic, creative, and in a nonsectarian sense—spiritual aspects. Holistic education takes into account the numinous mystery of life and the universe in addition to the experiential reality.

(See 1991 Global Alliance for Transforming Education, Sustainable Development, World Class Education, and Appendix XXVII.)

Gradualism. "Two steps forward, one step back." This political process allows change agents to introduce major social change in bits and pieces, rather than in sweeping proposals.

Often semantic deception is used to introduce these changes, focusing attention on the "trees" (the bits and pieces) rather than the "forest." Gradualism keeps the common thread of change out of view while the process of change continues—unnoticed by the general public. (See Preface)

Group Process. The group process uses sensitivity training and other psychological techniques to strip the individual of his individuality and to manipulate him into conformity with politically correct group values and goals. (See 1947 National Training Laboratory, Consensus Building and Appendix XXII)

Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS). Psychological manipulation using "application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation" (the higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy) without the factual knowledge needed for rational and objective thinking. The student is drawn toward making conclusions based on biased, politically correct information and disinformation. (See Critical Thinking and Appendix XIX and XXIII)

Holistic (Wholistic) Education. Involving the whole person—"body, soul and spirit." It integrates all subjects and infuses everything with a pantheistic, monistic spirituality. (See 1991 Sustainable Development/GATE entry, Global Education, Appendix XXVII, and Resource List Brave New Schools information)

Human Capital or Resource. The new label for all children and adults who are being shaped/molded to match the supposed needs of the global economy. The trained workforce product of global/national schooling. (See Appendix XI, XII, XV, and XVIII)

Humanism (Secular). A belief system based on the self-determination of man. Recognized as a religion in the United States. (See 1933 entry on Humanist Manifesto I and Onalee McGraw pamphlet and Character Education) Individual Education Plan (IEP). A plan drawn up to accommodate the needs of individual children who traditionally have been labeled "special education." IEPs will, in the future, be used for all children due to the move from traditional competitive education to noncompetitive, teach-to-the-test outcome-based education/mastery learning/direct instruction and workforce training (STW) which necessarily use individually prescribed instruction.

IEPs often call for the use of behavior modification techniques, including Skinnerian operant conditioning. Title I Special Education regulations contain a parental consent with the right to refuse requirement before developing IEPs or using behavior modification techniques, a protection not presently available to non-special education students. It is important that in the future all students who have IEPs be covered by this consent requirement and that relevant language, i.e., language covering all such students and all types of "plans" related to behavior disorders, academics, career training, etc., be included in the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. The transformation of schools from academics to OBE and STW will require IEPs for all students. (See 1982–1983 Profiles in Excellence: Secondary School Recognition Program) Individually Prescribed Instruction (IPI) or Individualized Education. Developed in the early 1960s at the University of Pittsburgh’s Learning Research and Development Center and at the federally funded laboratory Research for Better Schools in Philadelphia, PA, Individually Prescribed Instruction’s development coincided with the Great Society’s accountability movement in the sixties which had as its focus equal opportunity and would increasingly deal with outcomes at the individual student level. Performance-based education (IPI) calls for mastery learning/direct instruction, which has been gradually implemented over the past thirty years, initially as a result of the emergence of computer technology which permitted the student to work at his own pace with programmed learning. Computerassisted- instruction using OBE/mastery learning/direct instruction enables the planners to predictably achieve their "outcomes"; i.e., to bring about behavior change as well as training in skills necessary for the global workforce and to collect and store data in such detail as to include information on the individual student/adult, necessary for "recycling" and remediation purposes. (See Appendix II, III, VII and VIII)

Life Skills, Life Role Competencies, Lifelong Learning. Preparation for all life roles. The total development of the child—body, mind, and spirit as a learner, worker, consumer, family member, and citizen. What the student will believe, think, and do to meet the exit outcomes. UNESCO coined the phrase "lifelong learning" and identified the life skills/life role competencies which are being implemented worldwide. Outcome-based education, mastery learning, and direct instruction lend themselves to "lifelong learning" since one can take as long as one wants or needs—forever, if need be—to master whatever the controllers want him to "master." (See Appendix IV)

Literacy, Functional. Basic literacy skills, such as reading a bus schedule, needed to "function."

Professor Oettinger of Harvard, who supports functional literacy, says "in the modern context of functionalism, comic books may not be all that bad." (See 1975 Commissioner of Education T.H. Bell comments, 1979 "K-12 Competency-Based Education Comes to Pennsylvania," 1981 Professor Oettinger speech, and 1983 "Functional Literacy and the Workplace")

Local Control. A euphemism to pacify critics of federal control, since all control in the 1990s rests with those who determine the national standards and assessment and provide the money to implement the restructuring. Local educators are free only to find ways to meet those national standards. If local schools do not meet the standards (perform), they will be penalized. Taxpayers should be aware of the fact that state intervention in local schools does not always mean that your school is not doing well academically. It may mean just the opposite: there is still resistance from good educators who refuse to participate in the "teach to the test dumbing down" which is part of performance-based teaching, OBE, mastery learning and direct instruction. Sometimes called "localized control" and often incorrectly associated with block grants which circumvent elected officials at the state level, thereby lessening true local control.

The 1994 Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development Yearbook: The Governance of Curriculum stated: "...[I]ndeed, local control has been, and continues to be, the most durable myth, or operating principle, of educational governance in the United Glossary G–13

States." From Communities and Their Schools by Don Davies, Ed. (McGraw-Hill: New York, 1981), Miriam Clasby, longtime Community Educator, makes the statement: " ...Unless considerations of schooling are placed within the contexts of... world society, they run the danger of unwittingly affirming a past that no longer exists."

