Writing the Tucker Plan into Law
By Allen Quist
Bills are being introduced in Congress that,
if passed, will write much of the Marc Tucker education plan into law. The
most significant of these bills so far is the Dodd-Ehlers Standards to Provide 
Educational
Achievement for All Kids Act (SPEAK) S 224, HR 325, also referred
to as the “Dodd-Ehlers Bill” or “SPEAK.” Future bills will likely be forthcoming
to implement other features of the Tucker plan.
What does Tuckers’ plan hope to accomplish?
The focal point of his proposal, says Tucker, is to “to adopt internationally benchmarked standards
for educating” our students and workers (Executive Summary of the Tucker Report,
paragraph 1, emphasis added). He says again that in order to improve education,
we must enable students to “succeed against internationally benchmarked
education standards” (Executive Summary, p. 12).
What are “internationally benchmarked
education standards?” In the field of education, the word “standards”
means two things. (1) It means “content standards,” or “curriculum,” the
subject matter schools are to teach, and (2) it means “achievement standards,”
the level of accomplishment regarding the curriculum that students must achieve
as measured by tests of some kind. “Benchmarks” are the detail of the
curriculum and the tests. So the term “internationally benchmarked education
standards” means international
curriculum and international tests (Emphasis added).
What
international curriculum and tests does Tucker have in mind? He clarifies on
page 87 of his Report that he favors the Program for International Student
Assessment (PISA) tests and curriculum. PISA are the
politically-correct international tests and curriculum favored by the
postmodern left. They focus on fuzzy math instead of traditional math, and they
disregard errors in spelling, punctuation and grammar while they ignore reading
fluency and comprehension in favor of students being able to “construct” and
“reflect” on what they have read.
Not surprisingly, PISA tests give far different
results than knowledge-based tests. When Tucker calls for “internationally
benchmarked standards,” he wants to give the impression he is speaking of high
expectations on academic knowledge and skills. Nothing could be further from
the truth. The PISA tests are all about political-correctness and the leftist
worldview; they do a poor job of measuring knowledge and skills. (For an
analysis of fuzzy math and the damage it is doing to our children, see my book America's Schools: The
Battleground for Freedom.)
All
educational curricula and achievement tests are based on a political and
educational philosophy. The philosophy of the PISA tests Tucker prefers is not
consistent with the worldview and wishes of most parents and other citizens in
the United States. Perhaps that is why his plan also calls for
the elimination of locally elected school boards.
International Education
The international PISA
tests and curriculum are consistent with the international education system
already being followed by the United States. President George Bush Sr., on
behalf of the United States, signed the international education agreement known
as The World Conference on Education for All
(EFA) (1990), an
accord overseen by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO). This international agreement required the United States
to establish a national system of education as opposed to a state and local
system a feat largely accomplished by the Goals
2000 Act of 1994.
The updated version of EFA was formulated in
2000 and is known as The Dakar Framework for Action. It was signed by President
Bill Clinton before he left office. This second international agreement,
commonly known as “Dakar,” is an expansion of the
1990 Education for All agreement.
On October 3, 2003, in a speech to UNESCO,
U.S. Education Secretary Rod Paige said: “Education for All is
consistent with our recent education legislation, the No Child Left Behind Act.” Paige also said that the United States and
UNESCO were pursuing a “common strategy” and were “implementing joint action”
in education policy. The reason No Child Left Behind is consistent with Dakar is because it (NCLB) was structured to meet the
requirements of the international agreements.
The Content (Curriculum) of International Education
The
Education for All website explains the international curriculum participating
countries are expected to teach. Paragraph 58 says education should:
“strengthen respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms as proclaimed in
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
[UDHR] (Article 26).” And what does Article 26 of UDHR say? It says
education “shall further the activities of the United Nations.” In other words, at Dakar the United States
agreed to design an education curriculum that promotes the activities of the UN
including treaties and documents America has not signed such as the UDHR, the Treaty on the Rights of the Child, Kyoto, the UN Treaty on Biodiversity, the Earth
Charter and the treaty establishing the new UN Criminal Court, to name just
a few.
Like PISA,
the curriculum required by the UN documents and treaties focus on attitudes,
values and worldview, not high knowledge-based expectations. The Earth
Charter, for example, calls for legalized abortion, gay marriage, income
redistribution within nations and between nations, military disarmament and
education in Pantheism along with numerous other positions of the hard left. Dakar requires the United States to
promote the political agenda of the UN in its education curriculum.
Do these international education agreements
have the force of law in the United States? No. Since the agreements have never
been ratified by the Senate, they do not have the force of law in and of
themselves. The signatures of U.S. Presidents on these agreements, however, means
the agreements are now the education policy of the executive branch of
government. Since the Department of Education is an arm of the
executive branch, it is expected to comply with the international agreements and
it does.
In addition, Goals 2000, School-to-Work
and NCLB have written key features of
the international agreements into our law. The Tucker plan does more of the same. The following is a
description of how it will work.
Writing the Tucker Plan into Law
Tucker
explains that his plan will require students to pass new Board Exams. He says:
“Our
first step is creating a set of Board Examinations. States will have their own
Board Examinations, and some national and even international organizations will
offer their own. A Board Exam is an exam in a set of core subjects that is
based on a syllabus provided by the Board. So the point of the exam is to find
out whether the student has learned from the course what he or she was supposed
to learn” (Executive Summary of the Report,
p. 10).
