================================================================== The BIRCH BARK BBS / 414-242-5070 ================================================================== THE NEW AMERICAN -- August 8, 1994 Copyright 1994 -- American Opinion Publishing, Incorporated. P.O. Box 8040, Appleton, WI 54913 414-749-3784 ================================================================== ARTICLE: Overview TITLE: "THE STATE OF OUR DECLINE" ++++++++++++++++++++++++++ SUBTITLE: "A POSTMORTEM ON PUBLIC EDUCATION" AUTHOR: William F. Jasper ================================================================== "This country, I think, has been plagued with negativism about education long enough," U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley declared at a February 11, 1994 news conference after addressing the annual meeting of the American Association of School Administrators. "I think what we can do is get positive about education -- that's number one." To Riley, "getting positive" appears to mean ignoring the accelerating implosion of the government school system. To Mr. Riley, the former governor of South Carolina, and his boss, the former governor of Arkansas, "positive" appears to mean aggressively and unconstitutionally expanding the reach and control of federal bureaucrats over all aspects of education. "Positive" means more legislation, more statist nostrums, and more education fads marching under the shop-worn banner of "reform." And, of course, "positive" means more money -- always more money. IRREVERSIBLE DECLINE "Education is the most important expenditure we can make in this country," says Riley. "I used to say in my state that whatever we spend on it, it's the right thing to do. But you don't want to waste money, you don't want to have fraud, you don't want to have waste of any kind." Is Riley dreaming or living on another planet? Waste and fraud are synonymous with the public education system, and have been for a long time. And not just waste and fraud involving economic resources, but more importantly, waste and fraud involving -- to use a favorite term of the educationists -- "human resources," i.e. students. Public education, says Myron Lieberman, a nationally prominent educator who has spent decades in the system teaching and consulting at all levels, "is in irreversible and terminal decline." Unfortunately, the public school system has become so extensively intertwined with all areas of our society that it threatens to drag our whole civilization down into the grave with it. Any honest appraisal of the precipitous academic, social, and moral decline of our schools over just the past three decades must admit that this unparalleled plunge has been a horrendous disaster and one that we cannot sustain. Yet if we look at all the current indicators and project the lines down the road even a couple of years, a nightmare looms. It is certain that a continuation of the present course will bring an imminent dissolution and overthrow of our entire society. A LOOK AT THE SCORE Most surveys of the state of American education begin with a genuflection to A Nation at Risk, the 1983 report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education that shocked many Americans from complacency with its claim that "the educational foundations of our society are being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people." The claim was true. However, it, and the report's facts that supported that claim, were used with an ulterior motive. The subtitle of A Nation at Risk was The Imperative for Educational Reform, and the Commission, as well as the educational establishment that supported it, had their "reform" agenda all laid out and ready to offer the newly awakened American public. Those "reforms" have been working their way into the schools for the past decade and are responsible for much of the continuing chaos and decline. In many cases they have exacerbated it. Nevertheless, A Nation at Risk did shine a much needed spotlight on the "dimensions of risk before us." Among the Commission's findings were these bleak facts: * "International comparisons of student achievement ... reveal that on 19 academic tests American students were never first or second and ... were last seven times." * "Average achievement of high school students on most standardized tests is now lower than 26 years ago when Sputnik was launched." * "Between 1975 and 1980, remedial mathematics courses in public 4-year colleges increased by 72 percent and now constitute one-quarter of all mathematics courses taught in those institutions." * "Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT) demonstrate a virtually unbroken decline from 1963 to 1980." * "Business and military leaders complain that they are required to spend millions of dollars on costly remedial education ... in such basic skills as reading, writing, spelling, and computation." ACADEMIC NOSE DIVE So, after a decade of "reform" in which a couple trillion more dollars were "invested" in our schools, where do we stand academically? According to test scores and a host of reports, we were snookered again. By every conceivable measure -- academic, social, moral, spiritual, economic -- the public school system remains a colossal disaster. Let's look at some of the key "indicators": * Ninety million American adults cannot write a letter complaining about a billing error, figure out departure