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

[aburke5054@aol.com]

Tauna ...

I do not believe that the world divides neatly into paragons of virtue 
who are for NCLB and bad actors who are against it.  I do not at all 
believe that NCLB is perfect, or even close to it.  In fact, I welcome 
changes that would make it more effective.  However, I also believe 
that most of the criticisms of NCLB that I see on this list are 
absolute, total, and complete nonsense, because they accuse NCLB of 
saying what it doesn't say and doing what it doesn't do.  This includes 
much of what you say about NCLB here.  Arguments of the kind that Jerry 
advances that NCLB was designed as a stealth tool towards privatization 
strike me as nothing more than loony paranoia, even if publishers are 
making money and even if there have been conflict of interests around 
Reading First.  FairTest and the Educator Rountable are in worlds of 
their own.  It's as if you and they project everything that is wrong in 
education and in society onto NCLB.  My opinion is that NCLB is far 
from perfect, but that at the same time it has been a tremendous 
advance for the educational interests of parents and children and that 
it is changing American education for the better.  I agree with Brent 
Staples that NCLB ranks in importance with Brown for protecting the 
interests of poor children and minority children.  This is partly why I 
don't buy the objections that all kids proficient is unrealistic, or 
there are too many tests, or too much phonics, or it is too top-down - 
and I think that you and others simply miss the forest for the trees 
when you go on and on about those things.

You seem to believe that NCLB brings only irrelevance, if not actual 
harm, to children with special needs. Maybe things are not going well 
in your school, but your attitude seems to me to be against both wider 
experience and common sense.  A teacher told me that because of 
materials his district provided in response to NCLB he is better able 
to reach all the children in his classroom now than ever before in his 
30 years of teaching.  National organizations are aware of things like 
this.  Madeline Will addressed the NCLB Commission as the mother of a 
child with a developmental disability and as an officer of a national 
organization that advocates for such children.  She testified that 
NCLB's focus on accountability for children with special needs is one 
of the best things to have happened for the education of these 
children. She specifically rejected recommendations that would lower 
standards for special-needs children or reduce accountability under the 
banner of "flexibility."  La Raza has much the same point of view 
concerning the needs of  children whose first language is other than 
English.  Where you go wrong, I think, is that you seem to fail to 
understand that standards and accountability and "rigor" are not the 
heart of NCLB.  The heart of NCLB is the requirement that states 
improve their schools, particularly schools that serve poor children, 
minority children, children with disabilities, and children learning 
English. Creating urgency to improve schools for all children, 
particularly for children whose families might otherwise have little 
influence, is precisely the civil-rights need that NCLB addresses -- 
civil-rights organizations recognize this and that is why they support 
it.  That's why I support it.  Creating urgency to improve schools is a 
grand reason to keep NCLB - in a purified form, of course, that 
eliminates the nasty profit motive that only "private" interests are 
prone to.

NCLB does not solve all of life's problems for children who are 
neglected or abused, or for children with very low IQs, or for other of 
the nation's "hurting" children, as you describe them, but no one has 
said that NCLB is all these children need in their lives.  Federal and 
state education law is not the only vehicle for addressing their needs 
and people concerned for them and their parents should be pleading for 
them in arenas other than education law, instead of blaming NCLB for 
not doing what it can not possibly do and what it was not designed to 
do.  What NCLB does is push states to improve schools for all children 
- that alone makes it worthwhile.  The fact that, as you say, all 
children are not able to learn the same things in the same amount of 
time is an excellent reason to support NCLB, not a reason to be against 
it.

I can well believe that it is difficult for children with IQs below 70 
to meet state standards.  But, again, you miss the point:  NCLB does 
not ask the impossible of children - it asks the difficult of schools.  
That is exactly right and exactly what Americans should expect from our 
schools.  NCLB would work better if educators would rally around making 
the changes that schools need instead of tolerating excuses and 
frivolous objections.  How sad.

Art

-----Original Message-----
From: Tauna Rogers <taunar@plateautel.net>
To: arn-l@interversity.org
Sent: Tue, 7 Aug 2007 8:30 am
Subject: Re: [arn-l] Spinning NCLB "accountability" as civil rights: 
neocon girly manhood !?!


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






************************************** Get a sneak peek of the all-new

AOL at

http://discover.aol.com/memed/aolcom30tour

-------------------------------------------------------

ARN-L archives:

http://interversity.org/lists/arn-l/archives.html







________________________________________________________________________ 


AOL now offers free email to everyone.  Find out more about what's free

from AOL at AOL.com.

=0

-------------------------------------------------------

Subscribe ARN-L:

http://interversity.org/lists/arn-l/subscribe.html







________________________________________________________________________
AOL now offers free email to everyone.  Find out more about what's free 
from AOL at AOL.com.
=0