Just finished Dumbed-Down

“DUMBED -DOWN SATS DISGUISED DEFICIENCIES—

THE FAULT, DEAR EDUCATOR, IS NOT IN Our Tests,” by George C. Roche, president of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, was published in the July 5, 1996 issue of Human Events. Dr. Roche’s article underscores the success of the internationalist change agents’ relentless efforts to dumb down our children and, in turn, our nation.The following excerpts are most enlightening:  --  Deliberate Dumbing Down of America

“SAT Scores Rise Strongly after Test Is Overhauled” read a Wall Street Journal

headline.The continuation of the article carried the title “SAT Scores Post Strong Increase.” Good

news?

Hardly. The “higher” scores came from a “dumbed-down” test. Students now have

an extra half hour to complete the “new” Scholastic Aptitude Test. They now use electronic

calculators and answer fewer questions in general and fewer multiple-choice math questions

in particular. Reading passages now ask definitions from context. And the difficult antonym

section (involving knowledge of words that are opposite in meaning), calling for linguistic

and intellectual subtleties long lost, has been dropped entirely.

...Here’s the College Board’s rationale for the changes: “Students taking the SAT in the

1990s are substantially different from those who took the test in the 1940s when the scale

was created. Continuing to force-fit their scores to a scale established for a very different

group of students reduces the interpretive value of the score within the population for the

sake of slavish consistency to the original scale and comparisons over time.”

They’d like you to be persuaded by exaggerations like “force-fit” and “slavish” and

breeze past their statement that today’s students are “substantially different” from those who

took the test in 1940. I’d like you to be persuaded that the College Board just admitted that the

educational system’s “substantially different” students are really “substantially deficient.”

...The history standards of the government’s new Goals 2000 program, drenched in

political correctness, highlight America’s admitted faults and leave out much that is positive.

OBE students going through the Goals 2000 program wouldn’t have much of a chance with

the older, tougher SAT test, but the easier version, plus the “recentering” changes now in

place will help disguise actual deficiencies.

Putting an artificially higher number on actually lower academic performance only

highlights the problems facing American education. You can fiddle with the figures forever,

but as long as education “professionals” refuse to be honest with our citizens, matters can

only get worse."

[Ed. Note: Not only did Dr. Roche vent his frustration with the new SAT,

The New York Times, in an article entitled “Defining Literacy Downward” in its August 28, 1996 issue, stated: “The S.A.T. turns poor performance into a new norm.”]