Re: Report: No Senate Action on NCLB Reauthorization in 2007

[Csubstance@aol.com]

In a message dated 11/4/07 4:16:19 PM, kber@earthlink.net writes:

<< This raises an urgent issue.  This almost certainly means that the 
Education Dept will be funded under a continuing resolution.  >>

11/5/07

HOORAY! First stall NCLB, then organize organize organize to kill the damned 
thing...

I think this gives people the time to take a step (or several steps) back, 
take a deep breath, and admit that the only "revision" NCLB needs is elmination. 

The battle for sanity in most of these things was lost when a lot of decent 
people jumped around for "standards and accountability" ten and more years ago 
without looking closely (for the most part) at how the standards were going to 
be established (and by whom) and the accountability done (and by whom to whom 
based on what).

When NCLB was first unloaded on the desks of the members of the House and 
Senate education committees six years ago, everyone should have (a) taken the 
time to read it (Kennedy said he never bothered, for example); (b) thought 
through what its various provisions had actually meant -- from "Reading First" based 
on "science" to SES to the closing of schools; (c) considered the possibility 
that in all places where these "standards" and this type of "accountability" 
was foisted on people (Texas; Florida; Chicago) it had been and continued to 
be an expensive mess, press clippings and PR notwithstanding.

And some other things. But that would have been a start.

Just because the Heritage Foundation and a couple of other places shovel a 
thousand pages of bullshit into your lap, you don't have to eat it twice. The 
first time everyone actually said it was really beef. Now everyone knows better 
but is trying to find the alchemy to turn bullshit into beef.

Sorry. 

Doesn't work. 

Won't. 

Ever.

Unless "working" means that NCLB is really supposed to marketize what was 
once one of the the greatest public education systems in the "free world". Which 
is what some of us have been saying now for a long long time. 

I'm going back to my second reading of "The Shock Doctrine" and then writing 
my study of how Chicago's 12-year version of NCLB destroyed the political 
backbone of black Chicago, undermined the education of tens of thousands of black 
children, and bought the support of most of the "leaders" of the black 
community in Chicago. 

Abolition, not amelioration.

George N. Schmidt
Editor, Substance

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