Lower-Order Skills. These include knowledge, comprehension, and memorization, the cornerstones of traditional education. HR 6—the 1993 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965—recommended the abandonment of the so-called "lower-order skills," to be replaced by ones which engage students in more "complex tasks." (See 1993 HR 6)

Magnet Schools. A public school focused on a specialized area of learning, often in  partnership with a private organization. They were originally promoted as a way to bring about racial integration. In the context of a socialist full employment, planned economy, magnet schools have traditionally been associated with the Soviet polytech system and its quotas for engineers, ballet dancers, etc. Charter schools can also serve the same purpose by providing specialized training. (See 1991 NASDC article, Charter Schools and Appendix XII)

Mastery Learning (ML). Proponents of ML believe that almost all children can learn if given enough time, adequate resources geared to the individual learning style of the student, and a curriculum aligned to test items. Mastery learning and direct instruction use Skinnerian methodology (operant conditioning) in order to obtain "predictable" results. The critical teacher behaviors found to correlate directly with high levels of achievement are: specifying learning objectives, setting high standards for mastery, modeling, practicing, eliciting responses from all students, reinforcing correct responses, setting up systems for frequent and consistent rewards, and time on task. Benjamin Bloom, the father of ML, says "the purpose of education is to change the thoughts, actions, and feelings of students," and he developed his mastery learning to do exactly that. (See 1968 Mastery Learning entry, Direct Instruction, Effective School Research, Individually Prescribed Education, Outcome-based Education, Appendix VI and XIX)

National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). "The Nation’s Report Card" which measures student progress by testing different subject areas in alternate years, carried out from 1965 to 1981 by the Education Commission of the States and since 1983 by the Educational Testing Service under contract to the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Educational Statistics. Also gathers personal data on children and families in order to fill out longitudinal profiles that include information on students’ and parents’ attitudes, values, and beliefs. (See Appendix IV and XI)

National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE). Founded by Marc Tucker, NCEE conceived the CIM and CAM in a 1990 report called America’s Choice: High Skills or Low Wages! [Note: NCEE’s subsidiary, the National Alliance for Restructuring Education, has been renamed "America’s Choice for School Design."] (See Certificates of Initial and Advanced Mastery, New Standards Project and Appendix XV and XVIII)

National Skills Standard Board (NSSB). NSSB, an independent authority acting under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Labor, has authority to identify occupation clusters and define the student skill level required for certification to work within these clusters. Both schools and businesses would be expected to follow government guidelines and adopt G–14 these standards. In other words, students will have to meet the government standards in order to be certified for various kinds of jobs. (See SCANS)

New American Schools Development Corporation (NASDC). NASDC was formed in 1991 when President George Bush requested that the business community raise funds to support development of "radical, break the mold" schools—one in each Congressional district. Ann McLaughlin was CEO and President of NASDC. The Request for Proposals stated: "The design may entail major changes in community governance... community structures and functions of other institutions such as public health agencies and welfare departments."(See 1991 NASDC)

New Standards Project (NSP). A partnership formed by Marc Tucker (head of NCEE) and Lauren Resnick, co-director with Robert Glaser of the University of Pittsburgh’s Learning Research and Development Center, to establish a "world class" system of standards and assessment that reflects international standards and culminates with the CIM and CAM. (See Certificates of Initial and Advanced Mastery)

Outcome-based Education (OBE). The following definition comes from Excellence in Instructional Delivery Systems: Research and Dissemination of Exemplary Outcome-Based Programs, a grant application submitted to the United States Department of Education for funding in 1984 by William Spady, Director, Far West Laboratory for Educational Research and

Development:

The concept of Outcome-Based Education emerged from the synthesis of two broad areas of instructional design and improvement. One is known widely as Mastery Learning and is identified with the pioneering work of Benjamin Bloom (1968, 1976), James Block (1971, 1974), Block and Lorin Anderson (1975), and Block and Robert Burns (1977). The other is known as Competency-Based Education (not to be confused with Minimum Competency Testing) and was defined conceptually and operationally by Spady (1977) and by Spady and Mitchell (1977).

The term "Outcome-Based Education" represents a synthesis of these two approaches and took form in the winter of 1980 with the formation of an organization known as the Network for Outcome-Based Schools. OBE is based on the following philosophical premises:

1. Almost all students are capable of achieving excellence in learning the essentials of formal schooling.

2. Success influences self-concept; self-concept influences learning and behavior.

3. The instructional process can be changed to improve learning.

4. Schools can maximize the learning conditions for all students by a. Establishing a school climate which continually affirms the worth and diversity of all students

b. Specifying expected learning outcomes

c. Expecting that all students perform at high levels of learning

d. Ensuring that all students experience opportunities for personal success

e. Varying the time for learning according to the needs of each student and the complexity of the task

f. Having staff and students both take responsibility for successful learning outcomes

g. Determining instructional assignments directly through continuous assess-

ment of student learning

h. Certifying educational progress whenever demonstrated mastery is assessed and validated. (See Appendix XXVI)

Outcomes. Based on Prof. Benjamin Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, the outcomes of education in the 1990s and in the 21st century define "What students must know, be able to do, and be like." Determined at the national and international level, they must be met locally. Called "learning goals," "performance objectives," "standards," "competencies," or "capacities," all require students to embrace "new thinking, new strategies, new behavior, and new beliefs" (Lee Droegemueller, Commissioner of Education, "Assessment:

Kansas Quality Performance Accreditation [QPA]," Kansas State Board of Education, Topeka, KS, January 1992).

