On January 18 the Senate voted 99 to 1 for an amendment to the Unfunded Mandates Bill that sharply criticized the National History Standards and stated that no federal funds should be awarded to the National Cent er for History in the Schools at UCLA which developed the standards through a collaborative effort with a broad coalition of organizations. The final language was stated in terms of a resolutio n which expresses the sense of the Senate but lacks the enforceability of a statute. Letters to Jeffords thanking him for taking this position would be very helpful. Although this amendment passed, the Sena te has not yet passed the bill to which it is attached, S. 1, the Unfunded Mandates Bill. Our role was to assist financially in the nonpartisan process of developing some of those guidelines for further public discussion, review, and ultimate decision by state and local school authorities.
School reform is much too important to be made a hostage in the culture wars.
Declassification - On January 19 the Clinton Administration released to the public copies of what seems close to the final draft of the revision of Executive Order 12356 on classification and declassification policy. Because there has been considerable public comment on earlier drafts there are no plans to seek additional public comment. Many of the recommendations made by the NCC in the past two years were incorporated in the current draft. This draft calls for all classified information more than twenty-five years old to be automatically declassified whether or not it has been reviewed and provides for a five year grace period with benchmarks for progress in declassifying the backlog. This draft does not include all that we had hoped for but it is a major step forward from the current order which has no target date for declassification and requires page by page review of all material.