Just as a matter of record, I've written two books** about this and 500 articles. I keep trying to think of simpler ways to explain what happened to this country. My latest motif is this: there are two levels. There have been two levels for 120 years.
The top level is the reality we all know. Schools, children, classrooms, teachers, principals, curricula, textbooks. We can safely assume that almost everyone involved is sincere in caring about education and children.
The lower level is unseen, undiscussed, and remarkably unconnected to the top level. The whole place is Top Secret. The people there have a separate agenda, which can roughly be described as Brave New World. These people claim they care about children and education, but their top priority is their ideology. John Dewey is the main face we attach to this ideology. He is sometimes called the Father of American Education. In fact, Dewey was interested in education only secondarily. When he used the word education, he was always thinking social engineering. When he used the word Democratic, he was always thinking Socialism.
Like the Fabian Socialists in England (starting 1884) and the Communist International (starting 1921), the John Dewey Machine was dedicated, tireless, and tended to believe that the ends justify the means. Socialism was good, therefore anything they did to facilitate the transition to Socialism was good. That's how the whole machine ended up being negative and injurious. That's how we have the Deliberate Dumbing Down of America.
Professors of education developed a lot of bogus theories and methods, all of which were presented to the public as Progressive panaceas, but all of which turned out to be swamps. Whole Word and its variations to teach reading. New Math and similar to teach arithmetic. Constructivism and its off-shoots to teach academic content. Together these three boondoggles explain why so much is “not allowed to be taught.”
A lot of people want to believe that our experts mean well but can't get their act together. I've been arguing for years that they have got their act together and they don't mean well at all. Until you consider that perspective, you will make no sense of our K-12. There is just too much deceit and dysfunction. The US has 50 million functional illiterates. What else do you need to know?
Just for the sake of argument, let's concede that the top 10% of students get a good education, whether from private schools, homeschooling, Montessori schools, or AP and other advanced work in the public schools. That still leaves 90% of American citizens who have been deliberately under-educated in our public schools. They have been deliberately kept from reaching their potential, that is the great crime.
(Good School, Bad School: this short video shows what you get on Level One and Level Two. Fundamentally, Level One is common sense, traditional education as practiced around the world for thousands of years. Level Two is counterproductive and counterintuitive. You get pathology and failure when there's no good reason for either one.)
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** "Saving K-12 -- What happened to our public schools? How do we fix them?" is lively reading about a serious subject. Great gift for smart friends. Amazon and ebook. www.lit4u.com/saving-k-12
I agree that there is something wrong with education and certainly, it continues to be dumbing down. In higher education, I have seen grade inflation where the letter, F, has nearly disappeared, along with the letter, D. However, 50 years ago, when I attended an elite school that has created more billionaires, than perhaps even Harvard--Stanford--many of the courses gave grades of "satisfactory," or "unsatisfactory." All those graduates 50 years ago under that progressive grading system, seem to have done quite well. I guess it was their basic education like I got, memorizing tables and words, rather than learning to learn. As I recall my undergraduate classmates in my undergraduate technical and teacher's college, over 50% were functionally illiterate and they were becoming teachers with good jobs and good benefits. Taxpayers and lawmakers no longer value public education, thanks to the likes of you, and therefore, teachers no longer earn salaries worthy of going into teaching. For professors, it's even worse. Over 50% of all college teachers are now adjunct with low, by the course , and no benefits.
I will agree that education is changing. Conservatives would like to separate "good," students and put them in competitive, profit-making schools from the functionally illiterate so they can continue the trend towards the rich becoming richer and more controlling and the poor getting trickle-down leftovers. No amount of pointing out the danger in this will get the conservative ear. They are hell-bent on their own destruction. The results of charter and other private schools has been discouraging.
I know of two teachers who come from the right stuff teaching in public schools. My niece teaching high school science with a degree and experience in environmental science from a top university, and my brother's wife who recently retired from teaching the fourth grade to continue teaching the sixth grade in a new location they have moved to for retirement.
Ron