Ms Iserbyt, according to her bio at that same website, is also 'best known for her 1985 booklet Back to Basics Reform or OBE: Skinnerian International Curriculum and her 1989 pamphlet <i>Soviets in the Classroom: America's Latest Education Fad</i> which  covered the details of the U.S.-Soviet and Carnegie-Soviet Education Agreements which remain in effect to this day.'<p>Now, while I'm no lover of teacher's unions or abandonment o tried and tested instructional methods, her suggestion that american pedagogy is a communist plot is itself an example of 'dumbing down'. I'm reading her e-book, and it's little more than bad polemic, absolutely riddled with logical fallacies and cheap rhetorical gimmicks. Sophistry is unfortunately not confined to one end of the political spectrum.