Re: Spinning NCLB "accountability" as civil rights: neocon girly manhood !?!

["Tauna Rogers" <taunar@plateautel.net>]

Art.

Every last person on this list is against civil rights for poor and minority 
students, disadvantaged students, disabled students. Except you, you paragon 
of virtue.

All except you are terminally deluded and our railings against No Child Left 
Behind and high-stakes testing are exercises in silliness.

There, feel better now?

How silly we are to object to the mega millions in profiteering taking place 
for private interests under an accountability system so absurd it defies 
description... while the very children the law purports to care so much 
about are the ones being hurt most by it.

How silly of me in the years since NCLB kicked in to object to subjecting 
children with IQs in the 50 -70 range to the same grade level tests as their 
non-disabled peers. Clearly, I've been a bigot, guilty of the soft bigotry 
of low expectations.

I got three new students (siblings) just before school was out in May. Mom 
is a drug addict and the little boys have been subjected to terrible abuse 
and neglect, including long periods of being kept locked in a garage without 
food, water, lights. These boys are representative of hundreds of thousands 
of this nation's hurting children who are victims of cultural and societal 
ills, pervasive conditions which have a horrendous impact on academic 
achievement.

But I see the light now - these children struggle to learn so what they need 
is RIGOR, the academic bar must be set higher, we must make things even 
harder. How bigoted of me to think otherwise! God forbid that all children 
are not able to learn exactly the same things in exactly the same amount of 
time.

Tauna


----- Original Message ----- 
From: <aburke5054@aol.com>
To: <arn-l@interversity.org>
Sent: Monday, August 06, 2007 8:20 PM
Subject: Re: [arn-l] Spinning NCLB "accountability" as civil rights: neocon 
girly manhood !?!


This list is getting more and more bizarre and farther and farther out.
 And that is saying something.  Some of the nation's most respected
civil-rights organizations and legal organizations with civil-rights
missions support the accountability that NCLB has brought to schools
and they believe that a retreat would weaken schools and would be a
serious blow to parents and children.  They're right about that.

Art


-----Original Message-----
From: QCao009@aol.com
To: arn-l@interversity.org; fcarforum@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Mon, 6 Aug 2007 5:43 pm
Subject: [arn-l] Spinning NCLB "accountability" as civil rights: neocon
girly manhood !?!

_Black is white_ (http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/black_white)
Submitted by _Rick Perlstein_
(http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/user/rick_perlstein)  on August 6,
2007 -
8:55am.

When I wrote about  the Supreme Court's monstrously mendacious decision
to
ban local school  districts from seeking racial fairness, I was
especially
offended by Chief  Justice Roberts' formulation, “the way to stop
discrimination
on
the basis of  race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
Historian Nancy McClean has now published an amazing little essay in
which
she reveals the workshops that churned out this Orwellian notion.
"Roberts’s
decision," she writes, "is replete with quotable phrases from the
lexicon
conservative strategists honed in their think tanks in the 1970s and
then
carried
into the nation’s courtrooms through their various legal societies."
Here's the story:
[H]ow did National Review greet the Brown decision? Frank Meyer, its
founding co-editor and the leading conservative movement builder in the

formative
years, called the high court’s decision a “rape of the  Constitution.”

To fight the implementation of Brown, Buckley and Meyer forged an
alliance
with the intellectual architect of “massive resistance,” James  Jackson
Kilpatrick. Kilpatrick’s agitation against school desegregation as
editor of
the
Richmond News Leader earned him praise as “one of the South’s  most
talented
leaders” from the Mississippi-based white Citizens’ Councils  then
working to
crush the civil rights movement.

Buckley traded mailing lists with this avid white supremacist
organization
in 1958, assuring its leader that “Our position on states’ rights  is
the same
as your own.” Indeed, it was. What made “the White community” in  the
South “
entitled” to use any means necessary to keep blacks from voting,
Buckley had
editorialized the year before, was that “it is the advanced race”  so
its “
claims of civilization supersede those of universal  suffrage.”
But calling the emancipation of black schoolchildren a "rape," and
calling
blacks civilizationally inferior, wasn't flying with the public. So
they did
what conservative do: borrowed from the black arts of corporation
public
relations.
They were tutored by northern neo-conservatives like Irving Kristol,
who  in
1964 warned Buckley of the “political folly” of arguing against school
desegregation “in terms of racial differences.” Buckley and his allies
wisely
dropped the racial rationales and most now say that they regret their
earlier
arguments.

But their core commitments stayed the same. To fight social justice,
conservative spokesmen simply mastered the art of rhetorical jujitsu.
They
seized
the civil rights movement’s greatest strength--its moral power–to
defeat its
goals. They complained less and less that civil rights measures
violated
property rights, aided communists or elevated racial inferiors.
Instead,
conservatives claimed that civil rights measures themselves
discriminated.

“I am getting to be like the Catholic convert who became more Catholic
than
the Pope,” Kilpatrick marveled in 1978 about his own altered
phraseology.  “
If it is wrong to discriminate by reason of race or sex,” intoned the
outspoken enemy of civil rights, “well, then, it is wrong to
discriminate by
reason
of race or sex.”

The former segregationists now portrayed themselves as the true
advocates of
fairness. They framed “the egalitarians,” in Kilpatrick’s words,  as
“worse
racists--much worse racists--than the old Southern  bigots.”...
Yes: quite literally, they argued that black was white. Read the whole
essay
_here_ (http://hnn.us/articles/41501.html) , then groove to Nancy's
_book _
(http://www.amazon.com/Freedom-Not-Enough-Workplace-Foundation/dp/0674019
091/ref
=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-0698794-2006438?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1186404043&sr=8-1)
Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of  the American Workplace.


Quan





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