$12.7 Billion in "Efficiencies"

Bush bringing his light to the subject of $12.7 billion in cuts to student assistance. From the Washington Post:

A sophomore asked why officials were cutting student aid by $12.7 billion. "How's that supposed to help our futures?" she asked. Bush seemed perplexed and asked if she meant federal money. "What we did is reform the student loan program," he said. "We're not cutting money out of it. . . . We're not taking people off student loans, we're saving money in the student loan program, because it's inefficient."

No Prose Literacy Problem Here

David Syatt is a first-year literary journalism major at the University of California, Irvine.

Measure Success Another Way
by: David Syatt

As achievement in the classroom slips and parents begin to lose faith in the California public school system, the California Department of Education set out to remedy the problem, to improve our schools, to make the fountain of knowledge flow and to make students realize their true potential … by forcing them to take yet another standardized test. Yes, despite all the problems our public schools suffer, public school administrators’ only solution was to create a test that all students must pass in order to graduate from high school.

Along with the STAR, SAT and SAT II exams, students now have to worry about the California High School Exit Exam if they hope to attain any kind of future. In theory, an idea like this seems logical. After all, what’s wrong with requiring students to wield a basic knowledge of English and math? But is standardized testing the answer? Let’s fill in the blanks.

In 2002, the CAHSEE was administered to all high school sophomores in California for the first time. I took this test (as a true pioneer). Classes were delayed while we shuffled ourselves into the gymnasium for a three-day marathon of number-two pencil sharpening and testing. I took the test … and failed. Now I’m a white, upper-middle class Jew (statistics love me) who wears glasses, yet I failed the math section of the exam. This leads to my first grievance of having a mandatory standardized test. The authors do not know the schedule for every student in California. I was in a lower math course, which put me a semester behind people in more advanced classes. This course allowed me to graduate from high school and it satisfied the requirements for most universities. Yet, it did not prepare me for the CAHSEE, and about half the people in the class also failed the test. Blessedly, the Department of Education decided to rescind that year’s scores and postpone the test until the 2006 high school class. Suffice to say, the ground was kissed.

Of course, the argument can be made (deftly) that I’m simply a moron, but let’s put that aside and examine some more significant issues that arise with the CAHSEE. Thanks to affirmative action programs, our society is moving closer toward the equality that our nation has interrupted throughout its turbulent and narrow-minded past. However, with the advent of the exit exam, unfair policies once again leak themselves into the system.

For the complete article: http://horus.vcsa.uci.edu/article.php?id=4363

The Sunny Side of Jeb

This ain't why they call it the Sunshine State:

Reporters Ejected from Gov. Jeb Bush Speech in Florida

Published: January 22, 2006 11:30 PM ET
NEW YORK Florida Republican Party officials on Saturday called security to eject reporters listening to Gov. Jeb Bush speak to several hundred party activists in Tallahassee. Reporters had been trying to listen through an open door.

Five hotel security staffers and a sheriff's deputy led reporters away from where they could hear the governor in the middle of a speech, according to a report by the St. Petersburg Times' political editor, Adam Smith.

"I apologize for that if I'm indirectly responsible, which I'm not," Bush said after addressing Republican activists. "I would have loved to have you in there. . . . I wouldn't have said anything different if you were there."

The party's executive director explained that party leaders merely wanted to keep their party functions private.

On Kozol

Peter Majoy recently heard Jonathan Kozol, and these are his reflections:

On Thursday, November 17th, 2005, I attended a talk in Keene, New Hampshire (I live 16 miles south of Keene) given by Jonathan Kozol. This was a happy coincidence since I had already started reading The Shame of the Nation. I had never heard him speak; I was priveleged to be there to witness his charisma, humor, compassion, and biting commentary on the return of inner city schools to segregation brought on by economic and social policy. He includes NCLB as part of that economic and social policy and told us that he wrote this book to confront the Bush administration. Interestingly enough, he included mention of rural schools in our state and the fact that the school funding formula here is one of the worst in the nation. I reference Mr. Kozol to help me comment further on NCLB, small schools, and a bit about what it means to possess the vocation of a teacher.

