An Alabama Example of an "Equity Plan of Action" : Critical Race Theory Implemented in Alabama Schools

                                                                                     November 11, 2022

We write this article in an attempt to analyze the purpose and consequence of Dothan City Schools Equity Plan of Action. 

What was the purpose of this Equity Plan of Action? (https://www.dothan.k12.al.us/domain/2031) 

Section 1: Culture of Academic Equity

Our data reflects that 40% of our student population identified as white are outperforming the slightly more than 60% of nonwhite students by a margin of 45% (2018) & 42% (2019) difference in Math and 45% (2018) & 45% (2019) in Reading. This trend reflects a gap in achievement over two years of data (2018 & 2019).

One might look at the number of students who are unable to read on the 3^rd grade level in Dothan City Schools and assume that the administration would focus on the curriculum. No. The DCS Culturally Inspired Expertise Professional Learning Community Team Members  focused on an equity action plan to convert attitudes and beliefs using multicultural, social justice, and culturally responsive teaching. This is their gateway into the minds and hearts of our children, their justification for SEL (Social Emotional Learning). 

Quoting from the Equity Plan of Action: “Our process for arriving at our Equity Action Plan began with a book study Hammond, Z. (2014). Culturally responsive teaching and the brain: Promoting authentic engagement and rigor among culturally and linguistically diverse students. (Corwin Press)” 

Z Hammond is not a doctor and has not studied the brain. She has a Masters in Secondary English literacy.

These are her credentials taken from the COLLABORATIVE CLASSROOM website. 

She is a former high school and community college expository writing instructor. Ms. Hammond has also served as an adjunct instructor at St. Mary’s College School of Education in Moraga, California, where she taught The Foundations of Adolescent Literacy. As a consultant, she has advised and provided professional development to school districts and non-profit organizations across the country around issues of equity, literacy, and culturally responsive teaching for the past 25 years.

25 years as a consultant. And yet, she is considered an expert on culturally responsive teaching and the brain. And her book is the foundation for Dothan City Schools Equity Action Plan. 

One might challenge her credentials as we have no empirical data or research to refer to as the consequences of her plan of action in our schools. Nor do we have any real facts upon which to base her assumption that “What I call ‘inequity by design’ was historically the brick and mortar of our school systems.” 

And yet, this is the basis of her philosophy of education. 

This is another example of the public schools using our children as fodder for their experimentation. Our children are mere lab rats now. I will guarantee you that professional journals will receive articles written by those in administration promoting this agenda. These people will rise in the ranks upon the backs of our children whose cultural literacy will be limited to oppression and diversity.  

Now that we know that Z Hammond is the guru for Dothan City Schools Equity Plan of action, we need to go deeper into her belief system. Hammond cites Gloria Ladson-Billings as an expert she respects. 

“I believe that culturally responsive teaching as Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings framed it is the heart of instructional equity.” 

Collaborative Classroom  
"A Conversation with Z Hammond About Instructional Equity" 

 

So, who is Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings so highly touted by Z Hammond upon whose book Dothan City Schools’ Equity Plan of Action is based? 

 

Bill Ayers, convicted domestic terrorist, also recommends Ladson-Billings. On his website, he writes:  “Also, check out this Critical Race Theory in Education Teach-In today with Gloria Ladson-Billings...” 

 

Bill Ayers tells us that Ladson-Billings is an expert in Critical Race Theory (CRT) education, something Alabama has supposedly forbidden in our public schools by our governor and denied by most politicians…and yet, here it is touted by the author of the book upon which Dothan City Schools Equity Plan of Action is based. 

Ayers continues on his website to promote Critical Race Theory. 

