American Policy Center » 2007 » December

• Why is Public Education Failing?

December 17, 2007

By Tom DeWeese

It’s a fact. Most of today’s school children can barely read or write. They can’t perform math problems without a calculator. They barely know who the Founding Fathers were and know even less of their achievements. Most can’t tell you the name of the President of the United States. It’s pure and simple; today’s children aren’t coming out of school with an academics education.

Colleges know it. They have to set up remedial courses for incoming freshmen just to prepare them for classes. Parents know it. Their children grow dumber everyday.

The politicians say they know it. They hold hearings to grill education “experts,” and they hold high-powered education “summits” to debate and discuss the “problem.”

And they keep coming up with more federal programs and dictate more standards and spend more taxpayer dollars to fix the problem. But the problem continues to explode. Why?

Frankly, any parent can find the answer simply by looking through their child’s textbooks or taking a close look at the classroom structures that their children are forced to endure.

That’s just what I’m going to do for you and when I’m through see if you still wonder why there is an education crisis. And ask yourselves why all the politicians, with huge staffs to do their bidding, can’t seem to find the problem.

Restructuring the Classroom

It comes under many names; block scheduling, group learning, cooperative learning. It’s all part of a radical change in the way children are handled in the classroom.

Children are paired with others for group grades. Individual achievement is de-emphasized. Under block scheduling a number of subjects are tied together in one long class. For example, math, science, health and physical education have been combined in one school. Children are supposed to learn these skills by working on class projects, such as launching an imaginary rocket to the Moon.

Presumably when faced with various problems in building their rocket, students will seek out the necessary information. They’ll need math to calculate the projectory, science to find where the Moon is and health to know what to feed the astronauts. Obviously health is for astronaut training. Children are not instructed on how to do the math calculations or how to find the information they need. They are to find it for themselves. And Children who can’t keep up are to be helped along by other children in their group. It’s called “kids helping kids.” That’s why teachers are now called “facilitators.”

“Cooperative learning” is nothing more than a classroom-management technique that provides a convenient hiding place for bad teachers and under-achieving students. The student who doesn’t care to learn, or has failed to grasp a concept, allows the rest of the group to do the work and yet gets the same grade.

What students coming out of such classes cannot do is perform math problems, recite multiplication tables, conjugate a verb or structure a sentence. Random facts picked up in the rush to complete a project do not supply the proper base or structure to understand a subject.

Math

Perhaps the most bizarre of all of the school restructuring programs is mathematics. Math is an exact science, loaded with absolutes. There can be no way to question that certain numbers add up to specific totals. Geometric statements and reasons must lead to absolute conclusions. Instead, today we get “fuzzy” Math. Of course they don’t call it that.

As ED Watch explains, “Fuzzy math’s names are Everyday Math, Connected Math, Integrated Math, Math Expressions, Constructive Math, NCTM Math, Standards-based Math, Chicago Math, and Investigations, to name a few. Fuzzy Math means students won’t master math: addition, subtraction, multiplications and division.

Instead, Fuzzy Math teaches students to “appreciate” math, but they can’t solve the problems. Instead, they are to come up with their own ideas about how to compute.

Here’s how nuts it can get. A parent wrote the following letter to explain the everyday horrors of “Everyday Math.” “Everyday Math was being used in our school district. My son brought home a multiplication worksheet on estimating. He had ‘estimated’ that 9×9=81, and the teacher marked it wrong. I met with her and defended my child’s answer. The teacher opened her book and read to me that the purpose of the exercise was not to get the right answer, but was to teach the kids to estimate. The correct answer was 100: kids were to round each 9 up to a 10. (The teacher did not seem to know that 81 was the product, as her answer book did not state the same.)”

Children are not taught to memorize multiplication tables. Those who promote this concept believe that memorization is bad. Instead, children, they say, should be taught to “discover” multiplication. Students, they say, learn to multiply over several years by “thinking about math.”

Social, political, multicultural and especially environmental issues are rampant in the new math programs and textbooks. One such math text is blatant. Dispersed throughout the eighth grade textbooks are short, half page blocks of text under the heading “SAVE PLANT EARTH.” One of the sections describes the benefits of recycling aluminum cans and tells students, “how you can help.”

