Recalling the Bad Ole Days of No Child Left Behind

 

I wrote this in 2007, when it was clear that NCLB had failed children, parents, teachers, and schools. As the standardized testing cabal is now trying to get the band back together for another round of psychometric madness, let’s pause and remember what it was like: www.schoolsmatter.info/2007/11/what...

[image or embed]

— James Horn (@schools-matter24.bsky.social) July 2, 2026 at 1:17 PM

Hillary Rodham Clinton's Core CAP Charter Cabal

“That’s why, you know, I was a senator and voted for Leave No Child Behind [sic] because I thought every child should matter” — Hillary Rodham Clinton

Hillary Rodham Clinton's supporters have been less than honest about her education record. Worse still, those same Liberals will ask everyone on the left to vote for her as the ostensible "lesser evil" to GOP troglodyte Donald John Trump in November. There are myriad good reasons to oppose both Clinton and Trump in November, but Liberals will cite Clinton's endorsements by executives of the largest teachers' unions as evidence of her being better on education issues. However, these same unions endorsed President Barack Hussein Obama, who has been the worst education President in history. Rather than an extensive survey of Clinton's abject policy support for neoliberal corporate education reforms including: George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind (NCLB); the racist and classist Common Core State Standards (CCSS); so-called school choice through privately managed charter schools; punitive, but ineffective school closures; and a host of other wrongheaded policies, it might serve well to look at her relationships with members of the right-of-center think-tank Center for American Progress.

Center for American Progress (CAP)

CAP was allegedly founded for neoliberal Democrats to have a think-tank of their own, akin to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), or the Manhattan Institute. Essentially indistinguishable from that of those and other such organizations, CAP's education advocacy reads like it was crafted by John Birch Society and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Peter Greene lists some of the anti-public education policies CAP advocates, and that list could be easily increased. CAP has been the most vocal apologists for the Obama Administration's disastrous education policies.

Funded by a host of ideologically charged billionaires, CAP's education agenda looks like that of the Center for Education Reform. One teacher belonging to the Badass Teachers Association (BATs) used both a The Nation article and CAP's own website to compile this list that is more comprehensive than the SourceWatch list linked above:

Ford Foundation	$1,000,000+
The Hutchins Family Foundation	$1,000,000+
Sandler Foundation	$1,000,000+
TomKat Charitable Trust	$1,000,000+
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation	$500,000 to $999,999
Joyce Foundation	$500,000 to $999,999
Not On Our Watch	$500,000 to $999,999
Open Square Charitable Gift Fund	$500,000 to $999,999
Embassy of United Arab Emirates	$500,000 to $999,999
Walton Family Foundation	$500,000 to $999,999
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation	$500,000 to $999,999

Like that teacher states, "It's a who's who of corporate reformers."

Comparisons of CAP to the AEI should not be taken lightly, they frequently co-host education events together. The image used above here is from one of their many event pages. Aside from working hand-in-hand with extremist organizations like the AEI, CAP has a well-earned reputation of playing fast and loose with the truth.

Three key CAP figures loom large in the Hillary Clinton universe: John Podesta, Neera Tanden, and David Domenici.

John Podesta

Podesta, founder of CAP, is perhaps one of the most vehement opponents to public education this side of Betsy DeVos and the Brothers Koch. He is Clinton's 2016 campaign chairman. When not palling around with reactionaries Jeb Bush and Chester Finn, Podesta is hatching more ideas like NCLB, RttT, and CCSS. Many sources state that it was Podesta that encouraged Obama to select the doltish, non-educator Arne Duncan over Professor Linda Darling-Hammond for Secretary of Education. Given Obama's subsequent selection of John King to replace Duncan, it would seem Obama didn't need much encouragement choosing a corporatist over an educator. It's hard to imagine a Clinton administration being any better than Obama's on education issues, and given her abject history with the Walton family, and her reliance on Podesta, it could feasibly be worse.

Neera Tanden

Tanden is another longtime CAP fixture. On her first stint with the organization she was Vice President of Academic Affairs, and played a major role in shaping their neoliberal corporate education reform messaging. Another high-profile member of BATs posted the following, saying they preferred it be cited without attribution:

Hillary Clinton names Neera Tanden of the Center for American Progress to the Dem[ocratic] Platform Committee. CAP is a funder and promoter of the privatization of our schools, VAM, and Pearson testing. This is what AFT and NEA endorsement has earned us. if you are still supporting HRC nomination, understand she stands with your enemies.

