Education Problems and Solutions

I have been concerned about the reading ability of Dothan children since the practicum I did in the high school from which I graduated. I was working on my Masters in History and created a curriculum on Ethics. My students could discuss Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, and Jesus, but many could not read a question off the page before them. After reviewing the new reading books up for adoption and doing research in the TSUD library on the books used to instruct teachers in reading methodology, I realized Dothan was using the Whole Language method. New books were up for adoption so I took my concerns to the Director of Instruction for Dothan City Schools. Why was Dothan City Schools using reading books that used the Whole Language method rather than the Phonics instruction I knew worked from my own children's experience in learning to read?

"Dr. ____, I said, "At least 30% of our children cannot read." He said, "Well that means 70 % can read." Dr. ______," I replied. "That is just not enough. "You do know what a large minority population we have," he responded.

There must be something here I didn't understand, some validation of the Whole Language method I was unaware of. Surely the school system we had always considered excellent would not be using methods that were not tried and proven. I continued to search for research that would confirm the determination of the education establishment to use the Whole Language method. A Plus, supposedly a Research Foundation supported by the Business Council and other special interests, could provide me with no research supporting the success of Whole Language, yet they endorsed it. Dean Kunkel of the Auburn University School of Education when cornered at an APlus town meeting admitted that it was "current wisdom." (See also: Delphi Technique) As a mother I was shocked that that the leaders in education in Alabama thought following the crowd made good education policy and were chancing the future of my children who were then attending public school with that attitude. As a teacher I was appalled at my own profession. My father and sister are doctors. They would be sued for malpractice if they applied this type of non-scientific criteria to his medical care.

Note: Score 100 was the Back to Basics alternative to the OBE agenda of APlus. While APlus was permitted to use Northview for its meeting, Score 100 was denied the use of any Dothan school facility. They said Score 100 was "political." That was the epitome of the pot calling the kettle black.

My own study into what research revealed about the two methods had led me to discover Project Follow Through, the billion dollar study that was the most expensive study into what works in education that had ever been conducted. This study reviewed the Head Start Program funded with Title One money directed toward disadvantaged (minority) students because there was concern that there was at most a halo effect on children until the 2nd grade when from thence forward there seemed to be no improvement in their academic achievement compared to others who had not attended Head Start. The results of Project Follow Through showed that Direct Instruction (systematic, intensive, direct and early instruction for phonics and math) far surpassed any other method entered in the competition. (Unfortunately, DISTAR was the ONLY direct instructional program entered in the program.) However, the conclusion was irrefutable superiority in every arena including one not directly addressed...students' self-esteem.

I was shocked that no course at the University of Alabama where I got my BS or at Troy State University in Dothan, Alabama, where I got my Masters had even mentioned this mega-study or taken into account its results. My hero, Alabama native, Marva Collins, also had results similar to the results from DISTAR in her school in Chicago also dealing with minority students with Professor Phonics Gives Sound Advice and Open Court Readers. It was apparent that it was not the children who were at fault, but the methods their teachers were using to teach these children.

Later, working in a local county school, I discovered I had a large percentage of students who had trouble reading their 7th and 8th grade textbooks, yet when I looked at their permanent records, they had As and Bs, which I am sure indicated proficiency in subject matter to their parents. I recommended to their parents that they take them to an independent evaluator, one not a part of the "team" of the public schools, for an honest appraisal of their ability. Many were reading on the 1st grade level. Apparently they had managed to memorize the rolodex of words doled out through the fifth grade sufficiently well enough to satisfy their Whole Language trained teachers, but not well enough to decode unfamiliar words in their Middle School textbooks. Of course, the usual excuse without looking beneath the surface at the students' skill level is to blame hormones and adolescence as well as a lack of interest and parental involvement in the sudden drop in grades for students in Middle School. The official answer to the failure of the elementary teachers to prepare students for higher level education came when the Assistant Superintendent told me to read these students their tests because too many of my students were failing. (Circle the wagons and defend the system.) Some they managed to label LD (Learning Disabled) in order to justify their failure. However, that never explained to me their ability to make As and Bs in elementary school only to be "identified" in 7th grade.

My own children's first grade teacher at the private Christian school that used Phonics (the A BEKA program) said she had never had a child she could not teach to read with phonics.