Critical Race Theory in Education Scholars Respond to Executive Memo M-20-34(https://billayers.org/2020/09/17/critical-race-theory/)

On September 4, 2020, Russell Vought, Director of the Office of Management and Budget for the Executive Office of the President issued M-20-34, a “memorandum for the heads of executive offices and agencies.” The document states that “Executive Branch agencies have spent millions of taxpayer dollars, to date, on “training” government workers to believe divisive, anti-American propaganda.”  As critical race scholars working in universities and communities across the globe, the following statement is our response to Mr. Vought’s memorandum.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is committed to the historical documentation and naming of atrocities carried out in this country in the name of “freedom” and “liberty.”  In spite of this historical context, the claim that the United States is founded on freedom from tyranny, freedom of expression and speech, and the right to exist as a whole person, are ideals that all citizens of the US are taught in school to value, cherish and honor. From our purview as scholars of race and education, the United States of America has struggled to uphold not only the Constitution but also the Preamble of the Constitution. We are clear that racial healing cannot occur absent the recognition of the historical and current struggle against all forms of structural oppression that encumber the U.S. from ever fully living up to its democratic ideals.

Regardless of the Governor Ivey’s  statement that CRT had been banned in Alabama and the claims of school board members, quite a few Alabama taxpayer paid “scholars” signed onto Critical Race Theory on Bill Ayers’ website. 

What are Bill Ayers’ Goals? 

"Education is the motor-force of revolution." Bill Ayers

"I get up every morning and think...today I'm going to end capitalism." Bill Ayers

"Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon." Bill Ayers

"The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war." Bill Ayers

"Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at." Bill Ayers

"I haven't been silent. I teach, I lecture at universities, I write, I'm not silent." Bill Ayers

And now Dothan City Schools has signed onto the Equity Plan of Action to close the gap between white students and nonwhite students by social engineering. And you pay for this. 

And how will they measure success? 

“We will measure success by our state and benchmark data reflecting closing achievement gaps among subgroups; internal and external climate surveys, implementation surveys, and reflections through Q/A documentation; school culture and climate data i.e. discipline data, SPED/ELL students, poverty/non- poverty. We will measure success with evaluation feedback 3 times a year through surveys for implementation via staff, students, parents, community.”

May we point out that these outcomes are psychological? Mainly Affective data. How does one measure benchmark data when testing is affective/subjective? Suddenly education is no longer academic but SOCIAL EMOTIONAL LEARNING (SEL). 

Their important measure is how well the achievement gap is closed. How best to do that? 

Apparently it is to lower the academic standards. Then judge attitudes and beliefs, the true goal for this social engineering. Your Dothan City Schools school board passed this in April, 2022.

Don’t complain about the WOKE agenda when your tax dollars promote it. 

Sharman Burson Ramsey, BSE, MSE

 

DIVERSITY, EQUITY AND INCLUSION. MARXISM N OUR SCHOOLS

 

Just in case you thought we have misrepresented what is going on in our schools, read this. A group of parents viewed Teaching Tolerance produced by the Southern Poverty Law Center in the early 90s. They were using it then. I have sent you the reading scores in a separate email with scores that are abominable. Remember DEI is Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. You can see how our schools are controlled from above, not by the citizens here who support those schools. 

Who is Paolo Freire? He is a former Jesuit defrocked priest who participated in Liberation Theology in Nicaragua and then was introduced to the leading Marxists in our country where they decided education was the way to infuse Marxism into the people of America and produced Liberation Pedagogy. Please notice the mention of Paolo Freire in one of the screen shots Barbara Moore took and shared with me. BARBARA  ACCESSED DOTHAN SCITY SCHOOL'S EQUITY ACTION PLAN AND THIS IS WHAT SHE FOUND!

Notice the mention of Howard Zinn's textbook. It is a diatribe of hatred toward America. And many districts adopt it because this is what is coming out of the Department of Education and colleges of education. If you want to advance in the world of education you had better be ready to parrot this philosophy. 

I share these things with you because there is a battle for the American mind. If you have children in our public schools or not, your taxes are supporting this. And you must live with the consequences. I do not want you defenseless. Please notice this information was posted by a woman who is apparently well-paid as a "Better Lesson Coach". And we wonder why our children have trouble reading and doing math?

    REMEMBER YOUR TAX DOLLARS PAY FOR THIS! DOES THAT MAKE YOU JUST AS CULPABLE AS THESE WHO ARE UNDERMINING OUR CHILDREN?

