[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 65 (Friday, May 16, 1997)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E945-E946]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

[[Page E945]]

                  BACKGROUND OF SCHOOL TO WORK CONCEPT

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. HENRY HYDE

                              of illinois

                    in the house of representatives

                         Thursday, May 15, 1997

  Mr. HYDE. Mr. Speaker, no one doubts that education is a vital 
importance to our country. The question that must be answered is what 
role should the Federal Government play in supporting education? We 
have seen more and more legislative efforts to increase the Federal, as 
opposed to the local role, and this trend concerns many Americans, 
including myself.
  As we engage in debate, it is useful to understand the context, the 
historical background, of some efforts to increase the central 
government's intrusion into what has been a largely local 
responsibility. Dr. D.L. Cuddy, a former senior associate with the U.S. 
Department of Education, has written an interesting historical 
commentary on the school to work concept which I believe warrants the 
attention of Members.

                 Background of `School-to-Work' Concept

                          (By Dr. D. L. Cuddy)

       With ``School-to-Work'' (STW) legislation (H.R. 1617/S. 
     143) soon going to conference committee in Congress, it's 
     important to look at the background of this concept. Plank 10 
     of Marx's Communist Manifesto provides for a ``combination of 
     education with industrial production,'' and in 1913 when 
     Stalin was having difficulty getting his Marxist cadres into 
     key positions for the ``class struggle,'' he described a 
     ``regionalism'' strategy (e.g., NAFTA, later) against 
     nationalism and used the slogan ``workers of the world 
     unite.''
       Self-described American communist Scott Nearing in The Next 
     Step (1922) described how a world economic organization 
     (e.g., GATT and World Trade Organization, later) would be the 
     first step toward world government, but first in The New 
     Education (1915) he applauded ``breaking away from the 3 Rs'' 
     and Cincinnati's ``half time in shop, half time in school'' 
     system.
       In the Oct. 12, 1917 New York Times, Judge John Hylan wrote 
     about a letter by Dr. Abraham Flexner (Secretary of the 
     Rockefeller General Education Board and formerly of the 
     Carnegie Foundation) describing a ``secret conference'' of 
     New York City Board of Education members to elect a Board 
     president who would institute a type of STW/OBE (Outcome-
     Based Education) program. Hylan became Mayor of New York and 
     ``pitched out the Rockefeller agents, . . . the kind of 
     education the coolies receive in China . . . for the mill and 
     factory,'' William McAndrew, who had been in charge of the 
     ``new-program schools,'' admiringly referred to the 
     ``polytechnic institute'' (which the Soviets would adopt). 
     And in Raymond Fosdick's memorial history of the General 
     Education Board (GEB), he described the Board as part of 
     Rockefeller's effort toward ``this goal of social control.''
       After Hylan's expose of this STW/OBE plan, it wasn't until 
     the ``Eight-Year Study'' (1933-41) funded by the Carnegie 
     Corporation and the GEB that another major attempt was 
     evident. Research Director for the study's Evaluation Staff 
     was Ralph Tyler, who would later conduct a project for the 
     Carnegie Corporation that would in 1969 become the National 
     Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). One of Tyler's 
     associates in the ``Eight-Year Study'' was ``values 
     clarification'' originator Louis Raths, and another associate 
     was Estonian ``change agent'' Hilda Taba.
       In the early 1950s, Ford Foundation president H. Rowan 
     Gaither told Congressional committee Research Director Norman 
     Dodd that they were operating under directives from the White 
     House ``to make every effort to so alter life in the U.S. as 
     to make possible a comfortable merger with the Soviet 
     Union.'' And in 1960, HEW published Soviet Education 
     Programs, stating ``wherever we went, we felt the pulse of 
     the Soviet government's drive to educate and train a new 
     generation of technically skilled citizens. ... USSR plans to 
     bring all secondary school children into labor education and 
     training experiences through the regular school program.''
       By 1970, Americans were coming to be thought of as ``human 
     capital'' (note Lester Thurow's 1970 book, Investment in 
     Human Capital), and in 1971 UNESCO'S Secretariat asked George 
     Parkyn to ``outline a possible model'' for an education 
     system that resulted in Towards a Conceptual Model of Life-
     Long Education describing how students would choose a 
     vocational field and work part time, and receive 
     ``certificates'' of educational attainment.
       Two years later, Michael Lerner (who would become an 
     important advisor to Hillary Clinton) wrote The New Socialist 
     Revolution, proclaiming: ``Education will be radically 
     transformed in our socialist community ... the main emphasis 
     will be on learning how to ... live and work collectively ... 
     The next level is learning some series of skills, for one's 
     first set of jobs.'' And in Vladimir Turchenko's The 
     Scientific and Technological Revolution and the Revolution in 
     Education (1976) imported into the U.S. is described 
     ``linking instruction with productive labor.''
       In the early 1980s, neither the Soviet nor German socialist 
     education systems had been adopted nationwide in the U.S., as 
     Prof. Eugene Boyce in The Coming Revolution in Education 
     (1983) wrote that ``in the communist ideology ... education 
     is tied directly to jobs ... No such direct, controlled, 
     relationship between education and jobs exists in democratic 
     countries.'' However, in 1985 two things happened. At the 
     beginning of the year, the Carnegie Corporation gave $600,000 
     to establish the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy; 
     and later that year the Carnegie Corporation negotiated the 
     Soviet-American Exchange Agreement for the U.S. government, 
     whereby Soviet educators became involved in planning 
     curricula for some U.S. schools. In the Winter 1987/1988 
     edition of Action in Teacher Education, Professors Martin 
     Haberman and James Collins wrote in ``The Future of the 
     Teaching Profession'' that ``schooling is now seen primarily 
     as job training and, for this reason, quite comparable to 
     schooling in non-democratic societies. Once education is 
     redefined as a personal good and as emphasizing preparation 
     for the world of work as its first purpose, our schools can 
     appropriately be compared with those of the USSR.''
       The next year, the National Center on Education and the 
     Economy (formerly the Carnegie Forum) with Marc Tucker as 
     president was asked to help in developing the National 
     Education Goals upon which ``America 2000'' and ``Goals 
     2000'' would be based. Then in June 1990, NCEE (with Board 
     members Hillary Clinton and David Rockefeller, Jr.) produced 
     America's Choice: High Skills or Low Wages? (proposing a 
     ``Certificate of Initial Mastery''), which greatly influenced 
     the establishment of the Secretary's Commission on Achieving 
     Necessary Skills (SCANS) by the Department of Labor. In 
     September, Polytechnical Education: A Step (funded by the 
     U.S. Department of Education) by Robert Beck was published, 
     stating: ``The Soviet Union. . . (has) developed a curriculum 
     known as polytechnical education. . . . rooted in Marxist-
     Lennist ideology. . . . The German Democratic Republic has 
     accomplished a good deal with its polytechnical education . . 
     . The ideology of Soviet education has blessed the melding of 
     restructured academic studies . . .  and the preparation of 
     students for skilled labor. . . . That this should be 
     carefully monitored for possible adaptation in American 
     public education is not a farfetched idea.'' (Polytechnical 
     Education: A Step was published by the National Center for 
     Research in Vocational Education at the University of 
     California at Berkeley just 3 months after America's Choice: 
     High Skills or Law Wages?, a report by the NCEE's Commission 
     on the Skills of the American Workforce which included Laura 
     D'Andrea Tyson, the Director of Research for the Berkely 
     Roundtable on the International Economy at the University of 
     California at Berkeley, who has been a member of the Council 
     on Foreign Relations and would become Chairman of President 
     Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers.)
       In June of the next year (1991), the SCANS report 
     recommended establishing a national system for certifying 
     competency, similar to Germany's ``certificate of mastery.'' 
     Also in 1991, Carnegie Foundation chairman David Hornbeck's 
     so-called Human Capital and America's Future was published 
     describing an approach he admitted might be subject to the 
     charge of ``big brotherism.''
       On Aug. 2, 1992, Assistant Labor Secretary Roberts Jones 
     announced that the federal government was preparing to deny 
     aid and student loans to schools that fail to prepare their 
     graduates with the skills needed to compete for jobs in the 
     modern workplace, saying ``this is a touchy subject.'' 
     Shortly thereafter, Marc Tucker wrote a letter to Hillary 
     Clinton saying he had just come from David Rockefeller's 
     office where they were ``celebrating'' Bill Clinton's 
     election as president, as that will allow putting into place 
     their agenda to integrate education into a national system of 
     ``human resources development . . . from cradle to grave . . 
     . (for) everyone. . . . We propose that Bill (Clinton) take a 
     leaf out of the German book'' (regarding required) 
     ``apprenticeship slots.'' Relevant to this, however, was a 
     paper commissioned by the School-to-Work Transition Team 
     in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement 
     (OERI) within the U.S. Department of Education (one of a 
     set of commissioned papers published by

