Susan  - FOUNDATIONS' CONTROL OF EDUCATION. : WHAT ARE FOUNDATIONS? Randall G. Holcombe in "Writing Off Ideas" said, "The business empires of Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford, to name a few, generated tremendous personal wealth for their owners, and they placed the bulk of their wealth into foundations… now directed by foundation trustees. They do no fundraising, but operate using the earnings from foundation assets…these assets are sufficient to underwrite millions of dollars worth of projects every years…most of the largest foundations earn enough every year that their endowments are actually increasing…Foundations…continue to undertake expenditures to further their visions of the public good." /"Governments are run by elected officials. Business firms must satisfy their customers to remain viable. Even charities that operate from donations must satisfy their donors in order to keep the donations flowing. But foundations…do not have to answer to anyone for their programs, and their income will continue regardless of the merits of the programs and projects they fund. Should foundations have to meet some higher level of accountability?" http://fdncenter.org/research/trends_analysis/top100assets.html has financial information on tax-exempt foundations. /THE FOUNDERS AND THE SUBSEQUENT TRUSTEES of the foundations were/are not ordinary people. They have been described as "that portion of the American ruling class that is usually called the Eastern Establishment. ....Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote in 1965, "…the New York financial and legal community was the heart of the American establishment…It's front organizations were the Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie Foundations and the Council on Foreign Relations." (Iserbyt). They are business or academic elites who form "an invisible government" (Mayor John F. Hylan of New York.) ....Dennis Cuddy, Ph.D. refers to his former employer, the U.S. Department of Education, as the "Carnegie Department of Education." Periodic investigations of foundations have taken place (1912, 1950s, 1960s) but are not easily done. The foundations are powerful, and they have powerful friends. SOME EDUCATION/FOUNDATION HISTORY:

1895: Rockefeller endowed the University of Chicago at which John Dewey served as head of the combined departments of philosophy, psychology and pedagogy. Rockefeller also funded a laboratory for Dewey to study psychological principles and experimental techniques of learning. Rockefeller also contributed millions to the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, the goal of which was to prevent mental illness, focusing on elementary and secondary schools. The philosophy was that "mental illness hinged on faulty personality development in childhood and that personality development should supersede all other educational objectives. Stress was seen as the chief culprit, and parents and other authority figures as the second….The primary thrust of stress-reduction was to eradicate the "reactionary" criteria of authoritarianism, in particular, self-reliance and the work ethic, in favor of peer consensus and interdependence." (Eakman)

1896-1920: "A small group of industrialists and financiers, together with their private charitable foundations, subsidized university chairs, university researchers, and school administrators, and spent more money on forced schooling than the government itself did…In this laissez-faire fashion a system of modern schooling was constructed without public participation." (Gatto).

1905: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT) was founded to define and expand the standard of professional education. Eakman said that CFAT "is the most influential Carnegie entity for education" and "is the key to a long-standing partnership with the federal government."

1913: Rockefeller Foundation set up the predecessor to General Education Board. This was to further the Foundation's stated goal of "social control". Director of Charity Frederick Gates wrote, "…In our dream, we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand. The present educational conventions fade from our minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or science…"

1917: By this year, Gatto said, "the major administrative jobs in American schooling were under the control of "the Education Trust": representatives of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harvard, Stanford, University of Chicago, and the National Education Association. The chief end, wrote Benjamin Kidd, was to "impose on the young the ideal of subordination." Gatto called Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford "The Four Architects of Modern Forced Schooling" who thought that modern industry needed "workers who know nothing".

1921: Carnegie founded The Psychological Corporation, with J.McKeen Cattell as president. Cattell wrote, "… whatever else people have thought over the years that the various Carnegie organizations were contributing to education, their mission, as stated, has been "to promote the extension of applied psychology." (Eakman).

1925: Rockefeller Foundation set up The International Bureau of Education, formerly known as The Institute Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which later became part of UNESCO.

1933: Rockefeller Foundation began a comprehensive national program to allow "the control of human behavior". Schooling would figure prominently in the design.

1933-1941: Carnegie Corporation funded the Eight-Year Study that laid the groundwork for many of the education "reforms" and innovations we are now encountering. This study was foundational to the outcome-based education of today.

1934: Carnegie Corporation funded "Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies". Professor Harold Laski said: "At bottom and stripped of its carefully neutral phrases, the report is an educational program for a Socialist America." The report concluded that the educational system "must adjust its objectives, its curriculum, its methods of instruction, and its administrative procedures to the requirements of the emerging integrated order."

1944: Carnegie Corporation funded with $250,000 a study of problems of southern black Americans. A Carnegie committee reviewed applicants to perform the research, and selected Swedish socialist economist Dr. Gunnar Myrdal. He wrote "An American Dilemma", which became very influential in subsequent racial integration actions. Wormser wrote, "In "An American Dilemma", Dr. Myrdal libeled and insulted the American people unmercifully." Myrdal said Americans had a "nearly fetishistic cult of the Constitution."

