The little red school house is long gone. Even the neighborhood school, so prevalent only a couple of decades ago, is a relic of the past.

In danger of extinction are the happy children who once were excited about the social life offered by their school experience - the basketball games and the Valentines dances. Fading from view are the students who busily worked at the blackboard solving geometry problems under the teacher's watchful eye. Gone is the challenge to achieve academically. Soon to follow in the dustbin of memories will be the diplomas that stood as symbols of academic success.

Schools for our children today are becoming alien places. The old buildings still look the same. But under the roof, in the classroom and in the administration office (once called the principal's office), a social revolution is raging at full speed. Former Education Secretary Bell must be proud. We've certainly broken from the old ways.

Through federal intervention programs like Goals 2000, "School to Work" and "Life-Long Learning," schools have become social engineering laboratories. Children are sacrificial test animals.

Psychology is the driving force for today's education programs. Every child is analyzed, evaluated and scrutinized. Values and beliefs are questioned, attacked and remediated. Social interaction between young adolescent boys and girls is being revolutionized and somehow made to seem dirty. Parents are the outcasts of modern "teaching" methods.

The new curriculum no longer allows students to learn academically, slowly making career choices in their own time. Education is tied directly to jobs. Schools have become factories, busily grinding out worker bees to fulfill a very planned economy. There is no room for the dreamers or the undecided. Career decisions are made for them.

The school buildings are now being re-designated as one-stop social centers where drugs will be dispensed and mental health diagnosed in school-based health care clinics; family planning centers will disperse birth control and abortion counseling; under-school-aged children will attend mandatory day care centers; all under one school house roof. Schools will assume the responsibility of feeding students because they will be in the school building from 7 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. to take part in all of the social services provided there. It's all to be run by the education establishment, regardless of parental wishes.

In the classroom children are subjected to constant evaluation tests, checking, not their academic knowledge, but their values, attitudes and beliefs. Information from such tests is placed in massive data banks, creating personal files that stay with the students for life, affecting their ability to get a job, obtain government services or even vote.

"Life-long learning" programs dictate that the students will have to return again and again to school for the rest of their lives to assure that they maintain the "proper" attitudes and values as drilled into them during their initial school experience. Failure to do so will affect their ability to function in society.

Outside the classroom, families and their homes are under constant surveillance from a barrage of social workers and child protection agencies. Child abuse is the catch-word of the day. Parents are evaluated as to their suitability to oversee their own children. Negative evaluations can result in forcing parents to enter special behavior modification programs to "correct" their attitudes and values. Parents who fail to comply can be found guilty of child abuse and see their children removed from the home.

Why does America face and education crisis? Why are children unable to read or write? Because the atmosphere in today's classrooms and homes is one of fear, anger and frustration. Loving parents have been turned into criminals. Teachers have become pop-sychologists who assault the children's minds and social workers invade their homes. Law enforcement authorities and courts have become willing tools in a federal assault on children and families.

The Subversion of Education in America

By Alan Caruba

The Root of the Problem

I'll bet you think that the problems with our nation's schools are a fairly recent phenomenon. Wrong. It dates backs to the 1960's. Those that have implemented the subversion of our educational system have sought to fly well below the radar of public awareness, depending on stealth and duplicity to achieve the wreckage that has already stunted the lives of thousands who have passed through it.

I will walk you through the history of the problem with the help of an extraordinary book, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt. The facts I will share with you are found in a fat compendium of research by this former senior official with the U.S. Department of Education who discovered the mother lode, copied it, and fled. She is one of America's unsung heroes.

As Iserbyt points out, in the 1960's "American education would henceforth concern itself with the importance of the group rather than with the importance of the individual." The purpose of education would shift to focus on the student's emotional health, rather than academic learning. Remember the 1960s? Sex, drugs, and rock'n roll? Drop out, tune in, and turn on? Just about everything that is wrong with America today had its genesis in this pathetic decade of youthful self-indulgence.

In 1965, there were two major federal initiatives developed with funding from "The Elementary and Secondary Education Act" passed that year. One was the 1965-1969 Behavioral Science Teacher Education Program and the other was the publication by the government of "Pacesetters in Innovation", a 584-page catalogue of behavior modification programs to be used by the schools.

Let me repeat that: a catalogue of behavior modification programs! We're not talking of programs to teach students anything. We are talking about programs to indoctrinate children passing through the system to believe in values contrary to those on which this nation was based.

In brief, the intention was to create a generation or two of Americans who would accept the United Nations, not the United States, as their new "nation," a global nation, one-world government. The last thing the conspirators wanted was a nation of individuals who could or would actually think for themselves.

Iserbyt writes that, "In 1960, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's Convention Against Discrimination was signed in Paris. This convention laid the groundwork for control of American education-both public and private-by UN agencies and agents."

Now connect the dots. In 1960, "Soviet Education Programs: Foundations, Curriculums, Teacher Preparation" was published under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. It was the blueprint for the U.S. school-to-work restructuring that would take place and it would rely on the "Pavlovian conditioned reflex theory." The mastermind of mind control and conditioning was a psychologist, Dr. B.F. Skinner who was the guru of the mess that passes for education in America today.

