A WEEKLY COMMENTARY
Year Nineteen ... Number Forty-Six ... November 17, 1972
PROOFS OF A CONSPIRACY TO BUILD
A TOTAL, MANAGED GLOBAL SOCIETY
PART ELEVEN
ON BUILDING THE NEW MAN
TO SERVE THE NEW SOCIETY
The headline asked, "School Management: Is PPBS the Answer?" and there followed an article which did not answer the question but did serve to introduce a very controversial subject to its readers. Appearing in the Los Angeles Times, Sunday, July 26, 1970, and written by Robert B. Young, the Times Education Writer, this article was one of the first public notices of the fact that the State's Public School System was to be used as a kind of guinea pig in an experiment with a new psychopolitical method for "educating" school children.
Following are excerpts from that article:
"It's not a new missile system and if added to gasoline it won't stop smog, but a tongue-tier called PPBS is provoking mixed dread and joy among California education watchers. And its concept is as hard to master as its name is to say.
"The initials stand for Planning, Programming, Budgeting System. And California's teachers, school administrators and district boards will be hearing more of PPBS as 1974 approaches -- for that is the target date for overturning the schools' traditional 'line-item' accounting methods, and opening up a bulging bag of new management techniques.
"Can education be charted, or can't it? That is the question, for at the heart of PPBS are goal-setting and progress-measuring rituals that are taken for granted in large industrial firms -- especially in aerospace.
"A teacher of journalism and English at Taft Union High School, near Bakersfield, bristles at the very sound of PPBS. 'Teaching is such a personal process,' said Mark Donnelly, . . . . 'you can't measure it in terms of "efficiency," the way engineers measure things. . . .
"In government circles elsewhere, it has become something of a fad to have a PPBS. Now, 40 states and some cities -- notably New York City -- are gaining leverage on complex problems of civil administration with PPBS-style analyses. . . .
"The man closest to California's experiment with PPBS in education is James E. Waters, executive secretary of a Sacremento advisory commission on school district budgeting and accounting . . . . 'We're trying to move away from the idea of managing education as a process,' said Waters, 'and toward management of the end product. . . . "
(End of quotation)
The "end product" is, of course, the child, who is being 'conditioned' to take his or her place in a future society which has been "evolved" by master planners, using PPBS procedures to bring about the evolution.
PPBS is a complex, elusive, difficult-to-explain and difficult-to-comprehend form of psychopolitical procedure when it is applied to education. Mrs. Ruth Spencer perhaps explained it best by showing the interrelationship of PPBS methods as applied to government, industry and education. Mrs. Spencer served as Chairman of the Education Policy Committee of the United Republicans of California (UROC), and in that capacity made an intensive study of PPBS. An article by Mrs. Spencer appeared in the February, 1971, issue of Round-Up, the organization's publication. We quote from that article:
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PPBS -- TOOLING FOR "1984" THROUGH BUDGETING
A new sophisticated budgeting system has developed on the government scene with the potential of destroying all taxpayer control over budgetary matters and governmental policies, as well as preparing for the thought-control of "1984." Commonly referred to as "program budgeting," the Planning, Programming, Budgeting System (PPBS) has been activated on the national level and recently set in motion for adoption by the California Board of Education, unbeknown to most lay citizens and legislators.
PPBS was designed by Rand Corporation of Santa Monica to aid government in pursuit of its "goals and objectives" and policy reform through the process of budgeting. It is to be applied to the policies of Defense; Law and Order; Health, Education and Welfare; Economic Development; and the current business operations such as the Post Office. . . .
PPBS budgeting procedure is very complicated and riddled with new terms and meanings. It begins with "planning," which is the setting of so-called "goals and objectives." Goals are general, timeless and long-range policy pursuits. Then, subordinate to the goals, "objectives" are formulated. They are specific, short-range, measurable ways in which individuals are to think, feel and act as a result of certain programs which promote the goals. An example of a PPBS goal for a school district might be "Environmental Understanding," and a behavorial objective under that goal might be "Support legislation to control coastline conservation." Objectives of the goal "health" could be "Use existing community mental health services;" or, quoting from the 3M "SHES" cirriculum: "Explain conception, parental stages of development, and the birth process." Progressing from "policy" to action, goals and objectives of PPBS in education serve as guidelines in directing not only learning skills but also behavioral change and politically-oriented accomplishments. They are subject to measurement and "accountability" with regard to the teacher's ability to teach the objectives and the student's satisfactory accomplishment. Teachers and students will be "recycled" in case of failure to comply.