In 1923, Lenin recognized the Socialist Movement would not spread to industrialized nations so he brought together a group of scholars to retool their strategy. To camouflage its nature they called it the Institute of Social Research. This group has also been known as the Frankfurt Group. Key members of the group moved to the US, mainly Columbia University. In the US they developed what they called "Critical Theory." They designed it as a strategy to change, revolutionize, and bring down America by criticizing it. 

Marcuse ... advocated the "long march through the institutions" and recommended educational institutions as a refuge for radicals in the US.

The Frankfurt School was a significant influence on Paolo Freire in the conception of critical pedagogy, alongside influences from orthodox Marxism. Critical pedagogy was meant initially to address the needs of peasants resisting oppression rather than students in the United States, who attend universities as part of a process of entering the social or economic elite. Amidst the decline of the New Left, the rise of neoconservatism, and the election of Ronald Reagan,  animated by Aronowitz's reminder of Marx's dictum, "the ultimate task of philosophy and theory was not merely to 'comprehend reality' but to change it", Henry Giroux sought to make the university classroom a site for class struggle. Giroux drew on the work of Gramsci and the British cultural marxists in conceiving of teachers as a revolutionary vanguard. Alongside Michael Apple, Giroux popularized Freire in educational studies, to the point that Freirian language and techniques of critical pedagogy became ubiquitous in liberal arts classrooms of the 1990s. The value of these practices were questioned in the broader cultural conversation on political correctness.

McLaren has developed a social movement based version on critical pedagogy that he calls revolutionary critical pedagogy, emphasizing critical pedagogy as a social movement for the creation of a democratic socialist alternative to capitalism.

In 1992, Maxine Hairston took a hard line against critical pedagogy in the first year college composition classroom and argued, "everywhere I turn I find composition faculty, both leaders in the profession and new voices, asserting that they have not only the right, but the duty, to put ideology and radical politics at the center of their teaching.

Though no one has as yet surveyed how far social justice teaching has pervaded America’s 1,500 ed schools, education researchers David Steiner (now Hunter College ed-school dean) and Susan Rozen did a study two years ago on the syllabi of the basic “foundations of education” and “methods” courses in 16 of the nation’s most prestigious ed schools. The mainstays of the foundations courses were works by Paolo Freire, Henry Giroux (a leading critical pedagogy theorist), and the radical education writer Jonathan Kozol (“America’s Most Influential—and Wrongest—School Reformer,” Winter 2000) 

 

If you see, Paulo Freire's book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed or Ken Goodman's Whole Language Catalog, you can be guaranteed your university is producing radicals not educators. 

 

CRITICAL PEDAGOGY and Bill Ayers (domestic terrorist and Obama's boss at the Chicago Anenburg Project). Ayers’s spectacular second act began when he enrolled at Columbia University’s Teachers College in 1984. Then 40, he planned to stay just to get a teaching credential. (He had taught in a “Freedom School” during his pre-underground student radical days.) But he experienced an epiphany in a course taught by Maxine Greene, a leading light of the “critical pedagogy” movement. As Ayers wrote later, he took fire from Greene’s lectures on how the “oppressive hegemony” of the capitalist social order “reproduces” itself through the traditional practice of public schooling—critical pedagogy’s fancy way of saying that the evil corporations exercise thought control through the schools.

Critical pedagogy theorists nurse a rancorous view of an America in which it is always two minutes to midnight and a knock on the door by the thought police is imminent. The education professors feel themselves anointed to use the nation’s K–12 classrooms to resist this oppressive system. Thus Maxine Greene urged teachers not to mince words with children about the evils of the existing social order. They should portray “homelessness as a consequence of the private dealings of landlords, an arms buildup as a consequence of corporate decisions, racial exclusion as a consequence of a private property-holder’s choice.” In other words, they should turn the little ones into young socialists and critical theorists.

The reading list for his urban education course includes the bible of the critical pedagogy movement, Brazilian Marxist Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed; two books by Ayers himself; another by bell hooks, a radical black feminist writer and critical race theorist; and a “Freedom School” curriculum. That’s the entire spectrum of debate.

