Issues Tearing Our Nation's Fabric The Center for Reclaiming America

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Goals 2000 & OBE
Chapter Ten

Bureaucracy has crippled public education in America, and the attempt to enforce multi-culturalist and anti-American social programs has driven a wedge between educators and parents. Virtually every American has come face to face with at least one of the failed experiments of the past, such as open classrooms, new math, whole language learning, or values clarification. For more than fifty years hundreds of radical experiments have been tried, each with the same dismal result. By every measure, students in America’s public schools are less interested, less educated, and perhaps less educable than ever.

In 1785 the catalog of Columbia College said:

No candidate shall be admitted into the College … unless he shall be able to render into English Caesar’s Commentaries of the Gallic War … the four orations of Cicero against Catiline … and the Gospels from the Greek … and to turn English into grammatical Latin, and shall understand the first rules of arithmetic, with the rule of three.

Two hundred years later, high school graduates have no command of history, science, mathematics, or the English language. And in all comparative testing with students of other nations over the past twenty years, American students consistently rank dead last.

The effects of centralized control of public education and the involvement of the national teacher’s unions in curriculum planning becomes painfully clear in any analysis of educational attainment. In 1992, 72 percent of fourth-graders could do third-grade math; 20 percent of eighth-graders could do seventh-grade math; and just 6 percent of high school seniors could even understand the problem-solving skills for college level math.

These and other statistics reported in the Index of Leading Cultural Indicators should make any conscientious American wince. Students have lost interest in education, and who can blame them? Thirty years of socialist experimentation has destroyed the integrity of public school curricula, and the majority of teachers being certified by schools of education and teacher-training programs are poorly qualified in their fields. Many have come to perceive their roles not as teachers and coaches, but as social therapists and ideological reprogrammers.

An Act of War

In its brutally frank assessment of the state of public education published in 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education (NCEE) observed:

If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves . . . we have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral, educational disarmament.

In 1990, seven years after the NCEE report, the U.S. Department of Education conceded in its summary statements regarding the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP):

. . . large proportions, perhaps more than half, of our elementary, middle, and high-school students are unable to demonstrate competency in challenging subject matter in English, mathematics, science, history, and geography. Further, even fewer appear to be able to use their minds well.

As we approach the end of the century, our prospects for developing future leaders with real knowledge, understanding, competitive job skills, and respect for citizenship and community have never been worse. More than 40 million American adults are illiterate, and 50 million have only survival level academic skills. Two-thirds of school children are unable to read at their grade level.

Clearly, public education is a disaster area. It has not prepared young Americans for life, and not even the perpetrators can deny it. So what is the education establishment planning to do about our problems? Enter Goals 2000 and "outcome-based education" (OBE), the latest wave of social programs for "redefining" education in America.

Under Goals 2000, the idealistic brain child of the Clinton administration, three new federal bureaucracies will be created: the National Education Goals Panel, the National Education Standards and Improvement Council, and the National Skills Board. By federal mandate, local school boards will no longer determine curriculum, testing standards, or graduation requirements. Since education will no longer measure academic skills, the traditional high school diploma will be replaced with a certification of attendance.

Under the new program, the federal government will maintain electronic surveillance of student attainment, and each student will have a computer record detailing participation and fulfillment of social objectives in the classroom. Such records will cover compliance with instructions, honesty, integrity, and character traits, and will follow the student into the workplace and throughout his/her adult life.

Parents are to be reeducated, as well, in areas such as modern principles of child development, parent-child learning objectives, child rearing, social and personal responsibility, tolerance, multicultural and world perspectives, and sensitivity to ethnic, racial, and biological diversity. William Spady, principal author of the new standards, and the man who coined the term OBE back in 1980, explains the view that, "School is an instrument of socialization. It is supposed to teach civic values. Call it flat political indoctrination if you want. That’s basically what it is."

A Radical Transformation

The government’s Goals 2000 program specifies eight principal objectives:

To achieve these results, the state will implement a comprehensive program of "remediation" to tune up, adjust, or redefine the thinking of parents and children who do not comply readily with government directives.

Long-Term Consequences

Of all the issues that threaten the security of this nation, none has more serious long-term consequences than the miseducation of the next generation and the mind-control that parades as legitimate concern for the well-being of our children. Hear the words of Dr. William Coulson, a founder of the human potential movement, summarized here by Matthew Robinson of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture:

The education establishment shows no signs of change or even a rudimentary consciousness that something has gone awry. Classes continue to become more ideological, more frivolous, and teachers more irrelevant. Educators have adopted a psychological and philosophical set of beliefs that dismisses the wisdom of those who have gone before us. They have institutionalized ignorance and philistinism.

Teachers may find it easier to sit in "magic circles" and let students vent feelings than to teach. And unions may be predisposed to reduce class size and increase funding, rather than acknowledge these thoroughly discredited ideas. But citizens will not find it easier to live in a society where students—while constantly talking about their feelings—are never taught to respect other students’ feelings, let alone find their country on a map.

The solution to these problems is not to give up and/or withdraw passively. If ever there was an issue that demanded attention, and a time that demanded an informed and responsive citizenry, this is the issue, and now is the time. In New York City, a single feisty grandmother, Mary Cummins, was fed up with the trendy "Children of the Rainbow" curriculum being pushed by the education elites on the Manhattan School Board. She got on the phone and rallied thousands of like-minded parents to the cause and successfully stopped, not only the curriculum, but chancellor Joseph Fernandez, who was sacked.

In Pennsylvania, Peg Luksik led a grassroots campaign that successfully pushed through a bill that would allow local communities to throw out the OBE curriculum. And in Littleton, Colorado, outraged parents and voters tossed out virtually the entire school board and replaced them with a slate of pro-family, pro-American, and pro-education officials committed to restoring the traditional character and integrity of the schools.

Goals 2000 is not the responsible educational reform the Administration and the education elites would like people to think it is. It is a totalitarian, top-down program of social indoctrination that will not lead to superior performance and academic excellence, but the dumbing down of American culture and a form of mindless passivity that would place this nation in peril.

The answer is to defund the Department of Education, dismiss the National Education Association and other parasites who feed on dysfunction, and restore the power to the people in America’s communities. Pray for godly wisdom; protest the policies being inflicted on local schools by state and federal authorities; push the elitists off the school boards, and replace them with people of conviction and courage; and pass the word along to everyone you know. And finally, join with those who are speaking out on behalf of our children and our schools.

You can contact this organization:

Separation of School & State Alliance
4578 N. First Suite 310
Fresno, CA 93726
(209) 292-1776

For further reading:

Pamela Hoffecker, Peg Luksik. Outcome Based Education: The State’s Assault on Our Children’s Values. Vital Issues Press, 1996.
Ron Sunseri. Outcome Based Education: Understanding the Truth About Education Reform. Portland: Multnomah Press, 1994.
Thomas Sowell. Inside American Education: The Decline, the Deception, the Dogmas. New York: Free Press, 1992.

On the World Wide Web:

Eagle Forum: http://www.basenet.net/~eagle/educate/educate.html
Citizens for Excellence in Education: http://www.nace-cee.org/
Parent’s Information Network: http://www.christianparents.com/
Leadership University (search on "outcome based education"): http://www.leaderu.com

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Copyright 1997, Coral Ridge Ministries. All rights reserved.