• What is happening in our schools that will affect every worker in America?
• What happened to local control of our schools?
• Why are kids spending class time training for entry level jobs?
• Why is time spent on projects and group learning instead of the basics?
• Why are businesses training teachers in job skills?
• Why are reading, writing and math skills going down?

The answer to these and many other questions are found on this website. The federal government has set in motion a restructuring of our schools, our workforce and our economy to create a new system called School-to-work or STW. Minnesota and all other states are incorporating a central planning system to implement STW. STW places the needs of business above the needs or wants of the child.

Federal law forms a new governance structure that opposes both free enterprise and representative government. Instead, government centrally plans and manages the economy. The scaffolding for a centrally-planned economy was passed piecemeal under President Clinton and is currently being reassembled at the state level by combining federal laws into the following three-way "public/private partnership:"

This public/private partnership was created by the following federal laws:

• Goals 2000 (G2000) created the partnership between government and education by mandating dumbed-down national education standards, a national curriculum, national test, and national teacher licensure. Local and state control of education is ended.
• School-to-Work (STW) creates the education/business partnership, changing the purpose of education from acquiring knowledge, to supplying workers for business. Schools become job-training centers offering narrowly defined career choices, approved by government economic forecasters, which match students and adults with government-preferred industries.
• Workforce Investment Act (WIA) finishes the partnership triangle by creating a nationwide network of workforce boards, made up of "government-appointed representatives" from business, education, and government, who work to implement and manage the system through local "one-stop" centers.

Together, these laws align and consolidate all local, state, and federal policies, programs, and funding into a single state-managed economic system.

How the New System Works

• Public/private non-profits provide design, policy, and seed money as a catalyst for systemic change.
• The Federal Department of Labor chooses which private industry sectors are promoted in each state.
• K-12 and state colleges dump academics for job training in local "targeted" industries.
• A new national curriculum is used that embraces a socialist, globalist worldview; loyalty to all government and not America.
• "Teaching" is redefined through new training and national licensure rules.
• Students choose a career cluster at end of 8th grade, limiting curriculum to a narrow choice.
• Class time is spent at job sites for labor training, not in the classroom.
• "Appointed" local workforce boards match "learners" with local businesses who have requested them.
• Skill certificates awarded for specific job-readiness. Certificates will become mandatory for future hiring decisions.
• Required "Lifework Plan" follows individual from "cradle-to-grave."
• ALL students, all schools (public, private & home-based), all businesses expected to participate.
• Federal government forces compliance of all "partners" through rewards and sanctions.
• Government dominates and controls all partnerships.
• State defines new "covenant" with parents for raising children.
• Students, workers, employers, educators and parents held accountable to government-defined "performance" outcomes.
• All 50 states are currently implementing this system.
• The current reauthorization of the federally mandated elementary and secondary education act (HR1/S1) cements the entire system in place.

Government is implementing policies that will lead to poverty, not prosperity, by adopting the failed ideas of a state-planned and managed economy similar to that of the former Soviet Union.