ChildCare Action Project:
Christian Analysis of American Culture (CAP)


Overview - Goals 2000
by Kathy Finnegan




This overview of Goals 2000 was graciously provided by the work of two very special people. First I present that Mrs. Joan Battey of an educational email loop reproduced this material with permission from the author. Thank you, Joan. The next special mention is for the author herself: Kathy Finnegan.

All text between the horizontal bars with cyan fill below is verbatim from the email from Mrs. Battey. My only contribution is in preparing this into HTML and posting it to the CAP website with hypertext links to the topics within the article.

Thomas A. Carder
President
ChildCare Action Project: Christian Analysis of American Culture (CAP)
P. O. Box 177
Granbury, TX 76048-0177


Introduction | Title 1 | Title 2 | Title 3 | Title 4 | Title 5 | Title 6 | Title 7 | Title 8 | Title 9 | Title 10 | Book Info




Kathy Finnegan, author of "GOALS 2000: Restructuring our Schools, Restructuring Society" has given us the following brief overview of Goals 2000. She had been told by a friend that people needed to know what was in her book but were always "too busy to read it" when it was mentioned to them.

It is rare that an author will take the time to oblige those "too busy to read" what took such effort to write, by writing the following. She feels that people MUST know the facts, and if putting this added effort in will help, she is glad to do it.

THERE IS ONE PROVISO: You may recopy and circulate, but only in complete format, including all attributions and book purchase information.

We are proud that Kathy has honored us with the request to circulate her synopsis.

Joan

_________________________


This article may be copied provided it is duplicated in its entirety without changes.

Bite-size Pieces of GOALS 2000 to Ruminate On
by Kathy Finnegan
Introduction:
Ever since publication of my 350-page book, analyzing GOALS 2000, title-by-title, I've been asked to summarize what's in the law and to comment on its current and anticipated fallout. Since everyone is affected by this legislation signed by Bill Clinton on March 31, 1994, it's important that all of us taxpayers, parents, concerned relatives of school-age children - have a general grasp of what the law actually contains. As I'm sure most are aware, GOALS 2000 is our national centerpiece educational reform/restructuring plan, backed up by the force of federal law (P.L.103-227) to be carried out "voluntarily" by the states. Although I find it difficult to create "sound bites" out of 155 pages of complex legislation, knowing that summaries can sometimes accomplish what a book cannot - here goes!

We are told (twice) in the very first paragraph that this is "framework" legislation. A framework, as anyone who has ever seen a house under construction knows, is only the skeletal outline of what the finished product will look like. It's a "work in progress" - and that's what GOALS 2000 is - a law subject to change and expansion with every reauthorization. Those of you familiar with the Johnson administration's Elementary & Secondary Education Act (ESEA) passed in 1965, but reauthorized every five years since, will recognize how the "framework game" is played. The ESEA received more than 12 billion dollars at its last funding go-round.

Despite the repeated usage of the word "voluntary" throughout the law, we're also told in the first paragraph that GOALS 2000 provides a "framework for reauthorization of all Federal programs." How voluntary can this be when other federal education programs (like the ESEA cited above) are now expected to line up with the aims and objectives spelled out in GOALS 2000? Is any state going to risk losing other federal education funding for non-compliance? All 50 states are currently receiving some form of GOALS 2000 money. There were a few initial holdouts, but in 1996, the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) offered individual school districts the option of applying directly for GOALS 2000 funds. The government will not accomplish its purposes unless all schools participate, so they bent over backwards to bring everyone on board.

Title 1
The eight National Education Goals are spelled out in Title l. Summarized they are:

1. School readiness
2. School completion
3. Student achievement and citizenship
4. Teacher education and professional development *
5. First internationally in math and science
6. Adult literacy and lifelong learning
7. Safe, disciplined & alcohol & drug-free schools
8. Parental participation*

* These 2 goals were added to the original 6 in AMERICA 2000.

Many people think of these eight goals as the heart of GOALS 2000, probably because they are the only part of the law which received any real media attention. The eight goals grew directly out of six earlier national education goals contained in AMERICA 2000, the Bush administration predecessor to our current law. Those six goals, in turn, parallel six international education goals adopted at a U.N. sponsored conference in Jomtien, Thailand within months of the launching of AMERICA 2000. I have taken considerable space in my book to document the role of the United Nations and other internationalists (often abetted by wealthy, liberal foundations) in shaping the steady socialist drift of U.S. education. Too many are unaware of the behind the scenes manipulations that go into making our educational policies.

