Leave No Child Behind means make 'em vanish by Bill Maher

["Gloria Pipkin" <gpipkin@i-1.net>]

Houston Chronicle
Aug. 10, 2003, 8:20PM

Leave No Child Behind means make 'em vanish
By BILL MAHER

New rule: Stop believing slogans, especially the ones that come out of the
White House. Slogans are not policy, and they're not truth. Twinkies aren't
wholesome goodness, and The Clear Skies Initiative isn't really going to
bring clear skies. And, it turns out, the Leave No Child Behind law actually
leaves lots of children behind.

So many, they even have a name now: pushouts, as in were pushing you out of
school so that our cumulative test scores will be higher.

Yes, that's what this is all about. Our Leave No Child Behind law is written
like this: As a state, you get federal money for your schools, but only when
you make a few things happen, mainly get test scores to go up and dropout
rates to go down. How best to achieve both of those goals? By making the
dumber kids disappear!

The program President Bush brags about in Houston was all about raising test
scores by making almost the entire bottom half of the class drop out, and
then lowering the dropout rate by putting those dropouts in phony categories
like transferred or enrolled in general equivalency diploma, or GED,
classes. Sure, it was a little suspicious the way the testing system seemed
to funnel so much money to old Bush friends McGraw Hill, but what can you
do? You can't make an omelet without making a few people rich. What mattered
was, it worked.

Except it didn't. We weren't really improving the system, but we were
improving it where it matters: on paper. It's not for nothing that all
Texans looked up to Enron. When Bush ran in 2000, Houston's dropout rate was
given as 1.5 percent. It's been revised to 40 percent. Probably by the same
guy who does the budget. Enron was gaming the energy futures; here it was
the kids' futures.

Not that every kid should go to college; I've always believed every kid
should not. But every kid should finish high school, and if you call your
law No Child Left Behind, it does take a special kind of Texas-size nerve to
then treat those children like cards in a gin rummy hand, where you get to
ditch the two low ones, and where bodies just disappear like dissidents in
Argentina, or that Julia Louise Dreyfuss sitcom.

No child means none, and I don't need a degree in fuzzy math to know that 40
percent is not none. Are inner-city schools tough, with high dropout rates?
Yes, but again, when you say no child, the implication is that were going
after the section of kids who are harder to reach.

And who can be reached, as we've learned from scores of movies about
impossible high schools where one really dedicated actor, I mean teacher,
makes a huge difference and gets the kids to dig Shakespeare. George W. Bush
ran for office as the education guy, as the Sidney Poitier or Edward James
Olmos or Michelle Pfeiffer character, I mean candidate, and his caring about
leaving no child behind is what softened him into a compassionate
conservative. So it does seem wrong when we find out that were doing,
apparently, is just handling lots of kids a GED kit.

Our president has made speeches in which he chuckles at himself for being a
C student at Yale University. Of course, given who his father was, he could
afford to chuckle at it; falling behind would not really keep him behind.
But the rest of us aren't so fortunate. And as no one could tell you better
than George W. Bush, we don't all blossom early in life, so maybe writing
off so many kids at 15 or 17 isn't such a wise policy. It might amuse the
president to know that this is exactly what they do in his favorite country,
France, but the French don't lie about it and sell it as leaving no child
behind, and France has more of a social safety net than we do. We have one,
but it's called prison.

People say education is the cornerstone of our democracy -- they're wrong,
of course, it's campaign cash, and lots of it. But shouldn't it still count
for something? As the president himself might say, we can do gooder.

Maher is host of HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher.

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/printstory.hts/editorial/outlook/2038779