[[Page E946]]

     OERI in June 1994). In this paper, ``Determinants and 
     Consequences of Fit Between Vocational Education and 
     Employment in Germany,'' Professors James Witte and Ame 
     Kalleberg stated that ``the German apprenticeship's system 
     is so expensive. . .  Germany's contemporary vocational 
     education system is closely linked to its secondary 
     educational system. At age 10, students are tracked in a 
     rigid educational system. . . . After initial assignment, 
     movement between tracks is rare''
       NCEE Board member Hillary Clinton had been promoting the 
     Certificate of Initial Mastery concept, and in April 1994 
     NCEE's Tucker had published The Certificate of Initial 
     Mastery: A Primer. The same year, Senator Ted Kennedy's 
     School-to-Work Opportunities Act was passed, and a national 
     campaign is underway to promote the concept. Recently, Miss 
     America 1996, Shawntel Smith in Michigan spoke about ``our 
     investment in human capital. That's what School-to-Work is 
     all about.''
       Currently, students have the most to say about what career 
     paths they take. But as ``human capital,'' their paths 
     increasingly will be directed by society via STW/OBE 
     educational programs so that they ``demonstrate certain 
     skills.'' A leading OBE consultant today, Harvard University 
     Professor Howard Gardner, (who was involved in the infamous 
     MACOS project), wrote Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple 
     Intelligences, in which he proposed that ``ultimately, the 
     educational plans that are pursued need to be orchestrated 
     across various interest groups of the society so that they 
     can, taken together, help the society to achieve its larger 
     goals. Individual profiles must be considered in the light of 
     goals pursued by the wider society; and sometimes, in fact, 
     individuals with gifts in certain directions must nonetheless 
     be guided along other less favored paths, simply because the 
     needs of the culture are particularly urgent in that realm at 
     that time.'' Student ``profiles'' are an important part of 
     certain STW initiatives, with employers having continual 
     access to these as part of a permanent file on all 
     individuals who are now considered to be ``lifelong 
     learners.'' In Communist China, the file is called a 
     ``Dangan'' and describes the value of the individual (``human 
     capital'') to the State. Gardner has also written To Open 
     Minds: Chinese Clues to the Dilemma of Contemporary 
     Educations. If Americans aren't careful, STW/OBE educational 
     programs will pave the way toward an ominous techno-feudal 
     world of the future.

     

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