[CONCLUSION OF INTERVIEW BEGUN YESTERDAY]
CHARLOTTE ISERBYT on Resurrect the Republic with Tom Lacovara-Stewart
Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt joins Tom Lacovara-Stewart in the beginning of many conversations on everything from the deliberate dumbing down of the American education system, and Sovietization of American classrooms to Community Oriented Policing and more. Charlotte was born in Brooklyn, New York on October 26, 1930. She graduated from Dana Hall Preparatory School in Wellesley, Mass., and Katharine Gibbs Business School in New York City. Iserbyt’s father and grandfather were Yale University graduates and members of The Order of Skull and Bones, a secret society at Yale University. [1][2] She married Jan Iserbyt of Belgium in 1964 (deceased 2009) and has two sons, Robert Lieven Iserbyt (1966) and Samuel Thomson Iserbyt (1968).
Iserbyt is an American freelance writer who served as the Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education, during the first term of U.S. President Ronald Reagan. Iserbyt also served as a social worker with the American Red Cross during the Korean War (stationed at SAC airbases on Guam and in Japan), in the U.S. Dept. of State (Middle Eastern and Soviet Union Affairs), and as Admin. Asst. to Ambassadors Philip Crowe, Republic of South Africa (1959) and to Douglas MacArthur II in Belgium (1961-1963). She and her husband, Jan, lived in Grenada, West Indies from 1968-1974 where Jan operated a yacht charter business. Upon returning to the United States in 1974, Iserbyt served as an elected school board member in Camden, Maine 1976-1979. Iserbyt also founded the Maine Conservative Union, an affiliate of the national American Conservative Union, and Guardians of Education for Maine.
Publications
She is the author of Back to Basics Reform or OBE Skinnerian International Curriculum, 1985 (58 pages) and The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, 1999 (700 pages) and the 2011 updated/abridged version. [3]
Back to Basics Reform or OBE Skinnerian International Curriculum, 1985, documents her experiences working as Sr. Policy Advisor, U.S. Dept. of Education, where she was privy to past and future plans to restructure American education from traditional academics to values clarification (change from traditional moral values to humanist values) and global workforce training, using tax-funded private education /charter schools without elected boards, and the Skinnerian mastery learning/outcomes-based methodology in conjunction with computers. Her 700-page The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, 1999, and the updated/abridged version of 2011, contains a chronological record starting in the 1800s, of the “deliberate dumbing down” of not just the USA, but of the world. [4]
Much research in Back to Basics Reform and The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America relates to the expenditure of hundreds of millions of tax dollars a year on non-academic programs geared to changing students attitudes, values, and beliefs from those taught in the home and by the church. Iserbyt, while working for several weeks at the National Institute of Education, U.S. Dept. of Education, uncovered a major tax-exempt foundation project, under the supervision of the late Professor John Goodlad, entitled The Goodlad Study. This project resulted in publication by McGraw Hill Publishers of four books: “Schooling for a Global Age”; “Communities and their Schools”; “Arts and the Schools”, and “Goodlad’s A Place Called School”. [5]
The goal of the Goodlad Study, which was made available to all fifty state commissioners of education, was/is to change United States education in order to merge it into the global education system. Iserbyt later came across a federally-funded grant entitled Better Education Skills through Technology (Project BEST).