In many of these textbooks there is literally no math. Instead there are lessons asking children to list “threats to animals,” including destruction of habitat, poisons and hunting. The book contains short lessons in multiculturalism under the recurring heading “Cultural Kaleidoscope.” These things are simply political propaganda and are there for one purpose – behavior modification. It’s not Math. Parents are now paying outside tutors to teach their children real Math – after they have been forced to sit in classrooms for eight hours a day being force-fed someone’s political agenda.

English, Reading and Literature

Conjugate a verb? Diagram a sentence? Learn to spell? This is language class. We have more relevant things to learn.

In a seventh grade language arts class in Prince William County, Virginia, children are given a test entitled “What makes you good friendship material.” Children are to circle “yes,” “no” or “maybe” to questions like “Am I someone who is trusting of others; likes to have close personal friends; is able to influence others; enjoys sharing with others; can keep a secret? “If you answered yes to most of these then you are really good friendship material. If not, you need to work on yourself.”

One book being used in classes is called “The Book of Questions.” Designed around situation ethics, the authors openly admits that “this book is designed to challenge attitudes, values and beliefs.” Again behavior modification – not academics is the root of this exercise.

Here are a couple of sample questions from the book of Questions:

1. 1. On an airplane you are talking pleasantly to a stranger of average appearance. Unexpectedly, the person offers you $10,000 for one night of sex. Knowing that there is no danger and that payment is certain, would you accept the offer?”
   2. A cave-in occurs while you and a stranger are in a concrete room deep in a mineshaft. Before the phone goes dead, you learn that the entire mine is sealed off and the air hole being drilled will not reach you for 30 hours. If you both take sleeping pills form the medicine chest, the oxygen will last for only 20 hours. Both of you can’t survive; alone one of you might. After you both realize this, the stranger takes several sleeping pills and says it’s in God’s hands and falls asleep. You have a pistol; what do you do?

And so it goes, in Geography where, instead of looking for Colorado on a map, children are instructed to make a “Me” map to psychologically profile the children. In Civics, instead of learning how the government runs and of the great checks and balances that the Founding Fathers installed to protect our liberties, children are taught how to be “global citizens” under the UN’s Declaration on Human Rights.” In Health classes children are taught about Mother Earth – Gaia, with lessons on the Sierra Club as heroes.

Children are coming out of school dumb because they aren’t taught academics. They have, instead, become experiments in behavior modification to prepare them to be citizens of a global village. The fault lies with the U.S. Congress, which now dictates curriculum and perpetuates the Department of Education, from which all of these evils flow.

• American Education Fails Because It Isn’t Education

December 7, 2007

By Tom DeWeese

The debate over public education grows more heated. Regularly, reports are released showing that the academic abilities of American students continue to fall when compared to those in other countries.

Twenty years ago the U.S. ranked first in the world in the number of young adults who had high school diplomas and college degrees. Today we rank ninth and seventh, respectively, among industrialized nations. Compared to Europe and Asia, 15-year-olds in the United States are below average in applying math skills to real-life tasks. The United States ranks 18 out of 24 industrialized nations in terms of relative effectiveness of its education system. Knowledge in history, geography, grammar, civics and literature are all in decline in terms of academic understanding and achievement.

To solve the crisis, politicians, community leaders, and the education community all preach the same mantra. Students fail, they tell us, because “expectations haven’t been set high enough.” We need more “accountability,” they say. And every education leader and nearly every politician presents the same “solution” to the education crisis: more money, better pay for teachers, and smaller classroom numbers so the children get enough attention from the teachers.

Consequently, there are two specific categories in which the U.S. excels, compared to the rest of the world. First, the U.S. ranks second in the world in the amount we spend per student per year on education = $11,152. The U.S. is also a leader in having some of the smallest classroom numbers in the world. Yet the slide continues. American students grow more illiterate by the year. How can that be? We’re doing everything the “experts” tell us to do. We’re spending the money. We’re building more and more schools. We’re raising teacher’s pay.