Though hard to believe even now, the US adopted the Soviet Communist approach to education. In 1961, Rep. John M. Ashbrook tried to alert Congress to what was happening. Citing a document published by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare called "A Federal Education Agency for the Future," he called the new education programs "a blueprint for complete domination and direction of our schools from Washington." Guess what? He was right.

That is why the educational reform this nation really needs is the complete elimination of the US Department of Education. It won't happen. For the same reason we are now only learning that those "Red baiters" of the 1950's were right to assert the Department of State was shot through with Communists, no one in 2001 is going to believe that the US Department of Education is modeled on Communist theories.

Dumbing-Down

Just how did education in America turn from being a system that imparts knowledge to one that uses behavior modification techniques to influence the attitudes and beliefs of those passing through it?

To achieve this, beginning in the 1960's, the perpetrators of the subversion have employed deception to achieve their goals. Earlier this month, a New Jersey daily newspaper ran an editorial, "Let board members speak," noting that members of a local school board had been restricted from speaking to the press to avoid "confusion" about the board's programs and objectives. "But this isn't about 'confusion'," said the editorial. "It's about control," adding, "And it is insulting to the public and the idea of open local government."

There is nothing "open" about the effort to subvert education in America. It only has that appearance because it takes place at presumably local school boards or in a state education department. Always, the vehicle is a governmental agency. The controlling player, however, is the U.S. Department of Education.

The objective of those who control our educational systems has long been to produce poorly educated, little world citizens, ready to forego the liberties guaranteed by the oldest living Constitution. The system introduced into American schools mirrors the Soviet and Communist Chinese systems that produce a compliant and complacent population.

To achieve this, they have had to dumb-down the students passing through the system. On February 17, 2001, the Los Angeles Times reported that the president of the University of California "wants to eliminate the SAT as a requirement for admission to all eight of the university's undergraduate campuses." What a great way to further dilute all standards for academic achievement!

In January 2001, the Times reported that the University of California kicked out 2,009 students, six percent of last year's freshman class, for failing to master basic math and English skills in their first year of classes. These are skills that should have been mastered in their first twelve years in California schools! It means that the diplomas they received are worthless pieces of paper.

This pattern repeats itself from state to state because it is the educational system that is failing American students. The President's emphasis on testing misses the point entirely!

In the January/February 2001 issue of The American Enterprise, devoted to why so few schools succeed while the majority fail, Karl Zinsmeister writes that

"it's extremely interesting how many common traits are shared by the successful schools we profile. A remarkably similar basic formula applies in almost all of these places: high demands on students, strict discipline, a strong and unapologetic moral component, including a respect for religion, an emphasis on teaching intellectual basics, a preference for time-tested books and curricula, clear standards of dress, grooming, and comportment, and an insistence on politeness, respect and courtesy."

Compare that to schools in your area where the way students dress is an offense to decorum, the language they use is replete with profanities, and their chief complaint is that they have too much homework.

President Bush has bought into the education establishment's systematic stupification of students. He is not the first president to fall prey to this effort. The President has proposed a five billion-dollar program to help children learn to read.

One need only look at the realities of education in Texas to see why the call for national testing standards is a deception. An excellent article by Jerry Jesness in the November 2000 issue of Reason magazine blows away the hype about the test scores of Texas students. Despite apparent improvements, a closer look at the test scores of basic skills places young Texans in 39th place for SAT scores.

In 1984, the State adopted the Texas Educational Assessment of Minimal Skills that established minimal standards for graduation. The result has been that a considerable amount of time is spent "teaching to the test" in schools throughout Texas. Students are taught strategies to pass the test. For example, the acquisition of real arithmetical skills is sacrificed to methods that include drawing and counting sticks! This is not progress and the test is, essentially, meaningless.

All this was foretold back in the 1970's as the "educrats" continued their efforts to undermine the teaching of basic knowledge. In 1976, Catherine Barrett, then president of the National Education Association, gave a speech in which she said, "First, we will help all of our people understand that school is a concept and not a place. We will not confuse "schooling" with education. The school will be the community, the community the school." This predates Hillary Clinton's "it takes a village" concept, but it reflects a communist view that all of society must be employed to form the views of students. Individualism is bad. Conforming to the group is good.

Barrett went on to say

"We will need to recognize that so-called 'basic skills' which currently represent nearly the total effort in elementary schools, will be taught in one quarter of the present school day. The remaining time will be devoted to what is truly fundamental and basic - time for academic inquiry, time for students to develop their own interests, time for a dialogue between students and teachers - more than a dispenser of information, the teacher will be a conveyor of values, a philosopher. Students will learn to write love letters and lab notes."

You may want to read this again. The then-head of the NEA was talking about turning the school day into one devoted to just about everything other than the teaching of reading, writing and arithmetic. Teachers were, instead, to become "agents of change."

The change incorporated into today's educational programs is intended to change the entire social structure of our society and the values that make it great. Competition and achievement in the acquisition of basic knowledge and the skills to implement that knowledge are jettisoned in favor of changing attitudes about family, patriotism, religion, and sexuality. Look around you and ask yourself why we now except all forms of "families." Look around you and ask why we live in a cultural environment drenched with sexuality without responsibility. Ask yourself why millions fail to vote. Look at the way the expression of religious values is continually derided.