Title 2
This title formally sets up a new entity, the National Education Goals Panel (NEGP). In addition to issuing an annual "report card" on progress toward the national education goals, this body will review and be the final judge of national "standards and assessments." Is this a powerful group? Well, it is if you believe that curriculum and testing are at the heart of any educational program. A national standards and improvement council was also called for in Title 2, but proved so controversial it never got Congressional funding. Critics referred to it as a "national school board." However, what the U.S.DOE doesn't get one way, it usually gets another, and at the Governor's Summit held in 1996, a new "national information clearinghouse" called "Achieve" was formed out of a concern that the standards movement was losing momentum. Achieve, funded by governors and business leaders, is apparently carrying on the work of the defunct national standards council. The Goals Panel will also be looking at "Early Childhood Assessment." (More about this in Title 4.) They're also charged with coordinating a national strategy to infuse technology into all educational programs. If you listened to Clinton's State of the Union address earlier this year, all these themes will have a familiar ring. And I see nothing in the law to prevent the NEGP from adding additional national goals if they choose to.

Title 3
Title 3 called for each state to submit to the U.S.DOE a Statewide Systemic Improvement Plan (SIP) showing that they are in compliance (or working hard at getting in compliance) with the many "suggestions and guidelines" spelled out in GOALS 2000.

Wasn't this supposed to be "voluntary?" Most states dutifully submitted their SIPs, but since some were balking, the absolute requirement was eliminated in 1996. Whatever it takes to get all states on board!

One of the prominent features of this title is the partnershipping of schools with a myriad of outside agencies, services, and businesses, in order to provide non-educational services such as child care, nutrition, health care (including school-based health clinics), social services (including welfare, counseling, and Social Security services), and to establish mechanisms to get students into the work force (emphasizing vocational training and apprenticeships). GOALS 2000 refers to all this coupling of the schools with non-educational activities as "coordinated access." What we did not know at the time of passage of GOALS 2000, but can now see is that Hillary Clinton's failed national health care plan is being brought in through the "back door" using our school children and the public schools as the point of entry. Medicaid funds are being used for a broad range of these services. This is, in fact, one of the radical changes now taking place in our schools. These non-academic programs and services increase the state's primacy in the lives of our children and push Americans ever deeper into a cradle-to-grave managed society. We will, at the present rate, soon be no different than the socialist countries we've seen in this decade imploding under the weight of their failed systems - systems we now seem eager to emulate! Lifelong learning (part of the 6th National Education Goal), and a concept developed by UNESCO, is to be included in every state's Systemic Improvement Plan.

Title 4
This enables the first national educational goal: By the year 2000, all children in America will start school ready to learn. It does this by funding in every state "Parental Information and Resource Centers." In many states the available money will be used to expand and operate already existing programs such as PAT (Parents as Teachers), Home Instruction for Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY) or Success by Six. By whatever name, these are parental training programs aimed at children from birth to (usually) three years. GOALS 2000 affects us all because it addresses the entire lifespan of every citizen from programs like PAT through lifelong learning (whatever that may evolve into over time!)

The PAT program combines group interaction with home visits and while anxious first-time parents might glean some tips on child development and rearing, few are aware that the "nice" social worker who has just visited their home goes back to her office, pulls up the child's cumulative electronic portfolio and enters data on all she has observed in the home. These "certified parent educators" are especially concerned about "risk factors" that might necessitate the services of the health clinics and social service agencies with whom the program is coordinated. Though still voluntary, we see in these programs, the state pushing to assert its primacy over the family. They're sold as parental assistance, but in reality they advance an agenda of parental obsolescence and replacement by state agencies.

Title 5
This creates a National Skill Standards Board charged with establishing a set of national job related standards, complete with the mechanism for testing and certification. To really understand this title, it is necessary to know that at almost the same time GOALS 2000 was signed into law, a related law, The School-to-Work Opportunities Act, P.L.103-239, was also passed. S-T-W established a formal partnership between the U.S. Departments of Education and Labor. One of the collaborations between the two agencies has been to work on an outcomes based apprenticeship program, complete with "portable credentials" (already popping up across the country as Certificates of Mastery). S-T-W is one of the federal laws where grant money is tied to compliance with GOALS 2000 - one of the points of juncture between the "framework" legislation of GOALS 2000 and "reauthorization of all Federal programs." We have certainly not heard the final word on S-T-W and other education-labor linked legislation. Last year we narrowly avoided a managed economy scheme called the CAREERS bill which would have consolidated and greatly expanded S-T-W, the National Skills Standards Board, and many other federal programs that deal in some way with education/labor training. The move away from broadly educating students and leaving it up to them how and where they will apply that education to a much narrower vocational training that fits into a government-designated slot is well underway! Keep your eyes on this; it's a very important socialist agenda item not yet honed to the satisfaction of the one-world economy crowd.