 

Betty Peters on transgenderism and sex education in 2015

 Notice that this was written in 2015. How prescient Betty was! Common Core is still here. On steroids. 

But called something else!

Betty Peters

Michelle Mann

That Betty Peters has nothing good to say about Common Core standards is not a secret. The Alabama School Board District 2 member was clear in her opinion when she addressed members of the Coffee County Republican Women Oct. 21.

Common Core, a set of standards developed by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, has been a topic of controversy since November 2010 when the Alabama state school board voted 7-2 to align the state course of study for reading and math with Common Core standards.

Peters voted against Common Core and said she would continue the fight against it.

While Common Core was designed to help students meet English and math grade level standards to prepare for college, Peters said it is not working and that the problems extend well beyond just the curriculum.

Peters said the standards were a federal intrusion into states’ rights to set their own education standards. Peters said although the standards were set by the states, funding initiatives by the federal government made them a de facto “federal takeover” of education.

“I understand Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi are the three Southern states targeted by the radical, left, homosexualists to change our students’ perspective,” Peters said. “We have gone past gay, lesbian and bi-sexual and we’re now into gender fluid spectrum.”

Peters said the Southern Poverty Law Center is among the groups filtering informational texts involving sexuality and sexual orientation into the curriculum. They argue that the information is vital for diversity and tolerance, Peters said, adding that in her opinion it is raising even bigger concerns.

“The Southern Poverty Law Center is going to be developing your children or grandchild or neighbors’ children into little social activists for social justice, as they define it, or else transgender stuff,” Peters said, as she distributed a coloring book sheet with pictures of a variety of clothing items.

“This is part of teaching tolerance for transgenderism to four to eight year olds,” Peters said. “The students are given color crayons and two handouts. They students are supposed to color the photos of the clothes they want to wear.

“You will notice these are called outfits,” Peters said. “I have never asked my son or my husband what ‘outfit’ they are going to wear. This is just crazy. I think all this stuff is mainly written by whacky feminists.

“When you start complaining about this, the first thing you are going to hear is ‘that’s not part of Common Core,’” Peters said. “No, it’s not but it is aligned with it and it is allowed to be part of Common Core because it is informational text and teaching tolerance.”

Peters also distributed a handout with a Common Core math problem on it. “It’s one example of what I call stupid ways to do math,” Peters said. “It’s called counting up. They are not teaching the way we learned and golly, we did pretty well with our old math. We got to the moon, done a lot of medical research, making movies, all sorts of stuff.

“I’ve tried to get it changed and I will continue to try to get it changed because this is something that the parents cannot help their child with,” Peters said. “I didn’t vote for it but the state school board majority voted to have the Common Core with informational text included. You can get all sorts of mess with informational text.

“As I said when I first campaigned and I’ve said it every time since, we need to get back to the basics: Reading, writing and arithmetic from first grade on,” Peters said. “We need to be teaching the ‘c’ part which is Christian values, not Muslim values, not transgender values. We need to be teaching the old Biblical values.

“I’m sorry the Common Core happened under my watch. A lot of this is not a part of the Common Core but the Common Core allows it,” Peters said. “It’s time for Americans to stand up for this infringement of parental rights. They give us PowerPoint (presentations) with charts to make everything look credible but the assignments for these children from the Southern Poverty Law Center are just so stupid.

“Our nation has gone to Gomorrah and it’s up to us to turn it around,” she said referring to one of two ancient cities near the Dead Sea that were cited in the Bible as being destroyed by God as a punishment for the wickedness of their inhabitants. “There are enough voters out there who think like we do and we have just got to take our children back.

“Stand up. Don't be afraid of upsetting the school. The schools cannot exist without students. It’s your responsibility to shield your child and preserve his or her innocence as long as you can,” Peters said. “They’re growing up way too fast and it’s not good.”

·   

 

 

 

Comprehensive Sex Education Undermines Students’ Moral Development

https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2018/12/46417/

DECEMBER 19, 2018BY TAPIO PUOLIMATKA

Though its practitioners may be well-intentioned, comprehensive sex education does not offer a solution to sexual exploitation. On the contrary, it is part of the problem, since it fails to develop students’ capacity to differentiate between genuine love and sexual exploitation.