Kozol spoke of the patronizing politicians who should teach in a classroom for the whole day so that they understood one of the most important goals necessary for American education to move forward, "elemental racial justice." He said that segregation is back with a vengeance and that we are in the midst of "postmodern millennial apartheid." Schools are under a "state of seige" with the "sword of accountability over their heads." Later, Kozol connected these remarks directly to high stakes testing which he said created a state of terror in our schools where principals operate in a state of anxiety where sanctions include loss of money turning them into "curricular cops" who monitor teachers who have been handed scripts and texts with which to teach to the test where no time may be spent on anything but material that is test related.

Kozol continued to play this critical chord by asserting that under NCLB, teachers were becoming "mechanistic proficiency deliverers" instead of "lovers of culture" who would be able to look for the "hidden treasures" in kids. Instead, schools would not be able to "interrogate reality" because everything is prescribed. Inner city schools under this apartheid regime reinforced by NCLB were delivering a kind of lockstep militarized curriculum that was deadening of the human spirit. In this regard, Kozol said that "mediocrity is being imposed on the poorest of the poor in the guise of accountability." He went on to speak of the Orwellian lingo used to push NCLB like the "polysllabic pretentiousness standards people use in language of educational bamboozlement." He said that schools are being placed in a situation requiring "recovery from educational gibberish."

Kozol wove all of this together with stories of specific schools and individual students. One school's basement cafeteria was dark, filthy, and supportive of an animal atmosphere, but when one visited schools only several miles from these poor, black and now hispanic schools, the atmosphere of the cafeteria included salad bars, and both a seating and an aesthetic atmosphere conducive to a positive, interactive communication. Addressing this reality, he said that "we sweeten the lives of some and soil the lives of others". This was followed by comments on how beauty and aesthetic quality inform the soul and spirit in a way that, in itself, teaches children about life and the value of the world around them. He told stories of politicians who invite him to speak before committees and from this an incident where one well known political figure praised his talk but brought out a piece of the common script used to question everything he spoke about. "Can you really change things by throwing money at it?" asked the pol almost rhetorically. Kozol told us that this point was disingenuous when you realized what the per pupil expenditure was at the school his children attended! He gave an example of one inner city school in New York spending 11G's per student but only 4 miles North in a fairly well to do suburb, the per pupil spending was 18 G.s, and then on Long Island, one very rich system spent 22G's. He went on to speak of the 4 major prep schools in the Northeast where 30-40 G's per year fund each student's experience. Put into this frame of reference, one sees the hypocrisy of that comment on throwing money at poor schools.

Lastly, he commented on what great authors would do if they returned from the grave to find out that their literature existed only to help students reach a "certain proficiency". He said that their beautiful literary creations can't be enjoyed for themselves and that all is becoming banal. He said that the reality, language, and hypocrisy of resegregation and NCLB must be confronted. The redistribution of wealth is mandatory for social and economic justice, and he spoke of teachers, for whom he has the utmost respect, as "warriors for justice."

How can I have really done justice to this incredible experience, so I apologize for the fact that this brief review has left behind a great deal of what he said as well as the mesmerizing atmosphere he created through the way he said it. Let me go on to the book for a second to summarize what he says regarding small schools in The Shameof the Nation.

As soon as I bought the book, I looked up "small schools" in the index which directs readers to four places:

(1) pp 27-28....Martin Luther King High in New York was divided into 4 smaller schools and "some of the tension in the corridors and other common areas diminished as a consequence." It was still segregated, and Kozol points out that the social conditions like "virtual apartheid" seed the violence "in so many schools like this."

(2) pp. 275-279....There are good small schools which are good because each of them "is defined not only by its size but also by its sense of mission, with a teaching staff that truly wants to be there in the first place." Kozol praises Debbie Meier's Mission Hill school in Boston and states that "If I were a student, I would love to go there." Kozol lists the following types of small schools as examples of those he opposes: (a) small schools rushed into being by school boards who don't do the important and necessary groundwork; (b) small "elitist 'niche academies'"; (c) small military schools intended to recruit minorities into the army; (d) some small schools-within-schools that seem to get preferential treatment and trigger resentment in the rest of the school (this is not a universal judgment against this kind of small school); (e) small schools that are given academy names that have nothing to do with what is really happening there. In response to the statement made by the Advocates for Children that small schools offer "the best hope" for high school students in New York, but must be well planned to avoid cloning the problems they are attempting to eradicate Kozol agrees and states this: "These impressions are close to my own, although I would argue that 'the best hope' lies in small schools that are also making conscientious efforts to appeal to diversity of students rather than permit themselves to intensify the pre-existing isolation of their student populations." He ends this section pointing out the political pressures resulting in a successful law suit that enabled the small Center School in Seatlle to enroll a predominantly white student body( disproportionate to the white population) while the African American Academy was filled with mostly black students whose spirit had been dulled by direct instruction. To defend the results of their law suit, white parents pointed to the brand new African-American Academy but were blind to the fact that the result of the whole process created separate, unequal, apartheid schools.

