NATIONALIZATION 

School Restructuring, by Hillary 

Wednesday, June 16, 1993 

By Robert Holland 

So who are the movers, the shakers, behind the monolithic effort to remake public education on a nationally prescribed model? 

For one, try this name, friends:  Hillary Rodham Clinton.  And for another, this one:  Ira Magaziner. 

What's that, you say?  Right Social Democrats, wrong cause?  Sure, I know that a national health care plan has been the First Spouse's pet project, with Magaziner as her main helper. 

Ah, but I'm telling you that Lady Hillary has a national education plan, too.  Even though it is barreling toward implementation in many states, discussion in the major news media has been scant -- in contrast with health-care reform, which has received intensive coverage even before its unveiling.  But anyone willing to spend hours in the library combing mostly obscure journals can find the Hillary (and --ouch! ---Big Business/Labor Department) education connection. 

Before my fan club at the Department of Education accuses me of conjuring apparitions, here are some of my references:  Monthly Labor Review (July, 1991); Industry Week (August 19 1991); Employment Relations Today (Winter, 1992-93); Educational Leadership (March 1992); Public Management (February, 1993); and Chemical Week (March 11, 1992). 

The key components of the Hillary Plan are found in the Outcome-Based Education being marketed in Virginia and elsewhere as World Class Education.  Mrs. Clinton serves as co-chairman for implementation of the Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, which laid the foundation for the Labor Department's heavy intervention in school restructuring through its ominously dubbed SCANS system, beginning in May, 1990. 

Hillary also is on the governing board of the New Standards Project, in which the Virginia Department of Education is participating  Based at the University of Pittsburgh, the NSP has the explicit purpose of destroying the current testing system and replacing it with an ungraded OBE curricular approach allowing pupils to take a group mastery test as many times as they need to pass it. 

In the 1992 article with Magaziner in Educational Leadership, Mrs. Clinton sought to justify her scheme in the context of national industrial policy.  To meet inter-national competition, she said, U.S. workers must be trained in a wholly new way -- as members of teams that produce more.  Toward that end she laid out an OBE blueprint:

There would be one standard for all American students, to be met at or around age 16.  "This standard should be established nationally and benchmarked to the highest in the world," she declared.  Yet states would be responsible for ensuring that "virtually all students" passed this common "world class" test.  (Can you say 'norming," boys and girls?) 

With a Certificate of Mastery in hand, students then would choose among college-prep, taking a job, or a technological certificate.  Meanwhile, the Labor Department would set "voluntary" skill standards -- almost surely the precursor to sharp-toothed mandates -- for entry to virtually all occupations. 

Guess what?  That is almost exactly the centralized scheme that now has come down as hubby Bill's "Goals 2000:  Educate America Act."  Meanwhile, with the backing of elements of Big Business, DOL's SCANS principles -- extolling OBEish "higher order thinking" and downgrading basic education -- are becoming staples of school restructuring. SCANS asks schools to test for such worker "competencies" and skill "foundations" as "works with others,"   "self-esteem," "sociability," "self-management," "integrity," and "honesty." 

This emphasis on probing the psyche, educator/author Chester Finn has remarked acerbicly, neglects that "factual knowledge is to thinking skills as bricks are to mortar." 

In fairness, the Presidents Clinton are not solely responsible for this utilitarian push.  The self-proclaimed "education President," George Bush, set much of this in motion with America 2000.  And trade journals name such corporate prime movers in OBE and SCANS as Union Carbide, Motorola, TGI Friday's, MCI, Xerox, and Gannett. 

But all this is made to order for Hillary.  In fact, it may be what she has in mind when she speaks modestly of aspiring to lead "a remaking of the American way of politics, government, indeed life."  One of her philosophical gurus --Michael Lerner of a leftist rag called Tikkun --actually wrote the following in an essay on the "politics of meaning" (a phrase Hillary has adopted): 

"The Department of Labor should create a program to train a corps of union personnel, worker representatives, and psychotherapists in the relevant skills to assist developing a new spirit of cooperation, mutual caring, and dedication to work." 

That may be gibberish, but it's not far from what's actually going down. 

Yes, Americans do receive too few solid results for their investment in schooling.  But this ailment is certainly not the result of excessive local autonomy; rather educational standards began sliding precisely as powers were taken away from local communities and placed in the hands of central bureaucracies, beginning with LBJ's Great Society in the 1960's. 

Now we are asked to believe that Hillary Clinton, the race-norming-happy Department of Labor, corporate Clintonites, OBE gurus, and central educrats have the magic for transforming the schools.  Even were such institutions "effective," would everyday Moms and Dads want their children to attend and be cast in the desired Total Quality Management mold as good Organization Men and Women?  And would teachers want to teach in such centers of indoctrination?