Does comprehensive sex education make children vulnerable to sexual exploitation?

The systematic sexual exploitation of 1400 children in Rotherham between the years 1997 and 2013, as well as widespread child abuse in other English towns, has led to an independent inquiry and several serious case reviews. These have been analyzed by Norman Wells, the director of the UK organization Family Education Trust, in his 2017 book Unprotected: How the normalization of underage sex is exposing children and young people to the risk of sexual exploitation.

According to the UK government definition, child sexual exploitation

occurs when an individual or group takes advantage of an imbalance of power to coerce, manipulate or deceive a child or young person under the age of 18 into sexual activity (a) in exchange for something the victim needs or wants, and/or (b) for the financial advantage or increased status of the perpetrator or facilitator. The victim may have been sexually exploited even if the sexual activity appears consensual.

Wells refers to Alexis Jay’s Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham between 1997–2013. According to this report, children, including girls as young as eleven were

• raped by multiple perpetrators trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England
• abducted, beaten, and intimidated in some cases, doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight,threatened with guns,made to witness brutally violent rapes, and threatened that they would be next if they told anyone.

The authorities in Rotherham were complacent toward underage sexual activity, because they assumed that young people were making a lifestyle choice. The Rotherham Inquiry pointed out that “children as young as 11 were deemed to be having consensual sexual intercourse when in fact they were being raped and abused by adults.” The concerns raised by some of the parents were dismissed by the authorities. “In two of the cases . . . fathers tracked down their daughters and tried to remove them from houses where they were being abused, only to be arrested themselves when police were called to the scene.” The social workers thought that the concerned parents were not able to accept their children growing up. According to Wells,

“Comprehensive sex and relationship education” has created in young people the expectation that they will have a series of casual sexual relationships. Within this culture, sexual exploitation has been allowed to go undetected and vulnerable young people have been deprived of protection.

In the foreword to Wells’s book, Nottingham University Business School professor David Paton concludes:

A clear picture emerges of a culture in which underage sexual activity has come to be viewed as a normal part of growing up and seen as relatively harmless as long as it is consensual. Combined with official policies to encourage the confidential provision of contraception to minors, it becomes clear that current approaches aimed at improving teenage sexual health have frequently facilitated and perpetuated the sexual abuse of vulnerable young people.

Paton argues that “policymakers and professionals working in sexual health no longer have any excuse to ignore the evidence.” These are serious accusations. But what, exactly, are Paton and Wells condemning? What’s so bad about comprehensive sex education?

Separating Sex from Love—and Morality

Both Paton and Wells imply that the basic problem with comprehensive sex education is its amoral and relativistic approach, which separates human sexuality from its inherent connection with married love. This criticism has been philosophically developed by Dietrich von Hildebrand.

Von Hildebrand points out that instead of fostering objectivity, critical thinking, and autonomy, amoral sex education fails to develop young people’s potential for value-response and thereby fails to contribute to the unfolding of their human potential in general. Insofar as their moral capacity remains undeveloped, they become incapable of discerning and resisting sexual exploitation.

Von Hildebrand regarded the cultivation of value-responses such as love, faithfulness, admiration, veneration, and reverence as central for sex education. Separated from moral values, sex education becomes a way of narrowing and cramping the human personality. Amoral sex education undermines students’ moral agency, their capacity to evaluate desires, consider reasons, form intentions, and make and implement decisions based on their value experience. It fails to support the development of morally conscious persons capable of forming mature moral judgments based on their perception of values as moral agents who can make evaluative judgments without succumbing to relativism.

Morally “neutral” sex education teaches that there are no absolute sexual norms: all forms of sexual behavior based on mutual consent are normal and acceptable. In a sense, young people are left to decide for themselves. But insofar as there are no adequate normative criteria to help them choose among competing lifestyles, their choices will not be free in any meaningful sense of the term. Instead, their choices will be arbitrary, based on only the whim of the moment, as Hanan Alexander points out. When all sexual alternatives are presented as of equal value, young people will find it difficult to perceive the different moral implications and social consequences of various lifestyles.