1946: Carnegie Corporation funded the Educational Testing Service of Princeton, New Jersey.

1947: Rockefeller Foundation funded the creation of the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations, which joined with Kurt Lewin's Research Center for Group Dynamics at the University of Michigan. They created techniques now used in educational and other social settings (see E-File Number Six re: Dialectical Education).

1950s: "By the mid-1950s, the term "child-centered (or student-centered) curriculum" had worked its way into American educational lexicon, thanks to one of the Carnegie Foundation's presidents, testing mogul Ralph Tyler." (Eakman) Tyler was closely associated with Louis Raths, later to team up with Sidney Simon to create "Values Clarification" in the 1970s, used to free students to form opinions about controversial or sensitive subjects independent of their parents or other authority.

1953: The Reece Committee began to investigate tax-exempt foundations. It found that Carnegie Endowment trustees had decided they should get control of education and the social sciences in the U.S. to prevent a return to the way of U.S. life before the war (decentralized, individualistic, family-centered.)

1955: Rockefeller Foundation funded Marcuse's "Eros and Civilization", which "became the founding document of the sixties counterculture. It was pressed into the hands of student anti-war activists, bringing the Frankfurt School's messianic revolutionary mission to all the American colleges and universities, beginning with Columbia's Teachers' College…Although the Frankfurt School/Institute for Social Research started with Comintern support, over the next 30 years it obtained funding from, among others, the Rockefeller Foundation." (Eakman) (see E-File Number Six re: Frankfurt School).

1958: Wormser wrote his book about his findings as general counsel to the Reece Committee. He said that foundation grants had become so important that college and university presidents couldn't "afford to ignore the opinions and wishes of the executives who distribute foundation largess." Much research depended on the support by grants. Foundations could control what research was done through the selection of grantees and the rejection or approval of suggested subjects and methods of research. Wormser found the foundation/government "interlock" made it impossible to criticize the foundations without being distorted, slanted, discredited and ridiculed by the media.

1964: Carnegie Corporation appointed Ralph Tyler chair of the Committee on Assessing the Progress of Education, which became in 1969 the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Now funded by the federal government, NAEP, which "tracks conformity to government-generated goals" (Iserbyt), is widely used in the U.S.

1965: Carnegie Corporation and Ford Foundation awarded a grant to Terry Sanford, ex-governor of N. Carolina, to create a new venture in "cooperative federalism". This became the Education Commission of the States (ECS). The purpose was to bring "some degree of order out of this chaos" (referring to education policy-making in the states).

1965: Eakman noted: "Francis Keppel, another Carnegie Foundation president, author of "The Necessary Revolution in American Education", documented the Carnegie Foundation's role in creating, writing and passing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), the mother of all boondoggles which was again reauthorized by Congress in 1994." (Eakman) The legislation was written primarily to be indefinitely expandable. ESEA brought in education labs, early childhood education, social workers and child psychiatrists in schools, data collection, community education, bilingual education, ethnic heritage programs, etc.

1966: McGeorge Bundy became president of the Ford Foundation, "determined to use Ford's $3.7 billion in assets to leverage change in America". He had $200 million a year to give to whomever he wished. Between '66 and '79, he spent much on long-established civil rights organizations such as NAACP and SLCC, but also funded groups promoting black nationalism. Bundy was inspired by the Carnegie-funded Gunnar Myrdal study. (Bird).

1968: Ford Foundation gave over $500,000 to the Southwest Council of La Raza, $2.2 million for the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), and a grant to the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO). The president of MAYO, Jose Angel Gutierrez, gave speeches criticizing "gringos" and advocating eliminating their influence by killing them if necessary. Members of MAYO frequently went to Cuba, and disseminated pro-Castro propaganda to Mexican-Americans back home.

1968: Carnegie Corporation financed controversial textbooks in Project Read for culturally-deprived areas, produced by Behavioral Research Laboratories in Palo Alto, California. These inflammatory (excuse the pun) books contained phonics lessons in which a picture depicted a burning torch touching a porch. A student was to note how "torch" rhymed with "porch" (one example of several). Critics feared that children would be indoctrinated in anti-social ideas.

1968: Ford Foundation funded "Agenda For the Nation", which recommended replacing the high school diploma with a Certificate of Mastery, implementation of outcome-based education, etc. It was a forerunner of the later National Center of Education and the Economy and SCANS, the restructuring of the economy and education to the German and Soviet-style School-to-Work model (see E-File Number One.)

