Back of the class.

President Clinton's "goals 2000" education package is one part yawn, one part fraud, and one part nightmare.

To nobody's surprise, the Administration has invited Congress to codify the six national education goals that were set forth three years ago by President Bush and the nation's governors. They're worthy goals. Getting Congress to embrace them rather than gripe about them is not a bad thing. The risk - one that Mr. Bush declined to take - is that they'll emerge from their passage through Capitol Hill different from the way they went in. Mr. Clinton and Secretary Riley have deepened that risk by amending the goals. There may be nothing wrong with adding the arts and foreign languages (to the core of English, math, science, history, and geography). But once the wall surrounding the original five is breached, what's to keep out home economics, driver training, and value-neutral sex education?

The part of the plan that borders on fraud is its silent omission of today's most dynamic ideas for energizing education reform at the state and local level. The Administration talks about education reform yet excludes its likeliest sources of propulsion: wide-ranging parental choice, high-stakes testing with results that can be compared from school to school, charter schools (think of them as education enterprise zones), alternative teacher certification, etc. The Bush team understood that radical educational change will only come when competition cracks the establishment monopoly. The Clinton team, largely staffed by members of that very monopoly, has spurned all threats to its control.

Which brings us to the nightmare. The only source of energy in the Clinton plan is national standards. But the standards the Administration envisions have as much to do with school inputs as with student achievement. And the standard-setting is to be done by a powerful new twenty-member panel of appointed experts," elected by no one and accountable to no one except in the most formalistic sense.

This "National Education Standards and Improvement Council" bids fair to become the "national school board" that sensible people have long dreaded. It is charged with "certifying" national standards for curriculum, for school resources, teachers, and instructional materials, and for assessment systems. Though the White House press release terms these standards "voluntary," staffers at the Education Department are known to look forward to the day when states can be taken to court and sued for failure to comply "equally" with them.

So much for true innovation. So much for local control, grassroots change, and parental rights. Ten years after the United States was properly termed a "nation at risk," because of the mediocre products of its schools, we are presented by the President with a "reform" scheme that actually threatens to make a bad situation worse. They never learn.