Now that the President has declared education his top priority for his second term, and is about to pour $51 billion into school reform, the time has come for all good parents to come to the aid of their children. Despite the President's good intentions, the school reform that officiallly started in 1983 under President Reagan and continued under President Bush, has been sputtering and backfiring throughout these 15 years as a result of confusion in leadership and implementation, a confusion that could spell big trouble. Unfortunately, most parents (and taxpayers) have been unaware of the complexity and ramifications of the reforms. For this reason, a short, and critical, summary would be in order.

The original impetus for reform was the bad performance of American students on international tests designed to draw comparisons between student eductional achievement in key countries of the post-WW2 world. The poor showing prompted a Presidential Commission in 1983 to prepare a report known as A NATION AT RISK calling for drastic reform of the educational system. As resources began to be mobilized, the nation's governors in 1989 drew up a series of goals for American schools known as America 2000. With the election of President Clinton, this evolved into federal legislation known as Goals 2000: Educate America Act, with the subtitle "A Strategy for Reinventing Our Schools" This was signed into law by the President in 1994. Goals 2000 has since propelled the reform movement into an elaborate plan for the complete overhaul of American education from its ultimate goals to the operation and organization of schools.

Other federal legislation quickly complemented Goals 2000. One (HR6) dealt with the needs of the disadvantaged and with providing students with health, psychological, and other social services. Another, entitled the School-To-Work Opportunities Act of 1994 (HR 2884), outlined an elaborate plan to have schools provide every student with the skills necessary to qualify for "high-skill, high-wages employment opportunities." Since federal funding would be funneled through state agencies, most states have passed legislation and undertaken initiatives that would parallel the federal legislation, thereby assuring the flow of such funds.

How has this federal legislation affected the educational process? Here are a few examples. From the acquisition of basic academic knowledge that would provide students with skills and information leading to a wholesome and productive life, the primary purpose of education has become to instill in children an attitude toward learning that deemphasizes facts and knowledge and emphasizes politically correct social, psychological and global thinking. The original goals of Goals 2000 have become literally thousands of "Outcomes" affecting every grade level, every program, every course, and most graduation requirements. Other 'novelties' that have been introduced include untested teaching methodologies, unusual approaches to curriculum and testing, ways and means of forming partnerships with businesses and other community groups, the introduction of all kinds of new technologies into the classroom, mandatory community service, new roles for teachers, administrators, students and parents, and providing various social services including a National School Health Services Program.

While Goals 2000 has been the driving force behind the first five years of the reform, a new and still unproven theory of education known as Outcomes-Based Education (OBE) has been its major vehicle. This movement, led primarily by sociologists and psychologists such as William Spady, Benjamin Bloom, and William Glasser, maintains that education for the coming century must provide for "the social, emotional, and psychological growth" of children in addition to academic knowledge. This echoes Goal No. 8 of Goals 2000: "By the year 2000, every school will promote partnerships that will increase parental involvement and participation in promoting the social, emotional, and academic growth of children." Since comparative international testing shows American students deficient in academic knowledge, the new goals seem to be questionable.

Between 1990 and 1995 the public school classroom has likewise undergone a series of drastic changes. Here are a few: students no longer sit in rows of desks, but in groups of four or six; the teacher no longer teaches as in the past, but serves as a 'facilitator' who visits the various groups and provides help; the students are encouraged to 'discover' knowledge by working together on 'real-life projects' that encompass several disciplines at once(English, Social Studies, Science and Math, etc); this 'cooperative learning' process often leads to a 'group grade' which does not always reflect individual achievement; homework, memorization and grades are discouraged; traditional discipline is minimized; and class periods are based on 'block scheduling' that often doubles the length of classes, causing serious disruption in the school day and year.

The basic reform is really an attempt to make school children live not in a world of learning, but in a make-believe 'real world' of 'adult' life while in school. The ultimate goals - or standards or outcomes, as they are also known - of "self-directed learning" and "higher-order thinking skills" have prompted columnist Paul Greenberg to remark that today's reform"stresses not the substance of learning but its technique, not content but form, not what will be taught but how to log on to the Internet - and finally, not learning for its own sake but as an instrument of national power."

The haste to implement as much of the reform as possible during President Clinton's first term led to the anomaly of having the most ambitious education reform movement in this country's history resting on foundations that are untested and lacking in solid research. The results were predictable. According to the National Education Goals Report of 1995, the greater portion of the goals in Goals 2000 have yet to be achieved. What is more, the papers continue reporting the rampant illiteracy of American students and their bad performance on international tests, not to mention the increased violence and drug use during school hours. The first five years of the reform have not been very successful.