(See 1991 "outcomes" recommended at Jomtien, Thailand "World Conference on Education for All" and Conference of U.S. Coalition on Education for All, and 1994 "U.S. Coalition for All: A History")

Ownership. Encouraging parents to participate in school activities in order for them to feel a part of restructuring—to have a feeling of ownership which will result in parental support for radical change.

Paradigm. A world view; a mental framework for thinking, for organizing information, and for understanding and explaining reality. A paradigm shift occurs when one turns the traditional way of doing things on its head, as is the case with corporate fascist public-private partnerships, the use of unelected boards for decision making, School-to-Work, etc. (See 1991 John C. Hillary’s "Paradigm Change; More Magic than Logic")

Parent Report Card. Report card issued by the school that grades parents on how they bring up their children, especially concerning school-related areas. The State of California recently passed a law requiring parent report cards. (See 1993 Total Quality for Schools by Joseph C. Fields, and 1999 January Rosemarie Avila article)

Parents as Teachers (PAT). A federally funded program which brings the state educator into homes to make sure each child starts school "ready to learn" and "able to learn." The child is given a personal computer code number, and a computer record is initiated that will enable the national data system to track each child for the rest of his life. Parents as well as children are evaluated. (See 1992 Laura Rogers’s articles and At-Risk Students) Participatory Democracy. Opposite of republican, representative, constitutional form of government.

Participatory Democracy uses polls, unelected councils, and task forces in which the voice of the people becomes more important than the voice of elected representatives.

Example: 1998–1999 investigation of President Clinton and the use by the U.S. Senate of polls rather than principles to determine whether the President is fit to remain in office.

Form of government supported by socialists and communists. (See 1984 April letter to President Reagan from Willard W. Garvey, Executive Director of the National Center for Privatization, which said in part "Privatization is now an idea whose time has come....

The knowledge, communication, and computer industry can make political representatives obsolete.")

G–16 Partnership. Usually refers to a new concept of governance which calls for a merger of the public and private sectors, commonly known as corporate fascism or socialism. Partnerships between government and the private sector result in a breakdown of the representative form of government and a lessening of accountability to the taxpayer. (See 1981 "President’s

Task Force on Private Sector Initiatives," 1984 Washington Post article "Industrial Policy Urged for GOP" and Participatory Democracy) Planning, Programming, Budgeting, Management System (PPBS) and Management by Objectives (MBO). A system used for planning and accounting which calls for: 1) establishing a goal; 2) setting forth plans to achieve it; 3) funding the effort; 4) evaluating success or failure at the end of the funding cycle; and 5) adjusting plans to achieve the goal, including funding, and starting over again with more precise focus. The following background information is taken from Goals 2000: Restructuring Our Schools... Restructuring Our Society by Kathie Finnegan (Hearthstone Publishing, Ltd.: Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, 1996), pp. 306–307:

...Originally developed in 1961 by Robert McNamara when he was Secretary of Defense in cooperation with the Rand Corporation. PPBS is the vehicle for achieving predetermined goals in government.

In 1961, following suggestions of the Rand Corporation, President Kennedy launched PPBS in the Department of Defense (DOD) under Robert Strange McNamara.

Although PPBS was clumsy, costly, and ineffective (and no more successful in industry than it was in managing the Vietnam War), President Johnson initiated PPBS in 1965 throughout the entire legislative branch due to its administrative effectiveness. Later it was put into all branches of the federal government.

A key point about running the government by PPBS is that it is government by appointed—not elected—officials. In 1972 the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (another name for PPBS) was established in Austria with twelve nations participating, including the United States and the Soviet Union. PPBS under many names has become the dominant organization/restructuring/re-engineering model for most of corporate America and many institutions and organizations.

PPBS has been described as applied scientific socialism. It is used to control what people produce, what they consume, how they spend their work and leisure time, what they think, and how they react to various stimuli.

The concept applied to education works this way: if you know what you have to start with (young, impressionable children) and you know what you want to end up with (citizen-workers for a centrally planned global economy), it is possible to design a system that will achieve that "outcome." PPBS is a continuous loop, renewable/reviewed/re-funded every three, five, or seven years so that basic assumptions and goals can be re-calibrated.

(See 1967 PPBS in California, 1972 June 11th speech by Mary Thompson, Systems, and Appendix IX and XXII)

Privatization. Transferring policy-making and implementation from the public tax-supported domain into the private or business sectors, where educational leaders and elected boards become accountable to wealthy funders (such as the Carnegie, Ford, Danforth, Pew, Rockefeller,

Spencer, or Annenberg foundations, to name a few), multinational corporations, and non-profit organizations, rather than to concerned parents and taxpayers. (See 1981 President’s Task Force on Private Sector Initiatives) Psychological Approach. "1. A method of teaching in which new subject matter and ideas are presented in a manner appropriate to the way in which the pupil learns and through situations that are meaningful to him" is the definition given by the Dictionary of Education, 3rd Edition by Carter V. Good, Ed. (McGraw-Hill: New York, 1973), published under the auspices of Phi Delta Kappa. It is also called a Child-Experience Approach, Functional Approach. Contrast with logical method.

Psychomotor Domain. (See Taxonomy of Educational Objectives and Appendix XIX)

Quality. The following definition is provided in Filling the Gaps: An Overview of Data on Education in Grades K–12 (National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), Office of Educational Research and Improvement [ID: NCES 92–132]: Washington, D.C., 1992). In the section called "Teachers" on page 5 we find:

Beginning in the 1980s NCES collected detailed information on the characteristics and qualifications of teachers. Information collected includes years of full- and part-time teachers’ experience in public and private schools, major and minor degree fields for all earned degrees (from Associate degree to Ph.D.), type of certificate in teaching assignment fields, college coursework in mathematics and science, and, to a limited extent, participation in in-service education. The inclusion of these measures in SASS [Schools and Staffing Survey] allows for an assessment of the qualifications of the current teaching force.