David Domenici

Domenici is a Senior Fellow at CAP, and Clinton's go-to guy on finding ways to leverage disaster capitalism to push trough CAP and Clinton's anti-public education agenda. Clinton and Domenici hatched a racist, neo-colonial plan to inflict a nationwide privately managed charter school school network with a Teach for America style model in Haiti. This plot was exposed in the WikiLeak archive of Clinton's emails. These thoughts on the Haitian fiasco sum up Clinton's views on education for poor children, and children of color:

It's no surprise that the woman who refers to children of color as "super-predators", insisting that "we have to bring them to heel", would search out such a racist education plan to inflict on a Haitian population decimated as much by the Clintons' free-trade deals as by natural disasters. Like the distinguished Professor Michelle Alexander says, Hillary Clinton uses "racially coded rhetoric to cast black children as animals." While Haiti was spared this horrific, colonial charter school plan hatched by Clinton and her corporate advisors, we can expect more of the same if she somehow comes to power again. We need to organize and prepare to fight against her racist penchant for neoliberal corporate education reform.

With Clinton we'll be getting more of Podesta, Tanden, and Domenici's toxic policy advocacy. Much like we've seen with Obama, CAP's virulent brand of neoliberal corporate education reform will be a centerpiece of a Clinton administration.

Anyone supporting public education should reject both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

There is a candidate running for president — who will be on most November ballots — whose education platform is worthy of support from the left. Indeed, she has consistently articulated the best public education platform of all the candidates. That candidate is Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party.

Privatization: Remembering the Real Purpose of NCLB

Although the education scholars who had looked closely knew it, and hacks like Sandy Kress and Margaret Spelling who designed it knew it, the general public did not, and most still do not know.  EVen after the article below appeared in Time Magazine in 2008, many folks still view NCLB as a well-intentioned but failed effort. 

We know, of course, that NCLB was never designed to achieve its ostensible goal to close the achievement gaps.  But it did succeed mightily in achieving its unacknowledged goal of privatizing great swaths of the public education landscape.  At a time when corporate apologists are trying to paper over the privatization extravaganza that NCLB initiated, it is worthwhile to recall this piece.

And so, "No Child Left Behind: Doomed to Fail?" by Claudia Willis:

There was always something slightly insane about No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the ambitious education law often described as the Bush Administration's signature domestic achievement. For one thing, in the view of many educators, the law's 2014 goal — which calls for all public school students in grades 4 through 8 to be achieving on grade level in reading and math — is something no educational system anywhere on earth has ever accomplished. Even more unrealistic: every kid (except for 3% with serious handicaps or other issues) is supposed to be achieving on grade level every year, climbing in lockstep up an ever more challenging ladder. This flies in the face of all sorts of research showing that children start off in different places academically and grow at different rates.
Add to the mix the fact that much of the promised funding failed to materialize and many early critics insisted that No Child Left Behind was nothing more than a cynical plan to destroy American faith in public education and open the way to vouchers and school choice.

Now a former official in Bush's Education department is giving at least some support to that notion. Susan Neuman, a professor of education at the University Michigan who served as Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education during George W. Bush's first term, was and still is a fervent believer in the goals of NCLB. And she says the President and then Secretary of Education Rod Paige were too. But there were others in the department, according to Neuman, who saw NCLB as a Trojan horse for the choice agenda — a way to expose the failure of public education and "blow it up a bit," she says. "There were a number of people pushing hard for market forces and privatization."

Tensions between NCLB believers and the blow-up-the-schools group were one reason the Bush Department of Education felt like "a pressure cooker," says Neuman, who left the Administration in early 2003. Another reason was political pressure to take the hardest possible line on school accountability in order to avoid looking lax — like the Clinton Administration. Thus, when Neuman and others argued that many schools would fail to reach the NCLB goals and needed more flexibility while making improvements, they were ignored. "We had this no-waiver policy," says Neuman. "The feeling was that the prior administration had given waivers willy-nilly."

It was only in Bush's second term that the hard line began to succumb to reality. Margaret Spellings, who replaced Paige as Secretary of Education in 2005, gradually opened the door to a more flexible and realistic approach to school accountability. Instead of demanding lockstep, grade-level achievement, schools in some states could meet the NCLB goals by demonstrating adequate student growth. (In this "growth model" approach, a student who was three years behind in reading and ended the year only one year behind would not be viewed as a failure.) "Going to the growth models is the right way to go," says Neuman. "I wish it had come earlier. It didn't because we were trying to be tough."

Neuman also regrets the Administration's use of humiliation and shame as a lever for school reform. Failure to meet NCLB's inflexible goals meant schools would be publicly labeled as failures. Neuman now sees this as a mistake: "Vilifying teachers and saying we are going to shame them was not the right approach."

The combination of inflexibility and public humiliation for those not meeting federal goals ignited so much frustration among educators that NCLB now appears to be an irreparably damaged brand. "The problems lingered long enough and there's so much anger that it may not be fixable," says Neuman. While the American Federation of Teachers was once on board with the NCLB goals, she notes, the union has turned against it. "Teachers hate NCLB because they feel like they've been picked on."
Is there a way out of the mess? Neuman still supports school accountability and the much-maligned annual tests mandated by the law. But she now believes that the nation has to look beyond the schoolroom, if it wishes to leave no child behind.

