Charlotte T. Iserbyt is known for writing the book "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America". The book describes how the changes gradually brought into the American public education system work to eliminate the influences of a child's parents, and mold the child into a member of the proletariat in preparation for a socialist-collectivist world of the future. She considers that these changes originated from plans formulated primarily by the Andrew Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Education and Rockefeller General Education Board, and details the psychological methods used to implement and effect the changes.
She also authored "Back to Basics Reform" or OBE Skinnerian International Curriculum in 1985. This book 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.
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.
While working for several weeks at the National Institute of Education, U.S. Dept. of Education, Iserbyt 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”.