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March 3, 2000 
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The Clinton's effect on Arkansas education.

Excerpts from the New York Times Bestseller, Hell to Pay, by Barbara Olson: 

    "The Clintons spent a great deal of time "listening" to the people, from local educators to Fortune 500 CEOs.  As with so many of their efforts, the town hall meetings and backyard shindigs were sheer public relations, window dressing for an agenda that was already decided.  But Arkansas fell for it.
    With the reform firmly in place, the state could dissolve or annex any school that failed to meet its standards.  This forced schools to teach state-approved education guidelines, a multicultural curriculum that watered down American studies and Western civilization and extolled the virtues of African civilization.
    Blair Hurt of the WSJ found that the twenty pages of the Education Standards report that the reform legislation was based on, included 124 "shalls" including a multicultural agenda on history lessons.  In 1984, 84 of Arkansas's 367 school districts facing the threat of dissolution were forced to bow in another way.  They were forced to increase local taxes.
    School districts remained under the constant threat of abolition if their students failed 85% of the Minimum Placement Test.  The result, was widespread cheating-students left alone in a classroom with the answers or given the answers outright.
    ...it took 11 pounds of paperwork to prove a school district had complied with the top-down standards.
    Nor was teacher testing the panacea that it had been advertised to be.  Remedial training and a generous willingness to allow teachers to retake the test over a period of years kept 97% of Ark. teachers in place.
    Eventually, everyone seemed to benefit.  Gov. Clinton burnished his popularity.  The teacher's union got a payback in the form of tax money and teacher tests that were irrelevant.  Everyone was better off except for the children of Arkansas and their taxpaying parents.   The WSJ reported test scores for high school seniors on the ACT Fell in 1986.  In 92, Arkansas students again came near the bottom of the 28 states using the ACT.  In 1993, 57% of all Arkansas college freshmen had to take remedial classes in reading, writing, or math."

    "Hillary and Ira Magaziner served on the board of the non-profit project, the NCEE, which in 1992 proposed that the Clinton administration enact a utopian scheme for national training.  Government would guarantee three years of schooling beyond a basic competence certificate at age sixteen.  It proposed a mandatory 2% levy on American business to pay for this training program.  An NCEE experiment in the Rochester schools involved the fastest learners in the mentoring and the teaching of their slower-learning peers.  Predictably, this resulted only in a dumbed-down curriculum.  It also slowed down the progress of the fast learners.  The Rochester experiment was an abject failure.  Worse, it was described as corporate facism-a partnership between government and big business to create a planned economy. .
    In 1990-1, NCEE spent more than $100,000 in NY state grant money to pay Rose Law Firm for lobbying activity, with Hillary as the designated person to carry out its activities."

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