Yet, the public schools claim to use phonics. However, there is a difference in what the teacher colleges teach as "phonics" and what those who advocate phonics know it to be. The article Phonics: Implicit of Explicit? explains the difference. (Please note the caveat on the Clips from the Whole Language Catalog page where the author emphasizes that a WL classroom will NOT teach sounds in isolation, but rather ALWAYS in context. Clip 2.) The WL conclusions run directly opposite to what Scientific Experimental Research shows actually works in teaching children to read!

How could such a drastic departure from the tried and true traditional methods of education have occurred? Dr. Patrick Groff explains in the words of the Whole Language philosophers featured in the Whole Language Catalog how the foundations of educating children shifted from academic to social engineering in the article The Leftist Invasion of Reading Instruction. While claims are being made for the success of Whole Language instruction, SAT scores tell a different story. The Reading Scores on the SAT for Dothan City Schools tell the story of one school system that mandated Whole Language citywide.

Apparently the goals of Whole Language fits well in the "World Class" agenda of the many international Non Governmental Agencies that have enormous influence. A Conspiracy of the Left might give a bit of insight as to how these work together with the International Reading Association and why the Whole Language agenda has such appeal to the defrocked Marxist priests around the world, such as Paulo Frere, who once advocated Liberation Theology in Nicaragua and is now named as a Whole Language philosopher for Liberation Pedagogy in the Whole Language Catalog by Ken Goodman, et al..

During the "reform" effort of 1992 when "grassroots" input was requested, many Alabamians made their way to testify before legislative committees about their viewpoints to revive our Alabama education system. We were run through the motions while sub rosa an education revolution was transmitted through faxes in the Alabama State Department of Education and sent out through Chambers of Commerce throughout the state. The already written "Reform Plan" was written for Alabama by David Hornbeck, Carnegie consultant for the Business Roundtable and later Superintendent for the city of Philadelphia. Michele Buck accompanied me to make my testimony before one of these committees about what I had personally seen and experienced in my classrooms and how our children were suffering from school induced illiteracy. While in Montgomery, we ventured over to the Department of Education to speak with Superintendent Teague. He was unfortunately out of the office, but the Deputy Superintendent (former superintendent of South Carolina) did identify and offer to introduce us to David Hornbeck who was in his office receiving our Reform Plan over the fax machine from Washington.

Apparently many others around the state were experiencing the same thing and the testimonies at that panel meeting were filled with anecdotes of illiteracy exactly like mine. The Eagle Forum of Alabama took note and began a concerted effort for change.

Ironically, those fighting for a real education for our children had to battle the well-funded and politically well-aligned APlus, supposedly the "research" arm of the Reform movement. Actually, it turned out to be the Public Relations entity for the OBE movement which endorsed and promoted every outrageous "innovation" from the "think tanks" headed by David Hornbeck, Marc Tucker, and Hillary Clinton on their exalted seats on Carnegie committees. Then Superintendent of Alabama Wayne Teague's and then Governor Jim Folsom's Education Reform Plan both were near carbon copies of the Kentucky Plan, Oregon Plan and that of other states who had already been processed through the big lie of "grassroots" reform. While we fought this on the state level, the elements of the plan were adopted piecemeal at the recommendation of our clueless superintendent and school board. All we got for all we spent was more expensive more of the same.

Not only that, but the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, puppets of the liberal NEA, were considering outlawing drill and repetition. Imagine telling Bear Bryant that drill and repetition could no longer be used to mold, model and imprint basic skills. Imagine telling that to any good teacher!

After I was "laid off " from the county schools due to proration (I'll always believe it was the official results of the independent evaluations I sent to the Superintendent of Schools that was the real reason), friends who were as concerned as I was joined with my husband and me in trying to get a Pilot Program Proposed in Dothan, Alabama in 1993 into the public schools to show that public school children could benefit from the instruction private school parents must pay to get. Black educator John Winston convinced my attorney husband sitting in my living room that he took his first grade students (3 housing projects and 100% minority) from the 25th to the 80th in their reading scores and that my observations and conclusions were indeed accurate and the same as his own. Apparently the Director of Instruction's bias toward the ability of minority children to learn to read colored his choice of reading methods and led him to implement social engineering instead of expectations of academic excellence.

