Fwd: [oaklandteachers] NCLB Peppered by Corporate Critic

[Susan Harman <susanharman@igc.org>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Jim Mordecai <jim2812@yahoo.com>
> Date: Sat Dec 29, 2007  11:43:53 PM US/Pacific
> To: oaklandteachers@lists.riseup.net
> Subject: [oaklandteachers] NCLB Peppered by Corporate Critic
> Reply-To: oaklandteachers@lists.riseup.net
>
>
> Friday
> December 21, 2007
>
> Commentary: The Drive to Oust the Middle Class from Inner City Public 
> Schools
> By Margot Pepper (12-21-07)
>
>
> No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was signed into law in 2001 by President 
> George
> Bush, backed by both Democrats and Republicans. The backbone of the 
> program,
> allegedly designed to hold schools accountable for academic failure, is
> standardized state testing for students and educators. Rather than 
> improve
> public education, however, there is now ample evidence that NCLB 
> testing is
> part of a systematic effort to privatize diverse urban public schools 
> in the
> United States. The objectives of privatization have been threefold: 
> first, to
> divert taxpayer money from the public sector to the corporate sector; 
> second,
> to capture part of the market, which would otherwise be receiving free
> education; and third, to drive out middle class accountability, 
> leaving behind
> a disposable population that won’t have a voice about the 
> inappropriate use
> of their tax dollars, nor the bleak outlook on their futures.
>
> “As a for-profit venture, public education represents a market worth 
> over
> $600 billion,” notes Dr. Henry A. Giroux, in Z Magazine.
>
> “The emergence of HMOs and hospital management companies created 
> enormous
> opportunities for investors. We believe the same pattern will occur in
> education,” observes Mary Tanner, managing director of Lehman Brothers.
>
> “Bush’s proposal for national standardized testing is helping to pave 
> the
> way for these EMO’s,” says Project Censored in their annual collection 
> of
> most censored stories. “While the aptly named Educational Management
> Organizations are being promoted as the new answer to impoverished 
> school
> districts and dilapidated classrooms, the real emphasis is on 
> investment
> returns rather than student welfare and educational development.”
>
> For over a century, norm-referenced test results have been 
> misinterpreted in
> the United States to support racist campaigns. IQ tests were used as an
> argument against integration of schools, the passage of the Civil 
> Rights Law of
> 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 1969, Arthur Jensen used 
> his
> so-called “findings”—that average African-American IQs were 
> significantly
> lower than those of Euro-American or white children—to attack 
> educational
> programs which benefit the poor, like Head Start.
>
> An influential study by Elizabeth Peal and Wallace Lambert in 1962 
> found that
> the higher the subjects’ economic status, the higher scores would be on
> norm-referenced tests. Similarly, higher achievement scores on the 
> NCLB tests
> have been predicted according to zip codes, used by economists to sort 
> by
> economic status.
>
> Randy L. Hoover and Kathy L. Shook note that a study of 593 Ohio School
> Districts show the district’s high stakes tests “to correlate with 
> Social
> Economic Status to such a high degree as to virtually mask any and all 
> actual
> academic achievement claimed to be measured by these tests.”
>
> They observe that students were “visible victims of sorting by 
> socio-economic
> status… by high stakes tests that fail to meet recognized, scientific
> standards of test validity.”
>
> Now, the standardized tests that are part of the NCLB campaign are 
> being used
> to lend legitimacy to policies that lead to a cheap, uneducated labor 
> pool and
> increased profits in the private sector. The effect of NCLB has been to
> dismantle public education by funneling public tax dollars directly to
> corporations through penalties, private tutoring companies, and 
> vouchers. Once
> more, the populations paying for this policy are students of color and 
> the
> poor, since the poorest schools with limited resources comprised 
> primarily of
> such students perform the worst on the tests. The schools are then
> reconstituted by the school district, outsourced to private companies 
> like
> Edison, or a portion of their federal funding is diverted to “parental
> choice” tutoring programs. According to Ben Clarke in a Corpwatch.org 
> article
> entitled “Leaving Children Behind,” public school money was thus 
> diverted
> to the company Educate, which runs the Sylvan Learning Centers, whose 
> revenues,
> Clarke states, “grew from $180 to $250 million in the past three years
> [2001–04] and whose profits shot up 250 percent last year.” And, writes
> Clarke, since the introduction of NCLB, sales of printed materials 
> related to
> standardized tests nearly tripled to $592 million, money that was 
> drained from
> the public schools, since Bush provided no funding for the increased 
> costs.
>
>
>
> False Reports of NCLB Success
>
> A 2006 study by Harvard University Civil Rights Project found that the
> successes reported by NCLB proponents “simply do not show up on an
> independent national test, the National Assessment of Educational 
> Progress,
> known as the ‘nation’s report card.’”
>
> A comparison of public high-school graduation rates over the course of 
> the
> implementation of NCLB seems to confirm that the policy is actually 
> damaging
> students of color. The public high school graduation rate for African 
> Americans
> and Latinos nationwide has sunk from 56 percent and 54 percent 
> respectively in
> 1998—before NCLB policies took their toll—to about 50 percent in 2005,
> according to a March 2005 report by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard
> University. The authors, Dan Losen and Johanna Wald, point out that 
> “because
> of misleading and inaccurate reporting of dropout and graduation 
> rates, the
> public remains unaware of this educational and civil rights crisis.”