But the term "qualifications" is not synonymous with "quality." The characteristics that contribute to good teaching are many, and no single configuration of traits, qualifications, or behaviors unvaryingly produces optimal student outcomes in all situations. NCES teacher surveys have concentrated on collecting data on "qualifications," rather than trying to define "quality." In order to define and measure "quality," characteristics and qualifications of teachers must be related to growth in student achievement.

[Ed. Note: This definition forces teachers to comply with Goals 2000 criteria and to teach to the test.] (See 1992 Filling the Gaps) Regional Education Laboratories. The following definition comes from Goals 2000: Restructuring Our Schools... Restructuring Our Society by Kathy Finnegan (ibid.), pp. 306–307.

The U.S. Department of Education maintains ten RELs ("labs") in scattered geographic areas—all under the jurisdiction of OERI [the Office of Educational Research and Improvement]. The labs function as field offices of OERI, assisting the states under their jurisdiction in finding and implementing educational resources (such as the "validated" programs of the NDN [National Diffusion Network]) suited to their needs. They also generate and oversee research projects, print publications, and provide training programs to teachers and administrators.

Each lab puts out a catalog of its publications. Under Goals 2000 the regional labs are charged with designing appropriate materials for their clients if suitable ones cannot be found. The ten regions are:

1. The Northeastern Region (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, and Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands) served by the Education Alliance for Equity and Excellence at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

2. The Mid-Atlantic Region (New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Washington, D.C.) served by the Center for Research in Human Development and Education at Temple University in Philadelphia.

3. The Appalachian Region (Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee) served by the Appalachia Educational Laboratory (AEL) in Charleston, West Virginia.

4. The Southeastern Region (North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi) served by the Southeastern Regional Vision for Education (SERVE) in Greensboro, North Carolina.

5. The Southwestern Region (Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico) served by the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory (SEDL) in Austin, Texas.

6. The Central Region (North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Colorado, and Wyoming) served by the Mid-Continent Regional Educational Laboratory (McREL) in Aurora, Colorado.

7. The Midwestern Region (Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa) served by the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory (NCREL) in Oak Brook, Illinois.

8. The Northwestern Region (Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana) served by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory (NWREL) in Portland, Oregon.

9. The Western Region (California, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona) served by the Far West Laboratory for Educational Research and Development (FWL) in San Francisco, California.

10. The Pacific Region (Hawaii, American Samoa, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Kosrae, Pohnpei, Chuuk and Yap, Guam, Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau) served by the Pacific Regional Educational Laboratory (PREL) in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Restructuring. A systemic or system-wide movement to change the entire education model in order to achieve the new national goals; also known as "transformation." This lifelong, revolutionary, never-ending change system (paradigm shift) includes mastery learning, direct instruction, outcome-based education, Total Quality Management, and partnerships with business and community leaders, churches, and parents. Restructuring calls for the involvement of carefully selected, politically correct unelected members of the community in the decision making process. (See 1991 Hillary’s "Paradigm Change: More Magic than Logic," Paradigm, School Reform, Systemic Change and Appendix XII) SCANS (The Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills). SCANS was created under Elizabeth Dole as Secretary of Labor. It links education to the Department of Labor in a joint effort to create a workforce that meets the future needs for a global workforce and produces students who are competent in prescribed work skills including attitudes and group thinking. It can direct students into specific training, limit their options, and bring intrusive government influences into all aspects of life. (See 1990 SCANS article,

Certificates of Initial Mastery and Advanced Mastery, and Appendix XV and XVIII) School-Based Decision Making. A form of school governance that replaces elected school boards and/or central school system administrators with a school site council consisting of unelected principals, teachers, and selected parents who support the radical changes  alled for by restructuring. Designed to implement the changes with minimal hindrance, it is not accountable to elected officials, dissenting parents, or the taxpayers. It is also known as "site-based management." It could be referred to as "taxation without representation."

(See 1977 National School Board Association [NSBA] President’s Warnings at NSBA Conference)

School-to-Work or School-to-Career. Legislative initiative which changes focus of education to workforce training instead of information-based academic learning. The link or partnership between the schools and businesses established through the SCANS competencies which provide a criterion both for testing and training the global workforce, also known as "limited learning for lifelong labor." (See SCANS and Appendix XV and XVIII)

Semantic Deception. The use by change agents of words and terms which mean one thing to the average, normal, common sense American but have an entirely different meaning for the change agent who is attempting to restructure the schools or implement controversial programs. Some examples are: higher order thinking skills (HOTS), critical thinking, basic skills, core values, direct instruction, health, etc. Part of Appendix XXVI says: "...[P]olicy analysts sometimes use the rituals of research to confound and weaken political or scientific opponents, a form of research that appears similar to the ‘black’ magic of witches."

(See 1972 Mary Thompson paper on PPBS, and Appendix XI and XXVI)

Skill Standards. The following excerpts have been taken from The School-to-Work Revolution by Lynn Olson (ibid.), pp. 178–179. [The writer recommends Olsen’s book for those interested in the history of school-to-work activities in the United States, without necessarily endorsing her views, ed.]

Skill standards spell out what workers within an industry or cluster of occupations should know and be able to do to succeed on the job. They indicate to employers the skills of job applicants and provide workers with a widely recognized credential. They could improve the quality of career information available to schools, employers, and young people. For example, they could help improve the match between what is learned in school and what is necessary on the job.

