Chicago's Educational Tuskegee Syphllis Experiment

[Csubstance@aol.com]

July 18, 2007

Colleagues and Friends:

"The United States government did something that was wrong -- deeply, 
profoundly, morally wrong. It was an outrage to our commitment to integrity and 
equality for all our citizens... clearly racist." (President Clinton's apology for 
the Tuskegee Syphllis Experiment to the eight remaining survivors, May 16, 
1997)

I want us to look closely at what "Left Behind by Design" (and, of all 
places, the American Enterprise Institute) are telling us about the past decade of 
test-based "standards and accountability" in the United States and make a very 
insistent call for a historical precedent. I will not refrain from anger about 
this, nor do I believe we can avoid naming names, no matter how powerful 
those people were (and are). 

It's time.

I just read all 41 pages of the study written at the University of Chicago 
and recently discussed at the American Enterprise Institute. 

I've also read the coverage in Education Week.

What we have here, before our eyes, is a replication of the destructive kinds 
of "science" that was embodied 70 years ago (and continued for more than 40 
years!) in the Tuskeegee Syphllis Experiment. 

We cannot afford to wait 40 years to call an end to the Chicago experiment.

Only it was the Chicago "Accountability" Experiment. In both, "scientists" 
helped destroy people, most of whom were black. In the Tuskeegee Experiment, the 
victims were adults. In the Chicago Experiment, the victims were children, 
some beginning at a very young age. The men and women in the white coats helped 
make these destructions happen, even if Education Week and others are still 
helping cover up what was done. Whether it was Chicago's Mayor Richard M. Daley 
(whose policies of "standards and accountability" led to the destruction), the 
school administrators who actually carried out the experiement (Paul Vallas; 
Arne Duncan; Phil Hansen; hundreds of others -- most of them white) or the 
"scholars" who provided "scientific" cover for these crimes, it's time to begin 
the reckoning.

Left out by design? 

Hardly. 

Covered up for nearly a decade.

They knew people would "die" as a result of their experiment, and they let it 
happen. 

On March 31, 2000, a Chicago public school student, Lashanda Shavers, told 
the conference on high-stakes testing at Columbia University that a form of 
triage was taking place at her school (Chicago's Crane High School). By that time, 
many of us had already documented the pernicious effects of "standards and 
accountability" on the poorest and most powerless children in Chicago's 
segregated ghetto schools. One result of the massive segregation of places like 
Chicago (where, to this date, more than 300 public schools are all-black) is that 
corraling the victims makes the victimization invisible to many and easier, 
therefore, for those who would carry it out. 

Tuskeegee 60 years ago.

Chicago under Daley, Clinton and Bush. (Remember: The President of the United 
States in two State of the Union addresses praised Chicago's "school reform" 
during the late 1990s). 

During discussions at Columbia, Ms. Shavers said that students near "passing" 
on the tests used for high-stakes (at that time, the TAP for high schools, 
the Iowa for elementary schools in Chicago) were given a lot of attention. 

The students (like herself) that were already scoring high were kept 
interested.

And the students who were very low were sent to the auditorium. 

Shavers was a student then at Chicago's Crane High School, which was 100 
percent black then and had been for three decades. Crane, more than some other 
schools, was in fact the kind of school where the Chicago Experiment was being 
carried out far from the eyes of most of the public. 

Several years before that (and long before I was suspended in March 1999 from 
my Chicago teaching job for publishing the CASE tests), we had begun to 
criticize the way in which Chicago was utilizing the TAP and ITBS tests for 
"accountability." The "we" in that case included Designs for Change, PURE, and 
Substance. By 1998, I pointed out to people that Katerhine Lawrence of Riverside 
Publishing (then the marketing group for the ITBS and TAP tests) was telling 
schools to focus on the "bubble" kids, ignore the low ones, and find something 
interesting to do with the "high" ones.

This was years before the Teachers College (and AERA) "Bubble" article and 
nearly a decade before the current University of Chicago study cited here.

The students from Chicago who participated in exposing all of those frauds 
during the late 1990s and early 2000s are now adults. The ones who were already 
high-scoring have gone on to their adults lives and commitments. Will Tanzman 
(who led the protests against the CASE tests at Whitney Young High School in 
2000) long ago graduated from Yale. Bria Dolnick long ago graduated from 
Beloit. I lost track of Lashanda Shavers (who as a 16-year-old blew the whistle on 
the "bubble" triage stuff out of Crane High School at Columbia University nine 
years ago).

Note that all of these scandals took place long before "No Child Left Behind" 
became a national horror because of the same high-stakes monstrosities we 
were enduring in Chicago. 

What has been lost is the record of destruction of those children who were 
triaged out of instruction in Chicago during those years. Thousands of children, 
some as young as eight years old (at the time) were ignored in the pursuit of 
bringing up the "bubble" kids since the beginning of Chicago's high-stakes 
mania (now national thanks to NCLB). 

I read the entire 41 pages of Neal and Schanzenbach's study. Probably the 
most annoying thing to me is that the study devotes a great deal of its 
introduction to thanking people from Chicago's Consortium on Chicago School Research 
(including John Easton). Instead, Easton and his Consortium colleagues should be 
condemned for having spent (at some profit to themselves) nearly a decade 
helping Chicago's public schools CEOs (Paul Vallas from 1995 through 2001; Arne 
Duncan since July 2001) destroy the thousands of children who were triaged out 
of their educations since "standards and accountability" took over here in 
Chicago in 1995 when Mayor Daley was given dictatorial control over CPS.

If there is any justice in the world, the children whose educational lives 
were murdered during those years thanks to the people who promoted or enabled 
those test based monstrosities will somehow have to face what they helped do to 
thousands of children. We cannot forget nor forgive, because from the 
beginning of this mess there were people who warned that these policies would destroy 
many of the most vulnerable children some at the youngest ages.

And then the people who had the resources to actually document that 
destruction instead ignored it in the pursuit of their careers. Which are still going 
strong.

No. There is a historical record that pre-dates the "bubble" studies (Booher 
Jennings) and the new studies (Nearl, Schanzenbach). That record has to be 
brought to light now, and those who facilitated the destruction of children, in 
the name of "standards" and "science" need to be brought to light, then brought 
to justice.

George N. Schmidt
Editor, Substance <BR><BR><BR>**************************************<BR> Get 
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