Before the people of New York choose Hillary Rodham Clinton as their senator, they ought to know something about what she stands for on education, because that is one of the issues on which she is supposed to be very strong. Like every other candidate, she wants education reform. What kind of reform? Hillary is, unfortunately, not very strong on details. She wants better education. But don't we all? The simple truth is that the kind of education Hillary wants is not better at all. It's a more radical, socialist kind of education. In fact there is a name for the program she endorses. It's called the Human Resources Development Plan for the United States, and her education guru, Marc Tucker, conceived it.

Who is Marc Tucker? He is the president of a think tank called the National Center on Education and the Economy, which was founded in 1987 with the help of Gov. Mario Cuomo of New York. Cuomo urged Tucker to set up his think-tank in Rochester, N.Y., with help of a state subsidy of $5.5 million. Tucker was to develop a master plan for national education reform, which was to be tried out in the public schools of Rochester.

Tucker had come from the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy where, in 1986, he authored an influential report on teaching: "A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century." The report recommended the creation of a National Board of Teaching Standards, which would establish national standards for teachers.

To give the NCEE maximum prestige, Tucker assembled an impressive board of trustees with such high-powered liberals as David Rockefeller Jr. (vice chairman of Rockefeller Family & Associates), Mario Cuomo (honorary chairman), John Sculley (former CEO of Apple Computer), James B. Hunt Jr. (former governor of North Carolina), Vera Katz (ultra liberal speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives), Adam Urbanski (president of the Rochester Teachers Association), and Hillary Rodham Clinton (partner in the Rose Law Firm and first lady of Arkansas).

That appointment proved to be very lucrative for Hillary, for during 1990 and 1991 she was paid $102,000 for her work as a consultant to the NCEE. Apparently, Hillary gave speeches and met with leaders in business, labor and education to promote Tucker's 1990 report, "America's Choice: High Skills or Low Wages." Also, the NCEE had a contract with the Rose Law Firm to perform work that the firm has been unable to identify. An investigation by New York attorney general Dennis Vacco into who was paid for doing what has never gotten to the bottom of the mystery. It should be noted that the present commissioner of education of New York state, Richard P. Mills, was also on the NCEE board of trustees, along with Hillary.

In the fall of 1989, Bill, Hillary and Marc Tucker were active in shaping the education agenda that finally came out of the Governors' Conference in Charlottesville, Virginia. It was on the basis of that agenda that Goals 2000 was conceived and then promoted by President Bush in his State of the Union address in January 1990. Why President Bush chose to embrace an education reform plan conceived by left-wing radicals rather than one conceived by conservatives is another baffling mystery.

In November of 1992, Bill Clinton won the election for the presidency. Marc Tucker was so elated by this victory that he sent an 18-page letter to Hillary, outlining what the Clinton administration should do in order to enact his radical education program. He wrote:

I still cannot believe you won. But utter delight that you did pervades all the circles in which I move. I met last Wednesday in David Rockefeller's office with him, John Sculley, Dave Barram and David Haselkorn. It was a great celebration. Both John and David R. were more expansive than I have ever seen them -- literally radiating happiness. ... The subject we were discussing was what you and Bill should do now about education, training and labor market policy. Following that meeting, I chaired another in Washington on the same topic. ...

Our purpose in these meetings was to propose concrete actions that the Clinton administration could take -- between now and the inauguration, in the first 100 days and beyond. The result, from where I sit, was really exciting. We took a very large leap forward in terms of how to advance the agenda on which you and we have all been working -- a practical plan for putting all the major components of the system in place within four years, by the time Bill has to run again.

What was that plan? Tucker described it: "What is essential is that we create a seamless web of opportunities to develop one's skills that literally extends from cradle to grave and is the same system for everyone -- young and old, poor and rich, worker and full-time student." He then went on for the rest of the 18 pages to outline in detail what has since become the new School-to-Work curriculum, in which the government plans your life for you, just the way it was done in the old Soviet bloc nations in Eastern Europe.

"The object," Tucker wrote, "is to create a single comprehensive system for professional and technical education that meets the requirements of everyone from high school students to skilled dislocated workers, from the hard-core unemployed to employed adults who want to improve their prospects. Creating such a system means sweeping aside countless programs, building new ones, combining funding authorities, changing deeply embedded institutional structures, and so on."

Finally, he wrote, "Radical changes in attitudes, values and beliefs are required to move any combination of these agendas."

And so, the real agenda was not improving American public education academically but changing it from a system that taught young Americans basic skills and imparted essential cultural knowledge, to a system of training youngsters to serve the state in whatever capacity the government thought necessary.

Needless to say, during the next six years, Congress enacted many of the components of the Tucker-Clinton Human Resources Development Plan: Goals 2000, the Educate America Act, the School-to-Work Opportunities Act, and the Improving America's Schools Act, all of which were signed into law by President Clinton in 1994. Then in 1995 came the Careers Act and the Workforce Development Act. This time, grass-roots conservatives let the Republican Congress know they didn't want any further development of the Tucker-Clinton education plan. However, in August 1998, when most Congressmen were heading home, a small group of liberal Democrats stayed behind and voted in favor of the Workforce Investment Act of 1998, the latest version of the Careers Act which conservatives had blocked in 1995. Bill Clinton signed it into law on Aug. 7, 1998.

And so, Marc Tucker and his minions have all the money they need to implement their Soviet-style education reform. When and if Hillary Rodham Clinton becomes the senator from New York, you can be sure that she will do all in her power to further the Tucker plan.

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Samuel L. Blumenfeld is the author of eight books on education, including "NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education," "The Whole Language/OBE Fraud," "Is Public Education Necessary?" and "How to Tutor." His books are available on Amazon.com. For information about Blumenfeld's reading instruction program, "Alpha-Phonics," please write: The Tutoring Company, P.O. Box 540111, Waltham, MA 02454-0111.