1969: By this year, Bird wrote, "Bundy was clearly putting Ford money into the pockets of people who described themselves as social activists, progressives and agents of radical change." Holcombe wrote: "The Ford Foundation also supported the National Student Association (NSA), which was not in fact an association of students at all but an interest group that confronted faculty and students in an attempt to change campus policies. Through the NSA, the Ford Foundation financed the campus rebellion that was a visible part of 1960s social activism." Jeffrey Hart, quoted by Holcombe, said that the Ford Foundation supported those "who spouted the most extreme rhetoric, who presented the most exotic appearance, who were foundations of anti-white racism…"

1969: NAEP was initiated. It collected background information from students, teachers and administrators. It called for the periodic assessment of students at ages 9, 11, 13 and 17, in the subject areas of reading, writing, math, science, citizenship, U.S. history, geography, social studies, art, music, literature, computers, and career/occupational development.

1976-1980: Rockefeller Foundation and others supported the "community schools" project, which laid out "still another plan for a vastly larger role in education on the part of the federal government, including regional and county health system working with local education agencies…replacing parents as primary caregivers and doling out expensive social services to entire families, including health clinic services, managed care, case management services for at risk, screening for medical, personality, mental counseling and treatment, rehabilitation services, home visitations to assess parenting skills, and expanded special education services for all kids." (Eakman)

1979: Rockefeller Foundation with others funded a series of four books written by John Goodlad in which he proposed a program in which all students take a core curriculum until age 16, then graduates, then enters a new 4th phase of education which would combine work, study and community service. The books were provided to all 50 state school superintendents. Iserbyt said, "This provides an accurate picture of the role played by the tax-exempt foundations and the federal government in the restructuring/social engineering of American society and schools to accommodate the perceived needs of the 21st century."

1981: The president of the Rockefeller Foundation and many church, business, university, media, union, NGO, and government leaders took part in The President's Task Force on Private Sector Initiatives. It was created to make partnerships between the public and private sector. Iserbyt writes, "This totally new and un-American concept of partnerships has been readily accepted by our elected officials who ignore its roots in socialism and its implications for the discontinuation of our representative form of government and accountability to the taxpayers. Under the "partnership" process determining responsibility when something goes wrong is like pinning Jello to the wall."

1983: Educational Testing Service took over the contract of administering NAEP. This gave Carnegie Corporation and Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching control over the direction and content of American education as a whole, and individual state education policy making in particular.

1985: Carnegie Corporation negotiated education agreements with the Soviet Academy of Science. These produced an agreement to exchange computer specialists involved in the improvement of elementary and secondary education. This was a first step toward cooperation among educational reformers from a number of countries, including Britain and Japan. (More U.S./U.S.S.R. agreements were signed in 1989).

1985: Carnegie Corporation created the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy, a multi-million dollar initiative designed to help chart U.S. education policy during the next ten years. It became the NCEE, future promoter of School-to-Work (see E-File Number One).

1986: Carnegie Corporation awarded two major grants, totaling nearly $900,000 to forward the recommendations of the Carnegie Task Force on Teaching as a Profession. This solidified the methodology which teachers would be required to use in order to obtain board certification. It also developed assessments for use in the future. Task Force members included officials from business, unions, and government.

1988: A seminar on the federal role in education was held at the Aspen Institute. Sponsored by Carnegie Corporation, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Foundation, Hewlitt Foundation, and The Primerica Foundation, it reviewed research provided by the Carnegie-funded NCEE and the Office of Educational Research and Improvement of the USDOE. Participants discussed the transformation of the American economy, skill trends in employment by occupation, what students need to learn, who should learn, when they should learn, how the skills should be taught, the structure of industries, human capital supply and demand, and the federal role in education and the economy.

1989: Rockefeller Foundation, Sieman's Corporation, and Merrill Lynch funded The New American Schools Development Corporation, which presented a report to the Governors' Conference with the suggestion that big business should foot the bill to fund 6,000 new American schools. At this conference, governors put together task forces to make sure that the national Goals 2000 agenda would be promoted in their states.

1990: Carnegie Corporation, Control Data Corporation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, American Express Foundation, ARCO Foundation, and BellSouth Foundation funded the creation of a "Road Map" for restructuring state education systems. This was performed by the Carnegie-and Ford-funded Education Commission of the States (ECS) and the National Governors' Association, and included many STW features.

1990: Carnegie Corporation's David Hornbeck delivered a paper called "Technology and Students at Risk of School Failure." It promoted goals such as the use of technology, integration of knowledge, performance-based assessments, rewards and sanctions, and involvement of corporations in education. Hornbeck said The Business Roundtable has vital interest in American public education.

1991: Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander, under President Bush (Sr.), wrote America 2000 Plan", designed to implement Carnegie Corporation's restructuring agenda. This promoted the idea of a year round, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. school, for children 3 months to 18 years.

1992: Rockefeller Foundation, Lauder Foundation, Exxon Education Foundation, Karen and Tucker Anderson, and Chase Manhattan Bank funded the Center for Educational Innovation, a project of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. This developed ideas on choice in education, including vouchers.