LIBERAL, CONSERVATIVE COALITION
MOBILIZED PARENTS CAN BE STRONG FORCE FOR BETTER EDUCATION
Wednesday, May 5, 1993
By Robert Holland
Parental apathy and indifference aren't universal. Contrary to
conventional wisdom, there are a good many thoughtful parents who do care, and
care deeply, about their children's education. and some of them who
haven't been community activists before are being motivated to action --
radicalized, if you will--by bizarre twists the Education Establishment is
giving the school reform movement.
In New York City, a feisty grandmother, Mary Cummins, led the revolt against
the multicultural gay-glorifying "Children of the Rainbow" curriculum -- a
community uprising that toppled the school chancellor, Joseph Fernandez.
In Pennsylvania, Peg Duksik of Johnstown leads a 22,000 member parents'
coalition that has stymied the state education board's adamant push for Outcome
Based Education, the new paradigm preferred by behaviorists and self-esteem
groupies.
What of Virginia? My constantly jangling telephone and growing stack of
mail tell me that there's movement above ground and
below
--ready to erupt. The main rumblings are a consequence of DOE's unfortunate
obsession with Outcome Based Education as a model for a Common Core of Learning
(CCL) and pupil assessment.
Almost daily I hear reports of parents networking throughout the state to
make their concerns known about OBE. Almost overnight, a grass-roots
organization has sprung up in Chesterfield County called Concerned Virginians
for Academic Excellence (Box 845, Midlothian, 23113). It is not affiliated
with any political or religious group. Its members are primarily
professionals and homemakers from Central Virginia, and linkage has been made
with similar groups in the Northern Virginia and Tidewater areas.
THE EDUCATION Establishment's strategy for dismissing the opposition to
restructuring is one of the most disgusting exercises in disinformation since
the KGB's heyday The Denver based Education Commission of the States -- an
entity fed by federal and state tax funds and liberal foundations like Carnegie
-- has led he smear campaign by distributing propaganda ascribing opposition
wholly to "evangelical Christians" who seek "to take over the public school
system." Just to be sure all opponents are tarred as religious fanatics, ECS
says conspirators are trying to hide their agenda by concealing their true
identities.
To be sure, some opposition is religiously rooted. In yesterday's New
York school board elections, for example, the Catholic Diocese and Pat
Robertson's Christian Coalition joined with black civil rights leader and
mayoral candidate Roy Innis to distribute pro-family voter guides. People
for the [un?]
American Way may not like it, but the
Constitution
permits such activity. Nor, despite what the Agnostic Left would have you
believe, are all religiously motivated opponents wild-eyed zealots.
Much of the opposition, however is not religious or right-wing at all.
Consider, for example, the Alexandria parents who have vigorously protested such
OBE manifestations as the school systems' bid to drop an honors Western Civ
course and to end all ability-grouping. Alexandria is among the more
politically liberal enclaves of Virginia, and the parental OBE opponents reflect
that profile. Consider, specifically, Sylvia Kraemer.
Ms. Kraemer is a self-described "left-of-center Democrat and lapsed
Episcopalian." A Hollins graduate with a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins
University, she has taught American history at Vassar, Southern Methodist, and
the University of Maine. She is the mother of two children in
Alexandria's public schools. And she has written a 20-page analysis of the
unexpurgated version of Virginia's OBE blueprint (last October's draft) that can
be described only as brilliant. A few excerpts will not do it
justice, but here they are nonetheless:
"TRANSLATED INTO the political agenda that follows from these 31 (and highly
arguable) soothsayers' cliche's, Virginia's public school would be charged with
training our young people to become well-adapted servants of environmentalism,
multiculturalism, Total Quality Management (TQM), technological determinism and
public entitlements...(This may be your political agenda, and it may be my
political agenda. But it is not the business of taxpayer funded schools to
train followers for our political agendas.)...
"We also find buried here the Virginia Department of Educations' requirement
for heterogeneously grouped classrooms, and its 'Robin Hood' approach to
classroom learning. Pupils who have the misfortune to be high-academic
achievers (to the extent that academic achievement will be noticed at all under
the 'new paradigm') will be required to 'function as a teacher or mentor' for
the less able or slower learners....
"Half of our trial attorneys can be kept busy litigating cases arising from
the attempt of Virginia public schools to require high achieving students to
spend their precious in-school hours tutoring lower achieving students.
The other half will be busy litigating privacy statute violations arising from
the Common Core's necessarily intrusive "assessments' to determine whether
students are acquiring the "attitudes" and personality traits required for their
"life roles."....
"Some have argued that the kind of schooling proposed in the Virginia Common
Core -- a fundamentally anti-intellectual and behaviorist strategy for
personality modification and group socialization -- is now necessary because of
the changing population of our public schools. Where is it
written that young Afro-Americans should not aspire to become physicians,
scientists, business executives, and government leaders?
SYLVIA KRAEMER expresses in a cerebral way what so many of us feel in or gut
about academic deconstruction. If liberal and conservative parents buried
their differences and got behind an intellectual manifesto like hers, they could
be a potent force for a common core of genuine learning.