Along with 59 other top educators, policymakers and health officials--including three former surgeon generals, she's put her name to a nonpartisan document to be released on Tuesday by the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. Titled "A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education," it lays out an expansive vision for leveling the playing field for low-income kids, one that looks toward new policies on child health and support for parents and communities. The document states that much of the achievement gap between rich and poor "is rooted in what occurs outside of formal schooling," and therefore calls on policymakers to "rethink their assumptions" about what it will take to close that gap. Neuman says that money she's seen wasted on current programs, including much of the massive Title 1 spending should be reallocated according to this broader approach. "Pinning all our hopes on schools will never change the odds for kids."

Massive Charter Giveaways in ESEA Re-Write, Part 1

The NCLB rewrite that was passed last week by the House is a corporate states rights version of ESEA that, as Gary Orfield has noted, will set back education policy by more than a half century if it becomes law. 

If not halted in the Senate, this corporate welfare bill will send billions in federal grants to segregated “no excuses” charter school companies, venture philanthropists, and real estate developers over the next six years.  

With a continuing federal mandate to fix the bottom five percent of schools, the ESEA rewrite will provide at least a billion dollars each year to fund charter school expansion, thus further weakening public education.  The new grant programs will be fashioned to provide minimal oversight and maximum autonomy to charter companies and their corporate support organizations, and for the first time, private non-profit corporations will be classified as “state entities,” thus eligible to apply directly for federal grant programs.

The kind of bribery that Race to the Top made infamous will continue in the ESEA rewrite.  For instance, federal funding favorability will go to states that do not “impose any limitation on the number or percentage of charter schools that may exist or the number or percentage of students that may attend charter schools in the State” (see below). 

 Also, grants will be funneled to states that have established infrastructure to help charter companies in facilities acquisition and/or the handing over of public properties at rock bottom prices.  Federal help in corporate real estate acquisition signals the full maturation of a charter industry that will be worth hundreds of billions if this law passes:

‘‘(2) PRIORITY.—In awarding grants under this section, the Secretary shall give priority to State entities to the extent that they meet the following criteria:

 ‘‘(A) The State entity is located in a State—

‘‘(i) that allows at least one entity that is not a local educational agency to be an authorized public chartering agency for 
developers seeking to open a charter school in the State; or

‘‘(ii) in which local educational agencies are the only authorized public chartering agencies and that has an appeals process for the denial of an application for a charter school;


‘‘(B) The State entity is located in a State that
 does not impose any limitation on the number or percentage of charter schools that may exist or the number or percentage of students that may attend charter schools in the State.

. . . .

 ‘‘(I) The State entity is able to demonstrate that its State provides charter schools one or more of the following:

‘‘(i) Funding for facilities.

‘‘(ii) Assistance with the acquisition of facilities.

‘‘(iii) Access to public facilities.

‘‘(iv) The right of first refusal to purchase public school buildings.

‘‘(v) Low or no cost leasing privileges. (pp. 304-307)

. . . .

SEC. 3104. FACILITIES FINANCING ASSISTANCE.

‘‘(a) GRANTS TO ELIGIBLE ENTITIES.—
‘‘(1) IN GENERAL.—From the amount reserved under section 3102(b)(1), the Secretary shall not use less than 50 percent to award grants to eligible entities that have the highest-quality applications approved under subsection (d), after considering the diversity of such applications, to demonstrate innovative methods of assisting charter schools to address the cost of acquiring, constructing, and renovating facilities by enhancing the availability of loans or bond financing.

‘‘(2) ELIGIBLE ENTITY DEFINED.—For purposes of this section, the term ‘eligible entity’ means—

A) a public entity, such as a State or

local governmental entity;


‘‘(B) a private nonprofit entity; or


‘‘(C) a consortium of entities described in

subparagraphs (A) and (B).
 (pp. 309-310)

Other special favors are in store that will be discussed in Part 2, but one of the most striking stipulations in ESSA requires the Secretary of Education to consult with charter companies before modifying or implementing IDEA provisions:

‘‘SEC. 3107. SOLICITATION OF INPUT FROM CHARTER SCHOOL OPERATORS.

‘‘To the extent practicable, the Secretary shall ensure that administrators, teachers, and other individuals directly involved in the operation of charter schools are consulted in the development of any rules or regulations required to implement this subpart, as well as in the devel
opment of any rules or regulations relevant to charter schools that are required to implement part A of title I, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or any other program administered by the Secretary that provides education funds to charter schools or regulates the activities of charter schools. (p. 328)

Finally, it must be noted that, under the new law, if passed, charter schools will no longer just be for K-12.  In the future, we should get ready for more pre-K charters and, for the first time, charter colleges and universities.

 ‘‘(3) CHARTER SCHOOL.—The term ‘charter

school’ means a public school that—
 . . . .