(3) p. 302-303......Regarding the breakup of Martin Luther King High into four smaller academies, Kozol points out that the Arts and Technology Academy is almost totally black inspite of the fact it exists adjacent to Lincoln Center. Kozol pointed to the incredible commitment of its teachers and their outspoken criticism of the fact that their school was predominantly black in an overwhelmingly white neighborhood.

(4) pp. 379-381....This is the "Notes" section explaining more about what's above. In effect, Kozol sees small schools as a beacon of hope if correctly planned for and intentionally focused on developing a diverse student body. He has praise for small schools that stay true to their mission like Meier's Mission Hill. He criticizes small schools that are small in name only but continue age old segregation policies, i.e., sos in smaller packages.

I found The Shame of the Nation to be moving, personal, fundamentally on-target, and depressing as well as inspring. His critique of market-driven privatization pressures that dominate so much of educational reform efforts as well as his overt and subtle reminders of the continuing racist policies within American educational renewal, like the irony of NCLB's focus on standards based reform rather than on smaller class size and desegregation, is a solid reminder of how far we have not come. Lastly, if you want to really feel proud of the fact that you heard the call to be a teacher, Mr. Kozol is someone who will lift your heart and your spirit because you have done so.

Peter Majoy
pwmjoy@earthlink.net

Spellings as Ultimate Arbiter of HS Curricula

On their way to slashing $11-14 billion in college tuition assistance from the latest federal budget bill, the neo-cons tucked away an unseen item in the 744-page document that was intended to bypass their rejected efforts from last spring to expand the testing madness into the high schools by “eliminating a total of 48 programs from the Department of Education, including vocational education, GEAR-UP, TRIO and teacher quality enhancement grants . . .”

Reported today by Sam Dillon in the NY Times is the story on the neo-con efforts to offer tuition assistance grants to students graduating from high schools that Margaret Spellings has judged rigorous enough to merit the $750 being offered to college freshmen in exchange for a whole new level of federal meddling in the high schools:

It leaves it to the secretary of education to define rigorous, giving her a new foothold in matters of high school curriculums.

In the second year of college, the tuition assistance would be $1, 300. If recipients then decided to major in math, science, or engineering (remember to need to rise above the gathering storm and create an oversupply of engineers?), then assistance would then be bumped to $4,000.

Wonder how Maggie would determine if high schools have rigorous curricula? Could it be, maybe, I don’t know, you tell me.

By the way, would you want to guess which college majors are the most literate in all three areas (prose analysis, document analysis, and quantitative analysis)—according to the AIR study whose presentation has all the truthiness quality of the Colbert Report, minus the humor? Well, of course, the most literate are somehow lumped together as science, math, and engineering majors. Could there be some shortcomings in the way that literacy is being defined? Or do we follow the manipulated implication and conclude that the highest manifestations of literacy are to be found in engineers?

The AP story that AIR researchers and White House hacks have managed to pump out through the AP's Bob Feller three days ago is a great example of what Frank Rich noted today:

It's the power of the story that always counts first, and the selling of it that comes second. Accuracy is optional.

Neither Sobering Nor Bleak

The AIR study (click here for pdf) examines literacy among college students in three areas: prose literacy, document literacy, and quantitative literacy.

In the last post, I noted that the study shows no change in the levels of quantitative literacy levels between current college students and adults who already hold college degrees. Put in the economic terms that instigated this study in the first place, if past American economic successess have hinged on quantitative literacy of college graduates, we may expect, then, to do no better nor worse than we have up to this point.

The really good news, however, is in the comparisons between current college students and former college graduates in the areas of prose literacy and document literacy:

Students in 2- and 4-year colleges had higher prose and document literacy than adults in the nation with similar levels of education (Figure 2.3). On the document scale, the scores for graduating seniors in 4-year institutions were 20 points higher than the scores of all adults in the United States who previously received a degree from a 4-year college or university (p. 24).

