Re: Bill Maher on NCLB and Houston Dropouts

["Karen Canty" <kvscanty@pacbell.net>]

I also heard him read this on his show...so got out to a national tv
audience too...

Karen

-----Original Message-----
From: arn-l-owner@interversity.org [mailto:arn-l-owner@interversity.org]
On Behalf Of Bob Schaeffer
Sent: Monday, August 11, 2003 4:02 AM
To: ARN Main List; ARN2 Strategy
Subject: [arn-l] Bill Maher on NCLB and Houston Dropouts

An indicator that the connection between high-stakes testing and rising 
dropout rates has reached critical mass . . . ..

          LEAVE NO CHILD BEHIND MEANS MAKE 'EM VANISH
          Houston Chronicle Column -- August 11, 2003
                      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 <i>Real Time with Bill Maher

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