| IN CONTEMPT OF EDUCATION Bush's corrupt war agenda now invades our Public Schools By Douglas D. Noble, June 20 2003 For several years I have been active against the high stakes standardized tests in New York State, working with a grassroots organization in Rochester called the Coalition for Common Sense in Education. This past year, however, as we were preoccupied with Bush's invasion of Iraq, this important struggle against high stakes tests took a back seat to antiwar activities for many of us. The testing regime, however, has continued unabated in harming children, especially poor children, by enforcing a single, inflexible and invalid standard without first leveling the playing field. Now Bush's federal initiative, No Child Left Behind, has compounded the problem, with even more mandated tests, for even younger children. Refocusing my attention on these issues, I realize just how remarkably the testing regime, especially at the federal level, parallels the Bush Administration's Iraq war machine, in its deceit, its hidden agendas, and its contempt for reasoned evidence and public outcry. The New York State Regents testing administration suffers grievously from these faults, as we have argued these last few years. But the new federal initiative epitomizes in starkest terms the regime of punitive arrogance and cruel deceit that lies behind such testing systems. The parallels with the Iraq war are striking and instructive. Pretense of Liberation The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, signed into law in January 2002 with strong bipartisan support, promises that through systematic testing and federal mandates all children will at last receive an equal education, and, in particular, poor children will no longer be left behind by second-rate education. Just as the Iraqi people were to be "liberated" through the violent US overthrow of the Saddam regime, so poor children will be liberated from the stranglehold of inadequate education through resolute federal oversight (and even overthrow) of failing public schools. A system of annual tests in the elementary grades will be used to determine the "adequate yearly progress" (AYP) of student subgroups within each school. Schools whose students fail to show incremental progress on these tests will be labeled "failing," faced with such penalties as fired staffs, closed schools, even abolished districts. All to save the poorest kids. In the Iraq war, remember, we were asked somehow to believe the Administration's stated humanitarian goal to liberate the Iraqi people, despite years of US-led sanctions that impoverished the Iraqi people, despite years of US support for Saddam's regime against his own people, despite thousands of Iraqi people to be killed by a US war. With the NCLB, the deceit behind the stated humanitarian goal is just as astonishing. Consider the evidence. As governor, Bush, according to one observer, "displayed a colossal indifference to the poor children of Texas," which ranked third among all states in percentage of children in poverty, third in percentage of malnourished residents, second in percentage of poor children without health insurance, . and 36th in teacher salaries. Now Bush's 2004 federal budget includes severe reductions in all programs impacting children's learning, from food stamps, child nutrition, foster care, and health insurance for children, to childcare grants and various assistance programs for poor families. The education cuts in Bush's 2004 budget, affecting everything from dropout prevention to arts education to parent assistance, amount to over $1.5 billion. Meanwhile, Bush's budgeted increase through NCLB, only $1 billion, is almost $6 billion less than is authorized in the Act and a whopping $83.5 billion short of what state studies have estimated they will require to meet the schooling needs of the nation's poor children. Yet despite this clear accumulated evidence of Bush' s flagrant disregard for the nation's poor children, still we are asked to believe in Bush's stated education goal of liberation, to leave no child behind. . Contempt for truth, evidence and reasoned opposition We all remember how Bush contemptuously dismissed the largest worldwide mass demonstrations in history opposing the Iraq war; how he ignored fervent dissent among our closest United Nations allies; how he disregarded reasoned predictions of social disintegration and a violent occupation; how he overrode his own intelligence apparatus, fabricating evidence instead for Iraq's Al Qaeda links and weapons of mass destruction. This contempt for evidence, thoughtful opposition and truth is also the signature of Bush's NCLB. Scholars have accumulated mountains of evidence that most schools are being set up to fail with the new impossible-to-meet standards, that states already impoverished by the loss of federal funds cannot possibly afford the costs of the NCLB mandates, that children without their basic needs met are at cruelly unfair advantage, that punitive incentive systems don't work to motivate students and schools, even that yearly changes in test scores, the heart of the NCLB strategy, are meaningless, resulting mostly from random variations. Public opposition to high stakes tests meanwhile have been mounted in states across the country, especially by parents of disenfranchised children who have been denied graduation or promotion based solely on dubious test scores. And most major education organizations, including the American Education Research Association, the National Research Council, the International Reading Association, and the National Education Association, as well as the professional associations of the test makers themselves, have officially opposed the use of single test measures for high stakes decisions. Despite all this, the NCLB is going forward, as are the testing regimes in most states. Meanwhile, there is accumulating evidence of deceptive practices in many states to maintain the pretense that students' scores are improving. Scores are being manipulated, some students' scores are not counted, damaging data are ignored, and test cutoffs are altered for political reasons. Deceit and lies are used throughout the land to maintain a semblance of integrity for a fraudulent system, and the same is about to happen with the NCLB, since Bush, as we know from Iraq, has little regard for the truth. Power and punishment: Destroying the schools in order to save them The protection of Iraqi social, political, historical and physical infrastructure, and of Iraqi lives, was flagrantly ignored in Bush' s rush to take imperious control of the country. Bush's "precision" bombs caused up to 7000 civilian deaths, his use of depleted uranium weaponry has irradiated the country, he demolished basic services in the major cities with woefully inadequate plans to restore them, he destroyed the gainful employment of millions, he ignored scholars' pleas