Phony Parental Involvement

Activist parents from many states, those opposing public/private partnerships and controlled (dialectic) parent/citizen involvement in the schools, attended a U.S. Dept. of Education  conference  which took place in Indianapolis in the 1980s. We passed out a flyer with our documentation regarding "community education" and the change agents involved in Effective Schools, etc.  We succeeded in disrupting the conference to the extent that similar conferences scheduled for the remaining nine regions were cancelled by the U.S. Dept. of Education!

THE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE FOR PARENT/CITIZEN INVOLVEMENT IN SCHOOLS WAS held July 22–25, 1982 at the Hilton Hotel, Salt Lake City, Utah. A letter to Secretary Bell dated February 25, 1982 requesting conference funding contained an impressive list of supporters on its letterhead, including: Scott Matheson, governor of Utah; Mrs. Barbara Bush, honorary chairperson, National School Volunteer Program; T.H. Bell, U.S. secretary of education; Dr. Don Davies, Institute for Responsive Education; Dr. Carl Marer, National Committee for Citizens
in Education; Dr. M. Donald Thomas, superintendent of schools, Salt Lake City, Utah, and
education representatives from Canada and Australia.

Dr. Donald Thomas, originally on the board of directors of The Effective School Report, and
executive director of the Network for Effective Schools, is a well-known change agent. Thomas
has traveled to Russia under the auspices of U.S. Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander
and Dale Mann of Columbia University, to work with Russia on implementing international
education restructuring.

The above-mentioned letter to Bell also stated:

The “think tank” session will be by invitation only to leaders in the movement. Its purpose will be to assess the current status of parent/citizen involvement in the schools; to identify trends and directions of the movement for the 80s; and finally to plan further positive action to support the continuation of the movement.

One of the attachments to this conference correspondence included many pages related
to Effective School Research and a listing of the components necessary for education restructuring.
The list included:

• mastery learning/direct instruction
• expectations
• climate
• motivation
• measurement diagnosis
• assessment
• class management
• discipline
• classroom organization
• pupil conditions/rewards
• praise
• parent involvement, etc.

Those connected with such research are listed as follows: Michael Rutter, England, Effective
School Study; the late Harvard Professor Ron Edmonds; professors Benjamin Bloom
and John Goodlad; Larry Lezotte; Donald Thomas; and others.

A second attachment on National Coalition for Parent Involvement in Education (NCPIE—
Alexandria, Virginia) letterhead stated that NCPIE was facilitated by the National School
Volunteer Program and funded by Union Carbide Corporation.

Excerpted from page 188-189 of my book the deliberate dumbing down of america.