Title 6
This sets up international education exchanges through our U.S. Department of State! These are to be primarily with former Soviet-bloc countries in the areas of civics, government, and economics. Does it surprise you to find this in our centerpiece educational restructuring legislation? To see where such an idea comes from, I begin my book with a 70-year chronology of important events in American education. A look through this should make very visible the normally unseen hand of the United Nations and others of like mind in shaping our educational system. Heading into a one-world economic, political, and eventually religious system - as I contend we are - it makes sense to have the school systems of the world as much in sync as possible.

Title 7
This title began its life as a stand-alone bill, the Safe Schools Act of 1994. As often happens with federal legislation,this one got folded into and became a part of the much larger, fast-track GOALS 2000 bill. Title 7 enables the seventh national education goal, which states:

By the year 2000, every school in the United States will be free of drugs, violence, and the unauthorized presence of firearms and alcohol and will offer a disciplined environment conducive to learning.

Not surprisingly, we get more partnershipping in title 7 - this time between the schools and various law enforcement and community agencies. Emphasis is on programs involving the whole community - the now familiar "It takes a whole village {read that "government bureaucracy"} to raise a child" concept popularized by Hillary Clinton and parroted by the media. Half of the Title 7 money is for a model project to be carried out in Wash. D.C.

Title 8
This provides funds for Minority-Focused Civics Education which apparently is yet another term for diversity/multicultural training. The grant money is to develop and operate accredited summer seminars for teachers and other staff. How likely is it that special presentations to minorities (who are not defined in the law) and Native Americans will do anything other than further divide and polarize an increasingly heterogeneous and contentious nation? What has become of the old "melting pot" where we accepted ourselves and each other as simply Americans, one and all? Clearly that notion, which was once one of the stated missions of American public education, has been tossed out the window.

Title 9
Title 9 is the bloated behemoth of GOALS 2000- nearly 1/3 of the total 155-page law! Like title 7, it began its life as a stand-alone bill, supposedly a "routine" reauthorization of the U.S.DOE's Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI). The OERI is the large office (with field offices and "labs" scattered around the country) from which emanate many of the experimental programs that end up in our classrooms. A close look at this reauthorization quickly revealed that it was far from "routine." In addition to funding for already existing programs, title 9 of GOALS 2000 adds to the OERI empire: a new policies and priorities board, an office of reform assistance and dissemination, a national library, and - the biggest expansion of all - five Institutes (patterned after the National Institutes of Health). Each of the five Institutes is assigned a special mission (one or more of the top priority reform/restructuring agendas).

Title 10
This is the landfill of GOALS 2000. All sorts of odds and ends that didn't fit anywhere else were dumped here. There are no less than 14 separate and unrelated items (sections). Here you will find everything from "Sense of the Congress" sentiments to grants for midnight basketball leagues. Although one of these sections is entitled "Protection of Pupil Rights," and spells out some legal rights in much the same manner as did the Hatch Amendment, parents are going to find enforcement as difficult to come by as the proverbial hen's teeth. How many parents are aware this is included in the final pages of a 155-page law that many still have not even heard of - and fewer still have read?

Anyone reading through the GOALS 2000 legislation will probably be struck with how little it has to do with academics. Yet this is our centerpiece educational restructuring plan and it's the law! I think it apparent that GOALS 2000 is about far more than restructuring/reforming our schools (the stated agenda). When fully played out - paired with other federal legislation and programs - the net result (the real agenda/intended outcome) will be revealed as the total restructuring of American society using schools as the medium of change.

The change agents who brought us this law were very smart to choose one of America's most familiar, trusted, and used institutions - our public schools. And, to be sure, with the well publicized problems of recent decades, the climate was definitely right for federal "crisis intervention" in the name of reform. I find parents are still pretty trusting of their local schools and tend to think the serious problems are occurring in someone else's district or city. However to ignore what's happening everywhere through mandated federal and state programs is to put your children, their future, and the future of our republic at great risk.

If you have a child in the system, you need to be very concerned because that child ("human capital") has been targeted as a valuable resource to the state. The 13 years children spend in government schools is more than ample time to mold the desired attitudes, values, and behaviors sought by those minding the store. While you still have the choice, I urge you to do the one thing that will make GOALS 2000 and related statist plans fail:

DON'T GIVE THEM YOUR CHILDREN!

If you wish to learn more about GOALS 2000, my book is:
   GOALS 2000: Restructuring our Schools,
   Restructuring Society

It's published by and available from:
   Hearthstone Publishing, Ltd.
   500 Beacon Drive
   Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 73127
   1 800 652-1144





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Thomas A. Carder
President
ChildCare Action Project: Christian Analysis of American Culture (CAP)

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