or arrival times on a bus schedule, fill out a bank deposit slip, or comprehend instructions given to prospective jurors. * Twenty-six percent of U.S. public school students are in special education classes. In other countries just one to three percent are unable to learn in regular classes. * SAT scores made minuscule gains but are still barely above record-low levels, and substantially below scores of the 1960s. A newly revised (and dumbed-down) SAT will make future comparisons impossible. * American students spend only about 41 percent of their school day on core academic subjects (math, science, history, English) and the majority of their school time on subjects relating to AIDS, environment, driver's training, multiculturalism, consumer affairs, and family life. * Thirty percent of all college freshmen in 1989-90 enrolled in at least one remedial course: 21 percent in remedial math, 16 percent in remedial writing, and 16 percent in remedial reading. * A 1990 survey of 200 major corporations found that 22 percent of companies were teaching reading, 41 percent were teaching writing, and 31 percent were teaching computation to their employees. * Over 25 percent of students drop out of high school and fail to graduate. The litany of horror stories goes on and on. Of this much we can be sure: As a nation, we have been on a nose-dive, dumb-down course for 30 years; we cannot continue on this course without soon becoming "brain dead." Far from reversing this trend, the vaunted "reforms," as we shall see, have usually accelerated the decline. SOCIAL CHAOS As important as academic achievement is, it is far from being the only -- or even primary -- index of school performance. The public schools, goes a perennial cliche, provide an essential "socializing" function and a cultural glue that hold us together as a nation. The facts speak otherwise: * In a national survey of school violence by the American School Health Association, 8.8 percent of eighth and tenth grade students reported being robbed at school, 19 percent reported being threatened, and 9.5 percent said they were attacked. * According to a U.S. Justice Department study, 500,000 violent incidents occurred every month in public secondary schools in 1988. * Thousands of public schools have become prisons, with metal detectors, their own huge police forces, and drug-sniffing dogs. Still, thousands of guns, knives, and other weapons find their way into schools each year. * Public schools are the "market" where many kids buy their drugs. According to one survey, 57 percent of high school drug users said they bought their illegal substances at school. * Forget simple rules of courtesy and civility: Foul language, disruptive behavior, vandalism, graffiti, littering, and ignoring or talking back to teachers are the order of the day in many schools. However, the chaos is not confined to the school grounds, but spills out into society, too. Deaths from suicide in persons aged 15 to 19 more than tripled between 1960 and 1988, from 3.6 to 11.3 per 100,000. Deaths from homicide in the same age cohort nearly tripled during that period, from 4.0 to 11.7 per 100,000. The number of pregnancies per thousand girls aged 15 to 19 rose from 12.6 in 1950 to 31.6 in 1985. The number of abortions for the same age group jumped from 15.7 in 1972 to 30.8 in 1985. In his 1982 book The Disappearance of Childhood, Neal Postman reminds us that as recently as 1950 "in all of America, only 170 persons under the age of 15 were arrested for what the FBI calls serious crimes (such as murder, forcible rapes, robbery, and aggravated assault)." That was one in every 250,000, or .0004 percent of the pre-15-year-olds in the country. "Between 1950 and 1979 the rate of serious crime committed by children increased 11,000 percent!" Arrests of juveniles under 18 years of age for violent offenses increased more than 57 percent between 1983 and 1992 -- and continues to skyrocket. From 1983 to 1992, weapons violations among juveniles jumped 117 percent, while those charged with murder or non- negligent manslaughter rose by 128 percent. CRIMINAL EDUCATION Still another sad indicator of our descent into anarchy was demonstrated in a Wall Street Journal article of June 16, 1994, "Police Teach Getting Arrested Safely 101." According to the article, a high school in Prince George's County, Maryland is now having police officers teach students how to behave when being arrested. Well, why not? The schools pass out condoms based on the premise that students cannot learn to control their hormones and therefore must learn to fornicate "safely" whenever the urge strikes. Obviously one can't "moralize" to students about avoiding criminal associations and behavior likely to get them into trouble; just teach them how to "safely" comply with police procedures when being arrested for the behavior the schools expect of them. "For well over a century, supporters of public education in the United States and the United Kingdom have asserted that it would reduce crime," notes Myron Lieberman in Public Education: An Autopsy (1993). "'Open a school, close a jail' -- this was a prominent mid-19th-century rationale for education." "In fact," Lieberman writes, "crime rates have increased along with the proportion of children educated in public schools and the duration of their education." Further, he observes that "the one serious effort to