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.