In 1972, Dr. Chester M. Pierce, MD, of Harvard University wrote an article entitled "Becoming Planetary Citizens: A Quest for Meaning," that appeared in the November issue of Childhood Education. He was concerned that children, by the age of five, "already have a lot of political attitudes", among which were "a tenacious loyalty to his country and its leader." What he wanted was a child who entered kindergarten "with the same kind of loyalty to the earth as to his homeland."

This is a formula for degrading patriotism and loyalty to everything for which this nation stands in favor of creating citizens of the "global government" being pursued by the United Nations and the environmentalism that preaches against the use of the earth's natural resources.

All throughout the 1970's, the Federal government funded these goals. Local educational systems were taken over by programs designed to destroy local control. I do not want President Bush's education proposals to succeed because they reflect the continued subversion of our nation's schools by the Department of Education.

Outcome Based Education

This will come as a surprise to you - everything about the nation's educational system does - but Congress back in 1970 recognized that the Federal government is supposed to have limited authority when it comes to education. An amended General Education Provisions Act specifically articulated a "Prohibition against Federal Control of Education."

It forbids the Federal government from exercising any "direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration or personnel of any education institution, school, or school system, or over the selection of library resources, textbooks, or other printed or published instructional materials by any educational institution or school system."

The loophole through which the subversion of our education system was accomplished was federal funding of "research" and "development." By the 1980's the effort had turned schools from places where students actually learn something to places where their values, beliefs, and cognitive skills were determined by "Outcome Based Education," behavior modification programs. The objective of these programs is to turn students in to little citizens of a one-world government where they are mere economic units, not individuals, or people who give much thought to individual liberty.

Individual liberty was the reason the American Revolution was fought and is the philosophical basis for every word in the U.S. Constitution. A generation or two of Americans who are systematically robbed of any knowledge of this are ripe for an authoritarian takeover.

The father of this movement is Prof. Benjamin Bloom and his book, "All Our Children learning." Published in 1981, it is the bible of OBE. In it he says, "The purpose of education and the schools is to change the thoughts, feelings, and actions of students." No, the purpose of education is to provide students with a sufficient knowledge of basic skills in writing, reading and arithmetic, as well as history and the sciences. Thus prepared, they are likely to be the kind of citizens that will question efforts to deprive this nation of its sovereignty in favor of a world government run out of the United Nations.

It gets worse. Writing in The Effective School Report, Dr. Thomas A. Kelly, Ph.D., stated that "The brain should be used for processing, not storage." This is the view of education that says you prepare students to take a test determined by federal standards of what they should know. The student is merely to process predetermined bits and pieces of information. The best example of this is the rat's maze where the rat learns to follow a specific path to get a piece of cheese.

This is a simplified explanation of why today's children have difficulty acquiring and retaining a body of useful, long-term information such as multiplication tables or who the nation's presidents have been, the 50 States of the Union, when the Civil War was fought, where India can be found on a map, the names of the earth's oceans, et cetera!

The whole movement to utterly change the direction and purpose of our nation's schools picked up momentum in the 1980's and, sorry to say it, it occurred on Ronald Reagan's watch. The harsh truth about the subversion of the nation's schools has not been a Democratic or Republican program. It has occurred no matter who was in office or who controlled Congress. It happened because few politicians were paying any attention to what was really occurring over at the Department of Education.

In her book, Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt says, "The real purpose of this project was to propose a radical redesign of the nation's education system from one based on inputs to one based on outputs." It switched, in other words, from a curriculum of content a student was required to learn, to a series of answers the student was supposed to repeat when tested. Or as Iserbyt explains it, the system turned away "from one oriented toward the learning of academic content to one based on performance of selected skills, necessary for the implementation of school-to-work." The schools, with direction from the DOE and grants from major foundations, as well as input from corporate leaders, were redesigned to produce workers.

Well, what's so bad about that? We need workers. Ask anyone responsible for the management of any size organization, from a local bakery to a major corporation, what their primary problem is and they will tell you it's finding good workers. That is to say, finding people with even the most basic education or skills to perform any job with a minimum of competency. That is the result of the education system that has been foisted on this nation.

Take away their pocket calculators and the newest generation of workers cannot add or subtract. Take away "spell check" on their computers and they are helpless to spell accurately. These are basic skills Americans used to learn in one-room schoolhouses heated with a wood-burning oven. They could also tell you the branches of the U.S. Government and a whole lot more than today's graduates.

In the 1980's the DOE, says Iserbyt, "effectively transformed the essential character of the nation's public schools from 'teaching' - the most traditional and conservative role of schools - to 'workforce training' - perceived as liberal and 'progressive.'" It is a particular irony that one of Ronald Reagan's campaign platforms was the abolition of the Department of Education. He was right. He didn't do it.

What, in fact, happened was that control of the schools and their curriculums increasingly moved up the decision-making ladder away from local school boards and even state education departments. Administrators and teachers were delighted with this because it eliminated the "meddling" of locally elected and locally responsible school board members.

The instrument for this was the development of a "Course Goals Collection" completed by the DOE in 1980-81. "The collection consists of fourteen volumes with 15,000 goals covering every major subject taught in the public schools from K-12." Remember that 1970 prohibition on any Federal government involvement in instruction? Nobody else did either.