Looking closer, we can see, too, that there are lower numbers of students at the basic and below basic levels of literacy among both 2-year and 4-year students as compared to adults already holding 2 and 4 year degrees. This holds true for both prose literacy and document literacy. The trend, then, indicates significant improvement for those ranked lowest on the literacy scales.

Most interesting to K-12 educators is the finding that in all three areas of literacy, college students who graduated from American high schools scored higher than college students who graduated from foreign high schools. The following quote does not mention the American advantage in quantitative literacy because the differences there were not statistically signficant, even though those differences were also in favor of US high schools (USA high school grads--331 foreign high school grads--320):

Students enter U.S. institutions of higher learning with different educational backgrounds, some obtaining their high school diploma from U.S. schools and others graduating from foreign schools. Among students in 4-year institutions, the prose and document literacy of U.S. high school graduates was higher than the literacy of their peers who graduated from foreign high schools. Similarly, average literacy across the three scales was higher for students in 2-year institutions who graduated from U.S. high schools compared with the literacy of students who graduated from foreign schools (Figure 4.5) (p. 38).

That's enough for now, except to paste up this sad piece of plagiarism that has boiled down the initial misleadiing Feller article to this compact lie:

Literacy Study Is Bleak

January 21, 2006 8:01 a.m. EST
Andrea Moore - All Headline News Staff Reporter

Washington, DC (AHN) - A new literacy study found more than one half of students at four year colleges and at least 75 percent at two year colleges, lack the literacy to handle complex, real-life tasks such as understanding credit card offers.

The study, funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, is the first to focus on skills of graduating students which look at three types of literacy: analyzing news stories and other prose, understanding documents and having math skills needed for checkbooks or restaurant tips.

The study shows that students cannot interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.

However, the average literacy of college students is still significantly higher than that of adults across the nation. Researchers said that was encouraging but not surprising, given that the spectrum of adults includes those with much less education.

Unbelievable to anyone who doesn't know the history of media coverage on education issues.

More interesting findings in the next post regarding the advantages of educational experiences based in analytic and critical thinking.

From Sobering to Bleak

It is now a little over 24 hours since AIR released findings on literacy among college students, and the media’s emotional response ranges from “sobering” to “disturbing” to “bleak.” The original AP Feller piece has worked its magic so that now the impression is cemented that colleges are going to hell in a hand basket that will, no doubt, require some remedial action or accountability plan to correct what is obviously a breakdown in civilization, itself.

Let’s take a sober look at some of the findings and see if we can get as lathered up as the media by AIR’s own self-serving emphases and by the paid spinners who helped Feller write his piece that has now been picked up worldwide as fact. And let’s start with the worst news in the study, which has to do with quantitative literacy. This is how it is presented in the study, itself:

Students in 2- and 4-year colleges struggled the most with quantitative literacy. Approximately 30 percent of students in 2-year institutions and 20 percent of students in 4-year institutions have Basic or below quantitative literacy (p. 25).

Yes, that is not good. For someone with my own issues in terms of mathematical literacy, I realize that is not good. Looking closer, however, I notice that 29 percent of students in 4-year institutions are at basic and actually only, actually, only 1 percent below basic in quantitative literacy. Likewise, 19 percent of students in 2-year institutions are at basic, with only 1 percent below basic.

Still bad, though. But does this mean that things are getting worse in the area of quantitative literacy in colleges, as the breathless bleakness in the new stories indicate? The answer is emphatically no, and this, again, is based on the finding of the study, itself. When, in fact, current college quantitative literacy rates are compared to other American adults who hold college degrees, there is no significant statistical difference—except that the percentage of “below basic” students in 4-year institutions now is at 1 percent, compared to 4 percent for other adults with college degrees at the below basic level. If there is any trend, then, in quantitative literacy, this small improvement in the below basic category is the only statistically-significant difference.

There is, in fact, more good news than bad in the study, but somehow the media has chosen, with the help of paid spinners, to disregard it entirely. I wonder why?
Stay tuned.

The Blind Whores of Mammon

The American Institutes for Research (AIR) just released a new study entitled The Literacy of America’s College Students (click here for pdf copy of Report). It uses the same instrument that was used in the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) to focus on literacy of the current crop of college students who are nearing graduation. The study represents nothing more or less than continuation of mercenary efforts to offer a research-based grounding for the coming intrusions by federally-led education privatizers. Try this clip from the Executive Summary:

With the recent attention on accountability measures for elementary and secondary schools, accountability in institutions of higher education has been all but overlooked. The National Survey of America's College Students (NSACS) is a study that examines the literacy of U.S. college students, providing information on how prepared these students are to continue to learn and use the skills that they will need in the years to come. Such an examination provides a valuable set of indicators of performance in higher education, informing such issues as the relationship among educational experience, literacy, and preparedness for the job market.