The election of President Clinton to a second term has given new impetus to the movement. The managed health-care reform proposed early in his first term has now been replaced by the attempt to create a managed workforce. As the movement gathered steam and additional federal legislation was enacted, a slew of agencies and other bureaucracies arose to expedite it. The proliferation of changes and the availability of funds have led to increasing calls for 'innovations' and 'restructuring' by self-serving groups. This is where the second five-year plan enters the picture.

Leading the way in this phase have been the nation's governors, headed by Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin, and the CEOs of the top corporations and businesses, headed by IBM's Louis Gerstner. Insisting that the group is only interested in how to develop and implement high academic standards for students and use new technologies to improve teaching, learning and schools, the nearly 100 governors and CEOs held a key Summit at IBM headquarters in N.Y. in the spring of 1996. The governors have held two more Summits since then and have established a separate 'Entity,'called ACHIEVE which will direct the implementation of their proposals. The basic policy adopted at the 1996 Summit calls for all states to establish internationally competitive academic standards, assessment tools, and accountability systems within two years. The business leaders also agreed to change their hiring practices to consider a potential employee's high school transcript in making hiring decisions and to take into consideration the quality of a state's standards when making business location or expansion decisions. Federal approval of these plans may be seen in the first action taken by the 105th Congress: changing the name of the Education Committee to the Committee on Education and The Workforce.

Using as its props Goals 2000 and HR2884 (the STW Act of '94) with their call for a wider range of community partnerships, this group's proposals are aimed primarily at preparing a twenty-first century workforce second to none in the world. Big Government and Big Business are thus dictating to the states and to school districts how their schools will have to change if they want financial support to help prepare this super-workforce.

The rallying cry for this plan is "high-skills, high-wages employment opportunities" for all students, based on a "Human Resources Development Plan" devised by a sidekick of Hillary Clinton, Marc Tucker, who, like William Spady in the first five- year plan, mysteriously appeared on the scene as a 'change agent' of the Carnegie Corporation of N.Y. Tucker earned his undergraduate degree in American literature and philosophy from Brown in 1961, worked for a public TV station in Boston as a cameraman and part-time researcher, and then climbed the bureaucratic ladder of government service, becoming director of the National Institute of Education under President Nixon in 1972. He left government service in 1981 to avoid working for President Reagan, and joined for the Carnegie Corporation on a grant to do research on the use of computers and telecommunications in education. His Carnegie superiors were so impressed with his work that in 1985 he was appointed executive director of the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy for which he wrote the famous report on teaching, "A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century" released in 1986. In it he called for the creation of national teaching standards and the radical restructuring of the organization and management of America's schools as the only means of producing the high skill levels among American workers that would be needed in the next century. In 1988 Tucker was invited by Governor Mario Cuomo and other leaders of the Rochester, N.Y. community to move what was now known as the NCEE to that city to help the City School District become a laboratory for the state and the teachers' union to restructure operations in order to produce much higher levels of student performance. By 1995 the project was declared a failure.

Through a series of reports, the NCEE and its subsidiaries quickly emerged as the primary source of information that led to the first Governors' Education Summit in 1989, as well as to federal legislation intended to carry out its recommendations.

A Commission created by the NCEE issued a report in 1990, written by Tucker with the collaboration of Hillary Clinton and Ira Magaziner, calling for dramatic changes in the way American employers organize work and in the way the nation educates and trains workers if it wished to reverse its descent into a low- skill, low-wage economy. Among the recommendations were a national examination system, an alternative system for dropout recovery, a national-apprenticeship program, incentives for employers to train employees and restructure the workplace, a system for restructuring postsecondary education, a school-to- work transition program that would become a national model, new forms of skills certification, such as the Certificate of Initial Mastery, that would eventually replace the regular diploma ,and the establishment of one-stop local employment and training centers providing essential services for job seekers. The well- known SCANS report issued in 1992 by the Department of Labor, clearly reflects the Center's ideas.

As the Center's influence grew, it established a series of alliances, corporations, partnerships, centers, and projects encompassing a majority of the states and many individual school districts. It was instrumental in establishing the New Standards Project at the University of Pittsburgh which is working on elaborate plans for the new testing methods needed by the reforms. This influence naturally permeated the interest and work of the nation's governors who in turn proceeded to recruit and cultivate the partnership of the foremost CEOs.

This is the phase of the current reforms that is most disconcerting and that poses several problems. First off, the leaders of the movement do not have the credentials called for by perhaps the most radical attempt to "reinvent" American education since John Dewey. Like Tucker, very few governors or CEOs are sufficiently experienced in the field of education to recognize its special needs and requirements. Most of Tucker's projects represent money-making enterprises. Thus, the leaders of the second five-year plan are even less competent to initiate radical education reforms than those of the first plan.