In 1981, 70,000 copies were distributed, despite the fact that only approximately 16,000 school districts existed. And you wonder why every state now has the same goals? With remarkable success, Outcome-Based Education became the way American students were to be trained to believe the same things, have the same values, and to ignore those they were taught at home.

This is important because values are supposed to be the job of parents. Some parents are Catholic. Some parents are Protestant. Some are Jewish or Moslem. Some are liberal and some are conservative. Their values no longer seem to matter. That's why there is no longer a moment of prayer in any school in America. That's why the school day often does not begin with the salute to the flag or a recitation of a pledge of allegiance. Much of the day is spent "teaching to the test" whose standards were determined in Washington, D.C., not by the parents, not by the local school board, not by anyone you know!

How was this achieved? Because, according to a 1981 report by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, "Federal funds account for approximately ten percent of national expenditures on education. The Federal share of educational research and related activities, however, is ninety percent of the total national investment."

Thus, as Iserbyt notes in her book,

"just about everything that goes on in the classrooms of American public schools, with the exception of salaries, school buildings, buses, and the purchase of equipment, is either a direct or indirect result of funding by the U.S. Department of Education-as research!"

It should come as no surprise that, by the end of the 1980's, writing in the January 25, 1989 issue of Education Week, Chester E. Finn, Jr., the former head of the DOE's research branch, would tell business leaders that he favored a "national curriculum." Flashback to the congressional prohibition on a curriculum determined at the federal level. Consider it null and void. The people in the DOE obviously did.

That same year, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development's Elementary Global Education Framework was announced. Its goals were to create

"Human beings whose home is planet earth, who are citizens of a multicultural democratic society in an increasingly interconnected world, and who learn, care, think, choose, and act, to celebrate life on this planet, and to meet the global challenges confronting Humankind."

That is what is going on in our schools TODAY. That's why President George W. Bush's proposal to throw $5 billion at those schools, presumably to teach a subject, reading, they should already be teaching, is a continuation of the same bad ideas that presidents since Eisenhower have been rubber-stamping. And then ignoring.

Social Engineering

I have lived my whole life in an affluent, suburban community in Northern New Jersey. When I attended its schools in the 1940's and 1950s, the vast percentage of graduating seniors went on to college. Their parents had migrated from Newark during or just after WWII because the schools had an excellent reputation. Today, they are not much better than those of the inner city.

Here's an excerpt from a letter to the editor in our local weekly.

"I understand that our education officials have yet to detail for the public exactly what measures have been taken to ensure that a first-rate education will be provided for students." (This stonewalling is endemic to education bureaucrats across the nation. He thinks he's going to get an answer. He won't.)

"I was horrified to learn that 34 percent of the eighth grade students in (our) middle school were found to be only partially proficient-the worst grouping-in the 2000 GEPA math section. Simply put, we rank 97th out of 97 schools in this failing category. Further, this dreadful performance has been repeated over the past several years."

"As a homeowner and a taxpayer, I want to know how the district's school budget increased from $51 million five years ago to $70 million today, a 37 percent increase over four years, during which time these poor test scores have not gotten measurably better and our last place ranking has not moved out of the cellar."

Throwing more and more money at our nation's current education system is not the answer. The system is inherently flawed because it is not intended to provide a basic 3R's education.

President Bush proposes to introduce a national educational standard and then test to it, but we already know American students are deficient in all the areas of knowledge the schools are supposed to be teaching. The tests today's students take are more about their values than about any body of knowledge they have acquired. Today's schools are not about educating students. They are about teaching attitudes and values. The system has been designed to deliberately dumb-down students.

The architects of this attack on our nation's youth can be found in the U.S. Department of Education. They have adopted psychological methods of conditioning and have jettisoned the teaching of information and basic skills. It is called "Outcome-Based Education."

Today's students, as opposed to their grandfathers' or even their fathers' education, are being systematically conditioned to think in "global" terms about humanity, nations, religions, and, of course, the environment. They are conditioned to be citizens, not of the United States, but of the world. That's what you need when you're creating a socialist one-world governmental system and that is exactly what is occurring at the United Nations.

Today's students are taught not to make value judgments about other nations, even if they are authoritarian dictatorships. They may not know where Brazil is on the map, but they "know" all the rain forests are disappearing. They don't know when the Civil War took place or why, but they "know" that all of the Founding Fathers were slave-owners. They also "know" that America's history is one of destroying the native Indian nations, taking their land, and exploiting it with farms, mining, and the destruction of whole forests. They cannot tell you what the Bill of Rights is, but they "know" the US is the leading contributor of "greenhouse gases" to the atmosphere, thereby causing global warming. It is a full course of lies.

They haven't a clue about the individualism, sacrifice, daring and innovation that made this nation great, nor its political system, and most certainly not its history.

As Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt writes, they aren't being "taught the difference between free enterprise and planned economies, i.e., socialism; between 'group thinking' and individual freedom and responsibility."

By the 1990's the decades of effort to overturn an education system that taught specific bodies of information and the skills to use them - arithmetic, spelling, history, civics, science - had effectively been transformed into today's touchy-feely system. It is a place where a student's feelings of self-esteem are more important than whether they actually know anything other than the specific answers to the test. Thus teachers now "teach to the test" (their paycheck depends on it) rather than provide a broader body of knowledge. It is a place where competition is discouraged as unfair to those less qualified for any reason. It is a place where socialist attitudes and values are the priority, not knowledge.

