It's now officially OK to say what everybody who cares has known for years - NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND IS A ABYSMAL FAILURE. In fact it was doomed form the start as an educational reform plan. But of course, that was the public face of the reform, the one to flim-flam the masses and the well- meaning but myopic members of the elite who really cared. It was a coalition of the cynical privatizeers, the ideologically blinkered, the well meaning Democratic compromisers and the corporate shrills who gave us this Frankenstein. It was the children of the middle , working and lower classes who paid the price.
To start with, this:
No Child Left Behind: Doomed to Fail? Now a former official in Bush's Education department is giving at least some support to that notion. Susan Neuman, a professor of education at the University Michigan who served as Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education during George W. Bush's first term, was and still is a fervent believer in the goals of NCLB. And she says the President and then Secretary of Education Rod Paige were too. But there were others in the department, according to Neuman, who saw NCLB as a Trojan horse for the choice agenda - a way to expose the failure of public education and "blow it up a bit," she says. "There were a number of people pushing hard for market forces and privatization."
In the beginning the law had its supporters, but I never believed in it . It was the old corporate analogy applied to education , a pig with a new dress and lipstick.
Six Sigma is the appropriate tool where quality management is concerned. In an educational setting, teachers are the work force and parents are the customers.
The latter tend to pay the fees and expect their wards to get good and qualitative results. By improving teaching techniques, teachers expect a positive change in the performance of their students. This change is expected to last for a stipulated time for the acquired profit to remain constant.
There was always something slightly insane about No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the ambitious education law often described as the Bush Administration's signature domestic achievement. For one thing, in the view of many educators, the law's 2014 goal - which calls for all public school students in grades 4 through 8 to be achieving on grade level in reading and math - is something no educational system anywhere on earth has ever accomplished. Even more unrealistic: every kid (except for 3% with serious handicaps or other issues) is supposed to be achieving on grade level every year, climbing in lockstep up an ever more challenging ladder. This flies in the face of all sorts of research showing that children start off in different places academically and grow at different rates.
Just this last week, there appeared this summation of how bad this scheme has failed:
The study, by the Center on Education Policy, a Washington research group headed by a Democratic lawyer who endorses most of the administration's education policies, says that 48 percent of the nation's 100,000 public schools were labeled as failing under the law this year.
But the failures were stacking up long before 2011. As the educational justifications receded and the failures mounted, the program reminded in place. In some instances out of a genuine belief in the reforms, in many cases out of inertia and severl other factors.
One was the new breed of administrators, trained in business schools as corporate sytle educational "managers" , or literally business people brought over to manage the changes specifically because of their business "skills" . Another source of educational reform leaders was , ironically enough, "Teach for America" and similar programs. ( see here)
I meet a consultant at a joint public forum held by Rice University Education/Business schools and KIPP Academy:
He approached me afterwards and pointed out what all the latest gurus had in common. First, they had no training in education. Next, they had put in a brief stint in Teach for America or similar "anybody can teach , you don't need training type programs". Additionally many of them were driven by a desire to be the Young Turks who turn the educational establishment on its ear.
Increasingly, the for profit and Charter Schools are infiltrating public education. Here in Springbranch, they announced a pilot program to allow KIPP to help with the overflow of applicants for charter school slots. In Austin....
So the privitization goal of NCLB cynics is proceeding a pace. The one question that no one has ever been able to answer with regard to this part of the larger plan to destoy public education is - who will regulate and monitor the quality of these non-public institutions? The answer is , essentially no one or no one who wants to really be a watchdog . In Texas, a charter school that fails, simplely dissolves itself, chooses a new name and re-incorporates. There is no record kept of these transformations, so parents sometimes can't make informed decisions about using a particular charter school or not.
The largest experiment with charter and private schools replacing public ones was and is New Orleans. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it became the meccca of charter school experiment. As such , it has revealed more that the problems of supervision of such an enterprise. Try to find a school for your special needs child in the New Orleans system.
