Dumbing Down Our Kids / Break These Chains
McGroarty, Daniel & Sykes, Charles J.
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "Dumbing Down Our Kids / Break These Chains" only appeared to know in advance about the assassination mission to Mexico, he also seems to have approved of the plan, an allegation that should give everybody pause. The point is not that Clinton...
...JOHN R. DUNLAP teaches English at Santa Clara University...
...n 1918, a commission formed by the National Education Association issued a declaration of "Cardinal Principles," an implicit repudiation of traditional liberal education...
...In Break These Chains, Daniel McGroarty gives a "battlefield account" of the Milwaukee voucher experiment, "a street-level view of the schools, the parents, the children, the politicians and public officials on both sides of the barricades...
...But as Tyrrell puts it: "Clinton's re-election in 1996 would run contrary to the rules of evidence, normative human experience, and all known theories of history save those of Edward Gibbon, the diagnostician of civilizations in decline...
...Although there has been measurable improvement among the kids involved in the Milwaukee experiment, school choice remains untested on a large scale over a lengthy time...
...Instead of cultivating the individual mind, groups of students would be assigned problems "for cooperative solution" and would thus acquire "training in collective thinking...
...On one side is a coalition of conservative Republicans, private foundations, and inner-city minority Democrats fed up with the "plantation education" dished out in the public schools...
...one in eight delegates in 1992 was an NEA member, and Bill Clinton's endorsement by the union was predicated on dumping his earlier support for school choice...
...And of much else besides, apparently...
...To evaluate the experiment Grover hired John Witte, a University of Wisconsin education researcher who was already an outspoken critic of vouchers...
...Since 1976, the group has fielded the largest single bloc of delegates to the Democratic National Conventions...
...An antivoucher pamphlet prepared by the NEA cites Witte as "an independent evaluator" and backs up Witte's criticism by referring to a Carnegie Foundation report critical of vouchers-without mentioning that the Carnegie report itself relies on Witte...
...617 by the third) to attend non-sectarian private schools of their parents' choice...
...Tommy Thompson to get a pilot voucher plan accepted by the state legislature...
...73 The American Spectator . September 1996 Whatever direction Catherine Barrett had in mind for public education a generation ago, it was not toward accountability or competitive markets...
...Shanker is a man of intelligence and discernment so far as educrats go, but as McGroarty frequently shows, the AFT president's public comments on vouchers have been party-line schlock...
...A final glitch...
...merely a function of individuals...
...As related by McGroarty, opposition to the Milwaukee school choice experiment bordered on the fanatical...
...Driven by a narrow interpretation of John Dewey's vague educational theories, the document's seven "principles" of secondary education reform called for a "democratic" emphasis on practical homemaking and the manual arts, with the subject of history to be replaced by something called "Civics Education...
...He was told by Trooper Brown that the aircraft flying into Mena were carrying cocaine, yet he shrugged it off saying, "That's Lasater's deal...
...That Clinton is an utter scoundrel is demonstrated beyond any doubt in this brilliant book...
...There is no certainty in the proponents' expectation that school choice will leverage reform in the public school system, nor is it wise merely to dismiss as "purist" the argument of some conservatives that public vouchers will foster state control of private schools...
...As the battle for school choice gets hotter in the next few years, watch for an AFT/NEA merger...
...With Clinton riding twenty points ahead of Bob Dole in the polls, this looks like a rash prediction...
...Like Sykes, McGroarty ends with an uncertainty buoyed by high expectations, and one cannot help sharing the optimism...
...The point is not that Clinton was a closet patriot, secretly helping the Reagan administration to uphold national security...
...Superintendent of Public Instruction Herbert Grover- charged by state law to administer the school choice statute-dumped a spate of petty regulations on the participating private schools, loudly denounced the plan in the press, and instigated a lawsuit filed against his own office by fellow opponents of school choice...
...Unlike their private sector counterparts, public sector unions are less directly concerned with economic issues than with the political power needed to reallocate income toward the government that employs their members...
...If there is one thing in Clinton's past that cries out for a full-press investigation it is his friendship with convicted drug distributor Dan Lasater...
...1 an absorbing story of how, in 1990, Democratic State Rep...
...It would be a pleasant irony if the school choice movement became an incentive for the Catholic schools to reassert their distinctiveness, but the opposite effect seems more likely...
...Charles Sykes refers to this voluble 1918 declaration as "the ur-document of American educationism in the twentieth century," and a cardinal point of his latest book, Dumbing Down Our Kids, is that "nothing terribly new" emerges in the current debates over public education...
...If Americans do decide to send Bill and Hillary Clinton back to the White House for a second term after all that has come out, much of it in the pages of The American Spectator, then it is time for another Gibbon to chronicle the last agonies of a dying Republic...
...Yet some reservations are in order, with a prudent eye on Murphy's Law...