Given President George W. Bush's enthusiasm for education that is "accountable" and "will leave no child behind", will it surprise anyone that the "America 2000 Plan," written in 1991, was presented to the American people by Lamar Alexander, the Secretary of Education serving his father, President George Herbert Walker Bush?

The "America 2000 Plan" was proposed to radically restructure American society, beginning with its schools. It was intended to affect 110,000 public and private schools. When you're trying to create good little socialists, you can't afford to have anyone who is being taught to think independently or asked to incorporate moral and ethical values.

The "voucher" program exists to give the Federal government control over private schools because, whoever pays the piper, chooses the tune. Schools that accept voucher students will soon find themselves required to accept federal education regulations as well.

Goals 2000 and School-to-Work programs introduced to transform our schools reflect what Iserbyt describes as "the internationalization of education with exchanges of data systems, curricula, methods, et cetera, all essential for the implementation of the international socialist management and control system being put in place right now."

Everything, including the SAT college entrance tests, has been degraded to mask the dumbing down of those who are passing through our schools. Today's SATs permit students to use electronic calculators, ask fewer questions in general and fewer multiple-choice math questions in particular. Reading passages now ask definitions from context and the formerly difficult antonym section, calling for linguistic and intellectual subtleties, has been dropped entirely.

My hometown's parent who could not get any answers from his district's school board could not know that this is repeated across America in school after school. Parents are routinely lied to. Worse, today's parents are often required to have their child put on a regimen of Ritalin, a mind-altering drug. We've got seven million government-approved drug addicts going to school in drug-free zones!

To the individual parent, there seems to be no way to resist the juggernaut of a system that routinely turns out thousands of "educated" morons. Some choose to home-school their children. Others who can afford it send them to private schools. Still others shell out for after-school tutoring services. Why? Because the schools have been "restructured."

President Bush is not providing a solution. He is part of the problem. His father was part of the problem. Presidents going back to Eisenhower have been part of the problem because they failed to see that introducing Soviet-style educational methods -behavior modification to produce good little socialists- into American schools was destined to bring us to this point.

Education is not about national standards and national testing. It's about individual schools in individual school districts, all answerable to their communities and to the parents of the children entrusted to them. It's not about how the child feels, but about how well the child learns. There is pride in learning, but if there are no grades, how does anyone, parent, child or teacher know what, if anything, is being learned?

Congress will probably give President Bush the $5 billion he wants to throw away on failed reading programs, and money for the national educational standards and testing he wants. Previous Congresses have gone along, failing or refusing to see how the educational system has been corrupted. The Republican "Contract with America" and the campaign promise of Ronald Reagan to dismantle the Department of Education had it right. It didn't happen. It is the only hope to reverse the damage and return schools to local control.

Sit down with your child and watch "Jeopardy" together. If neither you, nor your child knows the answer to anything other than the television or film questions, you're in trouble. Now multiply that against an entire population of Americans who don't know the answers either.

THE CONTINUING SAGA OF FAILED FEDERAL EDUCATION POLICY

Tom DeWeese

It's a growing mantra on Capitol Hill: "smaller class size, more money, higher standards." That is the answer, we are told by congressional leaders, to end the "education crisis."

You see, children aren't getting enough attention from the teachers - that must be the reason academic skills are falling. Schools simply don't have enough money to hire good teachers - that must be the reason academic skills are falling. Students and schools simply aren't held accountable to strict standards of excellence - that must be the reason academic skills are falling.

Politicians. Give them a piece of legislation to wave in front of the cameras and a sound bite to explain it - and they're off and running. The truth is THAT is the reason academic skills are falling - too much federal education legislation and too many sound bites.

After forty years of almost non-stop federal programs (particularly in the past decade), an invasion by an army of psychologists, dumbed-down tests and an abandonment of the teaching of basic academic skills, our once great American education system is almost unrecognizable.

As a result of all of this federal attention to the once-sacred classroom, children are coming out of public schools unable to perform even basic math at a cash register. Their communication skills are little more than tribal gibberish. They have no interest in civics and they can't find their hometown on a map. Colleges and employers have to provide remedial education programs to high school graduates just to assure they can get into college or fill out job applications.

The panic grows, the programs pour into the hopper and the politicians pontificate about the need for higher standards of education excellence. But still - no congressional leaders seem to have taken the time to actually study what is happening in the classroom. If they did, they would understand that the problem is not lack of money, lack of qualified teachers or classroom size. In fact, a classroom could consist of one student and one highly-paid teacher, and still the student would come out of the experience dumb - if the teacher used the same teaching methods and curriculum now used in classrooms across the nation. Why? Because the problem is the curriculum - the programs dictated from Washington demanding social engineering instead of basic academics. Just take a look what really goes on in the federally-dictated classroom.

RESTRUCTURING THE CLASSROOM

It comes under many names; block scheduling, group learning, cooperative learning. But, it's all part of a radical change in the way children are taught 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, in one school, math science, health and physical education have been combined. Children are supposed to learn these skills by working on a class project, 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 out where the Moon is and health to know what to feed the astronauts. Apparently physical education will teach them how to get the astronauts in shape. Children who can't keep up are supposed to be helped along by other children in their group. It's called "kids teaching kids."

