“The role of private parties to carry out the high purposes of government makes us the subject of puzzlement and ridicule.” That’s what Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-IN), chairman of the Joint Committee investigating the Iran-Contra affair, said after commenting on the “privatization of foreign policy.”
If it’s wrong to privatize foreign policy about aid to the Contras, isn’t it just as wrong to privatize foreign policy to decide what is taught in our public schools? What would you say if you discovered that private individuals and groups were allowed, even encouraged, to negotiate with foreign governments in order to develop public school curricula?
Impossible? Far-fetched? Way out? No, that’s exactly what’s been happening. It’s a scandal of enormous proportions. After all, Iran-Contragate involves only a few million dollars, only a fraction of one percent of the foreign handouts we dole out legally to foreign governments every year.
The Carnegie Corporation of New York entered into negotiations with the Soviet Union on October 24-29, 1985, with the prior approval of our State Department and national security advisers. According to a statement issued by the U.S. Department of Education, the State Department “apparently determined that it would be more appropriate for a non-federal organization, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, to represent the United States in the exchange.” Carnegie was represented by its president, David A. Hamburg. The Soviets were represented by Yevgeny P. Velikhov, a vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and a pal of Soviet boss Gorbachev. Discussions resulted in an agreement that was signed by the Carnegie Corporation with the Soviet Institute of Informatics. The agreement calls for the Soviets and the Americans jointly to develop and test computer software for use in U.S. elementary schools, and to restructure the curriculum and teaching methods of our early elementary grades through the use of computers.
The agreement is ambitious and wide-reaching. It also covers bringing Soviet experts here to observe our use of computers in schools and universities, evaluating the training of teachers in the use of computers, eliminating teachers’ alleged “fear of computers,” and conducting Soviet-American joint experiments.
One month after this Carnegie-Soviet agreement was signed, Secretary of State George Shultz signed a 41-page agreement with the Soviet government covering a broad range of exchanges and cooperative projects in the education, scientific and cultural fields. Here are three paragraphs from this agreement signed in Geneva on November 21, 1985.
Article IV of the General Agreement binds the two countries to “the exchange, by appropriate organizations, of educational and teaching materials (including textbooks, syllabi and curricula), materials on methodology, samples of teaching instruments and audiovisual aids.”
Article II of the Program of Cooperation states: “The Parties will exchange one delegation annually of specialists in primary and secondary education of up to five persons from each side for a period of two to three weeks each, including a seminar of normally two to three days with specialists of the other country…. The Parties will encourage the exchange of primary and secondary school textbooks and other teaching materials, and, as is deemed appropriate, the conducting of joint studies on textbooks, between appropriate organizations in the U.S.A. and the Ministry of Education of the U.S.S.R.”
It’s quite a deal: the United States gives its computer technology to the Soviets, and the Soviets give us instructional material to teach American schoolchildren. The main source of funding for the exchange projects is the tax-exempt Carnegie Corporation, which is a longtime and notorious advocate of disarmament and “world interdependence.”
As soon as the ink was dry on these agreements, Carnegie began promoting a plan for the national certification of teachers. Certification has heretofore always been left to the states and local school boards.
Carnegie has also been deeply involved for years with the federally-funded National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is now in the process of expanding (from $4 million to $26 million a year) to make comparisons between state, local and individual student achievement levels. Local schools will be compelled to conform their curricula to this new national testing.
This national test will require students to learn the content of rewritten curricula, some of which will have been jointly developed by the Carnegie Corporation and the Soviet Union. Carnegie’s national teacher certification plan will assure that only teachers capable of teaching to the national test will be certified.
Soviet input into our public school curricula via computers will thus be disseminated nationally into every U.S. school by the techniques of national testing and national teacher certification.
The actions of U.S. government employees in encouraging private individuals and foreign officials to send a few million dollars to the Contras in Nicaragua is inconsequential compared to this deal in which State Department personnel allowed the private Carnegie Corporation to negotiate with Soviet officials to develop curriculum for American elementary school pupils. Carnegie-gate cries out for a fully televised Congressional investigation.
