Marc Tucker's New Education Initiative
By Allen Quist
On December 14, 2006, Marc Tucker released
his new education proposal, Tough Choices or Tough Times. His plan
reads like a bad novel. It is mostly rhetoric, and the claims he makes are
fantasy-land variety. If America adopts his plan, according to Tucker, the
following will happen: “No one will fail,” he says; and, “we can send almost
everyone to college and have them do well there,” Tucker insists; and “95%
of our students will [be qualified for college].” Such wild claims are not
only unreasonable, they are bizarre. Any experienced teacher knows they are
utopian, at best. And does 
Tucker
offer any real evidence his plan can improve education? He does not.
What is Tucker up to? When reading his proposal,
it becomes evident that Tucker has bigger things in mind than merely helping
kids learn. The heart and center of his master plan is stated on page 1, paragraph
1, of his Executive Summary. Tucker says that “to compete in the world economy,
the United States must adopt internationally benchmarked standards for educating
its students and workers.”
Internationally Benchmarked Standards
Most every government has its own education
system. The Tucker proposal transforms our education system into what is
essentially a UN government system.
Can Tucker succeed in selling his radical
system? He may. He is counting on business to help sell the proposal. Many of
them will see the plan as a way of certifying the same basic job skills for all
the workers of the world with the training done at taxpayer expense, no less. This way businesses can move skilled workers around the
world the same way they move minerals, oil and technology.
Tucker's new proposal, like his earlier one,
also makes all education vocational (Karl Marx saw education the same way). But
will it work to reduce education to being good for vocation only, to define
education merely as the provider of human resources for business? It will not.
Kids will figure out that their worth is being measured in terms of being
assets for large corporations. They will see that they have been reduced to
being cogs on impersonal economic wheels.
What
Does It Mean To Be Human?
Kids
haven't viewed vocational programs this way up to now. Why will it change? The
reason it will change is that kids have had the freedom in high school to
choose either a vocational or a college-bound track. They have been free to
experiment, to try different things. Some in each track change their minds and
switch over to another track. That is as it should be.
Under Tucker's proposal, however, students
who don't pass the 10th grade test have no choice. They cannot go on to
college. The door is closed. No one will be educated beyond his or her station
in life. Doing so is seen as a waste of resources. Student freedom will be
severely limited, and Tucker's statement that 95% will pass doesn't help,
because fantasy offers no real solutions.
Under Tucker's plan even college is viewed
as strictly vocational; college just prepares one for different vocations.
Tucker's plan won't work because it severely limits our freedom and it defines
people's worth only in terms of dollars and cents, the utilitarian philosophy
of education. Kids are reduced to being resources whose lives will be directed
by someone else. Kids will realize the whole philosophy of education has
changed, they have become objects. Kids intuitively know they were made to be
much more than that.
Kids have other aspirations: aspirations
like marriage and family, aspirations like hobbies and entertainment,
aspirations like understanding themselves and the world in which they live,
aspirations like music, art and athletics, aspirations like freedom,
aspirations like being loyal Americans, like serving in the military, like
being good citizens and being good neighbors to those less fortunate. Kids have
aspirations of what it means to be human. Tucker doesn't understand that. He
wants to control people the same way we control iron and coal.
We need to build on our strengths, not
destroy them. The strength of our economic and education systems has been the
degree to which they have been free, thus providing the opportunities for
people to be innovative and creative. You can't have freedom and innovation and
reduce people to being controlled objects at the same time. Why doesn't the
Marxist view of education work? It treats people as being less than human.
The
Next Big Step from NCLB
Marc
Tucker's earlier proposal in 1990, which he admits didn't work, provided the
framework for this new plan. That proposal was largely put into effect in
the Goals 2000 and School-To-Work Acts passed
by Congress in 1994. School-to-Work
spawned the requirement that students be put in a career track by
the 8th grade. Goals
2000 shifted the decision-making authority for school content away from
local school districts and states over to the federal government. It did so
by establishing a de facto federal curriculum known as the National
Education Standards. These national standards were actually a national
curriculum. (See my book Fed Ed: The
New Federal Curriculum and How It’s Enforced, EdWatch, 2002. For a detailed
description of how the national standards have severely damaged our education
program, see my work America's Schools:
The Battleground for Freedom, EdWatch, 2005.)
No Child Left Behind (NCLB)
solidified the federal government's role in controlling the schools academic
program. It did so by (1) requiring all states to adopt state curriculum
standards (which are mostly based on the federal curriculum), (2) requiring
schools to eliminate achievement differences measured by adequate yearly
progress (AYP), an impossible Marxist objective, and (3) requiring that the
NAEP (National Assessment of Education Progress) be given in all states to
ensure that states don't deviate from the fed's lead. (The NAEP is based on the
federal curriculum.)