Every American should understand that these three items: higher pay, smaller classrooms and more money for schools are the specific agenda of the National Education Association (NEA). The NEA is not a professional organization for teachers. It is a labor union and its sole job is to get more money into the education system, and more pay for its members. It also seeks to make work easier for its members – smaller classrooms. Clearly the NEA is not about education – it’s about money and a political agenda.

Clearly the nation’s education system is not teaching the children. They can’t read or work math problems without a calculator. They can’t spell, find their own country on a map, name the president of the United States or quote a single founding father. America’s children are becoming just plain dumb.

Yet we have been focusing on a massive national campaign to “fix” the schools for the past decade or more. Now we have ultra high-tech, carpeted, air-conditioned school buildings with computers and television sets. We have education programs full of new ideas, new methods, and new directions. In the 1990’s we set “national standards,” accountability through “national testing” through Goals 2000. Through that program we declared that every child would come to school “ready to learn,” “no child would be left behind,” and pledged that our kids would be “second to none” in the world. Above all, we’ve spent money, money and more money. The result, American students have fallen further behind, placing 19^th out of 21 nations in math, 16^th in science, and dead last in physics.

With all the programs and attention on education, how can that be? To coin a well-worn cliché – “it’s the programs, stupid.” More precisely, it’s the federal programs and the education bureaucracy that run them. It is simply a fact that over the past twenty years America’s education system has been completely restructured to deliberately move away from teaching basic academics to a system that focuses on little more than training students for menial jobs. The fact is, the restructured education system has been designed to deliberately dumb-down the children. (Note: the NEA hates that phrase!)

Most Americans find that statement to be astonishing and, in fact, to be beyond belief. Parents don’t want to let go of their child-like faith that the American education system is the best in the world, designed to give their children the academic strength to make them the smartest in the world. Politicians continue to offer old solutions of more money and more federal attention, almost stamping their feet, demanding that kids learn something. Programs are being proposed that call for teacher testing to hold them accountable for producing educated children. More programs call for annual tests to find out if children have learned anything. The nation is in panic. But none of these hysterical responses will improve education – because none of them address the very root of the problem.

The truth is, none of the problems will go away, nor will children learn until both parents and politicians stop trusting the education establishment and start ridding the system of its failed ideas and programs. Parents and politicians must stop believing the propaganda handed down by the education establishment that says teaching a child in the twenty-first century is different and must be more high tech than in days past. It simply isn’t so.

THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM

Today’s education system is driven by money from the federal government and private foundations, both working hand-in-hand with the education establishment headquartered in the federal Department of Education and manned by the National Education Association (NEA). These forces have combined with psychologists, huge textbook publishers, teacher colleges, the healthcare profession, government bureaucrats, big corporations, pharmaceutical companies and social workers to invade local school boards, classrooms and private homes in the name of “fixing” education.

The record shows that each of these entities has benefited from this alliance through enriched coffers and increased political power. In fact, the new education restructuring is working wonders for everyone involved – except for the children and their parents. As a result of this combined invasion force, today’s classroom is a very different place from only a few years ago.

There is simply not enough room on these pages to tell the entire history of education restructuring and transformation. It dates back to the early efforts by psychologists like John Dewey, whose work began to change how teachers were taught to teach in the nation’s teacher colleges. The changes were drastic as education moved away from an age-old system that taught teachers how to motivate students to accept the whole scope of academic information available. Instead the new system explored methods to maneuver students through psychological behavior modification processes. Rather than to instill knowledge, once such a power was established the education process became more of a method to instill specific agendas into the minds of children.

As fantastic as it seems, the entire history of the education restructuring effort is carefully and thoroughly documented in a book called The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America. The book was written by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, a former official at the Department of Education in the Reagan Administration. While there in 1981 – 1982, Charlotte found the “mother lode” hidden away at the Department. In short, she found all of the education establishment’s plans for restructuring America’s classrooms. Not only did she find the plans for what they intended to do, she discovered how they were going to do it and most importantly why. Since uncovering this monstrous plan, Charlotte Iserbyt has dedicated her life to getting that information into the hands of parents, politicians and the news media

Iserbyt’s work details how the process to restructure America’s education system began at the beginning of the Twentieth Century and slowly picked up speed over the decades. The new system used psychology-based curriculum to slowly change the attitudes, values and beliefs of the students.