...McGroarty (a portion of whose book was excerpted in the March 1496 TAS) tells E4 Both writers sing the praises of the Catholic school system: the largest single alternative to public education still delivers better goods at half the cost...
...And how much of Lasater's cocaine did Clinton snort himself...
...Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can't Read, Write, or Add Charles J. Sykes St...
...Writing more than a generation ago in Schools Without Scholars (1958), the educator John Keats noted a fundamental divide between the progressive educationist, for whom "the individual has only a functional significance in society," and the traditionalist, to whom "society is...
...How much protection did he provide for Lasater's drug network...
...Both writers sing the praises of the Catholic school system: the largest single alternative to public education still delivers better goods at half the cost...
...The Clintons began their public lives in the petty charlatanry of student government and ended in the 199o's as fit objects for grand jury inquiries, government subpoenas, congressional investigations, and massive rejection by the electorate...
...Grover's allies lost their suit in March 1992 when the Wisconsin Supreme Court narrowly upheld the constitutionality of school choice...
...In a chapter entitled "Boy Clinton and The Liberal Crack-Up," Tyrrell trenchantly predicts that the president's crimes and excesses will precipitate the final stage of the "Liberal Crack-Up," bringing down the whole edifice of late twentieth-century collectivism in one magnificent act of self-demolition...
...Modest in scope and restricted to low-income children, the school-choice initiative provided vouchers of $2,500 each for a small number of public grade-school kids (341 during the first year of the program...
...They seem unaware, however, of the extent to which that system has bought into the secular ethos in recent years...
...We are," NEA president Catherine Barrett boasted in 1972, "the biggest potential striking force in this country and we are determined to control the direction of education...
...t Joanna Pleszczynska Registered Patent Agent phone/fax: (703) 978-7678 4216 Sherando Lane Annandale, VA 22003 PATENT PROSECUTION Infringement, Validity & Novelty Patent Searches 74 September r 9 9 6 - The American Spectator...
...More and more Catholic dioceses require their teachers to go through the mind-numbing process of state certification, thus diluting the Catholic system with therapeutic fads in reading and math instruction, not to mention the intrusions of vocational training, trendy politics, and busybody sex education...
...On the other side are the usual suspects: Wisconsin educrats abetted by the NAACP, the ACLU, People for the American Way, a compliant local press, and of course the Wisconsin affiliate of the NEA...
...His motives were entirely opportunistic...
...Among the NEA's enthusiasms in recent decades: the nuclear freeze movement, feminist and homosexual militancy, statehood for Washington, D.C., abortion rights, denigration of parental authority, Goals zooo, higher taxes, and every Democratic presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter-never mind that some 35 percent of the NEA's two million duespaying members are Republicans...
...Plausibly characterized by its critics as a "nearmonopoly supplier to a governmentenforced monopoly consumer," the NEA has acquired a vested interest in the many conditions cited by Sykes as culprits in the deterioration of public education: parental apathy, fraudulent claims to expertise, dizzy faddishness, pervasive mediocrity among teachers, bureaucratic bloat for special-interest services, institutional privilege insulated from criticism and change...
...Martin's /34.r pages / $23.95 Break These Chains: The Battle for School Choice Daniel McGroarty Forum-Prima Publishing 288 pages / $23.95 REVIEWED BY John R. Dunlap...
...The same Witte appears in denunciations of school choice served up by Albert Shanker in his well-known "Where We Stand" ads...
...Educratic nuance aside, Keats's distinction is still a fair statement of the divide...
...It is hard to argue with that...
...Worse, he was partly responsible for corrupting the Mena operation, colluding in side-deals that involved the importation of drugs into the United States...
...The National Education Association is itself a perfect paradigm of the contemporary squalor...
...In the ensuing decades, the membership and influence expanded until the 196o's, when, with federal approval of public employee unions, the organization was transformed into an activist teachers' union...
...Dumb and Dumber: Does Choice Matter...
...McGroarty shows how Witte's reports, biased and methodologically flawed, created an "echo effect" among commentators with a shared hostility toward school choice...
...The activism has gone way beyond collective bargaining...
...Founded in 1857 as a "tea and crumpets" professional organization, the NEA had a modest membership of Io,ooo at the time of the "Cardinal Principles" declaration...
...In July 1993, true to its monopoly instincts, the ubiquitous NEA put out feelers to its putative rival, Shanker's 8oo,ooo-member American Federation of Teachers...
...Polly Williams mobilized black support in Milwaukee's central city and forged an alliance with Gov...
...Yet change is precisely what Sykes anticipates in "the coming education revolution," and prominent among his expectations is school choice...
...What's new, after another four decades of controversy, is the brazenness of the "progressive" education establishment, an arrogance born of vast bureaucratic entrenchment and raw political clout...
Vol. 29 • September 1996 • No. 9
