KINDER'S COMMENTARY: A+ PART OF NATIONAL REFORM CONCEPT

The A+ Schools program that is an outgrowth of Senate Bill 380 arrived in Cape Girardeau heralding "a complete overhaul in curriculum" of our local schools. It doubtless contains many laudable features, as supporters claim. The A+ program, however, can properly be understood only in the national school reform context of which it is a piece. Herewith, an attempt to sketch at least a portion of that national educational reform context.

Goals 2000 was a Bush administration school reform effort containing certain laudable and certain other highly dubious features. It was one of many pieces of unfinished business lying about when, in November 1992, the voters unceremoniously dumped the squire of Kennebunkport in favor of President Bill Clinton. When the Clinton administration hit town and hired every kooky left-winger not then playing in a rock band somewhere, the stage was set for a much worse bill, one whose grand design was to fit all U.S. schools into a new straitjacket. Our schools, for so long controlled at the local and state level, were to be completely made over. No longer would they be places where the mundane business of mere schooling occurred. They would be the instruments of a vast new state planning apparatus that would redesign the work force of the 21st century.

Connoisseurs of gargantuan state planning schemes, which one would have thought had perished with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet communism, will recognize the name of Ira Magaziner. Magaziner is a brilliant man who went to all the right Ivy League schools. He is (or was) chief cook and bottle washer for Hillary Rodham Clinton's catastrophically ill-fated plan to seize American health care and remake it in the image of the Post Office. With Magaziner advising her on education, as on health care, Hillary Clinton serves on the board of the New Standards Project, previously described in this space, which is a 17-state school reform consortium to which Missouri belongs. For the privilege of belonging to the NSP, Missouri taxpayers pay $250,000 annually, over the objections of some of us who fought hard to delete that funding.

By the time (1993) the Clinton administration and the now-defeated Democratic Congress had finished with the Goals 2000 bill, it had mutated into an instrument of vast federal intrusion into local schools -- the final step toward the nationalization of education. Nor were Ira Magaziner and Hillary Clinton the only ones involved. As finally passed, the Goals 2000 bill directed the Department of Labor to become much more deeply involved with a new national board to set skill-certification standards for "occupational clusters." These clusters will encompass virtually every job in the nation. By this means, the federal Department of Labor goes to work planning the makeup of the work force of the 21st century.

Students of the Clinton health care plan, designed by Ira Magaziner, will recognize a common thread: Under that government takeover of health care, government bureaucrats answering to an unelected national health board were to be given vast new powers. Among the crucial expansions of authority to be handed to these bureaucrats was to have been the authority to determine nothing less than the distribution of specialists to primary care practitioners in the practice of medicine. Thus, the Clinton/Magaziner board would have decided the number and distribution of family practitioners, as well as specialists of all descriptions, that could be trained at medical schools and hospitals nationwide. The particulars differ between the health care scheme and the Goals 2000 plan, but the grand vision, the positive faith in and passion for vast state planning, is common to both. Its common spirit might be summed up: Hillary and Ira know best.

The Clinton administration secretary of Labor is Robert Reich, a Magaziner buddy and Rhodes scholar who first met Bill Clinton in England and who never met a vast state planning scheme he didn't like. Dr. Reich is busy issuing orders for the New American Child through something called SCANS, the Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills.

Next: What SCANS means to the future of American education and how it relates to, and guides, efforts such as the A+ Schools project.

~Peter Kinder is the associate publisher of the Southeast Missourian and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.