EdAction
Maple River Education Coalition PAC
105 Peavey Rd, St 116 
Chaska, MN  55318 
952-361-4931
http://www.EdAction.org
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May 21, 2001

“Small learning communities” and HR1

Now every state needs to match Minnesota and raise the roof against HR-1! All of you education activists in Ohio, Texas, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Washington, California, Virginia, West Virginia, Arkansas, Missouri, New York, Massachusetts, Florida and more... Please contact your own Congressmen now. Urge them to vote NO on HR-1!

Please call House leadership, too! They need to hear from people all across the land that we oppose the Title I federally mandated curriculum in HR-1, the same mandate that was put upon our states with Goals 2000 and School-to-Work in 1994. They have not changed the language or the mandate! This is the heart and soul of the new federal education system. (Note: The "Straight A's" amendment requires the same mandated content standards and aligned assessments. Straight A's amendment continues the system intact.)

Amendments to HR1:

• See the amendments we support.
• There is an important amendment to oppose. The Hill amendment establishes "small learning communities." Please oppose the Hill amendment on so-called "small learning communities"! Small learning communities, in reality, are the implementation of School-To-Work career clusters and mandatory vocational training for all students.

Below are key quotes from Pat Harvey's "Blueprint" for the St. Paul schools.

Small learning community:

"Every student will be engaged in a small learning community by 2005-2006."

The Blueprint repeatedly emphasizes the importance of creating a "small learning community" for the student. This concept comes (as most everything else about the new system) from the NCEE. (See it on the NCEE website.) They define it as a small group of students (said to be typically from 200 to 400, and not more than 600 students) who share many of the same classes (and perhaps teachers too) for years at a time –  thus forming a "community." But in most schools, the traditional grade level (say, the tenth grade class) already meets that definition! So why does the Blueprint call for a new structure?

Answer:  A "small learning community" is pleasant sounding verbiage used to restructure schools along vocational lines. It is political spin – ambiguous and evasive about its real intentions – used to sell a radical reform agenda.

In practice, a "small learning community" will correspond to a career cluster (or embryonic version of it in the lower grades). A school will be divided into a number of small learning communities, that cut across grade levels – each aligned with a specific career cluster. "Every student" will be in one of these. This division into "small learning communities" is one of the ways the government (through its appointed workforce boards, etc.) will railroad children into specified careers, even before the child consciously makes any decision about it.

Centralized economic planning:

"Based on federal and state research on where job growth is anticipated, Saint Paul secondary schools will consider six career clusters as a focus of their small learning environments"

The new system is centralized economic planning. "Federal and state" workforce committees will make projections of "where job growth is anticipated", then (together with various political considerations) schools and curricula are planned to narrowly educate our children for those jobs! The central planners will determine the "career clusters" offered in schools, and into which our children will be corralled. "Six career clusters" have already been specified for St. Paul. The above statement again hints at the real reason for the small learning communities — each one is to "focus" on a career cluster.

Small Learning Communities are intended for every state. It is being modeled in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

Oppose the Hill amendment!