In 1992 the federal government funded 22 pilot projects to test whether industries in the United States could develop voluntary skill standards. The projects covered industries ranging from printing, metalworking, and electronics to retail, hospitality, and tourism. Of the 22 pilot projects funded so far, the vast majority are led by trade associations or industry groups. In 1994 the Congress created a National Skill Standards Board to help promote the development of such voluntary efforts. The Board is charged with clustering occupations or industries into broad groups that would cover most of the workforce in the United States. In addition, it is supposed to develop a common national framework in which skill standards could be developed.

(See 1990 SCANS article and Appendix XV and XVIII)

Special Education. Planned for all children "at risk" of not meeting the national standards.

Special Education has traditionally required Individual Education Plans (IEPs) for economically .disadvantaged, learning disabled, and gifted and talented students. Special Education IEPs are a necessary component of OBE/ML/DI and school-to-work programs.

(See At-Risk Students)

Sustainable Development. "World Class Schools and the Social Studies" from Social Studies Horizons by Dr. Cordell Svengalis (Iowa Dept. of Education: Des Moines, Iowa, Vol. 3, No. 1, Fall 1990) says in part:

...a World Class education program would have as one of its major objectives the development of skills and understandings grounded in an ethical/moral context. This ethical/moral context would be based on the idea of assuming a sense of responsibility toward our interrelated planetary future.... Perhaps the most compelling vision of our time is that of a "sustainable society" [emphasis in original]. Our global society, in terms of the environmental degradation, explosive population growth in the Third World, energy shortages, pollution, conflict, crime, drugs, poverty, and just sheer complexity, is not sustainable into the 21st century.... Students need to understand these things as part of their World Class education.

(See 1991 GATE entry, Global Education, Resource List, and Appendix XXVII)

Synthesis. One of the higher-order thinking skills in Bloom’s Taxonomy. Uses the principles of Hegelian dialectics to join the beliefs or ideas (theses) of individual students into a new joint belief—the compromise solution or synthesis. (See Taxonomy of Educational Objectives and Appendix XIX)

Systemic Change or School Reform. Total holistic transformation: top down, system-wide, international as well as national. "Systemic" means one mind directing one body with many parts. It includes preschools, public elementary and high schools, private schools, colleges, universities, health clinics, and every other kind of community partner. The planned deadline is school year 2000–2001. (See Global Education and Restructuring) Systems, Systems Design, Systems Approach. The following definition comes from Appendix VIII:

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); a solution selection (to meet the needs); development of instructional objectives (if an instructional solution is indeed needed); an analysis of tasks and content to meet the objectives; selection of instructional strategies; sequencing of instructional events; selection of media; developing or locating the necessary resources; try out/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. Individual learning requires systematic planning because it may operate with little or no direct intervention by the teacher. (See PPBS)

Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. From the book titled Taxonomy of Educational Objectives:

The Classification of Educational Goals by David Krathwohl, Benjamin Bloom, and Bertram Massie (Longman, Inc.: New York, 1956). Bloom explains the purpose of the taxonomy when he defines good teaching as "challenging the students’ fixed beliefs."

He also says that "The purpose of education and the schools is to change the thoughts, actions, and feelings of students." It is important to remember that Bloom is the father of OBE/mastery learning/direct instruction which are based on Pavlov and Skinner’s experiments with animals (operant conditioning). Remember also that mastery learning and direct instruction have been designed to implement Bloom’s taxonomy in the cognitive, affective (values) and psychomotor domains.

The six levels of Bloom’s taxonomy through which a child must travel in order to have his world view reorganized—his values changed—are Knowledge (list, match, name, define, state), Comprehension (explain, paraphrase, summarize, describe), Application (relate, solve, use, show, classify), Analysis (support, differentiate, generalize), Synthesis (design, produce, predict), and Evaluation (conclude, assess, critique).

The taxonomy has been used by teachers, curriculum builders, and educational research workers as one device to attack the problem 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. Bloom, in attempting to do research on what might be called "peak learning experiences," produced evidence which suggested that "a single hour of classroom activity under certain conditions may bring about a major reorganization in cognitive as well as affective behaviors." (See Appendix XIX)

Teacher Tenure. A policy which traditionally protected incompetent teachers from being fired.

Retention of teacher tenure becomes more and more attractive as competent academically- oriented teachers have their jobs threatened only to be replaced by non-academically oriented teachers trained in TQM whose expertise lies in the facilitation of learning (using Pavlovian/Skinnerian "Best Practices," providing the technological resources necessary to bring about change of behavior, predictable results, and training in workforce skills).

Total Quality Management (TQM). A socialist strategy for managing continual improvement through statistical tools and decision-making techniques. Administered through site-based management (school-based decision making), it emphasizes the "customer" or "stakeholder" including everyone but the concerned parent. TQM is simply a refined version of Planning, Programming, Budget Systems (PPBS) and Management by Objectives (MBO) and has much in common with the principles underlying continuous progress mastery learning. Edwards W. Deming, the physicist who originally introduced TQM to the Japanese as a manufacturing management process to use during their industrial rebuilding after World War II, said in an interview at the University of Pittsburgh: "What I took to Japan was not the American way." (See Appendix XXII)

UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization). A specialized agency of the United Nations, headquartered in Paris, France. UNESCO began in 1946 G–22 with twenty member states and now has 171 members. In a brochure called "What is UNESCO?" we find: "UNESCO’s Constitution says that ‘since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.’ Building these defenses through international cooperation remains UNESCO’s top priority."