study the issue concluded that public education leads to higher crime rates." The effort he refers to, a 1987 study by economist John R. Lott Jr. for the International Review of Law and Economics, also found that "higher levels of totalitarianism are associated with increased expenditures for schooling." Lott noted that "these results strongly challenge the presumed public goods relationship between schooling and democracy." The positive relationship between government schools and increasing crime rates has been known for some time. In 1886, Zachary Montgomery, who was nominated for U.S. Attorney General, pointed out that the government school systems of the New England states were proving false the anti-crime promises of the public school advocates like Horace Mann. In his book, Poison Drops in the Federal Senate: The School Question from a Parental and Non-Sectarian Standpoint, Montgomery noted that the 1860 census figures showed Massachu- setts, home of Horace Mann and cradle of the public school movement, to have one criminal to every 649 inhabitants, while Virginia, where education had been left under parental control, had only one criminal to every 6,566 inhabitants. Suicide was also more common in the six northeastern states than in the six mid-Atlantic and southern coastal states -- one to every 13,285 versus one to every 56,584. Montgomery attributed the striking differences to the state-controlled school systems of the northeastern states which undermined parental authority and family influence while neglecting religious and moral training. The public schools are also failing miserably in their supposed function of transmitting to the next generation the knowledge and understanding requisite for the survival of the American political-economic system. As one example, Shiller, Boycko, and Korobov reported in the June 1991 American Economic Review that according to a survey they conducted in Moscow and New York City in 1990, attitudes toward free market systems and principles were remarkably similar in both countries. Unfortunately, the attitudes were not favorable toward markets in either country. In his 1989 study of American voting habits (The Unchanging American Voter), Eric R.A.N. Smith concluded: "The growth of education in the United States ... may have done many things, but it did not contribute much to the public's understanding of politics. In sum, education is not the key to the public's understanding of politics." MORAL DEPRAVITY If the frightful social pathologies rampant in our schools and society give cause for alarm, however, the shocking moral and spiritual decay should even more so. Nothing more clearly shows the utter depravity of the public education system than the unrelenting and increasingly militant campaign by its leading lights to de-Christianize the schools and purge from them any mention of moral absolutes and eternal verities. Step by step the campaign has proceeded: prayer, the Bible, Christmas carols, Christian holidays, any mention of God -- all have been evicted from public schools. Our Christian heritage has been stricken from the textbooks. But, as we know, nature abhors a vacuum; and once cleansed of Christian influences, the schools could not possibly remain neutral. Far from it. They have been converted almost completely into temples of humanism and New Age paganism. Do we exaggerate? Not in the least. Even ten years ago, no force on earth could have, all at once, imposed on our schools the kinds of vile curricula and programs that abound in today's classrooms. Parents would have revolted and teachers would have been arrested for corrupting the young. But patient gradualism has had its way; like a cancer, the most hideous vices have crept into the schools and spread their malignant influence everywhere. Consider the following: * Condom distribution has become widespread, together with "responsible sex" programs, which are reaching to ever lower grades with ever more explicit and perverse material. * Homosexuality, at first barely broached in connection with AIDS education, is now increasingly presented as a legitimate (even preferable) alternative "lifestyle," or natural "orientation," with adult homosexual activists being allowed to proselytize in the classroom. * School-based clinics dispense not only contraceptives but abortion-referral information. * Widespread "values clarification" and situation ethics programs and psychological surveys attempt to undermine the moral and spiritual values taught in the home. In passing the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the American Founding Fathers provided that "religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." It goes without saying that they would be aghast at the abominations we have allowed into our schools under the guise of "education." ECONOMIC INSANITY To add bitter insult to grave injury, the financial cost for this disgraceful miseducation continues to rocket into the stratosphere. Education spending accounted for 29 percent of the combined state and local government expenditures in the 1991 fiscal year, according to a recent report by the U.S. Census Bureau. The study, Government Finances: 1990-91, revealed that state and local governments spent a record $1.06 trillion in fiscal 1991, an increase of nine percent over the previous year. Education was far and away the largest area of spending, at $309 billion, followed by welfare at $130 billion, health care at $81 billion, law enforcement and public safety at $80 billion, highways at $65 billion, debt service at $52 billion, and administration at $48 billion. University of Rochester economist Eric Hanushek estimates that annual per pupil expenditures, adjusted for inflation, rose from about $2,700 to $4,900 from 1965 to 1989. During the same period, Peter Passell pointed out in the New York Times for March 20, 1994, "Average class size fell from 25 to 18, while the proportion of teachers with a master's degree rose from a quarter to half and median teacher experience went from 8 to 15 years." Teacher salaries rose steadily between 1982-83 and 1989-90, increasing by an average of $765 per year above inflation. But, typical of most government operations, the lion's share of the massive sums spent on public education never reaches the classroom; it is eaten up by the droves of administrative jackals, who continue to multiply faster than rabbits. A 1990 study by Fordham University researchers found only 32.3 percent of the $6,107 spent per pupil in New York City schools actually made it to the classroom. Likewise, a study of 110 Wisconsin schools by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute found only 33.5 percent of education dollars made it to the classroom. New York City has more school supervisors than does the country of France, and the state of New York has more than the whole of Europe. Of course, a huge lobbying force of professional, full-time leeches has grown up in Washington and in state capitals to perpetuate and expand all education programs. The Committee for Education Funding (CEF) is a perfect example. A massive lobbying coalition made up of dozens of universities and education organizations -- AFL-CIO, American Federation of Teachers (AFT), American Association of School Administrators, American Council on Education, Council of Chief State School Officers, International Reading Association, National Education Association, National Association of Elementary School Principals, National School Boards Association, etc. -- swamps Congress with "experts" who testify in favor of increased spending. Economist James L. Payne's study of testimony before Congress on spending programs yielded some startling insights. Among his findings were that the ratio of witnesses in favor to witnesses opposed to spending programs was 145 to 1. Very likely, the same ratio holds true for education spending, where the miseducation lobby is always lavishly represented, but where parents, students, and taxpayers seldom are. WHO KILLED EDUCATION? By now it should be obvious that the public education system is totally bankrupt -- economically, academically, socially, morally, and spiritually. In fact, it is dead. It is a rotting corpse that should have been buried long ago. Yet, like the "living dead" in a grade B horror movie, it refuses to die, refuses to be buried. Why? Because a huge self-interested horde of educrats who profit handsomely from the corpse have convinced a gullible public to keep it on a life-support system fueled with our tax dollars and our children. The education lobby tells us that great, wondrous changes are in the offing. "Restructuring" and "reform" are in the air. But the promises are as empty and deceitful as those that have gone before. All of the fatuous bromides being offered -- national goals, national standards, merit pay, magnet schools, "choice," site-based management, vouchers, outcome-based education, charter schools, business partnerships, peer review, total quality management -- are pathetic attempts to hide the stinking corpse. And they are being offered by the same hucksters who have conned us so many times before. The 1983 Nation at Risk report stated: "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.... We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral disarmament." While it is true that no "foreign power" has "imposed" our educational disaster upon us, it is not altogether true that we have done this to ourselves. A close examination of the "reforms" of decades past that produced our present catastrophe shows that the individuals and organiz- ations most responsible do indeed constitute a power "foreign" to our republic and to Christian civilization. From its very beginnings in the last century, the public education movement was a subversive enterprise lead and guided by humanists, atheists, socialists, and utopian communists. Transported here from Britain by Robert Owen, the "father of modern socialism," in the early 1800s, the idea of state-controlled schools soon took root among the liberal Unitar- ians who had seized control of Harvard. One of the Owenite leaders of the day was the influential writer-editor-intellectual, Orestes Brownson, who later converted to Catholicism and turned against the plans of his erstwhile comrades. According to Brownson: The great object was to get rid of Christianity, and to convert our churches into halls of science. The plan was not to make open attacks on religion, although we might belabor the clergy and bring them into contempt where we could; but to establish a system of state -- we said national -- schools, from which all religion was to be excluded, in which nothing was to be taught but such knowledge as is verifiable by the senses, and to which all parents were