‘‘(M) may serve prekindergarten or postsecondary students (p. 501).


Corporate Dixiecrat Version of ESEA Moves Closer to Passage

The latest version of the Elementary and Secondary Act to replace NCLB moved ever closer in the past couple of days, as a deal was struck on a final version that will be tinkered with over the next two or three weeks before a final vote that will come after Thanksgiving.

The new deal keeps enough of the federal requirements to make the testing industry breathe a sigh of relief, as annual testing will be remain in place.  Also, and importantly for the charter industry, the Feds will continue to require states to continue interventions for the bottom 5 percent of schools. 

So the charter profiteers will have plenty of room for growth (there will always be a bottom 5 percent), and even more importantly, Orrin Hatch and Michael Bennett made sure that billions will be available to fund the well-connected no excuses segregated chain gangs that have a record of high test scores:

“Too often, we fund unproven programs with little to show in the way of results. More of our federal dollars should work to encourage innovative programs and practices that can demonstrate significant education outcomes. Our Education and Innovation Research Program establishes a dedicated funding stream to support the development and expansion of evidence-based programs and practices designed and implemented by educators and local communities.”

Additionally, the new "dedicated revenue stream" will allow federal grants to other corporate welfare artists besides charter operators:

• The Education Innovation and Research amendment would create a dedicated funding stream to support the development and scale up of evidence-based practices that encourage innovations in policy and practice.
• This grant would provide flexible funding for a broad range of locally-driven projects and allow schools, districts, non-profits, and small businesses to develop proposals based on the specific needs of students and the community.
• Grants would be awarded based on past success, with funding levels tied to the strength of the evidence the applicant is able to present of their program’s effectiveness.

Importantly, too, for the new states rights version of ESEA, the Secretary of Education and her federal department cannot provided oversight or corrective intervention in any way with states' decisions on how the billions of federal grants are spent. 

If the current version passes, federal education policy will be largely decentralized, which will require fifty battles, instead of one, to be waged by the small army that makes up the corporate education resistance movement.

We can thank the Ravitch's NPE, the NEA, AFT, and Fairtest for their eager support of this corporate welfare version of ESEA.   Once the passage becomes inevitable, we can count on all that former support to begin the transformation to opposition. 

NYTimes Gets It Wrong on Effects of NCLB

To see the NYTimes Editorial Board lie about education issues is entirely expected, but to see the same in news stories is a bit more disconcerting. This is from a piece yesterday on the fate of No Child Left Behind:

No Child Left Behind required the public release of test scores by race, sex, disability and family income. The release of those subgroups’ scores is broadly considered a success, bringing transparency that focused attention on children needing the most assistance, and helping to shrink achievement gaps.

In 2013, Stanford researchers concluded something quite different:

Overall, we find that racial achievement gaps have been closing slowly since 1990. This is true for both white-black and white-Hispanic gaps. Based on this trend, we turn to the period of No Child Left Behind and ask whether this federal policy, which explicitly aimed to narrow gaps between minority and nonminority students, was successful at achieving its goal. We find no consistent evidence that NCLB has narrowed achievement gaps, on average. Our estimates are very precise, and we can rule out the possibility that NCLB had, on average, meaningfully large effects (effects larger than 0.01 standard deviations change per year) on achievement gaps.

 And from p. 32, in conclusion:

Despite its intentions, there is no evidence that NCLB-style accountability has led to any substantial narrowing of achievement gaps. Although there is variation among states in the effects of NCLB, comparing the magnitude of these effects is akin to comparing the speed of different glaciers: some are retreating, some advancing, but none so fast that one would notice a meaningful difference except over a span of decades (or centuries). Even in those states where NCLB’s effects on achievement gaps have been greatest, our estimates suggest that NCLB has narrowed achievement gaps at a rate of only two-one-hundredths of a standard deviation per year. Over a student’s K-8 career, this would still only narrow the achievement gap by less than one-fifth of a standard deviation. NCLB’s framers aimed to “ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education.” With respect to racial achievement gaps, our findings suggest that NCLB has not been successful at this goal. For future education policies to be more successful, we will likely have to adopt a different, perhaps more deliberate, set of strategies.

State Attorney Generals Should Do "Close Reading" On The Student Success Act

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is investigating dietary supplements being sold to consumers by the largest retail companies in the world. After years of billion dollar profits, people getting sick or wasting their money, New York's attorney is taking on some powerful corporations.

As reported today in the Associated Press,

"The scientific community, public health officials, and others have raised serious doubt about the steps taken to ensure the safety and efficacy of the herbal dietary supplements taken daily by millions of Americans," Schneiderman said in his letter. "As part of a broader investigation, NYAG is reviewing the sufficiency of the measures manufacturers and retailers are taking to independently assess the validity of their representations and advertising in connection with the sale of herbal supplements."