"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 - yet he gets their grade.

However, it's been discovered in school after school that students coming out of such classes cannot 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 background or structure needed 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 the fact that certain numbers add up to specific totals. Geometric statements and reasons must lead to absolute conclusions. So today, math classes simply ignore math and talk about something else. Any real problem solving is performed on a calculator.

Under the category "New-New Math" children are not taught to memorize multiplication tables. Those who promote the new teaching method believe memorization is bad. Instead, they say, children should be led to "discover multiplication." Students, they say, learn to multiply over several years by "thinking about math" and will therefore retain it longer.

Educrats don't seem too alarmed that many children may never learn basic math structure through this random approach to an exact science. But there seems to be no shortage of programs that teach children nothing.

One is called "Action Math." Back-to-basics education activist, Sarah Leslie, who has experienced it, spent two days just trying to figure out why her sixth grader (an excellent math student) was even in the course. She finally came to the conclusion that there were no options for advanced students because there were no other math classes provided.

Action Math goes back to the above example of the integrated math, science, health and physical education. As Sarah describes it, "because the nature of this class is activity-oriented and project-based, do not expect your student to bring home a math book on a regular basis."

She goes on to provide a verbatim explanation from the school as to how the grading system would work when all of the students were grouped together in a project. The school said:

"as in any class, differences in student abilities may require adjustments to individual assignments. Projects may allow students to select one of many ways to demonstrate competence in a particular skill area (i.e. measuring/collecting data, graphics or drawing conclusions). Modifications will be made, as needed, to accommodate for the rate and level of learning for specific students."

Sarah expressed her concerns to the teacher that this system sounded like a "dumbing down" process if her child was placed in a group with overall lower math skills. "On no", said the teacher, "in situations like that we will DUMB UP" But hang on, it gets worse.

Perhaps the worst of all of the New-New Math programs is a monster called "Interactive Mathematics Program" (IMP). Billed as a college prep course developed by the University of California at Berkeley, IMP does not follow traditional sequence and therefore will not provide students with basic math skills.

One parent reporting on his child's experience with IMP tells of a trail of misinformation and outright deceit surrounding the program. The parent reports, "we were told this is a college prep course and that it contained more rigorous academics and higher standards than traditional math. We were told that the traditional progression of Algebra I, Geometry and Algebra II would not be taught as the students would receive those classes in IMP."

The father went on to say, "we were not told the IMP is integrated with English grammar, extreme environmental issues, HIV/AIDS instruction, social studies, science and geography. We were not told that standards had not been developed. We were not told that the academic content has been dumbed-down to the point that only about one fourth of the normal math content was being taught. We were not told that the students assessed themselves and their classmates for a grade." This, in a "college prep" course.

"Interactive Mathematics" promotes group-only student questions, has no practical problems and has a huge social engineering content. Looking through the pages of the text book, one will find problems based on radical environmentalism, AIDS, child-abuse, social studies, science, geography, "finding the perfect group" and many others.

For example, the child abuse problem has the student calculate the number of unreported child abuse cases, given certain statistics, and then asks each student "HOW THEY WOULD VOTE" on a child abuse screening program!

Social, political and especially environmental issues are rampant in New-New Math text books. One such eighth grade math text just making its way into classrooms is blatant. Dispersed throughout the book are short, half page blocks of text under the heading "SAVE PLANET EARTH." One of the sections describes the benefits of recycling aluminum cans and tells students "how you can help."

The teacher's edition lists additional activities and, after the lesson on endangered species, tells teachers to ask students to list threats to animals, including destruction of habitat, poisons and hunting.

The book contains short lessens in multiculturalism under the recurring heading "Cultural Kaleidoscope." One such section gives information on Blamndina Cardenias Ramirez, a pioneer in developing multicultural educational practices. This is not math. It is nothing more than propaganda for the purpose of behavior modification.

Meanwhile, data is beginning to emerge on students who have been subjected to such "math" classes. From California, where it all started, they now have data on its first graduates, Top students at California-Davis can't find math classes simple enough to gain basic skills. They are being shipped off to Community Colleges. In Palo Alto, students who have always scored high have seen standardized test scores drop from 86th percentile to 58th percentile. Sixty-three percent of the parents of middle school children pay outside tutors to get real math for their children.

ENGLISH, READING AND LITERATURE

Conjugate a verb, diagram a sentence, learn to spell? What planet are you from? This is language class. We have much 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 their answer of "yes", "no" or "maybe" to questions like the following: "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?"

At the end of the test this statement appeals: "if you answer 'yes' to most of these statements, you are really good friendship material. If you answered 'no' to a lot, you need to work on yourself."

English class is usually where students are told to keep a journal of their deepest thoughts and impressions. These journals are then collected and read by the teacher.

One book being used in these classes is called "The Book of Questions." Designed around "situation ethics," the authors openly admits that "this book is designed to challenge attitudes, morals and beliefs." He also states that there are no correct or incorrect answers or moral absolutes.