Citizens, parents of children within the school system, at their own cost, flew principals Madalyn Colby and John Winston from Louisiana to testify as to the amazing results the phonics program had brought to their schools, predominantly minority and low socioeconomic. Winston’s first grade readers went from the 25^th to the 80^th percentiles in reading; identified dyslexics fell from 40 to 1, and discipline problems dramatically decreased. Colby saw similar results. So effective was the reading program that children crossed school lines to attend the schools. The concerned citizens offered to pay for the instruction of Dothan teachers in the Spalding method.

The school administration had called its cadre of teachers to attend the school board meeting. Superintendent Musselman waved an article by Marie Carbo, then adjunct professor of statistics at Antioch College, that claimed to dispute the scholarly work Reading: the Great Debate by Dr. Jean Chall Harvard professor and director of the Harvard Reading Lab. Reading: the Great Debate methodically, study by study, refuted claims made since the 1920s to support the Look/Say, Whole Word, Literacy Based/Whole Language method. The Director of Instruction took the floor and introduced teachers within the system and professors from Troy State University Dothan who supported the Whole Language method. The major reading instructor from TSUD called phonics "Hiss, Spit and Sputter." When the Board (members of which had refused to shake hands or be personally introduced to Madalyn Colby, the experienced principal who brought testimony regarding the amazing effectiveness of the Spalding method) voted unanimously to make Whole Language the reading method for all Dothan City Schools, the auditorium erupted with hoots and stomping feet from the teachers assembled, a regular Whole Language hootenanny.

My disillusionment was complete. I could no longer believe that the teachers had merely been deprived of critical information. Indeed, the camp revival reception of the Board's decision made it quite evident that from that point on they were complicit in the decision and very much accountable for the results of their very vocal support of the Whole Language method. From that point forward, this messenger was effectively "killed" for the message with social snubs (former friends crossing the street rather than speaking) and accusations of profit motive, having an agenda, being a member of the Ku Klux Klan and Flat Earth Society, and being a disgruntled seeker of employment with the Dothan City Schools.

So much for recognizing good will and seeking parental involvement. Christians who claimed to "love unconditionally" gossiped and spread rumors none of which could be countered or answered. Sharing the research for the benefit of the children became impossible as even the civic organizations were manipulated by the representatives of the school system who dominated the education committees. Political campaigns were run (still are) on city property paid for with taxpayers dollars to promote their candidates and silence the "opposition." Trying to bring about change within the system, I ran twice for the school board. The local school system DEA/AEA/NEA managed to elect someone "with a heart" for education...and manipulated more OBE without challenge into the schools. The good old boy who brought this and other OBE components to our schools continues to be the major advisor to the community professional clubs and the Chamber of Commerce.

November, 1993, our daughter was now about to go to high school and suddenly block scheduling/4 period day appeared. Please take the time to read the story of how another ridiculous innovation made its way into our schools. (Now, 2003, cities around the state have headlines announcing the return to traditional scheduling and rejection of block scheduling. How much money was wasted there?) Needless to say our daughter did not attend public high school. Who could have any faith in a system that used children as guinea pigs for fads, fodder for articles to professional journals, stepping stones for their own careers?

Ten years later I now report the results of their decision to support the teachers, administrators and instructors at TSUD (Troy State University Dothan) with mandating Whole Language citywide in the article mentioned above, Reading Scores on the SAT. In spite of hundreds of thousands of dollars on reading specialists, computer assisted instruction solely for reading remediation, and in-service training in group learning, peer tutoring, and any number of other gimmicks to make the failed method work they remain in the dismal swamps of reading ability. (Now, 2004, 3rd grade reading scores have dropped 10 points from last year's scores.)

June 7, 1993, Forbes published an article calling entitled "The National Extortion Association" yet the NEA/AEA under continues to direct decisions based on their liberal ideology perfectly consistent with the radicalism of Whole Language.