Attorney General Eric Schneiderman sent letters Monday to four manufacturers, in Long Island, California and Utah, demanding detailed ingredient and quality control information on every herbal supplement they sell in New York state. The companies' products include the store-brand supplements Schneiderman ordered off the shelves at Walmart, Walgreen's, Target and GNC stores in New York state.
__________________________________________

What does this have to do with education you ask? 

Well, the scientific academic community in education has raised serious doubts about another bogus product, high stakes standardized tests.  Obama hosted the nation's governors this past week in Washington DC,  and he could have asked them to have their AG's investigate the education profiteers who have been selling the nation's public schools another toxic placebo costing taxpayers billions of dollars and decimating public schools, the teaching profession as they continue to destroy the souls of our nation's children with yet another revision of a bad policy.

Even though Paul Krugman let the cat out of the bag this week by speaking truth to power and ripping the fig leaf off bad economic policy, it seems there's still no accountability for anyone except teachers for a situation they have absolutely no control over - growing poverty.

Krugman wrote: But if my math is right, the 90s ended 15 years ago — and since then wages of the highly educated have stagnated. Why on earth are we still hearing the same rhetoric about education as the solution to inequality and unemployment?

Good question. I'm still waiting for an answer. One possible explanation could be the emperor just has no clothes. This little fictional tale from 1620 will make a good lesson this week as students prepare for PARCC testing. Perhaps it will reduce their anxiety just a little to reread The Emperor's New Clothes and help them understand why sitting at computers for hours answering inane questions instead of learning is taking up so much of their precious time in school.

It's highly unlikely Diane Ravitch or her followers letters to Congress will put any clothes back on this emperor or make a difference in terms of sane legislative changes.  As for me, I'm finished wasting my time. I just can't get excited about making another phone call, sending money to another organization, or standing out in the pouring rain and freezing cold to protest education policy. 

With all the hoopla in the blogosphere about reauthorization of ESEA, the latest media circus  isn't focused on education but on the Department of Homeland Security and its employees being held hostage so Republicans can throw poor immigrant children under the school bus once again.  Perhaps they'll find some common ground with Democrats and give immigrant children an opportunity to become soldiers, or work at a Walmart or even win the lottery and get a spot in a charter school or KIPP.

So let's check in and see what's happening in DC as the on-line petitions,  letters and phone calls flood the halls of our nation's capitol.   Congress continues to bloviate about a new and improved version of NCLB, aka, The Student Success Act  There are so many important decisions to make for the powerful who send their children to private schools where none of these policies exist. Should we test once a year in every grade? Or what percentage of a teacher's salary and job security should be based on their student test scores, 10%, 25%, 50%? 

Meanwhile, there is some good news for those working at Walmart this week. The company, which made a few billion in profits and saw their revenues surge this quarter, is raising its hourly rate to $9!  See, there's no need for Congress to pass a national living minimum wage and worker protections, no need for social studies, civics and history -- and no need for a college degree when you can look forward to $9 an hour at Walmart, or Target or another corporation that squeezes and abuses its workers and rewards its shareholders, its management team and the politicians in their back pocket. 

How many of our elected representatives in DC will do a "close reading" of the new and improved Student Success Act as they sit around discussing reauthorization of ESEA which has no chance in Hell of passing anyway. How many more books, blogs, columns, letters, protests, occupies and opt outs do we need before things change?

Will public school teachers and schools in crumbling towns and communities, urban centers and rural areas continue to be judged on the test performance of hungry, sick, anxiety ridden and depressed kids who might have to attend "bad schools" as Michelle Obama so eloquently pointed out this past week. Looks like it.

I wonder if the final version of  The Student Success Act exceed the 1,100 pages of No Child Left Behind passed a few days after 9/11. Can't wait to see the final bill that will never make it to the President's desk because there seems to be no accountability in Washington DC or in Governor's offices where union bashing, teacher trashing and budget cuts are the new normal. Another train crash again today, this time in California? No reason to invest in railroads or mass transit, especially when those making the laws and directing the money are flying around on private jets, yachts and limos. 

Meanwhile, Arne Duncan is running around like Chicken Little warning the sky is falling because of  Draconian budget cuts in the Republican proposal for education. 

Hasn't Arne  figured out yet that the Student Success Act, just like No Child Left Behind, is the placebo or Golden Goose that laid the Golden egg; and the WMD sent to blow up public education by measuring every child, every year in every subject? Maybe he was too busy playing basketball with Obama when Margaret Spellings was running this at the Department of Education.

In this upside down world of Alice in Wonderland, where up is down and right is left and no one can even tell the difference between right and wrong, just follow the Yellow Brick Road Arne.  It will lead to a beautiful Utopia where everyone plays basketball with the rich and famous and the children of the poor sit at computer screens quietly, grateful that no matter how bad their schools are, they too can become a Walmart employee some day.