Here are some sample questions from "The Book of Questions:"

1. "You, your closest friend and your father are on a vacation together, hiking in a remote jungle. Your two companions stumble into a nest of poisonous vipers, and are bitten repeatedly. You know neither will live without an immediate shot of anti-venom, yet there is only a single dose of it and it's in your shirt pocket." What would you do? In other words, who would you save?
2. "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?" These questions are for high school kids!
3. "A cave-in occurs while you and a stranger are in a concrete room deep in a mine shaft. Before the phone goes dead, you learn that the entire mine is sealed and the air hole being drilled will not reach you for 30 hours. If you both take sleeping pills from 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, says it's in God's hands, and falls asleep. You have a pistol; what do you do?"

A book for younger children by the same author offers questions like this: "If a rich kid wanted to buy your parents, how much would you ask for them assuming you were willing to sell? Would you trade parents with any of your friends?"

GEOGRAPHY

Here you might expect radical environmentalism and, of course, it is rampant. The world map is used to point out biosphere reserves and disappearing rain forests. But here again, no subject is safe from the psychological profiling of each student.

One sixth grade exercise is entitled "how to make a 'me' map." Children were instructed to create themselves as a map by answering such questions as; what type of land mass are you? Are you and island? An island represents a loner, an introvert, a person who likes to be by himself. A peninsula is almost completely surrounded by water except for one side that is connected to the mainland. The connected side could represent a close friend of a family member. Are you landlocked? If you are landlocked, you like people surrounding you. You are an extrovert.

The paper goes on to describe that if you have a lot of problems in your life then you will have a rocky shore, and so forth.

CIVICS

Learn about how the government is structured? No, too boring. It's time for more situation ethics.

An eighth grade activity sheet entitled "You Are In Charge" asks students to "imagine that you are the police sergeant in charge of dispatching officers to investigate crime reports telephoned in by concerned citizens." A list of calls are provided and students are instructed to list them in the order they would send police to investigate and then discuss why they made the choices. Again, the situations are life threatening and students have to decide who survives.

HEALTH AND SCIENCE

These courses are, again, filled with radical, one-sided environmentalism. An Earth Science text book published by Merrill offers a teachers guide entitled "Science and Society" in which teachers are provided classroom discussion material and project ideas for "saving the environment."

One such discussion is called "Conservation and the Sierra Club" in which this private advocacy group is played up as the hero in a fight to stop the building of a dam in Colorado. Only one side of the issue is given and the Sierra Club rushes to the rescue. It's simply nothing more than a recruitment ad for the group.

At the end of the "lesson" there is a section called "You Decide" in which children are asked "do you think there is a need for an organization like the Sierra Club? How would you have handled the fight against the dam?"

Another text book for seventh graders by Prentice Hall has a section called "Science Gazette" which raves about James Lovelock and his "Gaia hypothesis."

The book quotes Lovelock:

"Gaia is Mother Earth. Gaia is immortal. She is the eternal source of life. She does not need to reproduce herself as she is immortal. She is certainly the mother of us all, including Jesus...Gaia is not a tolerant mother. She is rigid and inflexible, ruthless in the destruction of whoever transgresses. Her unconscious objective is that of maintaining a world adapted to life. If we men hinder this objective we will be eliminated without pity."

ONE STOP SOCIAL CENTERS

With federal money now dictating education programs, schools are fast becoming local outlets for every other department of the government.

Federally-paid lunch programs have become a source of significant income for schools. Since guidelines dictate that only certain "at risk" students may receive the lunches, school administrations are busy re-assessing as many students as possible to fit the category. One school in Georgia actually managed to asses 75% of its students to be "at risk". It's a growth product.

Several other federal programs, most specifically "Title 1" provide taxpayer dollars to schools to perform special services. Most of those services require staffs which set up shop right in the school building.

To participate in and receive funding, schools must now show how they identified the child as "at risk" and provide the student's name. The information goes onto the student's permanent file in the massive federal data bank. That's why the definition for "at risk" is expanding rapidly.

According to the federal "Parents as Teachers" (PAT) program run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, it defines "at risk" to include:

• inability of parent to cope with inappropriate child behavior
• inability of parent to relate to or connect with child
• overindulgence, undue spoiling on part of parent

One must ask, who decides if a parent has failed to "connect" with a child? Who decides if a parent is spoiling a child? And how is it the business of the federal government?

The most frightening new trend in the government's drive for control of the children is the advent of massive powers for social workers and child protection agencies (see The DeWeese Report, Vol.5, Issue7, "The Coming Invasion of In-Home Social Workers").

Just as children are monitored and evaluated in the classroom, so are parents in the home. Social workers perform in-home visits to look around and evaluate the environment in which the child lives.

Their job is to determine if a child qualifies as "at risk". There are, of course, horrible things being done to children. Child abuse has become a daily headline.

But the definition of abuse has grown broad, as the power of child protection agencies has expanded. Today, "passive child abuse" is a threat to the most loving families.

How do parents defend themselves from a negative evaluation of a social worker when that report is based almost entirely on the agent's personal opinion? So broad are the definitions of child abuse that almost any conclusion can be drawn.

Such power to destroy families leaves the door open for major abuse of the system. But in today's education atmosphere in which "at risk" children provide a valuable funding source and where pop-psychology is practiced in most class rooms, is it any surprise that over one million people are falsely accused of child abuse every year?

Trends indicate, however, that it won't be long before the "at risk" requirement is dropped. In-school social services will soon be forced on all students.

