A Conservative’s Primer on Education

Conservatives’ doubts and deep concerns about President Clinton’s School-to-Work Opportunities Act and Goals 2000 legislation (Times Orange County Edition, Feb. 18) have been at best superficially covered and the public has unmistakably been misinformed. The issue has also been erroneously framed that conservatives are against vocational training and/or career guidance training. This is furthest from the truth.

To your credit, your article did address conservatives’ concerns regarding the potential erosion of academic instruction that has occurred in states that have implemented this legislation. Although well-intended, you omit the substantive issues shared by every locally elected official serving in Sacramento and Washington, save recently elected Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove).

Currently, the compulsory education process allows vocational training on a voluntary basis, but a paradigm change occurs in that the STW and Goals 2000 legislation eliminates the voluntary aspect of vocational training. Without constitutional authority or statutes, the law when fully implemented requires vocational training to be integrated with traditional academic curricula.

Likewise of concern is the federal STW language that requires “all” students to achieve certain workplace skills and “certificates of initial mastery,” preferably by age 16. The creation of new federal and state bureaucracies with unprecedented powers and control over education and new governmental employment and training boards also worries conservatives. Ultimately, it is the taxpayers who will pay for these programs with an already proposed increase in personal income and employer payroll taxes.

Other concerns include an expected increase in per-pupil expenditures and perceived civil rights violation because future data collection by government officials clearly violates personal privacy rights. Troublesome is this proposed collection of data, which includes invasive information like attitudes, group participation, conflict resolution skills and problem-solving proficiency of students. Finally, traditional testing and evaluation of students’ cognitive performance is tragically replaced with the new Performance Based Testing, which one federal publication suggested has an adverse impact on minority students.

While the above issues are clearly avoided by current news coverage, what needs to be established is that the conservative vision of education is based upon a “back to basics” theme. Our vision is: 1) children must learn how to read using systematic, intensive phonics; 2) schools must emphasize grammar and writing skills so our students can write a simple paragraph or term paper; 3) traditional computational skills and memorization need to be taught and highlighted; 4) schools must emphasize high-tech and computer skills; and 5) we need high academic standards, testing, and principles rather than curricula that promote self-esteem and social engineering.