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.