Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

357 Leadership: Washington, D.C., 1995) was published. 48 The following are comments by Mr. Jennings which reveal some heretofore closely guarded secrets related to the roots of Goals 2000 and The School-to-Work Opportunities Act : Now there is a measure of national agreement that there should be voluntary national stan dards.... All the major education organizations, all the major business groups, the nation’s governors, the current Democratic president, and the former Republican president have all advocated this concept. The purpose of this book is to explain why and how this agreement came about by focusing on two major legislative initiatives of the Clinton Administration: the Goals 2000 Act and the School-to-Work Opportunities Act . The Clinton initiatives are rooted in the Bush legislation and in the summit conference held by President Bush with the nation’s governors in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1989, in which then-Governor Clinton took part. At that event the governors and the President agreed on the concept of national goals for education, the first ever to be devised. While previously there had been some acceptance of the idea that the federal government had a role in dealing with special needs children and with certain problems in education, there had not been agreement in this century that the national government had a legitimate concern about the general state of education. And, it is important to point out, the governors did not universally endorse the idea of expanding the influence of the federal government in education. Some—probably most—hoped that some new way could be found to raise the issue of education to a level of national awareness without relying on such past practices as federal grants. The tension created by trying to find this new way permeated the debate that took place during the next five years. President Bush complemented his meeting with the governors by sending to Congress legislation that he believed would reform education. That bill contained a number of small scale programs seeking to change a few schools and practices. The Democratic House and Senate reluctantly passed a version of Bush’s bill. However, very conservative Republican senators subsequently filibustered the final bill; and the initial Bush school reform initiative died in 1990. In 1991 Lamar Alexander was appointed secretary of education by President Bush, and he substantially revised the bill that the Senate had killed the year before. Alexander, work ing with Chester Finn and others who were familiar with the work of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in enacting a national curriculum in England and Wales, convinced Bush to endorse the idea of national standards for education. [Ed. Note: Of interest here is that the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) had been working on assessment for many years, dating back at least to 1980, with Clare Burstall of Wales, U.K.] The internationalization of education, with its exchanges of data systems, curricula, methods, technology, teachers, etc., is essential for the implementation of the international socialist management and control system being put in place right now. A fascinating book entitled Union Now: The Proposal for Inter-Democracy—Federal Union (shorter version) by Clarence Streit (Harper Brothers Publishers: New York and London, 1941) described plans for the reunification of the United States and England, the first stage of which is presently being expanded to include the European Community and former (?) communist countries in Eastern Europe. Our nation’s replication of the English education system, as proposed by Lamar Alexander and Chester Finn, coincides with the proclaimed desire of Andrew Carnegie in 1886 to “create two nations out of one people” (return the United States to the “mother” country—England). The Noxious Nineties : c. 1995