They're baa-aack! Social engineers at it again

“Old social engineers never die; they just sit and wait, change a few words around, and hope the public has a short memory.”
--State Rep. Ron Gamble of Pennsylvania, in the Washington Times, Nov. 13, 1992

All that’s missing is the late Heather O’Rourke turning to face us and cryptically intoning, “They’re baaaa-aaack!”

Just about the time some had started thinking that Texas has turned the corner on public education, a couple of malicious poltergeists have been freed by the Obama Administration.

Like Reverend Kane, who stalked little Heather in the Poltergeist films of the 1980s, our old buddies Marc Tucker and Outcome-Based Education are once again loose to work their wickedness.

Tucker and his National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) were the moving force behind “education reform” in Arkansas in the 1980s during the governorship of Bill Clinton. Hillary Clinton and Tucker worked closely to implement Tucker’s “New Standards” in Arkansas – and watched as the state slid to No. 50 in the nation in educational performance.

Texas Gov. Ann Richards picked up the program and began implementing it in Texas, but was voted out of office before she could finish. New Gov. George W. Bush, upon first examining what the Texas Education Agency was up to, called it “mush” – but finished implementing it anyway.

More than a decade later, Texas is just now starting to turn the corner in cleaning up the damage left behind.

The Whole Language concept of reading instruction has mostly been replaced by tried-and-true phonics; reading and writing scores are on the rebound. Traditional skills-and-drills are replacing “fuzzy math” and “manipulatives” – and, again, Texas’ student performance is improving. Last year saw a complete rewrite of the state’s curriculum framework in the sciences, and lost amid arguments over creationism is the fact that the scientific method has been re-introduced and that political indoctrination on New Age myths like global warming has been lessened.

This spring, the debate turned to a rewrite of the state’s history/social studies curriculum framework, where a now-conservative majority on the State Board of Education managed to blunt blatant attempts to demonize Western thought and culture in favor of Politically Correct, globalized brainwashing.

How bad was the curriculum the board repaired?

The parent of a fourth-grader in Gonzales, Texas, visited my newspaper office earlier today. She mentioned she’d spent the previous evening watching the History Channel with her child to show the child that the United States was not an “evil empire” – the words used by the child’s teacher in class that day -- because it had used atom bombs to end World War II. The students had learned about atom bombs, but nothing was said about the Holocaust, the Rape of Nanking or other atrocities committed by the fascists the U.S. and the free world defeated in 1945.

Yet despite the clear and abundant evidence that Tucker and so many of his “education experts” know no more about how to educate children than they do about space shuttles, they’re back on the scene, raking in massive amounts of money in state after state with their “new ideas.”

Back in 1998, my reporting exposed the School-to-Work system embraced by the NCEE as nothing more than a reworked version of the old Soviet-style “polytechnic” schooling, intentionally designed to dumb-down the curriculum to create a worker caste incapable of advancing beyond basic skills, perpetually beholden to the education establishment to return to school every few years for “re-training.” When Texas Education Commissioner Mike Moses told the State Board of Education that Texas was not a participant in the School-to-Work idea and would not accept any funding for it, I found the documents that proved him a liar.

One of the key tenets of that system was the Certificate of Initial Mastery – a diploma awarded at the 10th-grade level certifying the recipient as “ready to enter the workforce.” The CIM mirrored the polytechnic system, which steered children onto “career tracks” as early as the fourth grade – regardless of their wishes or the wishes of their parents – and declared them ready for the work force after eight or 10 years of schooling.

In February of this year, the national press began gushing about a “new” pilot program being tried in eight states which would give “students the chance to earn a diploma in the 10th grade” and advance on to “college work” at one of the many conveniently-located community and trade colleges. Funded by the Gates Foundation, the project is the brainchild of – you guessed it – the National Center on Education and the Economy.

Ze’ev Wurman, a former member of the California Math framework committee and a member of the state's math testing program review panel since its inception,  and Dr. Sandra Stotsky, the eminent education chair at the University of Arkansas, pointed out the flaws in the NCEE’s approach in an April 4 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle:

“The center's so-called fast-track approach ups the ante and aims to get at-risk students out of high school and into college - and supposedly on a quick credit-bearing path to a degree. It also aims to get bright high school students into college sooner for supposedly better course work. However, the center's proposed 10th-grade "diploma" is the wrong answer to the wrong problem for three groups of students: those with a strong academic orientation, those without it but who are willing to stay in school and those who drop out.

“It is not the right solution for those capable of academic acceleration. Most parents don't want their 15-year-olds, bright or not, in any college environment. Moreover, the environment and course work at a community college are not for bright 15-year-olds.”

Coupled with the NCEE’s “new idea” is another old-but-renamed concept: Outcome-Based Education (OBE).

OBE has been known by many names since it was first introduced in the early 1970s as “Mastery Learning.” It is the ultimate social-engineering solution, placing an emphasis on the affective (values and feelings) rather than on the factual.

“Every child in America entering school at the age of five is mentally ill,” psychiatrist Chester Pierce told the 1973 Childhood International Education Seminar, “because he comes to school with certain allegiances toward our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity.

“It is up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well – by creating the international child of the future.”

The big education push of the Obama Administration follows on something begun, again, under George W. Bush – a nationalized curriculum called the “Common Core Standards.” While Congressional Republicans managed to curb the power of the U.S. Department of Education during the “Gingrich Revolution” of the mid-1990s by passing legislation which prohibits the DoE from mandating curriculum to the states, they didn’t eliminate the department altogether – and didn’t stop it from bribing the states to participate “voluntarily.”

Bring on the Obama Administration’s “Race to the Top” competition – billions of dollars of “federal money” for states which draw up the best assessments based on the Common Core Standards. Hoping to win some of that cash, all the states save Texas and Alaska adopted the Common Core Standards even before they were finished.

And make no mistake, the Common Core Standards don’t raise any bars in education: like every other federal idea, they’re geared to the lowest common denominator. At the risk of offending certain Geico advertising characters, even a caveman can do it.

“Parents might well prefer that assessments objectively measure their children's factual knowledge while also showing how their schools stack up against comparable schools by tracking individual student growth on standardized test scores,” write Robert Holland and Don Soifer of the Lexington Institute.

“But every indication is that America's families stand to receive something far different. Kids in every state adopting the national standards and national test will be subjectively scored by teams of anonymous evaluators on how they respond to open-ended questions with any number of real right or wrong answers.

“Multicultural activists will be pleased, even if everyday parents probably won't be. For decades, they have been advocating replacement of fact-based, multiple-choice testing with an evaluation of students' cultural competence and commitment to global world views.”

Most state-level curriculums are already stronger than the Common Core Standards, and now that states are seeing those standards first-hand, many are reconsidering using them at all. To combat that, the DoE is taking its case directly to many local school districts, where the lure of big cash awards is even harder to resist.

In spite of the proven record of failure, time and again, politicians keep returning to the same “education experts” such as Tucker to “reform” education. Why?

It’s because control of education determines control of society – and the social engineers control the education establishment.

“What we’re into is the total restructuring of society,” occultist, globalist and Mid-Coast Regional Education Laboratory leader Dr. Shirley McCune told the National Governors Conference in 1989 – an organization whose members at one point included both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. “What's happening in America today ...is a total transformation of our society. We have moved into a new era... Schools are no longer in the schooling business, but rather in the human resources development business… The revolution... in curriculum is that we no longer are teaching facts to children. We have a chance to develop the kind of society we want.”

Sooner or later, Americans have to wake up to the fact that our entire education system is built on a graveyard of failed social experimentation -- and that we need to exorcize the malevolent spirits which inhabit those rotting coffins.