"Because I came from a traditional program, I thought, 'Oh, that's my local special ed coordinator. That's the person who knows what's in the city and can direct me toward the schools that would be best for Noah," Fisher says.
But Kelly and her husband, Bob, say that New Orleans' open choice system left them totally on their own when it came to finding a school for Noah. In theory, New Orleans parents can choose from any school, whether it's a charter or one run directly by the RSD. But most schools are charters, and the best charters are full.
So the Fishers ended up on waiting lists. Bob Fisher says that the central district seemed powerless. "The director was just scrambling around, making phone calls. Actually, he says, at one point he remembers she ran out in the hallway, grabbed someone and said, 'Hey, do you have an opening at your school?'"
The Fishers say they kept looking for a school that could help Noah. Finally, they ended up at Lafayette Academy, a charter school. Lafayette is housed in a former district school building not far from where the family lives, in the Mid-City neighborhood.
At Lafayette, the Fishers say, Noah has the help he needs: He has a full-time aide named Daniel Thomas.
The Fishers suspect that other schools simply did not want to spend the money needed to hire an aide and were not interested in accommodating Noah. Lafayette Principal Mickey Landry admits that it is challenging for any school to cover the costs of special ed resources.
"The state tops out its financing for special needs students at about $18,000 a year. But some students cost us significantly more than that - sometimes as much as $40,000.
When the cost of educating a student is higher than the state stipend , there is every reason to NOT accept them. But Noah's story reveals another dark side of the charter/non-public and for profit movement - who educates the average student, the less motivated, the ones form troubled homes? For they too require more resources and will also drag down our test scores and public image. I ask this at the KIPP Rice Forum and I could get no satisfactory answer.
Diane Ravitch has said it well in her book The Death and Life of the Great American School System:
As currently configured, charter schools are havens for the motivated. As more charter schools open, the dilemma of educating al students will grow sharply. The resolution of that dilemma will determine the fate of public education.
The question for the future is wheterh the continued growth of charter schools in urban districts will leave regular schools with the most difficult students to educate, thus creating a two-tiered system of widening inequality. If so, we can safely predict that future studies will "prove" the success of charter schools and the failure of regular schools, because the public schools will have disproportionate numbers of less motivated parents and needier students. As charter schools increase in number and able students enroll in them, the regular schools in the nation's cities will be locked into a downward trajectory. This will be an ominous development for public education and for our nation.
(As a side note , this push for charter schools has the additional benefit of undercutting support for teacher's unions and more broadly for public unions. They are blamed for the failures of public education. )
This entire process has been accelerated in the last several years by the conscious efforts of the 1% as we have come to call them.
Nicholas Confessore has explained....
Policy Making Billionaries Nicholas Confessore shows that even in charity, the rich are different. You may contribute to a cause, but a billionaire can rewrite one.
In keeping with the anti-government spirit of the times, the new philanthropists - some with roots in the loosely libertarian milieu of Silicon Valley or Wall Street - share a disdain for established politics and an impatience with the slow churn of old-fashioned policy making. ...
But the very loftiness of such ambitions raises a significant question: Can even the very wealthiest philanthropists finance public services on the scale necessary to achieve social change - that is, on the scale of government itself?
Even putting aside what it would mean to live in a nation beholden to the largess of the 1%, the wealthy have discovered that they really can't do it as well as government. So they've taken next step: telling government how to do it.
After early experiments with directly financing new experimental schools around the country, for example, some of the biggest advocates for charter schools, including the Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundation of Eli and Edythe Broad, shifted gears several years ago and began pouring billions of dollars into advocacy at the federal, state and local levels. One result: The Obama administration's $4.3 billion "Race to the Top" grant program, whose rules prohibited states from limiting the number of charter schools.
There are several things wrong with this idea-a few billion, in fact-but the biggest might be that government is allowing people to set direction who have the most to gain if government policy fails. Step 1: compete with government. Step 2: fail. Step 3: get government to stop competing. Step 4: profit!
And so, I return to my title/question, is this the end for public education? I hope not, but I would not bet against it...