It's good  these youngsters aren't being taught how to close read quarterly financial statements or they might actually see the Wizard behind the curtain i.e., the billions of dollars in profits and tax breaks going to those who need it least and to the companies making their lives and futures a bleak, empty pile of debt and impossible odds. 

Like NCLB, The Student Success Act is shaping up to include more money for vouchers, charters and a little less testing to keep the teachers and students from literally killing themselves or someone else.

Meanwhile, the intent of this insidious legislation written into law in 2001, is doing it's job by putting the final nail in the coffin of public education and democracy itself.  The powerful and the wealthy are working overtime to cut the heart and soul out of the nation's public schools and its teacher unions, the one last bastion of job security and benefits about to be toppled in a world where even cooking is now a competitive sport. 

Since most teachers are women and some are the sole supporters of their families working around the clock to jump through all the hoops being thrown their way, Republicans in state houses and Congress are determined to turn the clock back about 100 years when women knew their place and were expected to be underpaid or not paid at all. Just think how much money the corporations could save on taxes if women just taught the children for free and took care of the elderly for free. No need for expensive social programs - free labor.

So, how much longer will politicians and business leaders blame public school teachers for America losing its competitive edge in a global economy or for poor children not reaching their full earnings potential? 

That's actually one question I know the answer to, as long as they can.

The NY Times Editorial Board Stays Stupid on Status Quo CorpEd "Reform"

It was only a matter of time until the NY Times would put their full weight behind the extension of our nation's slow motion educational genocide.  As intentionally misleading and out of touch as ever, today the Times board of elites offers its latest miseducative opinionating on the ESEA reauthorization scramble.  

With the Tea Party House of Representatives pushing hard its version of ESEA that would turn Title I into a massive block grant that states could carve up and pass out to charter operators, there seems to be plenty to make any neoliberal corporation like the Times sharpen up its most poisonous pens.  But today's piece of dissembling says not a word about block granting ESEA but, rather, doubles down on in support of another generation of testing accountability as the civil rights issue of another generation. 

The Times seems oblivious to the testing boycott that escalates daily or the searing hatred among educators and parents for the Business Roundtable profiteers who lined up for another generation of corporate education welfare.  And as always they are oblivious to the facts or pretend that editorials are for making your own facts:

National test data clearly show that since the unpopular No Child Left Behind Act was signed in 2002, academic performance for the country’s students has improved and achievement gaps between white and minority children have narrowed.

Here below are a few charts from that NAEP "national test data."  Who's lying to whom?  

First, those "gaps," and below that the facts about "academic performance":

 

Ravitch Continues to Dissemble and Mislead on ESEA

Yesterday Diane Ravitch, who has been leading the lemmings to support Alexander's NCLB Lite, posted a letter by UOO on their position on ESEA.  Ravitch closed with this:

Senator Alexander conducted his first hearing on January 21 and plans another hearing on January 27. Senator Alexander proposed two options in  his draft legislation: option 1 was to replace annual testing with grade span testing; option 2 was to keep annual high-stakes testing (the status quo). UOO is opposed to high-stakes testing in the federal law, period. (So am I.)

What Ravitch does not say here is that her chum's "option 1" continues high stakes testing, just less of it (it's sort of like a law against half the murders committed).

What she does not say, either, is how she can be against high stakes testing and give full-throated support for legislation that provides another generation of high stakes testing.

Letter Re ESEA Reauthorization 2013

Posted at Common Dreams and Chalkface:

To Members of the 113th 114th Congress:

I write to express my concerns regarding the various versions of the new ESEA now circulating in Washington, all of which appear to have enough in common to be combined, perhaps, under a more fitting title–something like The Corporate Foundation and Education Industry Welfare Act of 2013.  All of the versions that I have seen appear to embrace the principle that known failure should never be sacrificed for untried levels of success.

The past four decades represent generations now of failed accountability efforts to assist, threaten, demand, shame, and bribe public school students and their teachers to raise school achievement as a way to demonstrate that testing accountability  can accomplish what racism and poverty have made consistently impossible in America.  The chimerical idea that increasing education access could cure social and economic injustice was and is an ambitious, though fanciful, project that has been embraced by both liberals and conservatives since  the late 1960s at least.  Increasing educational access during the 60s came to serve as a coward’s proxy for more substantive and politically risky structural changes in housing, health care, jobs, transportation, and safety–all of which were and are as desperately needed as they are studiously ignored.

Today we are reaping the harvest of what we sowed during four decades of doing more of the same testing accountability while expecting different results.  Today’s hot and breathless pursuit of the status quo is packaged with the label of “reform,” and it is bound together with pretty rhetorical ribbons like No Child Left Behind Act, Strengthening America’s Schools Act, the Student Success Act, and Encouraging Innovation and Effective Teachers Act.  All of these fine-sounding pieces of legislation depend upon schooling methods that were cutting edge a hundred years ago, when achievement testing and IQ testing were first used to create a pseudo-scientific and entirely fake meritocracy based on real economic privilege and the sordid sorting and segregating of the poor, the culturally “inferior,” and the socially “defective.”