to protect priceless artifacts dating from the birth of civilization, and he offers only empty promises to establish Iraqi political control of the newly occupied country. Echoing an earlier war, the country has been callously destroyed in order to save it. The No Child Left Behind initiative is Bush's parallel "take no prisoners" attempt to assert imperious, impatient control over a recalcitrant public school system by demanding compliance through draconian threats and punitive measures. There is no consideration of the dire consequences for children or schools that scholars predict will result. Estimates, even by the White House itself, of the number of the nation's schools that will be labeled "failing" by NLCB range from 75% to 90%, since the demands are impossible to meet, especially given diminished resources. Ironically, schools in those states with the highest current state test score improvements are predicted to fail in the largest numbers, because still further yearly improvement will be harder to demonstrate. And a failing label will be assigned most frequently to those schools with students suffering the greatest impact of poverty (as the state tests already clearly demonstrate). According to a recent address by the president of the American Education Research Association, the NCLB proficiency targets for the year 2014, when presumably the schools will have achieved adequate performance, require that the schools increase the current secondary level math improvement rate by a factor of 12. Observes one scholar, "This is a rate of increase equivalent to having the automotive industry by 2014 averaging 288 miles per gallon." These impossible demands have already begun to fuel fear in schools and districts, scrambling to comply through further narrowing of curriculum, abandonment of successful programs, redirection of scarce funds to testing costs, increased pressure on teachers, and wily manipulation of data, none of which serves the interests of education or children. This predicted destruction of the best of public schooling falls on deaf ears in a Bush administration used to inflicting such misery without flinching. Privatization in disguise It has become clear that the hidden Bush agenda behind the Iraq war was the privatization of Iraqi industries, lining the pockets of multinational corporations in bed with the Bush administration. The latest uncontested contracts of Bechtel and Halliburton, both with close ties with the Administration, are just the tip of this iceberg. Naomi Klein has called the Iraq war "privatization in disguise," whereby the country is destroyed precisely to create lucrative opportunities and markets to rebuild and profit from this destruction. For years, education critics have warned that continuing federal and state impoverishment of public schools greases the skids for efforts to privatize schools through vouchers, for-profit school management, and other competitive measures. Heavily invested for-profit enterprises have hovered for a decade to take advantage of opportunities to profit from public school failures. The NCLB is their latest, most blatant, chance in this direction. Bush's original NCLB proposal included provisions for vouchers to let children attend private schools at taxpayer expense. Congress removed the voucher provisions, no doubt mindful of recent resounding voucher defeats in California and Michigan, but the impulse to privatize remains central in the minds behind the NCLB. Some critics have charged that the hidden agenda in NCLB is to dismantle the public schools through impossible testing targets and other demands, so that they might be turned over to the private sector through vouchers and through for-profit school management by such firms as Edison Schools, Inc. (which, though started with great fanfare a decade ago with promised voucher plans by Bush Sr., has yet to turn a profit or produce significant school results, despite questionable accounting practices). "Supplementary services" provisions in NCLB leave the door open anew to such firms, as public schools begin to be labeled failures. Could Bush be attempting intentionally to dismantle the public schools to privatize them? Isn't this all too farfetched and mean spirited? Ask the now destitute Iraqi people about Bechtel and Halliburton. Fakery, faith and fodder Bush's resolve to invade Iraq was grounded in his fundamentalist Christian faith, while his shifting rationales for war were concocted under cover of national security. Immovable faith and a shifty secrecy lay at the heart of the Bush war machine, which ultimately relied on the unquestioning patriotic allegiance of countless young troops. The NCLB was similarly concocted in secret, leaving precious little time for Congress to consider its merits before the vote. Also, the federal funds originally committed to states to meet the new mandates were shifted steadily downward in subsequent budgeted appropriations. Such sleight of hand leaves the severe mandates intact without the resources to address them. Two provisions secreted into the NCLB with little public notice reinforce Bush's fundamentalist faith and his call to the troops. One provision demands that all schools must verify that they have no rules which would in any way impede students' use of prayer in school. Another provision requires that all high schools must provide student records - including names, addresses and phone numbers - to military recruiters, unless parents specifically opt out, in writing. (Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld sent letters this fall to all the nation's school officials, cosigned by Education Secretary Paige, pointedly reminding them of this requirement in the NCLB.) These two provisions clearly have nothing to do with quality education, but they do further the very same Bush faith-based, militarist agenda that lay behind the Iraq war. ***** If we have learned one thing from the Iraq war, it is that the Bush administration really is as arrogant, mean spirited and contemptuous as it appears. Critics of his education agenda must hold this firmly in mind as they question the latest federal regimen of high stakes tests and punitive mandates in the nation's schools. At one antiwar protest in Washington DC this winter I saw a sign bearing a picture of an Iraqi child that read "No Child Left Alive." The spirit behind the Bush No Child Left Behind education agenda is just as sinister, even if it only slaughters the hopes and dreams of its young victims. Sources Gerald W. Bracey, NCLB - A Plan for the Destruction of Public Education, NoChildLeft.com, vol. 1, no.2, February, 2003 Gerald Coles, Learning to Read and the 'W Principle', Rethinking Schools, Summer, 2003 Naomi Klein, Privatization in Disguise. The Nation, April 28, 2003 William J. Mathis, No Child Left Behind: Costs and Benefits, Phi Delta Kappan, www.pdkintl.org/kappan/k0305mat.htm |