>
> In California, looking at the inverse—or dropout rates—according to
> statistics provided by the California Department of Education and 
> published by
> Ed-Data, from 2000 to 2005, the four-year dropout rate for California 
> went from
> 11.1 percent to 12.7 percent, with dropout rates for African Americans
> increasing nearly four percentage points from 18.1 percent to 21.8 
> percent.
> Latino dropout rates also increased from 15.3 percent to 16.6 percent 
> during
> that same period.
>
>
>
> Middle Class Flee to Private Schools
>
> The dismantling of the public schools is forcing those who can afford 
> to pay
> for private schools to give up their right to free, equal education. 
> Driving
> the entitled middle class out of the public schools furthers yet 
> another goal
> of privatization, namely that of decreasing accountability, reports 
> Dr. Giroux.
>
> Dr. Giroux points out, that while an increasing number of students of 
> color may
> not graduate under NCLB, their failing public schools are more than 
> willing to
> provide them with “the appropriate attitudes for future work in 
> low-skilled,
> low-paying jobs.”12 Pat Wechsler reported in Business Week that thanks 
> to
> partnerships with businesses, such as McDonald’s, in under-funded 
> schools,
> students “learned how a McDonald’s works, and how to apply and 
> interview
> for a job at McDonald’s.”
>
> It is no coincidence that one of the largest contributors to President 
> Bush’s
> drive to institute vouchers, tuition tax credits, and charter schools 
> is the
> Walton family—founder of Wal-Mart—who has dedicated at least $250 
> million
> to such efforts over the past six years, according to USA Today. 
> Wal-Mart is
> the largest private employer in the United States, with more than one 
> million
> workers. Wal-Mart’s wages and benefits are significantly below retail
> industry standards, according to a report entitled, “The Hidden Cost of
> Wal-Mart Jobs,” by Dr. Arindrajit Dube, Ph.D. and Ken Jacobs. 
> According to
> Anthony Bianco, who wrote a 2006 biography of the man, Walton 
> “preferred
> uneducated workers.” Such workers are unlikely to question low pay, or
> unionize.
>
> School failure is a product of “the political, economic, and social 
> dynamics
> of poverty, joblessness, sexism, race and class discrimination, unequal
> funding, or a diminished tax base,” summarizes Dr. Giroux.
>
>
>
> NCLB Requirments Lower Quality of Education
>
> An illustration of class and race discrimination leading to school 
> failure is
> the use of McGraw-Hill’s Open Court program by schools afraid of NCLB
> penalties, even though the phonics program has been proven to damage 
> students.
> According to a study by Margaret Moustafa and Robert E. Land at 
> California
> State University in Los Angeles, “schools using Open Court are 
> significantly
> more likely to be in the bottom quartile of the SAT 9 [state] 
> assessment than
> comparable schools using non-scripted programs.”
>
> The president’s educational program mandates any district wishing to 
> qualify
> for government funding to implement “approved” reading curricula. It 
> is not
> surprising that McGraw-Hill’s Open Court has a majority of these 
> contracts,
> given the fact that the McGraw-Hill and Bush family connections go 
> back three
> generations, notes Stephen Metcalf in the Nation: “The McGraws are old 
> Bush
> friends, dating back to the 1930s, when Joseph and Permelia Pryor Reed 
> began to
> establish Jupiter Island, a barrier island off the coast of Florida, 
> as a haven
> for the Northeast wealthy.”
>
> Similarly, Neil Bush, George W.’s brother, also used his political 
> influence
> to solicit contributions for his educational software company, Ignite. 
> “In
> February 2004, the Houston school board unanimously agreed to accept 
> $115,000
> in charitable donations from businesses and individuals who insisted 
> the money
> be spent on Ignite. The deal raised conflict of interest concerns,” 
> reported
> Cynthia Leonor Garza in the Houston Chronicle. More recently, former 
> first lady
> Barbara Bush donated to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund, with specific
> instructions that the money be spent on Ignite.
>
> Perhaps a more apt name for Bush’s NCLB is, No Corporation Left Behind,
> particularly if that corporation has strong ties to the Bush 
> family—though we
> must be careful not to confuse the Bush “dynasty” with a long-term,
> systemic illness. Ronald Bailey, a former fellow at the W. E. B. Du 
> Bois
> Institute for African and African American Research, and Chicano 
> Scholar
> Guillermo Flores have identified these deliberate historic campaigns 
> to exclude
> people of color from the political and educational system as a product 
> of
> “internal colonialism.”
>
> “Internal colonialism,” they write, “is nothing more than the domestic
> face of world imperialism.... The use of racial minorities brought 
> surpluses to
> white society that contributed to the growth of monopoly capitalism.” 
> In
> other words, cheap labor and raw materials led to huge profits for 
> monopolistic
> firms, which today have become supra-national corporations. These 
> larger forces
> are the real source of legislation like NCLB. Educators and activists 
> who want
> real change must recognize and address this fundamental reality if 
> they are
> serious about winning equal access to education for all.
>
>
>
> Margot Pepper is a Mexican-born writer published frequently in 
> journals such as
> Utne Reader, Monthly Review, Z-net, Counterpunch, and the San 
> Francisco Bay
> Guardian. You can find links at www.margotpepper.com.
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