The new school agenda was very different from most peoples’ understanding of the purpose of American education. NEA leader William Carr, secretary of the Educational Policies Commission, clearly stated that new agenda when in 1947 he wrote in the “NEA Journal:” “The teaching profession prepares the leaders of the future… The statesmen, the industrialists, the lawyers, the newspapermen…all the leaders of tomorrow are in schools today.” Carr went on to write: “The psychological foundations for wider loyalties must be laid…Teach those attitudes which will result ultimately in the creation of a world citizenship and world government… we can and should teach those skills and attitudes which will help to create a society in which world citizenship is possible.”

Professor Benjamin Bloom, called the Father of Outcome-based Education (OBE) said: “The purpose of education and the schools is to change the thoughts, feelings and actions of students.” B.F. Skinner determined that applied psychology in the class curriculum was the means to bring about such changes in the students values and beliefs simply by relentlessly inputting specific programmed messages. Skinner once bragged: “I could make a pigeon a high achiever by reinforcing it on a proper schedule.” Whole psychological studies were produced to prove that individuals could be made to believe anything, even to accept that black was white, given the proper programming.

The education system is now a captive of the Skinner model of behavior modification programming. In 1990, Dr. M. Donald Thomas perfectly outlined the new education system in an article in “The Effective School Report” entitled “Education 90: A Framework for the Future.” Thomas said: “From Washington to modern times, literacy has meant the ability to read and write, the ability to understand numbers, and the capacity to appreciate factual material. The world, however, has changed dramatically in the last 30 years. The introduction of technology in information processing, the compression of the world into a single economic system, and the revolution in political organizations are influences never imagined to be possible in our lifetime… Literacy, therefore, will be different in the year 2000. It will mean that students will need to follow

• • Appreciation of different cultures, differences in belief systems and differences in political structures.
  • An understanding of communications and the ability of people to live in one world as one community of nations…
  • In a compressed world with one economic system…it is especially important that all our people be more highly educated and that the differences between low and high socio-economic students be significantly narrowed…
  • Education begins at birth and ends at death…
  • Education is a responsibility to be assumed by the whole community…
  • Learning how to learn is more important than memorizing facts…
  • Schools form partnerships with community agencies for public service projects to be a part of schooling…
  • Rewards are provided for encouraging young people to perform community service.”

In this one outline, Dr. Thomas provides the blueprint for today’s education system that is designed to de-emphasis academic knowledge; establish the one-world agenda with the United Nations as its center and away from belief in national sovereignty; replace individual achievement with collectivist group-think ideology and invade the family with an “It takes a village” mind-set. Dr. Thomas’ outline for education is the root of why today’s children aren’t learning. These ideas permeate every federal program, every national standard, every textbook and every moment of your child’s school day.

THE BUSH SOLUTION

Upon election, President Bush declared education to be his number one priority. His first legislation to reach the hill was a major education policy proposal called: “No Child Left Behind.” The president said education was the hallmark of his time as Governor of Texas where he imposed strict guidelines for annual testing. He says he wanted to confront the growing problem of American illiteracy and the low standing of test scores. And the president said, “We must focus the spending of federal tax dollars on things that work.”

To those ends, the President’s education policy proposal addresses four specific principles including: 1) Annual testing to assure the schools are actually teaching the children and achieving specific educational goals. 2) Restore local control by giving local and state school boards the “flexibility to innovate.” Said the President, “educational entrepreneurs should not be hindered by excessive red tape and regulation.” 3) Stop funding failure. The President proposed several options for helping failing schools to improve. 4) Give parents a choice to find a school that does teach. President Bush gave schools a specific period of time to improve. If they failed, parents would be given the option of going to another, more successful school by way of a voucher plan.

On the surface these proposals sounded to many like fresh new ideas to take back local control of the schools and run the federal programs out the door. But time and a closer examination proved otherwise. In fact, President Bush himself unknowingly summed up the problem with his education program with one statement: “Change will not come by disdaining or dismantling the federal role of education.”