As stated by Tucker, these Boards will
determine the content that students must learn and will also write the tests to
see if the students learned what they were supposed to. But Tucker says he is
speaking of content and tests written at three levels of government: state,
national and international. (Tucker also indicates that we need a singular
national curriculum.) How can curriculum and tests written by three levels of
governance be brought into conformity? The
answer to that question is provided in the SPEAK
Act (S.224, H.R.325), the Dodd-Ehlers
Bill. According to the bill summary of SPEAK provided by the New America Foundation, this bill does the
following:
“Purpose:
To create, adopt, and implement rigorous, voluntary American education content
standards in math and science in grades K-12 and incentivize states to adopt them. [The bill]: 1. Tasks the National Assessment Governing Board…with
creating…national content standards in math and science for grades K-12.” (Emphasis
added.)
These “American education content standards
in math and science” have already been written; that is why the bill says the
board can “adopt” as well as “create” national standards (curriculum). (Look
for other bills to add in the other subject areas.)
The
effect of the Dodd-Ehlers Bill is
to (1) legitimize the national education content standards (national curriculum)
already written, (2) authorize the National Assessment Governing Board (NAG
Board)
to adopt or change the curriculum, (3) give this non-elected board the authority
to dictate the educational content and tests for all our schools, and (4)
equip the NAG Board to “incentivize” (force) the states to adopt their curriculum.
Non-elected Education Gatekeepers
Since
the voting members of the NAG Board are appointed by the President of the
United States, one non-elected board will now have the authority to dictate the
education content for all public schools as well as the authority to write the
important tests. According to Tucker’s plan, the resulting Board Exams, first
given in tenth grade, will determine if a child can continue in school or not.
A second Board Exams will dictate if students may attend college or not. This non-elected Board, therefore, serving at
the wishes of the President, becomes the education gatekeeper for the children
of our country. As explained above, these Board Exams will be more
interested in measuring the attitudes and values desired by the hard left than
in measuring knowledge-based academic achievement.
As noted above, the United
States already agreed to teach the UNESCO curriculum when our Presidents signed
Dakar. The Dodd-Ehlers Bill gives Dakar the force of law. In
this way the central features of the international education agreements will
become law in the United States without ever facing hearings or a ratification
vote in the U.S. Senate. The Constitution
of the United States will have been effectively bypassed.
International
Baccalaureate as Prototype
The
UNESCO curriculum is now being taught in some 680 American schools in the form
of the International Baccalaureate (IB) program. In 1996 the International
Baccalaureate Organization (IBO) formed a ‘partnership’ with UNESCO to form a
pilot program for what the IBO and UNESCO websites describe as an
“international education system.”
The IB curriculum focuses on students and
faculty becoming what IB calls “world citizens.” Faculty and students are
expected to memorize the 10 values of world citizenship.
(The Ten Commandments have been replaced with the 10 values of IBO-UNESCO.)
These IB values are vague and non-academic. IBO refers to them as the
“attitudes and values” that are central to the IBO curriculum. Like PISA, the
IBO curriculum does not focus on knowledge, it focuses
on the attitudes and values of the internationalist left.
The central theme of these IB values is
explained in a power-point presentation on the IBO webpage. One frame asks the
question: “Freedom fighter or terrorist? [According to] Mahatma Gandhi: Honest
disagreement is often a good sign of progress.” This frame defines the moral relativism and multiculturalism that is
central to the IBO curriculum terrorists only exist in the minds of some people, it’s all a matter of one’s perspective. In
direct contrast, the United States creed, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, insists that truth and morality are
real and universal not mere cultural constructs.
Which Direction Shall We Take?
Other
details in the Tucker plan make his agenda easier to accomplish. Those details
include: (1) having teachers be hired by the state, (2) having states take over
teacher certification (3) requiring that teacher education is based on the
Board’s curriculum, (4) establishing universal pre-school (the structure
already exists to force the same international curriculum on pre-school
education, and (5) establishing merit pay for teachers who help facilitate the
system.
The big question in education ‘reform’ today
is this: “What values and worldview
will form the foundation for the curriculum and tests?” Will we follow the fundamental principles of
the United States as stated in our Declaration
of Independence and Constitution?
Or will the foundation be the ideology of the postmodern, internationalist
left? That is the question.
If the internationalist plan is not what we
want, what can be done to stop it? We must (1) prevent the Tucker plan
and the Dodd-Ehlers Bill from becoming
law. (2) The United States should withdraw from the international education
agreements. (3) The U.S. Department of Education should be prohibited from
writing a national curriculum, regardless of it being “voluntary” or in the
form of “education standards.” (4) The United States should once again withdraw
from UNESCO. (5) Curriculum decisions must always be in the hands of elected
people who are accountable to the public. (6) Pre-school education needs to
be protected from the ideological and political curriculum being imposed on
it, and (7) For real academic progress, we need to go back to the pre-progressive
education policies that produced far better academic results than we see today.
That includes giving parents much more choice than they have today.
