Re: Chicago's Educational Tuskegee Syphllis Experiment

[aburke5054@aol.com]

If teachers and principals are cheating on the tests, or 
inappropriately ignoring some children to focus on others, we should 
tell them to stop doing it and tell them loud and clear.  Bringing in 
the Tuskegee experiments or the Holocaust or Iraq ior "Campbell's Law" 
indicates staggering moral blindness that grows out of a desire to 
propagandize at the expense of the interests of parents and children.

Art

-----Original Message-----

From: Csubstance@aol.com

To: arn-l@interversity.org

Sent: Wed, 18 Jul 2007 4:05 am

Subject: [arn-l] Chicago's Educational Tuskegee Syphllis Experiment


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 
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