Universal Values. Honesty, integrity, tolerance, and other values believed to be common to all the people and the world’s cultures. This belief is counter to the facts of history. (See Core Values/Virtues)

U.S.-Soviet Education Agreements. President Eisenhower signed the first U.S.-Soviet Education Agreement in 1958. It was just one of many agreements negotiated with the Soviets which dealt with space, medicine, culture, and other areas. The purpose of the education agreement was to initiate exchanges of teachers from both countries and to study one another’s curriculum and textbooks, but not to engage in the development of curriculum In 1985 the Reagan Administration and the Carnegie Corporation departed from this less controversial agenda when they negotiated agreements with the Soviet Union which dealt not only with teacher and student exchanges but also with cooperation in curriculum development, including "joint research on the application of computers in early elementary education, focusing especially on the teaching of higher level skills and complex subjects to younger children." This aspect paved the way for Russian teachers to visit and work in American schools including those specializing in school-to-work activities. (See 1991 articles "Cop Swap," "Week in the Subway," 1994 "School Exams… Russian Origin," 1995 "Russian Teacher Review Works in SAD 53, Maine," and Appendix XXIII)

Values Clarification (VC). A strategy for changing a student’s values, usually, but not always, associated with the work of Sidney Simon. VC prods students to examine their own values in light of their upbringing and if they find that their values are a result of their parents’ direction, they are told that their values are not valid. In order for values to be valid they must be chosen freely by the student without any influence from church or family. The VC process usually takes place in the group with exercises and games which create dependency amongst members of the group and which contribute to group consensus on what is right and wrong, based on situational ethics. (See Character Education, Citizenship Education, and Synthesis)

Vouchers. Vouchers and tuition tax credits are used by parents to pay for children’s education in private schools of their choice. A voucher is a direct method of payment to a private school of a certain amount of tax money provided by a public municipality, whereas a tuition tax credit is a form of delayed reimbursement by deduction of a certain portion of one’s taxes related to the cost of private school tuition. The dangers of such choice measures for parents are best expressed in the old adage "He who pays the piper calls the tune." (See 1982 entry "Public Service, Public Support, Public Accountability" by Chester Finn, former Assistant Secretary, Office of Educational Research and Improvement [OERI], U.S. Department of Education, under Secretary William Bennett, and Choice) Work-Based Learning. Programs designed to teach older students (grades 7 and up) work skills on the job site, thereby assuring that the student can perform the tasks needed by local employers when the student graduates from public school. (See 1976 May 21st article "Cuban Children Combine Studies, Work" from The Los Angeles Times) World Class Education. A term loosely bandied about by government and corporate change agents. It simply means Third World-class academic education and first-class school-towork/school-to-career Soviet/German (Socialist) polytech education. It is a non-competitive system based on national standards and benchmarks that match international standards.

Students must embrace a common set of universal beliefs and values in preparation for the next century. This process uses technology (computers, robotics, etc.), mastery learning, continuous progress, and individual education plans which allow for lifelong learning as promoted by the United Nations. (See Global Education) Behaviorist Terminology

The following list includes words, terms, and phrases used by educators and behavioral psychologists, scientists, sociologists, etc., in their educational research and literature as well as in background papers for elected officials. This list should be of use to the average parent who may not be familiar with these terms, thereby not being alert to their real meaning, allowing their children to be subjected to experimental behavior modification programs which are found in all areas of curriculum from social studies to reading instruction to workforce training. Although some of these words can also be used in a non-behaviorist context, most of them specifically relate to the field of behavioral psychology which holds the evolutionary world view that man is an animal, without soul, conscience, intellect, creativity, and free will.

If parents, elected officials, and others are familiar with these words—not necessarily having to thoroughly understand their definitions—they will be able to identify programs which may not be in the best interest of their children or their constituents. One can point to a barrage of education programs and legislation voted on during the past thirty-four years at the local, state,

and federal levels which might not have been approved or passed had our elected officials and their constituents recognized and understood the meaning of the words on this list.

The reader should also refer to their own dictionary or Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, 2nd College Edition (William Collins & The World Publishing Co., Inc.: Cleveland, Ohio, 1974) from which several of the following definitions were taken, or this book’s Glossary and/or Index to find definitions for some of the words and the location in this book of instances where the majority of them are used. For instance, appendices II, III, V and VII deal extensively with the subject of behavioral terminology. accountable, accountability All sorts of mischief has been carried out "in the name of accountability," from the implementation of individualized education—outcome-based education and all its tentacles—to the collection of personal and private data, to the justification of bigger budgets for education, using PPBS, etc. Traditionally, accountability meant being legally responsible for taxpayers’ money; making sure students had adequate resources,

teachers, etc., in order to learn. The state was responsible for offering an educational experience for all children—input—not for assuring that every individual child would learn what he was taught. Children were allowed to receive less than perfect grades for their efforts and not all children got what we used to call "the most" from their educational experience. However, the state’s legal responsibility had been fulfilled.

Accountability increasingly means that the government schools must be accountable G–24 for predetermined results (results, performance, outcome-based education). Legislation is in the works to hold teachers accountable for student results which means students are no longer held responsible for their work or lack of work. In order to implement such an accountability system, systematic, scientific, research-based education (based on behaviorist principles) is being implemented. Such education which teaches to the test, using Skinnerian operant conditioning, has predictable and measurable, if narrow, results and serves the limited learning needs of the school-to-work agenda. The results of such narrow education are measurable data which must be collected at the individual student and teacher level, able to be stored in the computer for recycling and remediation purposes.