During that era, millions of Mexican children had their futures determined by racist IQ tests and classist achievement tests given  in a language that they could not even read.  To show you how much things change and remain the same, today in Tennessee and other states wanting to “first to the top,” kindergarten children are taking standardized tests (the SAT-10) before they learn to read and count.  A hundred years ago society’s “defectives” (either mental, social, cultural, or racial) were offered, on the basis of junk IQ tests, a very different industrial training education that taught students to accept and to actively participate in their own subjugation.

Today we use state or  corporate achievement tests to justify closing public community schools and opening segregated corporate reform schools that no middle class parent would ever send they own their children to.  In these neo-eugenic schools, children are programmed to blame themselves if the propaganda fails to deliver.  Ask how many KIPP teachers or TFA missionaries would send their own children into the anti-cultural straightjacket chain gangs.  Ask your colleagues in Congress if they would make their children KIPPsters.

Today the hostility of corporate education reformers to the public interest and the common good is matched only a rapacious and unchecked greed that is supported now with hundreds of millions of federal dollars that your programs approve.  And all of the fine-sounding bills listed above want to scale up the KIPP model, TFA, and their emulators within the growing school incarceration industry of urban America.  Public schools, with your help, have become corporate revenue streams and miseducative, unhealthy testing labs.

If your plans proceed, more and harder tests from the Common Core Corporate Standards guarantee a continuing supply of hostile corporate takeover targets within poor communities.  More “turnarounds” equals more corporate reform schools, and there will always be a bottom five percent to prey upon.  Despite warnings from the science community, these same national tests you are planning are to be used in evaluating teachers, who will doubtless sacrifice care and commitment to students for the necessity of assuring their own paychecks. Testing performance has replaced student learning, and all of your bills further enable that tragic transition.

The bills you are offering, too, will help to make teaching even more unattractive than it is today (if that is possible), thus increasing the demand for more and more Teach for America temps who have no inkling of the damage they are doing.  You must understand that corporate reform is about building businesses of the most corrupt and exploitative variety–it is not about education.  I expect you will have quit reading my letter before you get to this point, but let me offer a picture of what will happen if high stakes is preserved in the new ESEA.

If the new ESEA does NOT eliminate high stakes tests and segregated corporate reform schools,

• You will see a growing army of parents and teachers and grandparents and policymakers, all working together to nullify the grand schemes of your legislation, with its next generation of racist and classist high stakes tests and segregated chain gang schools.
• You will see increasing numbers of students refusing to take the high stakes tests, enough to regularly cause test results to be useless.
• You will see an increase in civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance that will use any non-violent means to stop corporate schooling and high stakes testing.
• You will see very expensive technical snafus increasing as online high stake testing increases.
• You will see testing data warehouses targeted by hackers.
• You will see the end of corporate unionism and the rise of a real teacher union movement with the health and welfare of children’s physical, mental, and emotional health as the first and foremost non-negotiable demand.
• You will see a multiplicity of new information sources that no longer print the lies and propaganda that corporate foundations offer to you and the corporate media for parroting.
• You will experience increasing disruption of corporate education at every level, from pre-K to graduate school.
• You will see increasing resistance from within the university, and you will see much new high quality research in the public interest rather in for corporate benefit.
• You will see the vampire squid of the education industry exposed for public examination.
• You will find your connections to the corporate reform schoolers the subject of constant and unceasing examination.
• You will see that what Wall Street fears, the spirit of Jeffersonian and Deweyan democracy, that is alive and well and increasingly impatient with the status quo.
• You will come to see that these demands are not negotiable.

Duncan Sacrifices Student Welfare to Preserve Corporate Agenda

During the summer of 2001, as NCLB was moving toward its final mark-up, testing experts were waving a red flag over the 100 percent testing proficiency target for 2014. Thomas Kane and Douglas Staiger published their red flag as an op-ed in the New York Times that pointed to what was about to happen if the bill proceeded with the the insane proficiency target intact--the poorest schools and the most diverse schools would receive the most punishment before anyone else.

Both [Senate and House] bills would be particularly harsh on racially diverse schools. Each school would be expected to achieve not only an increase in test scores for the school as a whole, but increases for each and every racial or ethnic group as well. Because each group's scores fluctuate depending upon the particular students being tested each year, it is rare to see every group's performance moving upward in the same year. Black and Latino students are more likely than white students to be enrolled in highly diverse schools, so their schools would be more likely than others to be arbitrarily disrupted by a poorly designed formula.

What Kane and Staiger could not see was that, in the black hearts of Washington ideologues, their prime motivation was disruption of public schools, beginning with the poorest and most vulnerable.  Kane and Staiger didn't know those crafting the bill wanted to blow up public education and replace it with "market solutions."  They didn't know a cruel calculus and crude algorithm had been designed to prove the failure of the public schools, and it had been planted in NCLB and then covered over with the civil rights banner of leaving no child behind.  Truly a Satanic level of cynicism.

