Who's Who and What’s What
OCTOBER 8, 2014 CHARLOTTE THOMSON ISERBYT, ABCSOFDUMBDOWN.BLOGSPOT.COM
Day 4: Skinner Horror Files
The Next Generations of Programmed Instruction
This post is a history lesson taken directly out of my book the deliberate dumbing down of america, Appendix XXV. This appendix has two alerts that were sent out in the late 1990s that warned about how Skinner’s form of operant conditioning education (the original Programmed Instructions discussed in Day 3’s post) was continuing on with a life of its own in education, albeit under different names. The second alert will be posted on Day 5.
Names have been highlighted because they are important for understanding what has happened. These are not household names! But they are names well known to education reformers. And they have been directly and adversely affecting the education of your children and grandchildren for decades: “The Truth about How We All Have Been Had” was my alert sent out in late 1998, after the passage of Omnibus Budget Bill for 1999 which contained the Reading Excellence Act.
Please bear with me. This alert is going to try to explain what happened on the slow road to teaching our children how to read….
The Next Generations of Programmed Instruction
This post is a history lesson taken directly out of my book the deliberate dumbing down of america, Appendix XXV. This appendix has two alerts that were sent out in the late 1990s that warned about how Skinner’s form of operant conditioning education (the original Programmed Instructions discussed in Day 3’s post) was continuing on with a life of its own in education, albeit under different names. The second alert will be posted on Day 5.
Names have been highlighted because they are important for understanding what has happened. These are not household names! But they are names well known to education reformers. And they have been directly and adversely affecting the education of your children and grandchildren for decades: “The Truth about How We All Have Been Had” was my alert sent out in late 1998, after the passage of Omnibus Budget Bill for 1999 which contained the Reading Excellence Act.
Please bear with me. This alert is going to try to explain what happened on the slow road to teaching our children how to read….
First, I want to thank the loop for alerting me about two years ago to the activities of Doug Carnine, director of the federally funded National Center to Improve the Tools of Educators (NCITE) at the University of Oregon. By the way, folks, that is a federally funded office which has dealt for a very long period of time with programs for special education children. Carnine’s name jumped out at me when mentioned in one of the loop’s communications supporting direct, systematic, intensive phonics (direct instruction), which, by the way, is NOT TRADITIONAL PHONICS INSTRUCTION.
I immediately thought, “Wait a minute. What’s going on here? Is this the same Doug Carnine who was involved with Siegfried Engelmann’s Follow Through DISTAR program (now known as Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons or Reading Mastery), about whom I had written in my 1985 book Back To Basics Reform or… OBE Skinnerian International Curriculum?” Of course it was, and from that time on I devoted much time trying to convince parents that “direct instruction,” regardless of whether it is spelled with lower or upper case “d” and “i,” is based on the operant conditioning experiments with animals carried out by the Russian Ivan Pavlov and the American professor B.F. Skinner.
In January of 1997 I wrote many memoranda on this subject which were included on the Internet Education Loop website, identifying Carnine and Engelmann with Ethna Reid’s learning program which Ann Herzer (a traditional phonics reading teacher opposed to Skinnerian operant conditioning) so valiantly fought in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. When Herzer objected to the training, she was asked, “Don’t you know we are training our children to be people pleasers?” [See Appendix XVII of this book, ed.] I pointed out that my 1985 book Back To Basics Reform Or… discussed the ECRI/DISTAR method. Many of us have fought this method for twenty years and, sad to say, we have gotten nowhere. I suppose that is to be expected since we are not part of the national conservative leadership nor are we part of the education establishment leadership. No one listens to you unless you are well funded and have fancy letterhead. Follow the money, follow the money. We didn’t have the resources to make a difference. MORE
I immediately thought, “Wait a minute. What’s going on here? Is this the same Doug Carnine who was involved with Siegfried Engelmann’s Follow Through DISTAR program (now known as Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons or Reading Mastery), about whom I had written in my 1985 book Back To Basics Reform or… OBE Skinnerian International Curriculum?” Of course it was, and from that time on I devoted much time trying to convince parents that “direct instruction,” regardless of whether it is spelled with lower or upper case “d” and “i,” is based on the operant conditioning experiments with animals carried out by the Russian Ivan Pavlov and the American professor B.F. Skinner.
In January of 1997 I wrote many memoranda on this subject which were included on the Internet Education Loop website, identifying Carnine and Engelmann with Ethna Reid’s learning program which Ann Herzer (a traditional phonics reading teacher opposed to Skinnerian operant conditioning) so valiantly fought in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. When Herzer objected to the training, she was asked, “Don’t you know we are training our children to be people pleasers?” [See Appendix XVII of this book, ed.] I pointed out that my 1985 book Back To Basics Reform Or… discussed the ECRI/DISTAR method. Many of us have fought this method for twenty years and, sad to say, we have gotten nowhere. I suppose that is to be expected since we are not part of the national conservative leadership nor are we part of the education establishment leadership. No one listens to you unless you are well funded and have fancy letterhead. Follow the money, follow the money. We didn’t have the resources to make a difference. MORE