Sexual experimentation numbs the sensitivity needed to perceive the true nature of love and the values inherent in it.

Amoral Sex Education Dulls Moral Sensitivity

The problem is not merely the reductive and neutralizing nature of amoral sex education, but the distortion of the personal, individual, and intimate nature of sexuality. Amoral sex education obscures the fact that sexuality receives its genuine significance in the unique life-long love relationship between married spouses based on total and irrevocable self-donation.

Because of its “objective” and biologically reductive approach, amoral sex education tends to use explicit sexual material, which violates young people’s moral sensitivity and natural modesty and thereby undermines their capacity for moral agency. It deprives children of their natural innocence, which includes freedom from sexual thoughts, images, desires, and behaviors. It undermines their capacity for what von Hildebrand calls “noble shame” or modesty, “which conceals something because it is particularly intimate.” The latter is grounded in the privacy and intimacy of sex and “in the intrinsic awe it inspires, awe of its extraordinary and mysterious quality,” as well as in “an instinctive dislike of the impudent, the irreverent, the defiling and the sinister.”

Undermining young people’s natural awareness that sexuality is personal, individual, and intimate can have negative effects. It can encourage a promiscuous lifestyle, make it more difficult to resist sexual abuse, and generally weaken the ability to resist one’s own impulses. Separated from love, von Hildebrand writes, sexuality becomes “an intoxicating charm which draws man down to the animal level, a desecration of the great gift of sex—in short, a mystery of iniquity.” The “objective” representation of sex, devoid of moral values, “offends our sense of modesty because it takes no account of this shyness.”

Protecting children’s natural innocence is justified by pedagogical considerations as well. Sexualized children slip from their parents’ guidance, which threatens good parent-child relationships. Even Sigmund Freud admitted that the sexualization of children hampers their education: “We have seen from experience that seductive external influences can cause premature breach of the latent stage or its extinction . . . and that any such premature sexual activity impairs the educability of the child.”

Amoral Sex Education Undermines Moral Agency

Without a moral framework, young people do not have adequate criteria for choosing between competing life styles, which means that their choices become arbitrary. Amorality misrepresents the nature of human sexuality even more radically than immorality. The amoral approach neglects the very categories of morally right and wrong and thereby fails to foster the basic preconditions of human agency.

This is not a merely intellectual problem. It is an existential one.

The neutralizing sex education received at school undermines young people’s ability to comprehend the deep moral implications of sexual behavior. It makes them insensitive to moral distinctions by conveying the impression that there are no absolute sexual norms: all forms of sexual behavior based on mutual consent are regarded as normal and acceptable. Thus, neutralizing sex education deprives young people of the capacity to distinguish between genuine love and exploitative sexuality.

By reducing sexuality to a biological instinct, amoral sex education produces people who are guided by what is subjectively satisfying and controlled by their drives, appetites, and desires, rather than by what is intrinsically valuable. It fails to help young people to achieve moral transcendence and develop as persons guided by value-response. A biologically reductive sex education not only fails to develop young people’s capacity for the transcendence implicit in a value-responding attitude, it also fails to provide the preconditions for the development of their authentic subjectivity. Instead of becoming more alive, they become alienated from themselves.

Though its practitioners may be well-intentioned, comprehensive sex education does not offer a solution to sexual exploitation. On the contrary, it is part of the problem, since it fails to develop students’ capacity to differentiate between genuine love and sexual exploitation. What is needed is a form of sexual education that is oriented to married love and the virtues required by a stable nuclear family.

About the Author

TAPIO PUOLIMATKA

Tapio Puolimatka is a Professor of Educational Theory and Tradition at the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland, and an Adjunct Professor of Practical Philosophy at the University of Helsinki, Finland. His research is mainly in the areas of educational and moral philosophy.

