Re: [arn2-strategy] New Database Tracks NCLB Reform Proposals

[Csubstance@aol.com]

September 5, 2007

While I'm gald that this discussion continues, and that Fair Test exists, 
it's more and more necessary to ask who is paying the piper and who is playing 
what tunes as No Child moves ahead.

Am I missing something, or is this "New Database" really just another 
gatekeeper for the ruling class to legitimize -- or in most cases, anoint -- who gets 
to be the official people and groups to talk about NCLB from this point on.

Seems to me, based on a first reading, that this data base would exclude 
anyone here who wants NCLB abolished, since "legitimacy" (according to what I'm 
reading from them) requires that we accept the inevitability of No Child Left 
Behind and the continuation of corporate -- in my opinion fascist -- "school 
reform." I guess "official" groups have to pass some kind of sniff test. Question 
is: who's doing the sniffing?

Most of the more than 31,000 people -- not corporate funded or foundation 
funded groups well screened, but people -- who have signed the Educator 
Roundtable petition to abolish "No Child Left Behind" represent more real living human 
beings than most of the (well heeled, so long as they toe the Party Line) 
organizations being touted here as "legitimate" on this data base. Their eloquent 
comments are worth more to the average neighbor than those well scrubbed and 
carefully crafted position papers and Power Points now being used to defend 
NCLB against reality and preserve that noxious form of test-based child abuse and 
teacher bashing.

Corporate hegemony doesn't become more legitimate just because it hired more 
sycophants to defend it. In fact, it reeks more and more as it expands. 

I remember my friend Lonzie O'Bannon, before he died at age 89 back in 2005. 
Lonzie was the oldest member of the Substance staff back in the late 1990s and 
early 2000s. He had come to Chicago from Mississippi, worked hard, raised a 
really great family, and continued working into his 9th decade.

By the time we talked about this kind of stuff, he was warning that he had 
just seen the corporate future of the NAACP when he went (with his son, who at 
that time was NAACP president here in Chicago) to the national NAACP convention 
in Milwaukee. 

Lonzie said that the corporations had taken over NAACP. He said that the 
national (and many local) groups no longer answered to the dues paying members 
because to risk listening to people's problems -- as NAACP had tried to do 
through most of its history -- would be to risk losing all those corporate dollars. 
He suggested, almost half tongue in cheek, that NAACP leaders wear corporate 
sponsor jackets, decorated like "you white folks do at NASCAR" with patches for 
all the names of the corporations who were really paying for the NAACP 
policies.

You can read about Lonzie in our tribute on the old Substance Website, in the 
November 2005 issue (it also has a  picture of the man). 

I assume that's now true of most of these groups. We ought to do a cartoon 
showing all of them wearing the "colors" of their actual paymasters.

Here in Chicago, over the past four years, we've seen the corporate pimps and 
madams stip every legitimate grass roots organization of all or most of its 
funding unless that group praised the Daley "miracle" of corporate education 
reform. The Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform was hardly a firebrand 
of radicalism, but by having the affrontery to describe the Board of 
Education's budget and priorities as flawed, they were murdered by the funders and 
closed their doors in February 2007.

The same thing happened to the Neighborhood Capital Budget Group, which was 
the only independent bunch in town to track the actual impact of TIFs on 
education funding in Chicago -- and to demand that capital spending reflect 
community, rather than corporate, priorities. After more than ten years of great work, 
they were murdered by the pious "philantropic community" and forced to close 
their doors February 1, 2007.

By the time Chicago's Board of Education was in court trying to avoid even 
the barest scraps of desegregation (in a city where more than 300 public schools 
are all-black), there was nobody to represent the black children who were in 
segregated schools. The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under Law had 
closed down its school piece (and laid off Sarah VanderWicken) six months earlier. 
So, basically, there was no one with standing in the court to contradict all 
of the lies CPS told.

As many people here know, PURE has been stripped of most of its funding.

Designs for Change isn't doing too well either in terms of dollars.

While at the same time, groups that follows the party line (corporate "school 
reform", No Child Left Behind, but with "improvements") are doing quite well 
thank you.

Sorry, I'm not impressed with this kind of stuff anymore.

As far as I'm concerned that Data Base is just another gatekeeper to funnel 
quotes and quotable "legitimate" grups into The New York Times and other media. 
They really ought to print their pictures in color, along with them wearing 
those pretty NASCAR jackets with all their sponsors' patches on them.

Democracy is not well served when we play these games.

I guess we'll just begin another counter data base, that opposes fascism 
rather than believes that compromise will work.

George N. Schmidt
Editor, Substance

Chicago

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