GOALS 2000:
Education’s Reinventors Misled Public
Wednesday, September 29, 1993
By Robert Holland
When Secretary of Labor Robert Reich
and Secretary of Education Richard Riley jointly introduced President Clinton’s “Goals
2000: Educate America Act” last April, they said the provisions in it for curricular
content and student performance standards, and for national testing, would be “voluntary.”
States and localities could participate
or not as they saw fit.
That was just another government lie.
With the nation’s attention diverted by
Hillary Clinton’s high-flying plan for nationalized health care, a parallel scheme to
nationalize education is coming in under the radar.
Last week, Riley presented to a House Education and Labor subcommittee the
administration’s plan to reauthorize the $10 billion Elementary and Secondary Education
Act of 1965.
The reauthorization would be for 10
years instead of the usual five. And guess
what? It would require states to adhere to
the Goals 2000 blueprint to the letter if they wanted their slice of the juicy ESEA pie –
federal money on which schools, unfortunately are hooked.
So much for “voluntary.”
This is how Riley, the former South
Carolina governor, rationalized the shift to statist coercion in a presentation that wowed
subcommittee Democrats and (sigh!) Republicans alike:
“A common understanding of what
all our children should know and be able to do
should drive changes in all aspects of teaching and learning.
Textbooks, teaching practices, and tests should all be geared to State content and
performance standards that set forth the knowledge and skills our students need, and our
diverse democracy and our complex economy demand.”
Doesn’t anyone in Clintonian Washington
understand the danger of concentrating such power in
government hands?
Goals 2000 is replete with the
Outcome-Based Education favored by Reich, Hillary Clinton, and Ira Magaziner but so
loathed by so many everyday Virginia citizens that Governor Wilder felt it politick to
withdraw Virginia’s OBE plan – if only temporarily – on September 15.
Now, no matter how intense the
opposition of parents, no matter how many promises the Wilder administration makes to
return education restructuring to the community (where the issue should have been from the
start), the Rhodes Scholar junta in Washington wants to decide what’s best for all
schools.
The Virginia politician who has most
closely tracked this attempted power grab is Mike Farrris, the Republican candidate for
Lieutenant Governor. On the day Riley
presented the ESEA plans in Washington, Farris dropped by my office with the feds’
173-page (!) explanation of the changes along with the 399-page bill itself.
This maneuver is, said Farris, nothing
less than “a hijacking of state and local educational prerogatives by the federal
government. This is going to create detailed
national control of our educational system.”
Farris, a Loudoun County constitutional
lawyer, has made a career of defending home-schoolers and school patrons whose rights were
in danger of being trampled by Big Government.
He knows whereof he speaks. But if you don’t like his politics, it’s not necessary
to take his word. Consider what many
prominent public-school administrators are saying.
“It just means what everybody’s been
saying all along about the standards being voluntary:
bull ----. They’re mandatory, and
they’re tied to money,” American Association
of School Administrators associate director Bruce Hunter told Education Week, which is not
usually filled with such earthy expressions.
Of the Clintons’ plan to subject
non-complying school districts to “alternative governance arrangements,” including
possible removal of teachers, Edward Kealy, director of federal programs for the National
School Boards Association, said, “I don’t think any [corrective action] is left off the
list short of a nuclear attack on school districts.”
At a meeting last summer of the
American Educational Research Association, prominent educators filled the air with alarms
that the Clintons’ national standards, driven by assessments, might lead to a narrowing of
the curriculum, and have a harmful effect on education, as in some European countries.
Goals 2000 is a Little Shop of Horrors
of educationist doctrine. It mandates equal
graduation rates according to racial and ethnic group, which should be tip-off enough of
what happens to individual intellectual distinction.
It endorses “developmentally appropriate” early-childhood practices – a code phrase
for elevating self-esteem over academic instruction. It sets up a National Education goals
Panel, consisting entirely of politicians, to review standards, curricula, and tests
promulgated by, in effect, a national school board.
It also gives Robert Reich’s DOL power to certify skills of a national workforce.
There’s much more:
school-based health and social-service clinics: a “parents as teachers” program
that could intrude the state ever more deeply in family life:
and, of course, “opportunity-to-learn” or delivery standards.
The latter provide an opening for Washington to tell each state how much it should
spend per-teacher, per-pupil, or per-building in the name of “equity.”
Now, Lyndon Johnson’s ESEA, which was
designed to provide compensatory education to help poor students improve their basic
skills, is to become a big stick to enforce New Age ed across the land.
Schools are the institution closest to
the heart of most neighborhoods. Local
control of the education and nurturing of the young has been a cherished principle in
American life. Statist control of curriculum
is a pernicious trend, threatening liberty.
So why are so many people, including
putative “conservatives” on Capitol Hill sleeping through the
coup d’etat?