In 1995 it looked like the Business community might be coming around to realizing that there was something very basic and very wrong at the most fundamental component of education: Reading. Investors Business Daily addressed the issue in a September 28, 1995 article entitled: "Last Rites of an Education Fad: California Blasts Progressive Reading Fad." Volume 19, No. 2, Summer 1995 American Educator, the Professional Journal of the American Federation of Teachers dedicated almost its entire issue to reporting the benefits of "phonemic instruction." They quoted one teacher saying, "A Whole Language approach that does not incorporate sufficient attention to decoding skills leaves in it wake countless numbers of youngsters who, in the words of one teacher, are surrounded by "beautiful pieces of literature that [they] can't read." As Joanna Williams of Teachers College Columbia University, has observed: "Today, without strong direct systematic decoding instruction in regular first grade classrooms more and more children are being shunted into remedial classes, and even special education." Dr. Marilyn Adams published her scholarly research on reading and her conclusions were reported in an article in that issue of American Educator, "Resolving the Great Debate."

Unfortunately, too much brainwashing and too many careers and reputations had been made on that fad, however. Resistance remained within the power structure of those who could have brought about change. Instead they demanded extension of their authority with pre-kindergarten. Getting them away from their parents earlier would get them "ready to learn," they claimed, ignoring the studies that showed even Head Start only produced the "halo effect' until the 2nd grade. They blamed portable buildings, leaky roofs, crack babies and low teacher salaries. All of society was the problem...not the methods of instruction into which they had invested their careers and squandered our tax dollars and the opportunities of generations.

But, by 1996 the education establishment could no longer ignore the fact that the public was looking at the results of their reading instruction and recognizing it was coming up lacking and along came Education Week's grudging acknowledgement in "The Best of Both Worlds." Thus was born the new incarnation of the same failure under the sophisticated guise of an "eclectic approach" combining the best of both, expressed in an August 1996 article in the Alabama School Board Association journal entitled "A Slippery Subject: Understanding the Debate Over Phonics and Whole Language."

Still, the experimental research was conclusively in favor of phonics. Pressure had to be exerted on the complacent and recalcitrant education establishment to make them heed the research and implement its conclusions. Toward the end of the nineties, the reading disaster demanded that a Blue Ribbon Committee to take a look at the issue. The result was the Alabama Reading Initiative which has the potential to turn things around...unless those teachers who take the training fall back on their WL roots and refuse to give Phonics the emphasis it must have to be effective. Oil and water do not mix. Neither do analysis and guessing. (WL philosopher Ken Goodman wrote the definitive philosophy of WL in his article, "Reading, a Psycholinguistic Guessing Game" in 1968. He and a coterie "reading specialists" have been the major beneficiary of his philosophy by continuing to create their own demand.)

By the year 2000 optimism began to dim as even USA Today recognized the major problem...colleges of education that refused to teach phonics (Teacher Colleges Shun Best Way to Teach Reading). The Alabama State Board of Education passed a resolution requiring that the colleges of education in Alabama teach phonics. Ironically those professors from the Piaget/Rousseau natural man perspective on learning and education who made their reputations despising "hiss, spit and sputter" are now expected to be effective teachers of something they find so philosophically repulsive . The discipline and structure of the systematic, intensive, direct and early phonics instruction galls their very nature. Indeed, it is in their best interest to perpetuate their need by undermining the effectiveness of reading instruction.

With the dismal scores and critics across the state demanding accountability, the State Department of Education realized they at least had to go through the motions of looking at reading instruction. The Director of Instruction for the State of Alabama called together a committee and was forced to include a member of Eagle Forum who pushed for and got a respectable phonics component in the Alabama Reading Initiative. All that was left was for schools to request that they be allowed to participate and then to get the teachers re-educated.

But, did any school in Dothan even apply? Most principals were intimidated. Their response when we asked if they would try a phonics program was a sheepish, "..but we've already got so much invested in this other method..." And so we went on with more years trying to make a failed method work and wasting the opportunities of more students.

At last one principal decided to step away from the crowd and raise the appalling amount of money our state department of education decided to complicate the issue with. (I think the colleges of education throughout this state OWE their teachers education they were denied when they paid their tuitions trusting the colleges of education to prepare them as competent teachers.) Principal Delois Potter and the teachers at Faine Elementary School took the bull by the horns, raised the money, and gave up time during their summer break to get the training for the Alabama Reading Initiative. This program brings Phonics the recognition it deserves...unless the teacher chooses to pick the Whole Language elements of this "eclectic" program out and refuse to give the systematic, intensive, direct and early emphasis that is so vital to an effective Phonics program (See: Phonics: Implicit or Explicit? ).