"Programming" stands between "planning" and "budgeting" and refers to the countless types of experimental research, operational and evaluation activities or "performance" that are to be funded by "budgeting" to bring about the policy requirements of "planning." How the structure of programs works is illustrated in HEW's Planning-Programming-Budgeting guidelines for PPBS. Therein the federal department's health, education and welfare programs are classified and given a 6 digit coded number for computer use. A "program" would be indicated by the code entry 1 5 4 5 7 1. This would mean funding under the major category of education (1), for general research (5), directed at improving International Education (4), through developing innovation (5) at regional laboratories (7 1). This example of HEW's existing program code structure shows how programming is an essential component working with the policies of "planning" and with "budgeting," and budgeting becoming the means of setting programs in action, whether those programs are aimed at improving International Eduaction, basic skills, Headstart, sex education, educational parks, or whatever.
At whatever level PPBS program coding originiates, whether local, state or federal, a procedure of review and evaluation of the program comes into play. This review involves an extensive data collection effort and written reports giving data evaluation. Although at first the goals and objectives may be set at local governmental level, there will be a point at which the "cost effectiveness" of implementing programs must be evaluated, reviewed and revised. From these processes develops a "program analysis" which then evolves into new, revised, state-federal standardized, centralized programs based upon new goals and objectives, related by program coding to a central budget structure. This revision for centralization is consistent with the nature of computer programming which anticipates the replacement of preliminary, detailed input with a final centralized program. Thus the PPBS process can be compared to a man-wood-fire temperature control situation that could be replaced by a programmed thermostat button. There will be a "button" in PPBS also, at a point where "man," (teachers, principals, administratoin and school board officials) is eliminated.
Rand Corporation Memorandum RM-4271-RC, p. 41, depicts the anticipated centralization of the PPBS structure: "The first point to emphasize must be the personal responsibility of the executive head of the organization or the right or the ability to acquire the knowledge required to perform the necessary tasks of coordination." Therefore, in the advanced stages of PPBS, after the goals, objectives and programs have been "reviewed" and subjected to elaborate computer mathematics and programming technique, they will become centralized, revised, standardized, and "irrefutable." Those new centralized policies and programs will then serve as the basis for "decision-making" in budget preparation in requesting funds for new and continuing programs.
PPBS is no simple accounting system. Rand Corporation designed PPBS as "a resource analysis system," involving far more than traditional budgeting as associated with accounting. Several vital changes in the budgeting process are introduced; PPBS "budgeting" eliminates the function concept and puts budgeting on a program basis. This means that PPBS sets up a coded program format, geared to local-state-federal funds, and under each program is included the costs of such functions as salaries, transportation, maintenance, etc. Presently these functions are separated and their costs reported separately. In other words, under PPBS the cost of "salaries" will be distributed throughout the countless programs.
The new PPBS budgeting will also change the fiscal year reporting now designated to limit the exercise of officials' discretion and check their honesty. PPBS "looks beyond" a single year and provides for funding for programs which project into the future over spams of time covering two, five, seven years, depending on the program. A six-digit program budget code number will serve as a "crosswalk" to fit the multi-year programs into annual budgets. This time span of long-range programs involves another change having to do with funding for "future benefits" and the personal judgments involved. PPBS offers no alternative to reliance on such personal judgment and "crude intuition" in requesting money to pay for "future benefits."
These departures from the present budgeting system will serve to seriously decrease the taxpayers' control of budgetary matters, being based on "decision-making" beyond their reach, understanding and refutation. In addition to losing control of spending, under the PPBS "planning" and "programming" system, taxpayers and local officials will lose control of educational curricula content, health and welfare program policy, as those programs become "centralized" under state-federal standards. Another sophisticated characteristic of PPBS is its conceptual framework, which ties together the total of all governmental functions, so a "manpower" program could involve education, welfare and labor programs, further decreasing taxpayer power to control governmental policy (and spending).
CALIFORNIA SCHOOL BOARD SETS PPBS IN MOTION
At its December 1970 meeting the California State Board of Education directed the State Department of Education to proceed with revision of the State School Accounting Manual, a necessary procedure in preparing for "the adoption of the proposed program structure for budgeting, accounting and reporting purposes to become operative in California Public Schools beginning July 1, 1973." . . . .