AIR, which has profited mightily from federal research and Reading First oversight grants under the present regime, continues to prostitute itself by spinning its own research to pretend that it says something that it does not say. The current effort, which goes nicely with the recent one that tries to justify the use of chain-gang pedagogy in K-12 (see previous post here), represents a sustained attempt to the prime the pump for the anticipated gush of support for federal meddling in higher education by corporationist interlopers—which, in the end, is aimed at privatizing universities so that they become wholly the campus laboratories for corporate research and development. After all, the Chinese do it—except that their dictatorship is on a government payroll rather than a corporate one. Whatever—the world is flat, remember?!

The good news is that, despite efforts to give maximum negative spin to a press release headline and lead paragraph that could have been written by that whining dunce, John Stossel, there is not nothing that I can find in the study to justify this phony gasping:

NEW STUDY OF THE LITERACY OF COLLEGE STUDENTS FINDS SOME ARE GRADUATING WITH ONLY BASIC SKILLS

REPORT BY AMERICAN INSTITUTES FOR RESEARCH FINDS AT LEAST 20 PERCENT OF COLLEGE GRADS UNABLE TO DO FUNDAMENTAL COMPUTATIONS

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Twenty percent of U.S. college students completing 4-year degrees – and 30 percent of students earning 2-year degrees – have only basic quantitative literacy skills, meaning they are unable to estimate if their car has enough gasoline to get to the next gas station or calculate the total cost of ordering office supplies, according to a new national survey by the American Institutes for Research (AIR). The study was funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts.

Can you imagine! Then, in the very next paragraph, just when the education reporters have stopped reading and raced off to write their stories on the collapse of the American university, comes this:

The AIR study found there is no difference between the quantitative literacy of today’s graduates compared with previous generations, and that current graduates generally are superior to previous graduates when it comes to other forms of literacy needed to comprehend documents and prose.

This positive news is echoed on page 25 of the study itself:

Students in 2- and 4-year colleges had higher prose and document literacy than adults in the nation with similar levels of education, although differences in quantitative literacy between current and former college graduates were not significant.

Here are the full list of summary findings on from page 25:

This chapter compared the literacy of U.S. college students with the literacy of U.S. adults by key demographic groups. The results revealed the following:
∑ The average prose, document, and quantitative literacy of students in 2- and 4-year institutions was significantly higher than the average literacy of adults in the nation.
∑ Students in 2- and 4-year colleges struggled the most with quantitative literacy. Approximately 30 percent of students in 2-year institutions and 20 percent of students in 4-year institutions have Basic or below quantitative literacy.
∑ Across colleges and universities, the average literacy of male and female college students was higher than the average literacy of men and women in the nation.
∑ The literacy gap between men and women in the nation largely disappears among college students.
∑ With the exception of Asian students in 2-year institutions, college students from each racial or ethnic group outperformed adults from the same racial or ethnic groups in the nation.
∑ The literacy gap between Whites and minorities in the nation remains among students in colleges and universities.
∑ In 4-year colleges, students with a non-English language background had higher average literacy than adults in the nation with an English-only language background.
∑ Students in 2- and 4-year colleges had higher prose and document literacy than adults in the nation with similar levels of education, although differences in quantitative literacy between current and former college graduates were not significant.

Note that there is no mention in the press release or the news stories that the achievement gap, which the neocons are strenuously claiming to alleviate in the K-12, carry forward through college. But this study is not about the long-term effects of poverty and discrimination, is it?

So what gives with the sad face by the heads of AIR? Why such headlines about nothing new, except that college students are doing better in prose and document literacy? Well, there is this clue from Dr. Baldi, who directed the study:

“The surprisingly weak quantitative literacy ability of many college graduates is troubling,” says Dr. Stéphane Baldi, who directed the AIR study. “A knowledgeable workforce is vital to cope with the increasing demands of the global marketplace.”

