[van-discuss] Bush's corrupt war agenda now invades our Public Schools

[Henry Noble]

Please repost and circulate widely.

IN CONTEMPT OF EDUCATION
Bush's corrupt war agenda now invades our Public Schools
By Dr. Douglas D. Noble

For several years I have been active against the high stakes standardized 
tests in New York State, working with a grassroots organization in 
Rochester, New York 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 BBush'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

Author Dr. Doug Noble is a longtime progressive educator and activist in 
Rochester, New York  USA.  He can be reached at Jaria9295 at aol.com