Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, September 3, 1995                   TAG: 9509020003
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: G-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

GOALS 2000:

Many of the 47 that applied and took on the yoke of federal funding for education reform are, The Wall Street Journal reports, delighted.

Oregon discovered, for example, that the program allows states to ask the secretary of education to set aside federal regulations that have proven to be barriers to local reform. Its schools have greater, not less, flexibility to try to improve their programs.

Other states have passed along the federal funds to localities for such things as teacher training and expanding foreign-language instruction.

Hmmm. Is it all a trick - a ruse designed to fool states-rights-loving Americans?

Could be. But it's also just possible the program is working as promised: offering federal support for local efforts to meet higher educational standards.

To be sure, there are federal goals attached. But these are broad academic objectives that have no liberal or conservative slant. They are bipartisan in origin, and are creatures as much of the nation's governors as of Washington. They are goals everyone should agree on: such as making American students first in the world in math and science, and making sure they have reached a certain level of competence in core subjects.

An initial wariness might be understandable, given the federal government's genius for sinking a good idea into the quicksand of administrative rules. The law authorizing Goals 2000 calls for creating model academic standards in 13 subjects, and the standards are, shall we say, detailed. In geography, for example, they run to 272 pages.

But the point is: They are voluntary. Localities can take them as suggested signposts for proceeding toward the educational goals. Or they can leave them.

There was no talk in Virginia, at least officially, about black helicopters or other illusory symbols of a governmental plot to take over the rest of us. But the bedrock opposition to Goals 2000 is anchored in imaginative misinformation about its purpose.

In New Hampshire, another of the three states that rejected the federal funds, the Journal reports that parents were circulating rumors about a United Nations cabal and school inoculations using mind-controlling drugs. The Christian Coalition perceived a threat to parental authority. And a gun owners' group was convinced the education standards somehow would allow children to be removed from homes where there are guns that can be found and loaded in 10 minutes.

Hmmm. Would these children then be sold into slavery?

Not all of the opposition, of course, is so farfetched. Virginia authorities point to their current court battle with the U.S. Education Department over the state's right to expel a handicapped student who brought a gun to school. Because of such experiences, there will be no convincing some people that what starts out as a suggestion will not end up some day as a federal mandate or inflexible regulation.

Goals 2000 is an attempt, though, to suppress just that federal penchant for mucking about in the details, while setting clear and high overall goals that local schools can aim toward in the ways best suited to them. The effort should be tried before it is deemed a failure. And it's a shame to put ideological point-scoring ahead of Virginia students' future.