GRADING PERSONAL QUALITIES

As National Headmaster, Labor Wants Electronic Pupil-Dossiers

Wednesday, September 15, 1993

By Robert Holland

The United States Department of Labor has big plans for your local schools, not to mention your local workplaces.  In fact, it has the work specs for the New American Child.

What the DOL is pushing hard through its SCANS (Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills) manifestos looks a whole lot like the Outcome-Based Education being hawked by the education/industrial complex in Virginia and across the nation.

If you are a parent, a teacher, a student – or just an American interested in preserving individual freedom – you might want to know what’s in the SCANS fine print.  Perversely (if appropriately), I spent the long Labor Day weekend studying several hundred pages of SCANS documents pulled out of national data banks.

To begin with, if Labor factotums had their way, American pupils no longer would receive report cards with letter grades from A to F for their academic work.  Instead, they would have cumulative resume’s that would follow them throughout school – and into their working years.

On those resume’s (a sample of which is in a SCANS report and reproduced on today’s page), students would be rated for “workplace competencies,” such as their “interpersonal skills” and their “systems” thinking.  There would be proficiency levels (but no failing grades) for academic subjects.  And there also would be listings of portfolios of student work (projects on trendy topics like environmentalism), with names of teachers to contact.  Portfolios are the OBEists’ preferred replacement for objective testing of student knowledge.

Ever helpful, the SCANS commissioners actually provide classroom assignments to integrate SCANS competencies into the core curriculum.  For example, in English class, teachers could sharpen “interpersonal skills” by having students “discuss the pros and cons of the argument that Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice is a ‘racist’ play and should be banned from the curriculum.” So rather than studying a piece of masterful writing on its own merit, students would be invited to consider censoring it.  People for the American Way, where are you?

The most intriguing “outcomes” are the students’ “personal qualities” that educators would rate on the SCANS resume’s:  responsibility, self-esteem, sociability, self-management, integrity, honesty.  Oh, yes, on those resume’s students would be identified not only by name and address but also by Social Security number.

The report further states that the Educational Testing Service is developing an “employer-friendly” system called WORKLINK through which these assessments of pupils’ personal qualities could be shared with businesses electronically.  Doesn’t sound very little-guy-friendly.

If somewhere along the line you got on the bad side of school authorities – perhaps, say you failed to show up for your Pumsy the Dragon self-esteem session in elementary counseling – a bad mark for integrity would dog you for the rest of your life.  Takl about Big Brother abusing liberty.  American Civil Liberties Union, where are you?

The DOL has some gall to judge anyone’s honesty.  Remember, this is the federal behemoth that for 10 years – under Democratic and Republican Presidents alike – programmed its computers to score job seekers way up or way down on employment tests, depending solely on their racial classification – and that did so without bothering to inform the victims of that official racism.

Rather than spending time in moral receivership for its intellectual bankruptcy, the DOL is back under pro-OBE Harvardite Robert Reich as a super-Cabinet agency (dwarfing Education) with a scheme that multiplies the injustices of race-norming many times.  SCANS got a blessing under George Bush’s America 2000 program, but now is gathering momentum under an administration that believes in government as a healer of all social ills.

In fact, an internal advisory memo to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission gives the game away:  The national job-skills certification and education assessments in Clinton’s Goals 2000 legislation – now before Congress – seek to replace norming with “fuzzy” tests more likely to achieve equalized outcomes on a group basis.  These subjective measurements (such as portfolios or other exhibits) “are easily questioned – so there may be an avalanche of challenges to the grading of assessment exercises” the memo warns.

The SCANSers’ objectives are not modest:  “The nation’s school systems should make the SCANS foundation skills and workplace competencies explicit objectives of instruction at all levels.”  “All-employers, public and private, should incorporate SCANS knowhow in their human resource development efforts.”

In “reinventing education,” the SCANSers also concoct a new entitlement – to school success.  Youngsters have a “right” to be educated up to an absolute standard of performance “without putting the burden of failure on the backs of students.” (Hey, Teach.  You can’t flunk me.  I’m entitled. So much for the individual responsibility the SCANSers would presume to rate.)

It would be wrong to dismiss all this as just more psychobabble soon to fade.  Several states (Florida is the first) already are integrating SCANS competencies into their curricula.  A careful look at the Common Core of Learning “outcomes” in OBE states like Virginia will show utilitarian strains of SCANS:  “evaluating and managing one’s own behavior within the functioning of the group,” “plan, produce, and deliver high quality products and services,” etc.

Indeed, the linkages are clear.  SCANS traces from a Labor Commission report chaired by Clinton Rhodes Scholar buddy Ira Magaziner in 1990 (and on which Virginia Board of Education member Alan Wurtzel served).  Hillary Rodham Clinton was then made co-chairman for implementation with Magaziner, her ally in trying to nationalize health care.  Much of that Labor report was picked up almost verbatim by Virginia’s school “reformers” a few years ago.  Now SCANS is linked (as is Virginia) with the New Standards Project, which is writing national examinations on the OBE model.  NSP has the stated agenda of radically transforming the school curriculum through student assessment.

Meanwhile, word from Washington last week was that 90 million Americans read, write, and compute so poorly that they have trouble holding a job.  Those poor folks don’t need group hand-holding and government-approved “higher-order thinking.”  They need structure – phonics and drill on the multiplication tables and one-on-one tutoring.  The last thing they need – or their children need – is OBE.