Now, if you are interested in Ms. Rees, here is some history  related to her long-time involvement in charter schools.

3D, from The Deliberate Dumbing Down on America, pages 427-429:  NINA SHIKRAII REES OF THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION, WASHINGTON, D.C., WROTE AN Article entitled “Time to Overhaul the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965” which recommended a major shift in the traditional philosophy of education from an emphasis on inputs to an emphasis on outputs. An abstract of her article which was published in a Heritage Foundation Press Release dated December 2, 1998, follows:  During the reauthorization process of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the 106th Congress has a historic opportunity to change the course of K–12 education. Congress needs to shift the goals of the ESEA from one confined to inputs to one focused on achievement. Congress can make this happen by sending more federal dollars to the classroom instead of to education bureaucracies; empower parents, teachers and principals; boosting the quality of teachers; and allowing flexibility and demanding accountability. Sending money to the same old federal education programs will waste precious education tax dollars and allow American students to fall even further behind their counterparts in the developed world.

[Ed. Note: If what Ms. Rees recommends is authorized by the 106th Congress, the course
of K–12 education will be more than changed. It will be eliminated, to be replaced by K–12
school-to-work training, required by NAFTA and GATT, both of which are supported by Ms.
Rees’s employer, the Heritage Foundation. As sensible as the above recommendations may
appear at first sight, as one moves carefully through the text one can identify key words which
The Noxious Nineties : c. 1998 428 should raise red flags for those opposed to the philosophy behind Goals 2000 and the School-to-Work Opportunities Act.

When Ms. Rees says “Congress needs to shift the goals of the ESEA from one confined
to inputs to one focused on achievement” she really means she supports outcome-based education,
since the word “achievement” as she has used it means “outcome.” She then goes on
to recommend all the “nasties” associated with Marc Tucker’s National Center on Education
and the Economy which are also associated with all recent restructuring legislation, as well as
with outcome-based education: “empowering of parents, teachers, and principals”; “sending
more federal dollars to the classroom”; “boosting the quality of teachers”; “allowing flexibility”;
and “demanding accountability.”

Of special interest here is her recommendation to boost the “quality of teachers.” The
reader is urged to turn to the 1992 entry regarding Filling the Gaps for the new millennium
definition of “quality of teachers.”

Note also how this report uses the word “achievement.” This is the alternative to focusing
on “inputs”—the legal requirement of most state constitutions with regard to their responsibility
to the public to “offer,” “make available” or “furnish” educational opportunity to all citizens.
Most of our state constitutions—unless they have changed in the last few years—do not require
the state to be responsible for each student’s success, because the state cannot ensure what is
a personal responsibility. States are responsible for the provision of everything necessary for
a child or student to have the opportunity to achieve academic success—“inputs.” (This has
traditionally been known as the Carnegie Unit requirement.) It is when the state becomes the
guarantor of success—Ms. Rees’s “achievement”—that parents have felt the stifling hand of
the state in the area of privacy and personal freedom.

Sending more “dollars to the classroom” may sound like returning to local control, but
is in fact the reverse since it bypasses not only state legislators—who presumably represent
their constituents at the state level—but also local school boards who traditionally have made
decisions at the central office building level—not at the school building level—on how their
constituents’ tax money could best be spent.

Much damage has been done over the years under the guise of “accountability.” Exactly
to whom does the Heritage Foundation want the schools to be accountable? Parents and taxpayers
who have had no say whatsoever in restructuring plans, or the international business
community which initiated and supports the recommendations spelled out in most of Heritage
Foundation’s reports, including its call for the use of Skinnerian Direct Instruction (DISTAR) as
presently implemented in Houston, Texas at Thaddeus Lott’s Model Wesley Elementary School,
and which is on a roll across the nation since the passage of the Reading Excellence Act?]