Re: "No Child Left Behind" is a Hurricane Katrina aimed at public schools
- From: Citizen Jimserac <Jimserac@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 24 Oct 2007 10:00:44 -0700
On Oct 24, 7:22 am, Bothrops Alticola <theprophetmi...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
The horribly mis-named "No Child Left Behind" Act comes up for
reauthorization sometime between the end of the year and early 2008.
Thumbing their nose at the massive backlash that has developed among
teachers, administrators, and the general public against the changes
the law has brought to American education, Congresspersons of both
parties are scrambling to make cosmetic changes in the law to deflect
the opposition and keep the NCLB motors running. The first five years'
performance of the No Child Left Behind law expose the hollowness of
hopes that the law's goal of saving American education by punishing
schools, students, and teachers can be made to work without degrading
the content of instruction and without permanently sinking the concept
of universal entitlement to a fair, equal, and publicly funded
education.
For decades now, enemies of public education, on a crusade to
privatize all schools, bust the teacher unions, strip teachers of
their collective bargaining rights, and shift school governance to the
private sector, have been sapping the people's support for their
community public schools by bashing teachers in the mainstream media.
Some of the loudest critics of public education, the Hoover
Institution, the Fordham Institute, the Aspen Institute, Bill Gates,
Eli Broad, and the Fortune 500 corporations have partnered with the
Federal Government in an effort to, what they claim, save our public
schools, which is the corporate point of origination that the "No
Child Left Behind" Act comes from.
Terms used by the federal government such as "no child left behind"
"at-risk children," "students-at-risk," and "nation-at-risk" are scare
rhetoric that vilifies teachers as perpetrators of an educational
crisis that can only be fixed by holding schools, the teachers in
them, and the students of these teachers to rigorous performance
standards as measured by federally mandated testing for which the
price of failure is outright dismantling of so-called underperforming
individual schools and their replacement by privately run (non-union)
institutions.
Conversion of our country's severe employment crisis and systemic
income and social inequality into a crisis of education scapegoats
teachers for our deeper institutional and social failure. Sick,
uninsured, and untreated children living in homes with low-paid and,
increasingly, unemployed parents unable to feed them properly should
be treated as victims of a dysfunctional economy rather than
stigmatized as academic underachievers, and teachers of these children
commended for their heroic efforts to educate them rather than
denigrated for trying to teach in the face of these odds.
The guaranteed failure of America's teachers to lift performance on
tests of the nation's poorest young people to universal passing levels
by 2014, the purported goal of NCLB, serves only one clear purpose: to
pin a label of outmoded and antiquated on the public school system
that is sure not to reach these lofty goals and hand its ripe plum of
public funding to private corporations, i.e. EMOs (Educational
Maintenance Organizations) that are waiting in the wings to take over
the system and become the educational equivalent of the HMOs of
American health care.
Government has been hijacked by privatization. Subsequently and
predictably it will drop the ball on domestic policy. From privatized
welfare, hospitals, prisons, troops fighting privatized non-wars,
shooting public citizenscan privatized schools be far behind? WILL OUR
SCHOOLS SUFFER THE SAME FATE AS EDUCATION IN THE CITY OF NEW ORLEANS
IN THE WAKE OF HURRICANE KATRINA?
During a recent visit to New Orleans, I had the opportunity to video
document "A New Direction for the Gulf Coast" led by Democratic Party
Congressional Leaders from Louisiana and beyond, majority whip
Congressman James Clyburn from South Carolina (a key state for the
presidential primaries), and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi in
attendance. They spoke to the NCLB reauthorization this way:
Interviewer Price: Speaker Pelosi, with the No Child Left Behind
reauthorization coming up, there's great concern that schools in the
New Orleans district are not going to be able to make the gradewhat
sense does it make to punish schools that are going to need resources
anyways?
Speaker Pelosi: I will just say from the perspective of the speaker
the chairman has had hearings and listening sessions all over the
country and people have come to Washington to share their views on No
Child Left Behind. It was clear it was legislation that despite the
best of intentions was not fair was not flexible and was not funded.
So change had to be made.
Congressman Scott: There's going to be a lot of changes in No Child
Left Behindwe're going to go to what is called a growth model to make
sure that the children are actually improving not a static model so I
think that everybody will be treated fairly. We always felt it was
absurd to punish a school when the kids came to school three years
behind and when they finish with them they are one year behind. We're
going to go to a growth model to see how the schools are doing and I
think New Orleans schools are going to do well.
The Democrats are staking everything on the hope that the New Orleans,
Louisiana School District (NOLA) and others urban centers will succeed
with a growth model. Recently they put $1 billion more dollars than
Bush did, allocating into restoration of the vast, devastated region,
$30 million for teachers and $30 million for professors of education.
With housing and health care aid still dragging, and two thirds of the
students and families having failed to even return, NCLB doesn't begin
to offer help to such schools like NOLA. NCLB and the restoration of
New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are now in the Democratic Party's
hands.
The Democrats like to say that since they've failed to be able to hold
Bush to a timeline with legislative efforts, the Iraq War is now "the
President's war." The same can then be said about No Child Left
Behind; since the 2006 election, it's now owned by Chairman George
Miller in the House and Senator Ted Kennedy in the Senate.
Miller seems intent to bring everyone under one big house to
reauthorize it. Good luck. He would do well, though, not to treat the
teacher unions as just another special interest group, with such a
cavalier attitude on display, September 10th, 2007. On the first day
of the new draft proposal hearings, he accused Reginald Weaver, the
president of the National Education Association (NEA) of "dancing
around" the "fact" that the teacher unions had already approved much
of the language of the TEACH act. Weaver disagreed.
Miller treated Weaver like he was on trial. He is not. The law is on
trial as well as the Democratic Party controlled 110th Congress.
Weaver represents the nation's teachers; it is probably not in
Miller's best interest, nor of the Democratic Party, to make teachers
any angrier than they already are. The unions are none-too-impressed
with the idea of the federal government superseding collective
bargaining rights, nor should they be.
NCLB was intended, according to its advocates, to address what were
determined to be the critical problems of social promotion, lack of
teacher quality, and critically declining reading and math scores. Yet
punishing the schools, narrowing the curriculum by forcing "teach to
the test" and creating a bonanza of funds for the testing companies
will do little to close the achievement gap. If all the students did,
by the year of 2014, make the grade, they would all then, by default,
be eligible for college. Are there enough openings for all of these
students?
Chairman Miller has been fighting against the student loan companies
to make college education affordable. He would do well however to make
sure that teachers can afford to teach, too.
http://www.counterpunch.com/price10222007.html
The mess of public education has already been exposed, along with
charlatan like "programs" which purport to be of benefit to students
but which instead become money making factories for the "education"
industry.
Luckily, the full agenda of the elitists of both left and right, often
concealed or misstated so that angry parents will continue to be
soothingly convinced of the efficacy of the children's "education",
has already been exposed, brilliantly, by none other than a teacher of
30 years who finally got fed up with the "system" and decided to
research and expose it.
I refer to John Taylor Gatto and his incisive book "The Underground
Guide to American Education" (entire book is online at the following
link with nice chapter summaries so you can skip about to your
favorite sections):
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
Every citizen MUST read this book, and come to understand the social
sabotage that the perversion of our education now represents, in part
witnessed weekly by random outbursts of violence and other, less
severe, protests of the disaffected.
The part played by the "education" industry is also fully exposed.
Citizen Jimserac
.
- References:
- "No Child Left Behind" is a Hurricane Katrina aimed at public schools
- From: Bothrops Alticola
- "No Child Left Behind" is a Hurricane Katrina aimed at public schools
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