Re: FairTest reaction to Sec Spellings announcement of nclb 'differentiated accountability' pilot program

[Csubstance@aol.com]

In a message dated 3/19/08 11:18:30 AM, MONICALUCIDO@comcast.net writes:

<< There's no evidence from that one statement that NCLB did anything to 
"improve" that class. It could have just been in the lesson plans for instruction. 
In fact, how do we know if the focus on those subjects she mentions hasn't 
gotten WORSE. Maybe the depth was better before, and she's only focused on her 
one experience. Unless one has the "before" and "after" effects, to take this 
quote out of the context of the flow of the class over the years is useless. >>

3/20/08

Ignoring Art's usual nonsense (I had to read it, since it was tagged here), 
for disabled children, NCLB in Chicago has been depriving them of 
opportunities, not enhancing same.

The fact that some people here still waste their time on NCLB touts (rather 
than just using DELETE judiciously) is y'all's decision. 

But some important issues here are very close to home for us in Chicago.  

I'm not really interested in one silly anecdote from one place. 

Specifically, in Chicago prior to mayoral control (1995) and then NCLB 
(2002), we had a federal consent decree that was supposedly monitoring the education 
of special needs students. For the past six years (literally, since NCLB 
began; and with the full aid and support of Margaret Spellings and George W. Bush, 
both of whom have come here to Chicago to tout NCLB and praise Mayor Daley), 
the Daley administration has been attacking those rights and trying to get out 
from the federal enforcement.

Since NCLB, CPS has been joined in that effort by the Illinois State Board of 
Education (who've taken the position that NCLB will handle the rights of 
special needs children).

Given the enormous amount of evidence in Chicago or the systematic violations 
of the rights of disabled children and teenagers by the Chicago Board of 
Education, it makes me a bit more angry when I hear someone 2,000 miles away 
recycling right wing talking points about children with disabilities.

A month ago, I was taking photographs at one of the 19 hearings held in 
Chicago on the proposals to close (often, to privatize) a number of our public 
schools. At one point, parents were talking and I noticed that the child they were 
holding had Down syndrome. They were defending one of the few public schools 
in Illinois that had a pre-school program for special needs children. I had to 
stop taking photographs (the child, about three years old, was clapping his 
hands and smiling for the 200 teachers and students who had packed the hearing, 
smiling and being showered with the kind of community you can't buy with all 
the market solutions these creeps push).

I usually don't lose it. I was one of two reporters covering that even (it 
was on a Friday night; Labor Beat was the other). I just went to the side to 
shake it off. The guy from Labor Beat asked me why I was upset (actually, almost 
crying). I just pointed out what I had just realized through my viewfinder. I 
shook it off and went back to work.

Later in that same hearing, a parent got up and talked about how that partic
ular school had been serving her triplets, all of which had autism.

Two weeks later, the Chicago Board of Education voted unanimously and without 
debate to close the school that had been serving those pre-school children 
(and dozens like them). 

Don't you dare cite NCLB or any of these other Bush- Daley hypocrisies as 
helping special needs children. You long ago forfeited the right to even be part 
of this discussion, but others are more charitable than I.

George N. Schmidt
Editor, Substance

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