To recap briefly: In 2015, all members of the United Nations, including the United States, signed off on a program called “Agenda 2030,” which includes 17 “Sustainable Development Goals” (the “SDGs”). (For previous posts about Agenda 2030 and the SDGs, go here, here, here, and here.)
SDG 4 concerns education. It directs all nations to educate children and adults in “sustainable development;” as “global citizens;” and with an emphasis on changing “values and attitudes.” However, the United States, by its very structure, impedes the globalist agenda.
The Founding Fathers were not naïve about human nature. They knew tyranny is always just around the corner, and the government of the new United States had to be able to restrain itself. As James Madison wrote in 1788, in Federalist 51,
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. . . . It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary.
According to Madison, “all hands” (presumably, both Federalist and Anti-Federalist alike) agreed that a “partition of power” was “essential to the preservation of liberty.” (Emphasis added.) Further, “[i]n a single republic, all the power surrendered by the people is submitted to the administration of a single government[.]” However, the United States, as a “compound republic,” would have even more safeguards because the States themselves are sovereign:
In the compound republic of America, the power surrendered by the people is first divided between two distinct governments, and then the portion allotted to each subdivided among distinct and separate departments. Hence a double security arises to the rights of the people.
Yes, it does! Just ask those in the Federal government trying to track US performance under SDG 4 and its related “targets.”
SDG 4 Monitoring Falters in K-12
The Executive Branch of the Federal government maintains a website to track US progress on the SDGs, including target 4.7.1, which looks at the
Extent to which (i) global citizenship education and (ii) education for sustainable development, including gender equality and human rights, are mainstreamed at all levels in (a) national education policies; (b) curricula; (c) teacher education; and (d) student assessment
The reviewers at the sdg.data.gov site (“An official website of the Office of Management and Budget, the General Services Administration, and the US Office of Science and Technology Policy” – aka, “How many agencies does it take to review an SDG?”) appear frustrated by both this SDG target and US federalism (emphasis added):
The SDG 4.7.1 concept is difficult to define and measure, and it involves a wide array of different concepts and processes that are difficult to reduce to a statistical indicator. Particular with countries with federal education systems, such as the United States, there is no way to measure this indicator with available data even if the concepts were clear. Local and state agencies are responsible for determining student curriculum. Individual schools of teacher education would set the curriculum for their programs.
The sdg.data.gov evaluators (writing in October 2016) looked for a solution to this “round peg in a square hole” problem. They thought they had found one in the student assessment test known as the “PISA.”
The Leaning Tower of PISA
The “Programme for International Student Assessment” (“PISA”) is a test created by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (“OECD”), another multinational NGO to which the US belongs (and for which the US contributes roughly one-fifth of the budget). The PISA is administered every three years and allows nations to compare the performance of their 15-year olds in reading, math, science, and certain other metrics. In 2018, PISA introduced the newly-developed “global competence” assessment, “inspired by” SDG 4 (OECD; Schleicher introduction), and co-created by the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Sdg.data.gov “strongly recommended” that US policy makers “adopt this metric, rather than proposed indicator 4.7.1” as a “potential framework” for gauging US compliance with SDG 4. This could have been a handy work-around to the federalism “problem,” because the PISA is overseen and administered throughout the country by the US Department of Education.
This potential work-around failed. “The United States . . . did not participate in the assessment of global competence” in PISA 2018, nor was this assessment part of PISA 2022 (the test having been delayed by a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic). It remains to be seen whether OECD will again try to test “global competence” in PISA 2025.
Meanwhile….
The use of PISA as a measurement tool might have hit a snag, but that doesn’t mean US supporters of “education for sustainable development” and “global citizenship education” have given up – or even display discouragement.
While it is true that, as the Federal website states, “[l]ocal and state agencies are responsible for determining student curriculum[, and i]ndividual schools of teacher education … set the curriculum for their programs”, there is widespread – and voluntary – embrace of these concepts at all levels of the US education system.
We turn our attention there next.