Under these programs, schools are fast becoming one-stop centers for a vast array of social and medical services where students are counseled, diagnosed and even administered drugs without parental knowledge. What was once a simple trip to the school nurse now will include mental health diagnosis and treatments, and full-scale medical clinics

After a hearty day of sex education in the classroom, the clinics will provide birth control (including condoms, pills and diaphragms) and pregnancy testing.

Abortion counseling, including laboratory pregnancy tests are also part of the in-school services to be administered through federal programs. This service may even include free rides to an abortion clinic.

On-site family planning services can include induced abortions and even sterilization. In California it was disclosed that eight students were implanted with the birth control device Norplant.

How can this be done without parental consent or even parental knowledge? Check you state codes. Several states, have passed "minor consent laws." California's law states that "a minor is not required to have the consent of the parent or parents to obtain hospital, medical and surgical care related to the prevention or treatment of pregnancy. Even if the parent or parents refused to consent to the care, the minor could consent to the care and it could be provided."

Even without such laws, schools are able to get around many regulations by using outside agencies like Planned Parenthood that are not restricted by school policies.

While not all schools are yet participating in such programs, it is a trend for the future. As federal control grows in local school systems, such programs will emerge. The ground work has been laid through OBE curriculums and the advent of K-12 sex education programs.

WILL GEORGE W. BUSH FIX EDUCATION?

By Tom DeWeese

Americans want something done about education. Their children 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 the founding fathers. 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" with 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 19th out of 21 nations in math, 16th in science, and dead last in physics.

With all the programs and attention paid to education, how can that be? To coin a well-worn cliche; - "it's the programs, stupid." More precisely, it's the federal programs and the education bureaucracy that run them. It is a simple 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.

THE BUSH SOLUTION

President Bush has made education his number one priority. His first legislation to reach Capitol Hill is a major education policy proposal. The president has said education was the hallmark of his time as Governor of Texas, where he imposed strict guidelines for annual testing. He says he wants to confront the growing problem of American illiteracy and the low standing of test scores. And the president says "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." Says the President, "educational entrepreneurs should not be hindered by excessive red tape and regulation."
3. Stop funding failure. The President proposes several options for helping failing schools to improve.
4. Give parents a choice to find a school that does teach.

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

President Bush has decided to completely ignore the very root of the education problem - the federal government and its programs. President Bush's proposal accepts the incorrect conclusion that the problem with education is simply an overblown 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," come 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 can address a single school reform issue.

First, his plan to restore local control is 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 leaves 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 has made much of the testing program in the state of Texas which shows scores up by dramatic numbers. His new Secretary of Education, Rod Paige, owes his appointment, in a great way, to his leadership in the Texas testing program. But a close look at what actually has taken place in Texas is cause for concern.

Under Governor Bush, Texas established a state-wide 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 now proposes, TAAS provides "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 cheer leaders. 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, parent's may see test scores go up, but they will find that their children still can't read.

The Bush plan ignores the existence of the social scientists who have made psychological guinea pigs out of the children. It ignores 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 seek to teach. Nothing will change in the classroom under the Bush plan.

TIME TO INVESTIGATE THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

President Bush has made it clear that he has no intention of getting rid of the Department of Education. It is not possible to make the changes that Americans are hoping for without taking that step. Bush's plan simply uses warm and fuzzy rhetoric to further institutionalize more of the same. His voucher plan is little more than a Judas Goat to lead private schools into the nightmare of federal programs that attack and feed on any school that accepts federal money. And so the cancer grows.

Obviously the President insists on keeping the establishment intact. Therefore, 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.

Fix it or Forget it

In the 1960's, the leftist radicals who sought to revolutionize America and toss out the establishment used the battle cry, "fix it or forget it." Perhaps today that phrase whould become the battle cry of parents. The public schools are fast appoaching a point where no amount of legilsative fixing can save them. A new battle cry is being heard: "Take the children out of the schools."

In 1998, the Seperation of School and State Alliance condicted a poll which reported that 27% of the general public supported the group's two main propositions: eliminate both compulsory attendence and tax-funded government education at the K-12 level. Currently some 12% of the American public (7 million out of 52 million families) have their children in private, parochial, Christian or home-schools. Estimates are that Christian schools and home schooling are growing at a rate of 15% per year. Currently 2-3% of the K-12 population are being home schooled.

In the year 2000, Phi Delta Kappa, a public school fraternity, with assitance from the Gallup Poll organization ran a similar poll which shows those favoring public school reform dropped from 72% in 1997 to 60% in 2000. Those favoring a private education model grew from 24% in 1997 to 34% in 2000.

More education activists are coming to the conclusion that there is no hope to work in the system to fix the schools. In local school board meetings and in the halls of congress, they have found themselves to be ignored, oustricized and demonized as the assault on Chiristian beliefs and traditional academic-based education grows in intensity.

Many of these activists, including Rev. Ray Moore of the Exodus Mandate and Mashall Fritz of the Seperation of School and State Alliance are now openly advocating the end of the public school system as the only solution to the education crisis. With the passage of the Ted Kennedy/George W. Bush-sponsored H.R. 1 Education Bill the evidence is becoming overwhlemingly clear that nothing short of a mass exodus will stop the federal assault on children.