Staiger and Kane concluded:

In their current bills, the House and Senate have set a very high bar, so high that it is likely that virtually all school systems would be found to be inadequate, with many schools failing. And if that happens, the worst schools would be lost in the crowd. The resources and energy required to reform them would probably be dissipated. For these schools, a poorly designed federal rule can be worse than no rule at all. 

Needless to say, the warnings were ignored and NCLB was quickly approved in the wake of 9-11. 

And it worked like a charm.  By the time Barack Obama was elected in 2008, half of America's public schools were not making testing proficiency targets, and the mass conversion of the poorest urban schools to corporate charters was well underway.  Private tutoring companies were raking in billions, and Reading First contracts were funneling billions more to McGraw-Hill and Pearson.

To maintain the momentum of corporate takeover and to expand profitability into the technology sectors, Duncan/Gates devised a plan of extortion and bribery that would move states to sign on to new federal mandates in order to avoid the certain failure that was headed their way by 2014 if they did not.  Race to the Top offered would offer more money to states left desperate following the 2008 Crash, but to get the money, states had to sign on to Common Core (with online testing), removal of charter school caps that would allow accelerated expansion of charters, and value added test-based teacher evaluations that would be used to run off all those real teachers who refused to have the worth of their profession determined by a gain score from a junk test. 

There was a problem, however.  The National Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences had issued, what's that!, another red flag, this time about using value-added test scores for high stakes purposes.  In fact, they wrote a 17 page letter during the RTTT pre-approval comment period to Arne Duncan stating the folly of using value added for high stakes purposes.  That was in the Fall of 2009.  Gates/Duncan proceeded without blinking, just as the Bush Gang had in the Fall of 2001when NCLB was ready for launch. 

In the Spring 2014, this fateful year for those who did not respond to the extortion and bribery by Duncan/Gates, the American Statistical Association underscored the NRC and NAS conclusions from 2009, with its own blistering appraisal of the continued use of value added testing for high stakes purposes.  This time Duncan/Gates responded by simply saying the scientists were wrong.

Which brings us the New York Times article today about what is going on in the state of Washington, where legislators have defied the the extortion and bribery schemes to expand the corporate takeover of public education. In doing so, they have awakened the insane proficiency mandates of NCLB, which remains in effect for those who will not go along with value-added test based teacher evaluations.  Here's a clip:

SEATTLE — Three years ago, Lakeridge Elementary School, where most pupils come from lower-income families, was totally remade. A new principal arrived and replaced half the staff, and she lengthened the school day and year. Working with a $3 million federal grant, the staff collaborated with the University of Washington to train teachers in new instructional techniques. The results were powerful: Test scores soared.

Yet just before school resumed for this fall, Lakeridge learned that it had been declared a failing school under federal education law.

In fact, nearly nine in 10 Washington State public schools, including some high-achieving campuses in the state’s most moneyed communities, have been relegated to a federal blacklist of failure, requiring them to set aside 20 percent of their federal funding for private tutoring or to transport students to schools not on the failing list, if parents wish.

The schools in Washington are caught in the political crossfire of a battle over education policy. Because the State Legislature has refused to require that teacher evaluations be based in part on student test scores, schools are being held to an outdated benchmark that is all but impossible to achieve — that by 2014, every single student would be proficient in reading and math. Thousands of schools in California, Iowa, North Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming have also been declared failing for the same reason. . . .

Gates/Duncan remain unmoved by the millions of students being cheated as a result of insane federal rules that are written to benefit corporations:

Mr. Duncan said he wanted states . . . to use student test performance as one of several measures to rate teachers. “The goal of teaching is students learning,” he said. “And this is a piece of evaluating what students are learning.”

Got that?  I close with a clip from the most recent reminder from the ASA to Duncan/Gates of the unethical, unreliable, and invalid use for which they insist on using to turn children into test scores for the benefit of the Oligarchs.

·      VAMs are generally based on standardized test scores, and do not directly measure potential teacher contributions toward other student outcomes.

·      VAMs typically measure correlation, not causation: Effects – positive or negative – attributed to a teacher may actually be caused by other factors that are not captured in the model.

·      Under some conditions, VAM scores and rankings can change substantially when a different model or test is used, and a thorough analysis should be undertaken to evaluate the sensitivity of estimates to different models.

·      VAMs should be viewed within the context of quality improvement, which distinguishes aspects of quality that can be attributed to the system from those that can be attributed to individual teachers, teacher preparation programs, or schools.

·      Most VAM studies find that teachers account for about 1% to 14% of the variability in test scores, and that the majority of opportunities for quality improvement are found in the system-level conditions. Ranking teachers by their VAM scores can have unintended consequences that reduce quality.