Secondly, the superimposing of additional reforms (STW) on the earlier and still incomplete ones (OBE, schools as community centers, etc.) is creating chaos in the classroom. Not only is there very little solid research to justify the adoption of many of the new ideas, but teachers are sadly unprepared for such drastic novelties. Most classroom work consists of ad hoc accomodation to the new fads, as teachers try to cope with such "standards" as a graduation (or exit) requirement that states that students will acquire "knowledge of all subject areas to solve real-life problems and to handle real-work situations."

Thirdly, the alacrity with which the federal government and the giant corporations have decided to become involved in education reform, which in the past was almost the exclusive purview of state and local authorities, is highly puzzling. Their dependence on educrats, change agents, and both public and private agencies with questionable competency that seem to crop up overnight make their participation suspect and even dangerous. As with the concept of the "gentle bulldozer," that has been used to describe the reform movement, there seems to be no stopping their initiatives to overhaul education from top to bottom. Despite their assertions that the movement represents top-down funding for bottom-up reform, the opposite seems to be true. This contradiction is caught beautifully in the title of the book by IBM CEO Louis Gerstner, REINVENTING EDUCATION: ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN AMERICA'S SCHOOLS.

Finally, the speed with which the reform movement is proceeding, and the resulting confusion on the part of teachers, students and administrators, seem to be spawning still greater bewilderment among parents and communities. This may be seen in the increasing number of students being taken out of public schools and sent to private schools or homeschooled over the past five years. It may also be seen in the increasing violence in the schools, in the number of dropouts, in the increasing early retirements by teachers, in the increasing school taxes, and in the growing number of college students needing remediation. Perhaps best of all it may be seen in the continuing mediocre performance of American students when compared with students of other countries.

As education critic and activist Thomas DeWeese has observed regarding the STW program, big business has joined forces with the Federal Department of Labor, the Department of Education, the Chamber of Commerce and the National Governors Association to turn schools into job-training facilities. Gone are the liberal arts programs that provided well-rounded academic teaching, the student's freedom of choice to make his own career decisions, as well as his individuality and his ability to adapt to new technology through the shear force of his over-all academic knowledge. He has become a "human resource" to fill the needs of the "workforce."

The questions being asked by bewildered parents are many: Will my child be forced too early into a particular career? Will my child drop out of school once he feels the attraction of earning money? Isn't talking about career goals in an English or Social Studies or Math class taking time away from the academic substance of those classes? How can teachers and schools keep up with everything that is being thrown at them? Isn't the idea of filling schools with make-believe shops, post-offices, and travel agencies run by students rather ridiculous?

So, what are ordinary parents and citizens to do? There is a simply answer: shut off the federal and state money spigots. Most of the federal legislation adopted so far has provided funding for the first five-year plan. Funding for the second five years is being held up by legislators able to perceive the black hole that is developing as reform plans mushroom. The 104th Congress considered two parallel bills to supply the needed funds. One was HR1617, known as the CAREERS Act (Consolidated and Reformed Education, Employment and Rehabilitation Systems Act). It paralleled S180 (Workforce Development Act) sponsored by Senator Kennedy. Both bills called for "non-stop career centers" (located mostly in schools) which would be capable of training and delivering a dependable and obedient workforce wherever it is needed. They would replace the School-To-Work Opportunities Act of 1994, and provide all the necessary funding for the next five years. After that the burden would fall on local districts. Fortunately, both bills were never reported out of committee in the last Congress. There is little question that sponsors will re-introduce them, including increased funding as promised by President Clinton.

States have likewise been scurrying to be eligible for the funds. Oregon has led the way, urged on by Marc Tucker and Ira Magaziner, by passing as early as 1991, a bill entitled the Oregon Educational Act for the 21st Century, combining principles of OBE and STW and providing abundant funds for the remainder of the century. Many other states have followed suit, imitating the Oregon bill almost verbatim. This includes New York, where Assembly Bill 3889 was successfully bottled up in committee in the 1996 legislative session. A sponsor of the bill, now renumbered A5077, has promised to reintroduce it. At a Regents' meeting last December, a report was presented on the status and early evaluation results of the School-to-Work initiative which the N.Y. Department of Education has been implementing over the past two years with a federal STW Implementation Grant of $60.3 million dollars. The report declares the program a success and refers to it as "an engine driving school reform in New York State."

It is incumbent upon concerned parents and citizens to flood their federal and state legislatures with demands that these bills, intended to fund the current shaky reforms, be defeated or kept bottled in committee until such time as a careful, comprehensive blueprint for reforming American schools is drawn up.