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University Had Short Attention Span for Super Teaching

by Betty Peters

May 28, 2010 | Consultants, News

The University of Alabama in Huntsville recently dissolved a contract with a self-styled business guru — who had a history of fraudulent business practices — to help develop a piece of teaching technology aimed primarily at K-12 students. But some observers are wondering why it took the university six months to terminate the relationship after unsavory details of the entrepreneur’s past came to light — and why due diligence did not stop the university from signing the contract in the first place.

The university went into business in 2007 with Bernard Dohrmann — an entrepreneur who has a long history of run-ins with federal watchdogs, including two convictions — to help monetize a tool called Super Teaching. It entered into a contract in December of that year with a company called Life Success Academy, headed by Dohrmann and his wife, as well as another company called Monte Sano Associates, to help test and improve the Super Teaching hardware.

Super Teaching is a system of teaching purportedly designed to harness the short attention spans of today’s students. It does this by projecting images onto three screens at the front of the classroom, and rotating slides related to the lesson with various unrelated images so as to stimulate the brain into a state of optimal receptivity, according to promotional materials.

In return for studying and improving the Super Teaching system, Alabama-Huntsville would collect a share of the revenue once the system, which was projected to cost at least tens of thousands of dollars per classroom, was turned into a commercial product, according to a copy of the contract that the university provided to Inside Higher Ed.

Things never made it that far. The university dissolved its relationship with Life Success Academy and Monte Sano Associates two months ago, without Super Teaching ever being sold as a product. According to Kannan Grant, the director of technology commercialization at the university and one of the signatories of the contract, the university backed out because “there was no market for it.”

In the end, nobody made a buck from the deal, including the university. Alabama-Huntsville officials say that, since Dohrmann set up the equipment for free, the university didn’t lose any money, either — except, perhaps, for the labor hours of university employees charged with improving the system.

Pals with a convicted ‘con man’

Still, some observers believe that Alabama-Huntsville should have ended its deal with the Dohrmanns much earlier, and for different reasons. Six months earlier Brian LeCompte, an engineer and Huntsville alumnus who runs a political blog called Flashpoint, wrote a lengthy post enumerating Dohrmann’s history of shady dealings and sharply criticizing the university for legitimating the work of a “huckster” whom “most reputable institutions wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.” The student newspaper at Huntsville followed up a month and a half later with an article headlined “Learning at the Speed of Con.”

Both accounts referred to a 2002 San Francisco Chronicle article outlining the history of legal troubles surrounding Dohrmann’s moneymaking ventures. The article, written after Dohrmann re-emerged as an organizer of expensive business seminars in Los Angeles, reported that he had been convicted for illegal business practices twice — once in 1975, for securities fraud, and again in 1995, for misrepresenting sales figures to investors in one of his companies. The Securities and Exchange Commission also charged Dohrmann with deceptive sales practices in 1982, in connection with his work for an investment diamond retailer, but he settled out of court. After his 1995 conviction, a U.S. attorney called Dohrmann a “very dangerous con man.”

Attempts to reach Dohrmann at Life Success Academy were unsuccessful, as the company is no longer listed at the address indicated by the contract with the university. Dohrmann did not reply to multiple e-mail and Facebook messages seeking comment.

The Chronicle article quotes Dohrmann’s wife, Lynn, as saying she and her husband hoped to “get Super Teaching classrooms into schools all across America.”

At the beginning of the university’s partnership with the Dohrmanns, the campus leadership appeared to share this vision. In a video posted a year ago to YouTube, purportedly from a university source, David B. Williams, the university’s president, is heard in a voiceover saying, “We are perhaps better suited than any other university in this country to be the lead in helping to bring Super Teaching to the rest of the world.”

Pleading ignorance

Several Alabama-Huntsville officials close to the 2007 deal with Life Success Academy told Inside Higher Ed that they were not aware of Dohrmann’s history of legal indiscretions before signing the Super Teaching contract.

“That’s totally immaterial,” said Wilson Luquire, CIO and dean of the library at the university. “People are not vetted for their past, that’s not our normal process here.”