Another shocker came in 2003 when an amazing coalition developed between a Republican governor who rejected the mandate of the Conservatives who elected him and joined with AEA leader Paul Hubbard and APlus to call for increasing taxes to establish two new entitlements for education, Pre-K and Hope Scholarships for college, both unproven to improve education. Sadly, someone (A Plus and the AEA?) has told him North Carolina and Texas have led the way. Amazingly those who voted for him who oppose the increased taxes and call for accountability are being called "unchristian." If the situation I have outlined above were truly understood by Christians how could they possibly in good conscience allow it to continue, much less reward those who resist the truth of scientific research with more control of our children and increased salaries?

I recently encountered a Georgia special education teacher in the library in Abbeville. She was relating to the librarian her experience in trying to get first grade students up to a 26 score on a test they required to pass before progressing to the next grade. She used phonics. She was commenting upon her surprise that a child who had never attended school would score in the 80th percentile on the test when those others in her class were struggling to reach the required score. I could not help but ask her if she did not realize what an impediment three years of having been in a WL classroom was to those children's ability to learn to decode. If they start in 3 year old kindergarten teaching the child to guess from the shape of the word, pictures and context what a word might be, think how difficult it is to shift to analyzing letter sound correlation, blending them into syllables and sounding out the words. It is a totally different process. They do not mix. Children cannot learn to play the violin by being immersed in music and neither can a child learn to read by merely being immersed in words. The Music Man without the magic of Hollywood really could not make an orchestra with fancy uniforms and expensive instruments any more than educators can produce proficient readers with fancy computers, eye-catching bulletin boards and mobiles, and facilitators reading from big books with large words. They must be taught directly and systematically with drill and repetition until they are proficient. And then they can fly...

Sadly, teachers at Beverly Middle School continue requiring 7th and 8th grade students (those who can read) to read The Giver by Lois Lowry, a Newberry Award winning book with graphic images of euthanasia and infanticide. I do recommend Berit Kjos's book Brave New Schools to find out just exactly what your Dothan City School board has mandated...available on her website http://www.crossroad.to.

I suggest you read every book your child does. My tenth grader's reading list included The Chocolate Wars which had m__t__b__ion throughout the book, not exactly elevating literature to inspire a child to excellence. Compare these books to those on Marva Collins reading list.

Equally disturbing are the sex ed materials. Diana Fessler, Ohio State Representative, has put together materials on the Centers for Disease Control sex ed materials. Be prepared for graphic, disgusting stuff intended for your children. I have posted with blips the sex ed information on the materials some on the Dothan City School Board find acceptable, but has our representative on the Alabama State School Board quite upset. Some on the Dothan City School Board object to Abstinence Only which is mandated by the state. One wonders just where the film advocated by the Middle School Association to help students determine their sexual orientation fits with what most parents expect from schools.

The therapeutic classroom ultimately brought despair to its creators, Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers. Their colleague William Coulson now travels the country attempting to undo some of the damage. Unfortunately the message has not reached the colleges of education...or else it is being stifled because it doesn't not fit the current political agenda. We continue to reap the whirlwind they have wrought.

Matthew 18:6: "But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him (or her) to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea."

Mark 9:42: "Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him (or her) if a great millstone were hung around his (her) neck and he (she) were thrown into the sea."

Luke 17:1: "And he said to his disciples, temptations to sin are sure to come but woe to him (or her) by whom they come. It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were cast into the sea than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin." (or "to stumble" in the Greek).

I often wonder whether I should have just shrugged my shoulders and gone along with the pretense that all was well with our schools. The retirement I would have received would have been nice. Perhaps you are a member of my church who ignored or disregarded my sincere concerns about what is the responsibility of Christian people to the questions below. Perhaps you are a colleague, a fellow teacher that I sought to empower with the tools that really work to educate children...the reason we went into education in the first place. This was not personal when we endeavored to bring a pilot program into our community to determine whether systematic, intensive, direct and early phonics would give our students the same boost that Marva Collins, John Winston, Thaddeus Lott, and Madalyn Colby had gotten their students, but somehow someone made it personal.