to be compelled by law to send their children.... Many years later, in 1932, the head of the Communist Party, USA, William Z. Foster, would announce that his organization was committed to the same evil plan. In his book, Toward a Soviet America, he stated: "Among the elementary measures the American Soviet government will adopt to further the cultural revolution are the following: the schools, colleges and universities will be coordinated and grouped under the National Department of Education and its state and local branches. The studies will be revolutionized, being cleansed of religious, patriotic, and other features of the bourgeoisie ideology. The students will be taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism, internationalism, and the general ethics of the new socialist society." This communist vision for education was shared by many of the leading educationists of the day. Like Foster and Owen, John Dewey, the "Father of Progressive Education," deplored Christianity's division of humanity into the saved and unsaved. "I cannot understand," wrote Dewey in A Common Faith, "how any realization of the democratic ideal as a vital moral and spiritual ideal in human affairs is possible without surrender of the conception of the basic division to which supernatural Christianity is committed." Dewey's Fabian Socialist colleague at Columbia University's Teachers College, George S. Counts, wrote in Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order (1932) that "teachers should deliberately reach for power and then make the most of their conquest." Toward what end? They must "influence the social attitudes, ideals and behavior of the coming generation." "The growth of the science and technology," said Counts, "has carried us into a new age where ignorance must be replaced by knowledge, competition by cooperation, trust in Providence by careful planning, and private capitalism by some form of socialized economy." FOUNDATION FUNDING But this radical scheme for our schools could not have been popularized without the aid of some of America's great fortunes. The big tax-exempt foundations -- Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford, and others -- have played a major role in advancing virtually every major subversive influence in education in this century. In 1902, John D. Rockefeller Jr. set up his General Education Board (GEB), a private institution funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, that would have immense impact on American education. What was Rockefeller trying to accomplish through the GEB? According to the GEB's memorial history, it was the "goal of social control." And the GEB left no doubt as to who it expected to be exercising the "social control." In the Board's Occasional Letter, No. 1, GEB Chairman Frederick Gates remarked: In our dreams, we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand. The present educational conventions fade from our minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. These foundations lavished so much money onto communist and socialist causes that demands were made for Congress to investigate. In 1953, the Congressional Special Committee to Investigate the Tax-Exempt Foundations was established. Norman Dodd was appointed staff director of the committee. His extensive investigations led him to charge: "The foundation world is a coordinated, well-directed system, the purpose of which is to ensure that the wealth of our country shall be used to divorce it from the ideas which brought it into being. The foundations are the biggest, single influence in collectivism." In a personal interview with Ford Foundation President H. Rowan Gaither, Dodd was shocked when Gaither admitted that he operated the foundation under directives "to the effect that we should make every effort to so alter life in the United States as to make possible a comfortable merger with the Soviet Union." Dodd was equally shocked by revelations in the minutes of the Carnegie Foundation. According to the minutes, Carnegie's board of trustees determined soon after World War I that "we must control education in the United States." The Carnegie plotters, said Dodd, recognized that the task "was too big for them alone, so they approached the Rockefeller Foundation with a suggestion that the portion of education which could be considered domestic be handled by the Rockefeller Foundation and that portion which is international should be handled by the [Carnegie] Endowment." The deal was struck and American education has been ravaged by foundation- financed subversion ever since: evolution, removal of prayer and the Bible, school consolidation, removal of phonics, sex education, global education, textbook subversion, teacher unionization, forced busing, and on and on. And today the same Carnegie-Rockefeller-Ford revolutionaries are promoting false solutions -- national goals, national certification, choice, vouchers, charter schools, etc. -- to "solve" the crisis they have created. If adopted, these "solutions" will complete the revolution for the "new socialist society" envisioned by Comrade Foster. END OF ARTICLE ================================================================== THE NEW AMERICAN -- August 8, 1994 Copyright 1994 -- American Opinion Publishing, Incorporated. P.O. Box 8040, Appleton, WI 54913 ==================================================================