The education radicals complained, however,
insisting that states still had too much leeway in defining their academic
program. Not any more. That already-limited freedom disappears under Tucker's
new proposal because it transfers the education-content authority away from
local schools and states and away from the federal government over to the
United Nations. Decision-making authority takes 
another
giant step away from the parents and local communities. The education branch
of the UN (UNESCO, which stands for United Nations Educational, Scientific
and Cultural Organization) has already been writing curriculum and has begun
to write textbooks, much of it taking place under the UN's education program
known as International Baccalaureate (IB).
UN
Curriculum
What
content will the United Nations decide must be taught? The UN has already made
the content of its international standards perfectly clear. Required content
will include education for sustainable development, as defined by its Earth Charter, which includes abortion
rights, gay marriage, indoctrination in Pantheism, universal disarmament,
income redistribution between nations, and advocacy of all the UN environmental
treaties, to identify just a few of its doctrines.
The UN's required content will also include
its Universal Declaration of Human Rights
which says that people have no inalienable rights but have only those rights
the UN says they have. (This is the same view of human rights as that of
Castro's Cuba.) This UN document also clarifies that education must
promote the UN and all its activities and says that the UN is the highest court
of appeals on all human rights issues, higher even than our own Supreme Court.
The UNs required content will also include the dictates of its Treaty on the Rights of the Child which
says that parents have no right to decide what their children will be taught.
That right will now belong to the UN.
The
New Plan of the Same Old Gang
Who
is Marc Tucker? He founded the National
Center for Education and the Economy (NCEE), a prime force behind the 1994
federal Goals 2000/ School-to-Work
education plan, which culminated in the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act. In 1992, Tucker described his plan as a
"human resources development system for the United States" that
"extends from cradle to grave." (This is the same view of education
as that held by Karl Marx.)
And who are the Tucker supporters for this
radical plan? They are the same old gang that gave us Goals 2000 and School-to-Work:
former Michigan Governor, John Engler; former Clinton Secretary of Education,
Richard Riley; former Clinton Under-secretary of Education, Michael Cohen;
former Carter Secretary of Labor, Ray Marshall; and Fordham Foundation
President, Chester Finn to name a few.
How does Tucker propose to accomplish this
massive shift of political power? He would:
1. Eliminate local school boards.
2. Shift teacher's employment and
compensation from local boards to the state.
3. Require that students pass 10th grade
tests, based on UN content standards, in order to be free to continue in a
school.
4. Make free college preparatory education
(based on UN content standards) available for all present workers.
5. Establish universal pre-school for all
children. (Even though scientific research reveals that pre-school has no
academic benefit past 3rd grade. Other programs are inserting the UN's curriculum
into pre-school education, as well as child care.)
6. Create regional development authorities
that will plan economic development as well as education in areas larger than
states. These authorities will be given the power to tax and will take over
what little authority the states have left.
7. Have states take over teacher training
which can be expected to require teachers to follow the UN value system.
(Private colleges that train teachers will be out of luck. Private colleges
will also lose their right to determine who may attend their colleges and who
may not, because admission requirements will be dictated by, and measured by,
the government.)
8. Establish merit-pay for teachers who best
meet the goals of the plan.
Tucker's cost estimate for his plan is as
ludicrous as the claims he makes for it. He says it will cost $7.8 billion per
year more than we are now paying. That estimate assumes that his goals, such as
having 95% of students perform so well they will succeed in college, actually
happen. If his fanciful objectives do not occur, the cost of the plan mushrooms
to $75 billion per year (EdWatch estimate).
Giving
Away our Freedom
Tucker's
plan is the next big step. All of education will be geared to international
standards. That means the UN sets the standards. Since the tests are geared to
the standards, the UN will also dictate the content of the tests. Do teachers
teach to the test? Yes they do, especially when they are paid more when
students conform to the international curriculum. Tucker puts it this way, “the
old saw that what gets measured is what gets taught is essentially true.”
Tucker adds that the course syllabi
(content) and the content of any private tests need to be controlled, too. His
new system dictates to teachers and schools what they shall teach, and test
makers, including states, are told what they shall test. In addition, the
states will be told what they must teach the teachers. It will be one
unified, controlled, monolithic, worldwide education system.
The Tucker initiative claims to be about education,
and in a sense it is; but it is more about control. The plan is all about
the question of who will run our schools. Under the Tucker plan, business
becomes the customer and the UN sets the production standards and directs
the show. How about the rest of us? We are the worker bees, the drones who get to provide the resources so the queen can exude her
royal jelly.
Allen Quist is adjunct professor at Bethany Lutheran College in Mankato,
Minnesota. He served
three terms in the Minnesota legislature and has authored three books on education:
The Seamless Web, Fed
Ed: The New Federal Curriculum and How It’s Enforced, and America's Schools: The Battleground for Freedom. Allen’s wife, Julie, is Vice President of
EdWatch (www.edwatch.org) which is committed to educating the public about
the unprecedented movement of the U.S. workforce, the U.S. economy and the
entire educational system toward a centrally planned and controlled federal
system. The Quists may be reached by calling (952) 361-4931 or e-mailing them
at edwatch@lakes.com.
