For now here is an important piece of historical documentation:
THE LEDGER OF TALLAHASSEE FLORIDA ON JULY 27, 1972 IN AN ARTICLE ENTITLED “SCHOOLS to Try New Program” quoted Florida state education officials as saying that a new program being field-tested in Florida will tell teachers and parents not only why Johnny can’t read, but why the school can’t teach him and how much it’s costing to try. Excerpts follow:
“We’re putting all the various components together now,” said Associate Education Commissioner Cecil Golden. “What we’re doing should soon become very visible.” However, he estimates it will take seven to ten years before the program is completely operational....
Golden says it may sound like a lot of gibberish at this point, but “when we bring it all together” it should produce a more flexible and relevant educational system....
He said many people in the State Department of Education are working independently on various facets and aspects of the program and, like those assembling the atom bomb, “very few of them understand exactly what they are building, and won’t until we put all the parts together.”[Ed. Note: This article refers to PPBS/MBO—the early years. The Atlanta Constitution published
an article entitled “Georgia Schools OK Tracking System” in its July 1, 1998 issue which
describes later PPBS implementation and which is included in this book’s entry of the same date.]
The big secret regarding importance of data collection was exposed in 1972, same year Cecil Golden let the cat out of the bag by, guess who, one of the nation's finest education researchers, Mary Thompson, who spoke at the Exposing the Global Road to Ruin through Education, free You Tube download and for sale at Amazon.com. Below is an entry from page 110-111. Be sure to take a look at last sentence regarding vouchers!
MARY THOMPSON, SECRETARY AND MEMBER OF THE SPEAKERS’ BUREAU OF THE SANTA CLARA, California Republican Women’s Federation, gave a very important speech regarding Planning, Programming, Budgeting Systems (PPBS) on June 11, 1972. Following are key excerpts:
When I was first asked to speak to you about PPBS (Planning, Programming, Budgeting Systems), I inquired whether it was to be addressed to PPBS as applied to education. I shall deal with it at the education level today, however you should remember that PPBS is a tool for implementing the very restructuring of government at all levels in every area of governmental institutions. What is involved is the use of government agencies to accomplish mass behavioral change in every area....
PPBS is a plan being pushed by Federal and State governments to completely change
education....
The accountability involved in PPBS means accountability to the state’s predetermined
education goals....
One leader of education innovation (Shelly Umans—Management of Education) has
called it “A systematic design for education revolution.”...
In a systems management of the education process, the child himself is the product.
Note: the child... his feelings, his values, his behavior, as well as his intellectual development....
PPBS is the culmination of the “people planners” dreams....
Then in 1965 the means for accomplishing the actual restructuring of education was provided in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). President Johnson has said that he considered the ESEA the most significant single piece of legislation of his administration. Recall that it was also the same year of 1965 when the presidential order was given to introduce PPBS throughout the entire federal government. 1965 was the year which unleashed the actual restructuring of governmental processes and formally included education as a legitimate Federal government function....
PPBS is the systems management tool made possible by technology of computer hardware to affect the planned change....
In order to make an explanation of PPBS intelligible, you must also know that education itself has been redefined. Simply put, it has become the objective of education to measure and diagnose the child in order to prescribe a program to develop his feelings and emotions, values and loyalties toward predetermined behavioral objectives.... Drawing it right down to basics, we are talking about conditioned responses in human terms. Pavlov experimented on dogs!...
Taking each element of PPBS will show how the process is accomplished. PLANNING—
Planning phase (please note that the process involved with a systems approach is
always described in terms of “phases”) always includes the establishment of goals committees, citizens committees, needs assessment committees.... These are referred to as “community involvement.” The committees are always either self appointed or chosen—never elected. They always include guidance from some trained “change agents” who may be administrators, curriculum personnel or local citizens. Questionnaires and surveys are used to gather data on how the community “feels” and to test community attitudes. The ingeniousness of the process is that everybody thinks he is having a voice in the direction of public schools. Not so... for Federal change agencies, specifically regional education centers established by ESEA, influence and essentially determine terminology used in the questionnaires and surveys. The change agents at the district level then function to “identify needs and problems for change” as they have been programmed to identify them at the training sessions sponsored by Federal offices such as our Center for Planning and Evaluation in Santa Clara County. That is why the goals are essentially the same in school districts across the country. It also explains why three years ago every school district was confronted with the Family Life Education issue at the same time....
Unknowing citizens’ committees are used by the process to generate acceptance of goals already determined. What they don’t realize is that professional change agents are operating in the behaviorist’s framework of thought and Mr. or Mrs. Citizen Parent is operating in his traditional education framework of thought. So, the local change agents are able to facilitate a group to a consensus in support of predetermined goals by using familiar, traditional terms which carry the new behaviorist meanings....
Another name for this process is Participatory Democracy, a term by the way, which
was coined by Students for a Democratic Society in their Port Huron Manifesto to identify the process for citizen participation in destruction of their own political institutions....
Richard Farson of Western Behavioral Sciences Institute made a report to the Office of Education in Sacramento in 1967. He said it this way:
The application of systems analysis is aided by several phenomena that would be of help in almost any situation of organizational change. First, it is relatively easier to make big changes than to make small ones—and systems changes are almost always big ones. Because they are big, it is difficult for people to mount resistance to them, for they go beyond the ordinary decision-making, policy-making activities of individual members of an organization. It is far easier to muster argument against a $100 expenditure for partitions than against a complete reorganization of the work flow....
Teachers, you have professional organizations to protect your professional interests. Use them to protect your personal privacy and professional integrity. Encourage organizations of teachers to take positions publicly in opposition to PPBS....
We believe the time has come to establish private schools to keep our children from falling victim to the behaviorists while there is still opportunity to do so. BE AWARE OF THE FACT THAT THE VOUCHER SYSTEM IS LURKING IN THE WINGS TO BRING THE PRIVATE SCHOOLS INTO THE NATIONAL CONTROL [emphasis in original].