The use of such a narrow, rigid method of training assures predictable results which carry out the requirements of the new definition of accountability. That is why OBE, ML DI, and Effective School Research all claim that "almost all children can learn." Skinner said, "You will teach your student as he wants to be taught, but never forget that it is within your power to make him want what you want him to want." There is virtually no way a student can avoid "learning" exactly what the planners want him to learn unless he actually rebels against the method/system which considers him nothing more than a machine/animal to be conditioned/trained. (See Appendix XXIV) affective (Feelings, emotions)

alignment (All teacher training and curriculum resources are aligned with tests, assessments, etc.; i.e., teach to the test) animal, animal psychology (Used to develop operant conditioning programs) assessment, assessment strategies, authentic assessment (See Glossary) attitude, attitudinal (Point of view; dealing with attitudes, values, beliefs) automaticity (Level of training at which behavior becomes automatic ["knee jerk" reflex]) Behavior Analysis (One of twenty different intervention strategies that was used in Project Follow Through)

The following four behaviorist definitions are taken from Dictionary of Education, 3rd Edition by Carter V. Good, Ed. (McGraw-Hill; New York, 1973), published under the auspices of Phi Delta Kappa:

behavior modification: (Techniques for dealing with maladaptive behavior either through classical conditioning [for example, avoiding anxiety in a specified situation by conditioning a response incompatible with anxiety] or through operant conditioning [as by arranging and managing reinforcement contingencies so that desired behaviors are increased in frequency and maintained and undesired behaviors are decreased in frequency and/or removed]. When used with the nonfunctioning or disruptive school child, behavior changes are measurable by continuous assessment and graphic means; behavior management, though using many of the same techniques, is a less precise method.) behavior shaping: (The process by which a target response or series of responses is developed through the use of strategically placed reinforcers; a term used primarily by those who identify themselves with B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning.)

behavior theory: (A view which regards human behavior as primarily rooted in the experiential history of the organism, as having been learned, and as susceptible to modification by psychological means; emphasis is on the nature of the learning processes that underlie behavioral change, and these processes are regarded as essentially identical to those involved in any other kind of complex human learning.) behaviorism: (A systematic approach to or school of psychology, which regards objective, observable manifestations such as motor and glandular responses as the key to an understanding of human behavior; consciousness, feeling, and other subjective phenomena are rejected as unnecessary; places much reliance on the study of behavior of animals under controlled conditions; originated with the work of M.F. Meyer, A.P. Weiss, and J.B. Watson during the first two decades of the present century; the most widely known contemporary exponent was B.F. Skinner.)

Best Practices (Term often used in performance-based educational teacher training material which refers to behavioristic, scientific, research-based teaching practices) climate (Environment) clinical practice (Diagnose and prescribe) coaching (To instruct and train) competent (Adequate) computer-assisted instruction (C-A-I: programmed learning) conditioned (Having developed a conditioned reflex or behavior pattern) conditioned response (Conditioned reflex in which the response—e.g., secretion of saliva in a dog—is occasioned by a secondary stimulus—e.g., the ringing of a bell repeatedly—associated with the primary stimulus—e.g., the sight of meat) criterion-referenced testing (Testing which does not compare student’s scores with those of the group, but which has the student working at his own pace and in competition with no one but himself; such testing is necessary for individually prescribed instruction, mastery learning, and direct instruction, all of which teach to the test. Traditional education does not teach to the test, thereby exposing the student to a much wider and rich knowledge base, some of which he is never tested on, but which becomes an important part of his understanding of the world around him.) critical thinking (See Glossary) cue (A secondary stimulus that guides behavior, often without entering consciousness) direct instruction or Direct Instruction (SRA’s DISTAR: Direct Instruction System for Teaching and Remediation, also known as "Reading Mastery" or any programmed learning based on the principles of Skinnerian operant conditioning) education (The following definition of education is taken from a 1972 speech given by Mary Thompson on the subject of PPBS in education: "The objective of education is to measure and diagnose the child in order to prescribe a program to develop his feelings and emotions, values and loyalties toward predetermined behavioral objectives. Drawing it G–26 right down to basics, we are talking about conditioned response in human terms. Pavlov experimented on dogs.") effective, effective school research, effective schools (International school restructuring movement which seeks to level the playing field for all children, thereby dumbing down the particularly bright and average students; a form of redistribution of brains, intelligence.

[See Glossary and Appendix XXVI]) elicit (Used in relation to a specific behavior: to draw forth, evoke, cause to be revealed) enabling (To make possible or effective) environment, environmental (Climate—"psychologically facilitative" when applied to education) exceptional (Teachers who are trained to use operant conditioning. Also, master teachers) experimental (Used in relation to research conducted on teachers and students, usually without their "informed" consent. Legislation is on the books which protects prisoners from such experimental research.) extinguish (Stop certain behavior) fade (As behavior reaches "automaticity" level, use of operant conditioning is gradually reduced to zero level) guiding (Helping student to model [copy] teacher’s behavior) incentives (Motivators, rewards, special treatment to assure correct behavior) indicators (Specify what students must know and be able to do) individualized education, individualized education plans/programs (IEPS) (See Glossary for Mastery Learning, Direct Instruction)

