The new “Nation at Risk” report

by David Safier

A task force headed by Condi "Smoking gun into a mushroom cloud" Rice (so much for her credibility) and ex-New York school system chancellor Joel Klein has decided to use 9/11 langugage to up the ante on their conservative "education reform" agenda.

"The dominant power of the 21st century will depend on human capital," [the report] said. "The failure to produce that capital will undermine American security."

So how are they going to solve our grave education/security issue? Are they suggesting we put money into improving our schools, like the Condi Rice types always recommend when it comes to military and privacy invasion spending in the face of a similar peril? Nope. They want to add more charter schools and more voucher programs. Their two other recommendations are nothing more than window dressing: Improve the common core initiatives and improve assessment of the quality of our schools.

If anyone tells you this task force takes in people on all sides of the education issue, that's more false than true. True, AFT president Randi Weingarten and the 2008 Obama campaign advisor Linda Darling-Hammond are members of the task force. But they put together a dissenting opinion which doesn't agree with the published findings. So they sat on the task force, but they don't endorse its conclusions. (Note: I haven't read the documents yet, which is why I'm only making general comments.)

Remember "A Nation At Risk" from the Reagan administration? It made similarly dire predictions that our country's economic future was being compromised by our abysmal system of education. Yet the students who were in school at the time went on to spark the intellect- and education-driven tech revolution, where the U.S. led the world. Nearly every prediction in the document has been proven false. Now here's another conservative report whose purpose is to scare us into privatizating education. It points out the usual problems with U.S. education, most of which are real and well known, and uses them as an excuse to push a wrong-headed agenda.