The Threat to Freedom in Goals 2000
The Goals 2000: Educate America Act, which President Clinton signed into law last week, has eight lofty goals for systematically improving the quality of American schooling. But the law also has one deep and probably fatal flaw: It will lead to the creation of a national curriculum as a means of reaching its student-achievement and citizenship goal. In setting model national content and performance standards in English, mathematics, science, foreign language, civics and government, arts, history, and geography for K-12 students, as well as certifying standards and assessments submitted by states seeking federal school reform grants, the government will be provoking a storm of conflict which it can neither resolve nor control.
The self-destructive conflicts which now plague California reading tests and Texas health textbooks are signposts for what we may expect on the federal level as this national curriculum takes shape. Californians are confronting a dispute over the state's removal of two stories by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker from a reading comprehension and -analysis test. One story, involving the marriage of a Christian and a Muslim, was alleged to be antireligious; the other was apparently considered propaganda for a fifth column of militant vegetarians. (See Education Week, March 9, 1994.)
Meanwhile, Texas has been continuing its tradition of looking for a secular humanist under every textbook cover by ordering 300 changes demanded by conservatives in state-authorized health texts. (See Education Week, Feb. 23, 1994.) The battle over whether students in Texas ought to be permitted an informed discussion of AIDS, divorce, drug abuse, human sexuality, and physician-assisted suicide appears headed for the state legislature. There a majority vote will presumably distinguish between official truth and dissenting propaganda, and inform the teachers and children of Texas of which ideas and opinions they should...
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