Luquire was the one to whom Dohrmann originally pitched the idea of having the Huntsville campus act as a proving ground for the Super Teaching system, according to a university spokesman. “I’m a big proponent of a venture that would make the university money,” Luquire said. “We all have to be in these budget times.” He refused to answer further questions.

The contract empowered the university to terminate the agreement at any time, for any reason.

As for the time that elapsed after Dohrmann’s legal history came to light and before the contract was terminated: “Could it have been shorter? Maybe, maybe not,” said Grant, the director of technology commercialization. “It just took six months. And I think that’s because the product — there was no market for it.”

Asked why the university did not hastily end its relationship with Dohrmann’s company once his checkered past came to light, a university spokesman, Ray Garner, said its officials were too distracted by other issues, such as budget cuts and the Amy Bishop shootings, which occurred in February, to worry about it.

“Our campus has experienced some very real challenges in recent months, and while some may view this issue as important, we have had to deal with other, more pressing matters,” Garner said. He did not elaborate on why fallout from the shootings would affect any technology commercialization contracts.

One person who does view the issue as important is Betty Peters, a member of the Alabama School Board. Peters says Dohrmann’s history of defrauding clients does not inspire much confidence that Super Teaching would be a good investment for any school that might have bought it, and was disturbed by the idea that if the system had been successfully packaged as a commercial product, the University of Alabama in Huntsville would profit from sales of the units to taxpayer-supported primary and secondary schools and community colleges.

“UAH is known as an engineering school,” Peters said in an interview. “They have strong ties with NASA. … If they’re going to be selling something for our schools that’s a waste of money, that would be unbecoming to a public university at best," she said. Williams, who before coming to Huntsville was vice provost for research at Lehigh University, “should know better” than to affiliate the university with such “funny business,” Peters said.

“We didn’t necessarily think it was a fraudulent product,” Grant says. In fact, another video, posted to YouTube by the same purportedly university-affiliated source as the one bearing Williams’s ringing endorsement, shows Luquire, the Huntsville CIO and library dean, announcing that the university had redesigned the Super Teaching hardware unit to be more compact. In the video, Luquire says the improvements would reduce the projected per-classroom retail price of $200,000 by two-thirds.

The contract holds the university harmless from any lawsuits levied against the purveyors of the new-age system by dissatisfied customers.

Jury still out on effectiveness

Super Teaching’s most outspoken champion in academe is Lee Pulos, a member of the American Psychology Association who “has conducted over 200 corporate seminars for Fortune 500 companies on Qualities of High Performance Persons, The Power of Visualization, and The Role of Intuition in Decision Making,” according to his website.

Pulos has vouched for the scientific merits of Super Teaching. In one paper, he cites past studies where the brains of rats and primates showed measurable cell growth when exposed to “hyperstimulation,” one of the bedrock concepts behind Dohrmann’s system.

Still, there is little available experimental data on the system’s effectiveness. In 2002, at least two institutions — an elementary school in Michigan and Salt Lake Community College in Utah — ran Super Teaching pilots. Officials at the school in Michigan said they could not track down anyone with direct knowledge of that pilot or any data that might have come out of it, citing personnel turnover.

Kurt Shirkey, the director of media services and electronic classrooms at Salt Lake Community College, was originally hired in 2002 to oversee the Super Teaching system there. During the four years the college used the system — before deeming it obsolescent and abandoning it in 2006 — Shirkey collected survey data on student and faculty opinions about the technology. He says faculty thought it was “OK,” though some were irked by having to learn how to use it, and that students generally liked it — particularly the music and videos that the system played as they were entering and leaving the classroom. However, according to Shirkey, Salt Lake never formally studied the effect of Super Teaching on learning outcomes.

The impact of the Super Teaching system on student performance was being studied by a graduate student at the University of Alabama in Huntsville — and in fact still is, according to a source at the university who asked not to be named. The data from that student’s research has been collected, said the source, but the analysis has yet to be approved.

None of the student’s findings have been published, leaving the question of pedagogical merit — the question that lies at the heart of the debate over Super Teaching in Huntsville — unanswered. For now, that is. 

Read more…  University Had Short Attention Span for Super Teaching