Goals 2000: What's in a Name?.

Abstract

More than decade after President Bush and the nation's governors adopted goals for education for the year 2000, Ms. Ohanian charges that it's time to ask, Whose is being served? GEORGE BUSH the Elder called it America 2000. Bill Clinton calls it Goals 2000. I call it an alphabet soup of bureaucratic interference in the lives of children, and I say to hell it: CEI, CIM, NAEP, NAGB, NASDC, NBPTS, NCEE, NCEST, NEGP, NESIC, NSP, NTFEEG, OBE, OERI, OLT, SCANS, STW, TFTP, TIMSS, TSWE, and more. Much, much more. I admit that NCEST is my favorite acronym. Not because I ever remember what it stands for, but because the way you pronounce it suggests the intertwined relationships of the fiscal opportunists and ideologues promoting Goals 2000. Goals 2000 is, of course, the offspring of A Nation at Risk, teacher- and school-bashing report representing not so much an evaluation of pedagogical practices and student achievement as Zeitgeist of the early 1980s. I wonder what Goals 2000 says about our current ethos - as we cheerfully, nay, avidly, look forward to new age when leaders across the country will echo New York's commissioner of education, Richard Mills, in insisting that subjecting fourth-graders to test they can't pass is good strategy. What can we say about an era that coins the term raising the bar to describe the way it thinks young children should be treated? Writing in these pages exactly 15 years ago, I described the cheap rhetoric emanating from the corporate and political remittance men and their band of consulting mercenaries as being akin to a nasty swarm of bloodsucking mosquitoes. Their bites may not kill, but they sure don't help us do our job.1 At that time, operating from third-grade teacher's realpolitik of This, too, will pass, I shrugged off the documents as just so much ugly rhetoric. I didn't meet one teacher in hundred who even bothered to read the offal. Everybody knew that being teacher meant keeping your focus on children and not allowing yourself to be distracted by tiddly-pom. Times have changed. This time, we can't afford to shrug off the assaults on public education in general and on children in particular as just one more round of pricks from parvenu opportunists looking for easy, vulnerable targets. (Why don't CEOs ever take out after the members of Congress the way they do teachers? Why don't members of Congress ever take out after CEOs the way they do teachers?) We must not be lulled by the fact that as they co-opt the jargon of our trade for their own purposes, the rhetoric of the corporate/politico connivers has cooled. I, for one, don't find much comfort in being called an incompetent in need of scripted lessons rather than cancer on the nation's landscape. This time, the sharp talons of the vultures dig much deeper. Before, they just annoyed us; this time, they're sucking our blood. This time, they can kill us. By the time Congress passed President Clinton's Goals 2000: Educate America Act in March 1994, the infrastructure was already in place. Take look at Reinventing Education: Entrepreneurship in America's Public Schools, by Louis Gerstner, Jr., chairman and CEO of IBM (with Roger Semerad, Denis Doyle, and William Johnston).2 The fact that it was published within month of the passage of Goals 2000 is no coincidence. One of the noteworthy features of Goals 2000 is that Gerstner and his cronies got to name the problem as well as define the solution: claiming the need for choice, competition, and technology in the schools; defining students as human capital and the teaching/learning compact as protected monopoly offering goods and services; describing the relationship between teachers and the communities they serve as that of buyers and sellers. Gerstner and company talk about measuring school productivity with unequivocal yardsticks (p. 69). They speak of the need for national tests and absolute standards, insisting that schools must compare themselves to each other the way Xerox, for example, compares itself to L. …