July 9, 1997

So, sometime Thursday Texas will officially become an Outcome-Based Education (OBE) state; soon thereafter moving to implement government control of jobs training and government control over parenting.

You can't say we didn't warn ya.

The State Board of Education, dominated by a majority which has embraced the "Clinton Education Plan," will formally adopt the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills Thursday in Austin. We've seen ample evidence over the last two years that Texans have been manipulated, misled, misdirected and outright lied to concerning the direction this state is headed by both our state bureaucracy and the politicians we entrusted to eliminate those bureaucracies.

This is only the final step among many which have been taken, some subtly, some not-so-subtle. Had they tried to do it all at once, Marc Tucker once noted, "trying to ram it down everyone's throat would engender overwhelming opposition."

• Former Gov. Ann Richards and former Education Commissioner Skip Meno embarked on implementing Ouctome-Based Education in Texas in 1992. Current Gov. George W. Bush — elected on the promise he would scrap that — has instead fast-tracked it under new Commissioner Mike Moses.

• Texas has been a participating member of the New Standards Project, at least since 1992. The New Standards Project is the brainchild of the National Center on Education and the Economy, an organization run by Marc Tucker — a social engineer, not an educator. Texas has served as a field-testing site for the New Standards.

• Texas has accepted federal Goals:2000 and School-to-Work grant monies. Goals:2000 requires the development of "performance standards," a central tenet of OBE. Texas' School-to-Work Act money requires the state to integrate academics with work-skill training.

• The 1997 Legislature passed legislation creating a "Texas Healthy Kids Corporation," providing state-funded insurance for children. School-based health clinics — provided for by the bill — were central planks in the failed socialized medicine plan pushed by the Clinton Administration only last year. They came in through the back door, despite a preponderance of evidence of abuse and mismanagement in states like Pennsylvania and Kentucky.

• Texas Education Agency officials, including Mike Moses and State Board president Jack Christie, continue to deny they're developing a Certificate of Initial Mastery system — another element of OBE as expounded by Bill Spady and Marc Tucker. The Texas Workforce Commission, as noted on our front page today, is training educators on how to create such a system.

• The Clinton/Tucker Plan calls for a labor market information system to measure and track individuals and the job market. The Texas Quality Workforce Planning Committee has already tested and is expanding just such a system, which will link student records to other educational institutions, the Texas Education Agency and employers.

As noted by the Texas Eagle Forum's Stephanie Cecil, what Gov. George W. Bush has benignly supported "ultimately supplants our free enterprise system with a government-controlled economy, a.k.a. socialism."

You will be told how to raise your children. Your children will be told where they will work. Few of them will ever attain enough of an education to recognize what happened, and they will only attain that advanced education if they espouse government dogma.

All of these systems, of course, can be rejected by local school districts. They're all "purely voluntary," and can be rejected by any local school board which chooses to not accept state and federal money. I'm minded to giggle at that.

Actually, I'm too busy weeping to giggle.