In the meantime, newly elected State Superintendent of Public Instruction Wilson Riles (he succeeded Dr. Max Rafferty, who opposed PPBS -- Ed.) has revealed his plans to expand the roles of the State Board, its Curriculum Commission and the State Department of Education to promote "performance accountability" in the state's public school system, to establish experimental schools to test various programs; to collect information about the program results; to analyze, evaluate, and revise the goals and then to broadcast their recommendations under state auspices . . . . When the program coding is completed, and geared for "planning," "programming," and for state-federal funds, California taxpayers will have lost control of their local school budgets and curricula content, will have subjected their students, school administrators, officials and themselves to "behavioral" measurement, and opened the floodgates to federal aid and control of public schools.
PAST IS PROLOUGE
It will behoove taxpayers and legislators who wish to better understand the "Big Brother" potential of PPBS to review the history of the socialist "progressive education" movement in America, for what is past is prolouge. The design inherent in PPBS to take control of education -- health and welfare as well -- from taxpayers and their representatives and put that control in the hands of distant social scientists, with federal funding has been the challenging vision of collectivist minds in this country for over sixty years. Great headway toward socializing America already has been made by liberal "progressive" educationists and politicians who have worked deceitfully to create "a new social order," who believe that capitalism is doomed and some form of socialism is desirable and inevitable, and that it is the business of schools to help build a radically different collectivist form of society, whether fascist or communist. These advocates of socialism, followers of John Dewey and many other Keynesian-Fabian Socialists, would have the schools assume a propaganda function; indoctrination, not education, is their watchword. Children are to be prepared for participation in a collectivist order, and therefore the role of the school -- from the nursery through the university -- is to serve as "an agency" in revising procedures and curricula that will accomplish that end.
It was in 1933 that an important spokesman for the movement, Dr. George S. Counts, counselled the schools to "deliberately reach for power" and "to the extent that they are permitted to fashion the curriculum and procedures of the school they will definitely and positively influence the social attitudes, ideals and behavior of the coming generation," where "trust in Providence" must be replaced by "careful planning" and "private capitalism by some form of socialized economy."
Now, after many years of such growth, PPBS offers its science and technology of business procedure to the human-social realms of health, education and welfare. Careful policy "planning," "programming," revision, and the irrefutable access to federal aid "budgeting," come within closer reach than the socialist Frontier Thinkers ever envisioned.
And PPBS's totalitarian potential offers this extension: the "democracy" of the teachers' and the community's efforts will be discarded when the PPBS "executive head" is ready to finalize the program of "1984" -- only make it 1974!
All legislation and action to implement PPBS in the California school system should be repealed, and constant guard against passage of any changes in the law to establish PPBS should be maintained by concerned citizens and loyal legislators in Sacramento and Washington, lest the tooling for a "1984" machine gun is allowed to proceed under the guise of an innocent, baby-carriage budgeting system.
(End of article by Mrs. Ruth Spencer)
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The preceding article concentrates on the situation in California, but exactly the same things -- with variations depending upon the locale and temper of legislators -- are going on in every State in the Union. There has been more exposure of PPBS, and more opposition to it, in the State of California because a group of very alert "school watchers" in that State were first in the Nation to discover a plot that was intended to remain secret to all but those Planners who were active in socializing America, deceitfully and clandestinely.
California is spotlighted, too, because that State was chosen as a "project" area for the development and perfection of PPBS techniques. The system was developed at Rand Corporation, which is sitauted at Santa Monica, and under the alleged conservative leadership of Governor Reagan, it was easier and less questionable to transfer the locally-residing "experts" from Rand to State employment.
But the concerned citizens of all States should feel grateful to that small band of California citizens and parents who spotted the PPBS plot and began doing their utmost to alert the rest of the Nation to the dangers inherent in PPBS.
Your editor wishes at this time to express his particular thanks to those who did the original research, and made available to us their findings, files and documentation. Our special gratitude is extended to Mrs. Marilyn Angle, Mrs. Virginia McNeil, Mrs. Ruth Spencer, the late Florence Fowler Lyons, Mrs. Mary Pohle, Joseph P. Bean, M.D., Gary North, and others whom we may have overlooked.
We mention these names because they have spoken out or written publicly against the evils of PPBS, and whom we can therefore thank publicly. Also -- as we continue to shine the editorial spotlight on the use of PPBS as a political, economic and social weapon against school children, teachers, school administrators, parents and citizens of the Nation; we shall be more and more dependent upon the work that has been done by these Californians Against PPBS. The research and the data-gathering could never have been accomplished by one individual. We are proud to have become a kind of human "data bank" into which their combined efforts can be collated, and then channeled out to the concerned citizens of the entire Nation.
(To Be Continued)
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For information concerning this letter, write: DON BELL REPORTS, P.O. Box 2223, Palm Beach, Florida 33480