Alex Newman： Dumbed-Down Schools Are Intentional
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Summary
In this episode, Alex Blumberg talks about his journey into education and how he became the author of Crimes of the Educators, a book about the failures of the American education system. He talks about how he got his start in journalism and why he decided to write a book.
Transcript
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I kind of came at this from a weird direction. I had actually never gone to a public school. I grew
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up mostly in third world countries. I grew up in Latin America, a little time in Europe, and then
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went to Africa, back to Europe. So I never really experienced the public school system. But as a
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journalist, I started getting curious. It was very obvious to me, you know, I didn't even finish high
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school, but it was very obvious to me coming back to America that something must be really wrong
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with the educational system. I could not believe it. I took, you know, every state in the U.S. has a
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high school equivalency test you can take. And so I took that and I could not believe it. I mean,
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this was stuff that I was learning in third, fourth grade. I couldn't believe that this was seriously
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an exam to allow you to skip high school. But it was. So I knew very early on that something was
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very wrong with the system in the United States. I started writing articles about Common Core. Now,
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for those who aren't familiar, Common Core is the set of national standards that the Obama
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administration tried to impose on America by basically bribing our state governments to adopt
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it. And, you know, right away, my radar went off. I said, OK, something's really wrong here. We're not
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supposed to have national standards. As I dug into it and started talking to some of the people
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involved, it became very clear that this was subversive. The values that were being taught were
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contrary to Christian principles, contrary to what our nation was founded on. The academics were just
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mind numbingly dumbed down. And in fact, this was coming from the people who were on the Common
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Core Validation Committee. They had one math expert, one English expert. They both told me I serve on
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some boards with them and they both told me that this is a disaster. I mean, I'm not going to sign off
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on this. So it was clear something was wrong. A couple of years after that, I was contacted by Dr.
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Samuel Blumenfeld. He and I wrote for a number of different publications and we shared some of
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the bylines and some of the same publications. And he asked me, Alex, would you be willing to
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work with me on a book on education? He had already done 12 books on education. And what an honor it was
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for me to be asked that. He had done. Let me see if I have. Well, you see a whole bunch of them behind
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me. The one that we ended up producing, Dr. Blumenfeld and I, you can see it right here. It's called
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Crimes of the Educators. This was published in 2015. And so Sam had spent 60 years of his life
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studying the public education system, real research, right? He would go to the universities
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and pull out the archives and the correspondence from the people he was investigating. True, true
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research. And so he focused on the past, how we had gotten to where we were. I focused on what was
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happening at the time, which was the rollout of Common Core, the increasing federalization of our
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education system, and where it was all going, right? The globalization of education around the
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world and how these international standards, international testing, international values were
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making their way down to the local level. So as I was working on this with Sam, I ended up reading all
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the books that he ever wrote about it. And it clicked. I realized that this is the issue that transcends
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all the other issues. You know, I've been writing about all kinds of things. I've been writing about
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the UN, the open borders, the efforts to suppress our free speech, the efforts to silence Christians,
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you know, all of these things I've been talking about, and I've been researching, and I've been
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exposing. But when I realized that education was the thread that ran through them all, I said,
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this is, I mean, this has to be the focus. Because if we get this one wrong, we're going to lose on