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?