Recently, in my Sunday School class, I attempted to make a public apology, as I thought Christians were called to do, if I had in any way made my issues oriented objections to public school policy personal. It was a totally humiliating experience and merely started more gossip and whispering. I came home and hibernated until I started redoing this webpage. I now remember. It is not I who owe anyone an apology. I was merely doing what God led me to do. Nor was it I who made this personal. It is they who owe an apology...to the children and parents of this community.

I surely have new empathy for Jonah. I understand Jesus' righteous anger when he upset the tables of the moneychangers in the Temple. Perhaps I have been wrong in my approach, but I cannot help but wonder what else I could have done. Ignore God's prodding?

So Goals 2000 is a failure...according to its biggest promoters...and guess who is now coming up with the answers for the failure? You guessed it...those who caused the failure!

"When principles that run against your deepest convictions begin to win the day, then battle is your calling and peace has become sin. You must at the price of dearest peace lay your convictions bare before friend and enemy with all the fire of your faith." Abraham Kuyper, 19th century Dutch theologian and politician who fought against the liberalism that was infiltrating the European seminaries.

"The only means of establishing and perpetuating our republican form of government is the universal education of our youth in the principles of Christianity by means of the Bible." Benjamin Rush, youngest signer of the Declaration of Independence and founding father

"The free public schools of America are outgrowths of the parochial or pastoral schools of puritan New England, which were established by our forefathers to prepare their children for becoming useful members of society and the church. Nurtured in the lap of the church, these schools soon became so necessary to society at large that the church reluctantly relinquished her claim upon the elementary schools, and turned them over to the care of the commonwealths, retaining for herself the higher institutions of learning--the academies and colleges. Whether this was wise or not, it is not our purpose to discuss, further than to remark that, if the study of the Bible is to be excluded from all the State schools, if the inculcation of the principles of Christianity is to have no place in the daily program, if the worship of God is to form no part of the general exercises of these public elementary schools, then the good of the State would be better served by restoring all schools to church control." Kansas Teachers Union book summarizing the history of education in America, 1892

Once upon a time there was a group of women strolling along the banks of a beautiful river. Suddenly one gasped and pointed to a child caught up in the current struggling helplessly toward the waterfall. The women immediately formed a human chain to grab the child from swiftly flowing river. As soon as one child was brought to safety another child appeared, and then two more, and then three…the women could barely keep up with rescuing the little ones when one woman broke away and headed back up the river.

“Where are you going,” the others cried. “Come back. We need your support!”

“I am going back up the river to find out who is throwing the children in,” she responded.

Those who claim to “support public education” are like those women desperately pulling the children out of the water. Those who are seeking the answers as to why students graduate unable to read their diplomas, fill out job applications, requiring remedial classes in our institutions of higher education, and labeled in greater and greater numbers as learning disabled, special education, ADHD, etc. are like the woman going back up the river to find out “who is throwing them in.”

Until we analyze the education choices for the past thirty years and make conclusions based on valid studies, we will continue to throw money at a problem, and continue to use fancier, ever more expensive methods of attempting to catch the children already caught in the current. Can those individuals who have been producing the situation where the children wound up in the tragic current suddenly have an epiphany and know what to do to fix the problem?

Perhaps the answer has always been there in the secure schools, built on the solid foundation of traditional methods and values, where those parents who broke away placed their own children out of danger before going back to rescue the others.

Bob Riley is merely bowing to political pressures by levying more taxes to enable the “supportive” group to rig a more expensive net, woven with fragile strands of political correctness, pop psychology, and social engineering, across the river. A Plus, Riley’s favored education consultant, fought traditionalists in the 1992 education debate, supports the “current wisdom” now controlling public schools and continues to promote the NEA agenda. Riley’s tax “fix” will merely buy the education system more time before they have to be accountable for why so many are falling into the dangerous currents.

These are Berit Kjos definitions for education "innovations" in Dothan City Schools boasted of in the Dothan Eagle headlines during the 1990s so we know their entrance was applauded by our administration. For an expanded glossary visit Berit Kjos website and linger to learn.

MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION: Teaching tolerance, "respect and appreciation" for the world's diverse cultures, beliefs systems, and lifestyles – especially those that clash with traditional values and biblical truth --with the acknowledged goal of producing public consciousness of the unity of all things. It shows little tolerance for biblical Christianity.
MULTICULTURAL PERSPECTIVE: All are one, no matter what religion or values a person chooses. (See preceding definition) A global world view, a way of thinking or a way of understanding reality based on a new politically correct "consciousness" or "awareness" that all things are essentially interconnected through a pantheistic spirituality.
Dothan City Schools has also mandated:
INTEGRATIVE EDUCATION or CURRICULUM: Organizing learning around broad themes, thus making it easy to infuse global, new-paradigm suggestions and activities into standard lessons. See note with practical explanation at the end.
INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES: blending various subjects (math, art, language, etc.) in order to teach and demonstrate the unity of all things. We reject the foundational concept of teaching disciplines by building understanding of concepts from simple to complex. See systems thinking.
SYSTEMS THINKING: The "new way of thinking," by which all things are seen as part of "the whole." Old definitions and ways of reasoning must be adapted to the new "holistic" or "wholistic" way of looking at nature, people, education, social problems, and the "environmental crisis." According to Education for Sustainability, page 5 (a publication prepared in partnership with President Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development), systems thinking would "teach skills such as problem solving, conflict resolution, consensus building, information management, interpersonal expression, and critical and creative thinking." And, according to Corinne McLaughlin, first task-force coordinator for the PCSD, "The systems view sees the world in terms of relationships and integrated wholes whose properties cannot be reduced to those of smaller units."1 (See Global Education and "World Heritage 'Protection: UNESCO's War Against National Sovereignty'") and
CONSENSUS BUILDING: The process by which students, schools, communities or groups of people learn to compromise individual beliefs and ideas in order to seek "common ground" and come to consensus. This pre-planned consensus may be dictated from the top-down (national to local), yet be promoted as grass roots ideologies. It changes beliefs through pressure to conform to group-thinking. (See Synthesis
CONFLICT RESOLUTION: A psychological technique for dealing with (often hypothetical) conflicts. It manipulates a child's value system, trading old absolutes and convictions for compromise positions. In a legal context, it is used to avoid litigation. (See Consensus Building and Common Ground)
GUIDED IMAGERY: A visualization exercise directed by a teacher/facilitator to produce a relaxed or altered state of consciousness. Since the facilitator often guides the students toward pre-planned images, the exercise becomes ominously like a class in witchcraft. As Starhawk, founder of the Covenant of the Goddess, wrote in The Spiral Dance, spell casting and magic are based on a four-fold formula: relaxation, concentration, visualization, and (mental projection). See Star Wars joins United Religions at the Presidio (Dothan parents saw guided imagery in the Conflict Resolution Curriculum for Dothan City Schools).
HIGHER ORDER THINKING SKILLS (HOTS): Psychological manipulation using "application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation" (the higher level of Bloom's Taxonomy) without the factual knowledge needed for rational and objective thinking. Students base their "own" conclusions (to which they are led by a trained teacher-facilitator) on biased, politically correct information and disinformation. (See Lower Order Thinking Skills and Chapter 3 of Brave New Schools.)
INCLUSION: Assigning all students to regular classrooms, including those with severe disabilities, thus turning each class into a special education class.
PHONICS: Learning to read by decoding words. Students break words down into component parts and relate letters and groups of letters to the sounds of spoken language. (Contrast with Whole Language)
WHOLE LANGUAGE: A reading and learning method which trains students to focus on words, sentences and paragraphs as a whole rather than letters. Sometimes called the "look-say" method, it ignores the proven success of phonics, and tells children to find meaning by guessing, by recognizing whole words they have memorized, by looking at the pictures, and by creating a context based on surrounding words. It emphasizes "rich content" (multicultural stories that fit the global paradigm) and encourages students to "construct their own meaning" (with guidance from peers and facilitator of consensus process). Retrieving or comprehending the traditional or intended meaning of the author is no longer important -- that is, unless the author teaches the global worldview. It serves to introduce children to the global worldview and context for learning before children are set free to explore more traditional and possibly contrary sources of information and values.

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