Goals 2000 in the Home

Now that every state has accepted Goals 2000 money, in one way or another, it is time to take a closer look at what comes along with it.

Although it will probably be several years before all of the programs have been fully implemented in every state, the Parents as Teachers (PAT) program is already being instituted in many areas.

The phrase “parents as teachers” sounds wonderful. The teaching of our children is an appropriate, indeed necessary, role for parents. Unfortunately, many aspects of PAT have little to do with teaching our children. Instead, PAT includes a systematic invasion of family privacy in order to classify students as “at-risk.”

The more “at-risk” students a district has, the more funding it receives under one or more programs from the federal and/or state government. In fact, one school, in the Saddleback Valley Unified School District in Orange County, California—situated in one of the highest-income areas in the United States—represented in a grant application to the state government that all children in its school were “at risk.” That was an attempt to obtain more funding.

The Goals 2000 legislation provides, “Each application submitted shall, at a minimum, include assurances that a grantee will . . . (j) use part of the funds received under this title to establish, expand, or operate Parents as Teachers programs or Home Instruction for Pre-School Youngsters programs. . . . The federal ‘Parents as Teachers Programs’ is based on the Missouri Parents as Teachers model.”

Again, this is an innocuous-sounding program. So what is the source of concern? The PAT manual given to local teachers as part of their training provides as follows:

Beginning in the third trimester of pregnancy and continuing until children reached age three, MPAT participants received the following services: . . . Monthly personal visits in the home by professionally trained parent educators to individualize the program for each family.

The program, which was made mandatory for all school districts in Missouri in 1984, provides a “performance-based home visit observation tool.” The manual provides that “school districts may wish to measure child outcomes, parent outcomes, or both. . . . Parent interest and involvement in their child’s school experiences is also worth studying.”

What are these “parent educators” looking for? “Risk factors.” What are these “risk factors”? According to the manual, they include the following:

  • Inability of parent to cope with inappropriate child behavior.
  • Low-functioning parent. . . . Is the parent too ill, too heavy, too tired, or too depressed . . . ? Does the parent seem to have low-level intelligence or be mentally retarded?
  • Inability of parent to relate to or connect with child.
  • Overindulgence, undue spoiling on part of parent.
  • Undue stress that adversely affects parent’s functioning . . . These can include such things as a death in the family, divorce, separation, a parent that travels frequently, moving to a new home, birth of a sibling, three children under the age of three living in the home, prolonged illness in the family, loss of a job, low level of income, overcrowded conditions in the home, frequent arguing or conflict in the home, etc.
  • Other. This can include a wide variety of conditions . . . such as allergies, heavy cigarette smoking in the house, a family history of hearing loss . . . lack of stimulation or overstimulation, predominantly inappropriate or very few toys, and total lack of routine in the home. Other individual concerns should be included here.

If a government agency wants to, it could find one or more of those “risk factors” in just about any family in this country.

Why is this important? Besides leading to more money for the district for “at-risk” students, all of the information obtained is—under Goals 2000—sent to a national database that is available to a variety of government agencies, and private companies.

Not all of this information is being gathered for the good of our children.

Author

  • Gary G. Kreep

    At the time this article was published, Gary Kreep was executive director of the United States Justice Foundation, located in Escondido, CA.

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