To the great disappointment of many, President Bush decided to completely ignore the very root of the education problem – the federal government and its programs. Instead, President Bush’s proposal accepted the incorrect conclusion that the problem with education is simply an over blown bureaucracy that wastes federal funds and fails to enforce clear standards by rewarding bad schools. His numerous statements that “no child will be left behind,” came straight from the decade-old motto of the Children’s Defense Fund, the group that claims Hillary Clinton as one of its leaders. By being so off-the-mark, there just is no way the Bush proposal could appropriately address a single school reform issue.

First, his plan to restore local control was directly tied to the use of Title I federal funding. Title I is one of the main federal programs to directly fund the “at-risk” catch-all devise now driving the invasion of in-home social workers; the establishment of in-school health clinics; the enforcement of pop diagnosis by teachers and administrators that has put millions of children on Ritalin. Title I is the root of the education establishment’s attack on families.

Second, by leaving the federal Department of Education intact, President Bush left in full force the machinery now driving the education system. State school boards are simply outposts of the federal bureaucrats. They are of the same mindset, driving the same programs in the states that are dictated by the federal office. Local ideas from local teachers and parents have no chance of a hearing in these vast bureaucracies. Failing to address this behemoth simply dooms any attempt to improve education.

President Bush made much of the testing program in the state of Texas, which shows scores up by dramatic numbers. His first Secretary of Education, Rod Paige, owed his appointment, in a great way, to his leadership in the Texas testing program. But a close look at what actually took place in Texas caused concern.

Under Governor Bush, Texas established a statewide achievement test called TAAS, which is administered annually to every public school student from third grade through twelfth. Texas officials tout the fact that, today, Texas reports an 80% passing rate. The test is given the credit for the dramatic increase because, as Bush then proposed on the federal level. TAAS was touted as providing “accountability” and an annual measuring stick to determine how students are progressing.

However, Texas colleges are reporting that Texas-educated students still cannot read, even after getting good grades on the TAAS test. Why? Because so much emphasis is placed on passing the test that teachers have begun to “teach to the test.” Even months before test day, teachers pressure students to be ready. They become little more than cheerleaders. Schools fly banners, hold pep rallies and the pressure builds to pass the test. Classroom time is spent practicing for the test rather than just focusing on well-rounded academic curriculum. Rarely do classes branch off into anything that’s not on the test.

Why such pressure? Because teacher salaries and job security are tied to the results. Schools have even been found to cheat on the results. Is this what parents have in mind when they call for accountability? This is the heart of the Bush plan. Under it, parents may see test scores go up, but they will find that their children still can’t read.

The Bush plan ignored the existence of the social scientists who have made psychological guinea pigs out of the children. It ignored the role of the Department of Education as a teacher training lab which brags that, in just two weeks, it can completely change the attitudes, values and beliefs of good, academically-focused teachers, and turn them into pliable facilitators to help dumb-down the very students they sought to teach. Nothing was changed in the classroom under the Bush plan.

TIME TO INVESTIGATE THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

From the start of his administration, President Bush made it clear that he had no intention of getting rid of the Department of Education. Consequently, the Republican dominated Congress dropped its intentions to de-fund and remove the Department of Education. However, it is not possible to make the changes that Americans are hoping for without taking that step. Bush’s plan simply used warm and fuzzy rhetoric to further institutionalize more of the same. His voucher plan has proven to be little more than a Judas Goat to lead private schools into the nightmare of federal programs, which attack and feed on any school that accepts federal money. And so the cancer grows.

While promising to fix American education, the President doomed any hope of it by insisting on keeping the establishment intact. The “No-Child-Left-Behind” Act simply succeeded in institutionalizing the failed policies of Goals 2000 and School to Work. And that’s why American education continues to fall.

It’s time to ignore the agenda of a self-interested labor union and begin to look at the real reasons why American public schools are in crisis. What is robbing our children of the ability to get a good education?

Americans who want to rid the nation of this plague have little choice but to insist that their representatives in Congress begin a complete investigation into the Department of Education and its policies, its waste, and its fraud on the taxpayers, parents and children of this nation.

Perhaps then, as the facts are exposed under the hot lights of a Congressional hearing, the American people will begin to understand that the problem with education isn’t low paid teachers and crowded classrooms – but rather, is the result of a cynical, deliberate attempt to dumb-down America to promote a radical political agenda. For that is the truth.