instructional design technology (The use of such technology can be compared to assemblyline type of teaching which requires teacher to perform in a systematic, exact manner, so that the student’s every action [behavior] can be scientifically measured and replicated; to shape and mold the child as one would shape and mold a piece of clay) intensive, systematic phonics or any other "scientific" research-based instruction (A simple way to teach which uses operant conditioning; a method which must be understood and rejected if teaching is to remain "teaching" and not become behavior modification and "training." Some excellent traditional phonics programs are incorrectly described as "intensive and systematic direct instruction of phonics" when in fact they are not, since they do not use operant conditioning. ) know and be able to do (See Glossary for Taxonomy of Educational Objectives) latent period (Interval between stimulation and response) management skills (Related to TQM [See Glossary for Quality]) mastery, mastery learning (Based on Skinnerian operant conditioning; same as direct instruction [See Glossary]) measurement (Critical component of Skinnerian operant conditioning) measurement by objectives (In education, means only the prepared script will be taught and tested, or teach to the test [See Glossary for Quality]) merit pay (Tied to teacher performance, effectiveness; whether performance results in student achievement [See Glossary for Quality]) modeling (Performing behavior teacher wants students to copy) monitoring (Observing behavior of student and teacher; teacher behavior must be monitored daily and weekly to make sure teacher doing prepared script correctly, like an actor performing before his audience) neurological (Response which strictly deals with the nervous system; in education, related to operant conditioning which bypasses the brain; often referred to as "knee-jerk") observe, observation (Of student and teacher [See monitoring above]) operant conditioning, behavior modification (At every step, immediate feedback or reward desirable, immediate repetition and elaboration of the correct response used) outcome-based education (Known as OBE; formerly known as mastery learning combined with Competency-Based Education) outcomes (Results, performance, competencies, standards, achievement) overt response (Can be measured and timed; very important in Direct Instruction, DISTAR/ ECRI-type programs since Skinner said a response must be oral; why children are required to respond in unison and orally) penalize (Mostly in regard to teachers who "just don’t get it"; cut their classroom supplies, give them bad performance rating, etc., get rid of them by any means [early retirement, etc.] and hire teachers trained in TQM) penalize failure (School doesn’t "produce" desired results, using the "systems design/approach"; state departments of education will know teachers aren’t teaching the script, aren’t teaching to the test, aren’t using programmed learning, operant conditioning; school will be punished in order to get the results required by Goals 2000 and School to Work.) performance-based (Outcome, result, achievement, standards, competency-based, necessary for workforce training) precise (Exact, able to be "measured") predictable (Able to be accurately predicted because dependent on measurement and is scientifically based; does not allow for free will) predictable response (If operant conditioning is used, one can predict the response; it is virtually a "sure" thing; automatic response which bypasses the brain) programmed learning (Independent learning by a pupil, who advances little by little, through a series of questions, the answers to which are given elsewhere in the programmed textbook or computer software program; computer-assisted-instruction) prompt (Word used to describe action to remind or help someone remember a line, as for an actor; often referred to as a cue) psychological climate (The careful and systematic arrangement of the student’s environment to facilitate whatever behavior is desired by the teacher) psychology (The modern version of psychology relates to nothing but behavior) quality teaching (Characteristics and qualifications of teachers related to growth in student outcomes, results, performance, achievement; the opposite of traditional education where "inputs" [resources, books, teachers, science labs, etc.] were legally required for education, but not student "results" which were considered the responsibility of the student.

Obviously, the behaviorists consider students as machines, not human beings, since they don’t take into account the fact that human beings have free will and may just not want to learn when and what the behaviorists want them to learn. Such a definition of quality teaching, which puts the 100% onus on the teacher, is sure to cause an exodus from public education of our nation’s finest teachers.) rate (Speed of reaction; Skinner method demands a high, quick, fast rate of response; otherwise student will have time to reflect on what he/she is doing; high rate of response assures that the subject will respond without thinking) reflect (Give back an image of; think critically about your practice [teachers]; recommended for teachers when monitored by performance raters) reflex (Neurological reaction; i.e., as when one automatically withdraws his hand from a hot stove) reinforce, reinforcement (To increase the probability of a response to a stimulus by giving a reward or ending a painful stimulus) replicate (Repetition of an experiment under controlled conditions so that a specific result may be observed) research-based ("Scientific, research-based instructional practices" has come to mean teaching/ training based on a world view that considers man an animal without a soul, conscience, creativity, or free will whose behavior can be changed using operant conditioning and other manipulative psychological techniques without his knowledge or "informed" consent.

Government research is necessarily "scientific, research-based" since government’s world view is based on evolution and Skinner. Private research is another matter since it is not required to be based on any particular world view, but often reflects the same viewpoint.

Unfortunately, many religious and private schools are using methods and programs based on "scientific" research.) response (Reaction, reply) script (Teachers using Skinnerian operant conditioning must teach from a prepared curriculum format; they are not allowed to deviate from that script) sociology (The science of human society and of social relations, organization, and change; specifically, the study of the beliefs, values, interrelationships, etc., of societal groups and of the principles or processes governing social phenomena. Of interest here is that many of the principal promoters of outcome-based education, Spady et al., which includes Skinnerian operant conditioning and effective schools research, are for the most part sociologists, not educators.) stimulus (Any action or agent which causes a change in activity in an organism, organ, or part, as something that excites an end organ, starts a nerve impulse, activates a muscle, etc.) succeed, success (Meet the required criteria) systems, systematic, systems theory (Basis for current restructuring of education. [See Glossary for Planning, Programming and Budgeting Systems, Systems, Systems Design and Systems Approach]) taxonomy (See Glossary for Taxonomy of Educational Objectives) teaching practice (Teacher performance, not necessarily academic or knowledge-based) technology (Any form of instructional media) theory into practice (The late Madeline Hunter’s Mastery Teaching: Instructional Theory into Practice (ITIP). Translating into practice in the classroom the theory teacher has learned; experimentation on the students) threshold (Baseline, in operant terms, where subject can be conditioned) Total Quality Management (Management technique which uses behavior modification [See Glossary for Systems and Total Quality Management])

END

 

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