By LYNN CHENEY

Almost everyone agrees that schools need to do a better job of preparing students for the workplace. So the "school-to-work" programs now up and running in 37 states should be uncontroversial.

But all across the country, many parents are angry about these efforts and the $2.3 billion Federal plan that helps support them.

Instead of targeting students in vocational education, these parents point out, school-to-work programs, by law, include all students. And in practice these programs assume unwarranted authority over their lives.

Kristine Jensen, a Nevada mother, told me that her daughter, an honor student who wants to work for NASA, had been advised to consider a career in sanitation or interior design. Eunice Evans, a parental-rights advocate in Pennsylvania, described a boy in her neighborhood who wanted to be a doc-tor but was told it would be more ap-propriate for him to be a gas station attendant or truck driver.

Observing that school-to-work programs often try to lower the aspirations of youngsters who are thinking about high-prestige professions, Mrs. Evans asked, "Who are these people who are playing God?"

School-to-work programs not only direct job choices, they seek to inculcate attitudes supposedly good for the workplace, such as the belief that individual striving should be put aside in the name of group achievement.

Having students work in teams is one way of fostering this thinking, particularly when it is reinforced by group grading. A Texas Workforce Commission document suggests that teachers give every member of a team the exam grade received by the lowest scorer as a way to encourage "supporting and assisting the low-achieving members."

The School-to-Work Opportunities Act of 1994, the federal law that sets the framework for much that is going on in the states, requires that young women be encouraged to consider "nontraditional employment." In conformance with this mandate, a publication of the Texas Education Agency recommends that students be repeatedly tested to see whether they think some jobs are more suitable for one sex than the other. Thus, it can be determined, advises the Career Development Implementation Handbook, "if growth occurs in the students’ views of non-traditional occupations" or "if there is a need for early intervention."

Concern that schools in his state would get in the business of enforcing politically correct thinking led Craig Hagen, North Dakota’s Commissioner of Labor, to resign from his state’s school-to-work management team. "I couldn’t remain in that position with my principles," he says.

The National Center for Education and the Economy, a non-profit group in Washington, D.C., has been the major force behind both Federal school-to-work legislation and the programs in many states, including Oregon, Texas, and New York. Hillary Rodham Clinton served on the National Center’s board and before she became First Lady publicly promoted school-to-work ideas, including the notion that business should pay a tax amounting to one percent of their payrolls to support school-to-work efforts.

Ira Magaziner was another active board member, and the sweeping scope of school-to-work as well as its faith in central planning calls to mind the health-care proposal advanced by Clinton and Magaziner four years ago. in 1993 and ‘94. The concept was regional alliances to survey health care plans and decide which ones individuals should choose; now the idea is workforce boards to consider future market needs and decide what career choices schools should encourage.

But predicting workforce needs is an iffy business. In 1989, for example, a prestigious study declared that beginning in 1997, there would be a dramatic shortfall of humanities Ph.D.’s, when, in fact, there is now a glut.

Re-directing schools to prepare students for jobs that central

planners recommend does not guarantee the economic well-being of those students and can even be a hindrance. A student whose high-school career focuses on specific jobs in one field may discover in college that another area is more interesting and therefore more likely to inspire high achievement. But early specialization can leave the student unready to take the courses that his or her more mature interest requires.

A recent poll conducted by Public Agenda gives some notion of how misguided school-to-work programs are. When asked to identify the weaknesses of public school graduates, employers weren’t concerned with at-tiitudes so much as with lack of basic skills. Only 35 per cent of employers found the basic math skills of public school graduates to be excellent or good. Only 27% found their ability to write clearly excellent or good. Only 23% found their grammar and spelling excellent or good..

We need also to keep firmly in mind that schools have long been about preparing citizens as well as workers, a tradition that school-to-work programs seem determined to ignore. They typically insist that all courses, even those in elementary school, relate to the world of work.

In Salida, Colorado, the entire kindergarten through fifth-grade curriculum—reading, writing, arithmetic and social studies included—recently focused on a year on careers in health care.

A manual distributed at a Kansas school-to-work conference recommends that English courses concentrate on "resume’ writing, interviewing, team building, and task division," or "literature that looks at different kinds of work and workers."

A publication from the Department of Education and Labor, which together administer the federal school-to-work program, claims that there is a pedagogical reason to relate all subjects to the workplace: "Individuals learn best by relating what they learn in school to their experiences as workers." But thousands of years of human experience show people eager to learn about things beautiful and improbable that have nothing to do with work.

There is also a record stretching back to the Greeks that illustrates how valuable subjects like literature and history are for encouraging independent thought. The liberal arts, shoved aside and distorted in the school-to-work system, were so named because they foster the habits of mind necessary for freedom (in Latin, libera).

All across the country are people who understand that school-to-work legislation, though appealingly labeled, is a terrible idea for our schools.

Lynn Cheney is the wife of GOP vice-presidential candidate Richard Cheney. This article is her testimony before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Feb. 3, 1998.