Oh, yes, that global marketplace thing, the same one that the head humanitarians at Microsoft and Yahoo want to fully exploit, even if they have to become accessories to torture and murder by the Chinese government. That’s right, see Cohen’s op-ed from yesterday’s Washington Post, "Business, and Repression, as Usual," about American corporate assistance to the Chinese government’s round-up of dissidents and and anyone else who speak their minds.

Standing by to provide more negative spin on the AIR research for the AP story by Ben Feller was Joni Finney, one of national advisory panel members who “guided the direction of the study.” Finney is a finance and governing consultant for higher ed, has written a book on public and private financing of higher ed, and will go down in history as responsible for the first state by state report card for higher education. Report cards are not just for K-12 anymore!

The AP story, which is now being circulated around the world begins thusly:

Study: College Students lacking literacy skills
By Ben Feller
Associated Press
WASHINGTON -- Nearing a diploma, most college students cannot handle many complex but common tasks, from understanding credit card offers to comparing the cost per ounce of food.

Those are the sobering findings of a study of literacy on college campuses, the first to target the skills of students as they approach the start of their careers.

More than 50 percent of students at four-year schools and more than 75 percent at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks.

That means they could not interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.

Further down in the story comes this good news, which is immediately doused by Finney, who, remember, "guided the direction of the study":

There was brighter news.

Overall, the average literacy of college students is significantly higher than that of adults across the nation. Also, compared with all adults with similar levels of education, college students had superior skills in searching and using information from texts and documents.

"But do they do well enough for a highly educated population? For a knowledge-based economy? The answer is no," said Joni Finney, vice president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, an independent and nonpartisan group.

With efforts to sustain the "knowledge-based economy" having already eliminated the impetus for preserving civic, moral, and cultural values in the public schools, the focus is now moving toward the university, where nothing less is envisioned by the blind whores of Mammon.

The mis-information and negative spin coming from the researchers, authors, advisors, and coached reporters will most certainly find its way into the talking points of Spellings’ Commission on Higher Ed and the other privatizing efforts being staged at the corporate socialist think tanks. Don’t be surprised to hear about it, too, in the upcoming State of the Union Address, along with the lies derived from Rising Above the Gathering Storm, er, the "Augustine Report." That is, if you bother to watch the State of the Union.

Rebellion in Massachusetts

MCAS Critics Renew Campaign

By Jeremy Schwab
State House News Service
Wednesday, January 18, 2006

A coalition of civil rights and education groups have called for sweeping changes to the state's education system, including eliminating the use of the MCAS test as a high school graduation requirement.

At a press conference in Boston last week, members of the Alliance for the Education of the Whole Child said they plan to intensify their lobbying of Education Committee members to support measures overhauling the Board of Education, revamping the state's system of determining "underperforming" schools, and strengthening schooling for English language learners.

With the release of a 47-page report calling for a change in the direction of education reform, alliance members say they also plan to mobilize their members across the state to lobby their local legislators to support the bills. The alliance includes the state's two largest teachers unions, the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, and the Mass Association for Bilingual Education, among others.

Coalition members say the test is unfair to children in lower-income districts, special education students, English language learners and blacks and Latinos, groups whose members generally pass at lower rates. And they say current education policies are not closing achievement gaps between students in wealthier communities and those attending public schools in low-income neighborhoods.

For the entire story: http://www2.townonline.com/brookline/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=411989

Education for Democracy

Our environment is sick and our system of education is sick. Why? They are sick for the same reason -- corporate greed. It's as simple as that.

My uncle was a high school science teacher in Freehold, New Jersey and Bruce Springsteen just happened to be one of his students. Springsteen would bring his guitar to class and my uncle would tell him he was never going to amount to anything.

Today, one of my students brought a cake to school to share with his friends and teachers. He baked the cake himself and proudly walked into class excited that so many people enjoyed the cake. He told everyone how much he loves to bake.

Education is about freedom and passion. It's about loving something so much that you want to immerse yourself in the subject, whatever that subject might be. Basing an educational system on standardized testing of meaningless facts and forcing children to take test after test is nothing less than child abuse. Children must be provided with opportunities to experience life and explore where their passions lie. The current system is robbing them of their hearts and souls. Politicians and business leaders who are profiting from a regime built upon turning public education into a one-size-fits all mindless activity for their own economic gain are playing a dangerous game. Paul Wellstone understood this and so do the good teachers and parents. It is time to hold those who hide behind the empty rhetoric of accountability accountable for wreaking havoc with our children and our nation's future.

Perhaps someone like Bruce Springsteen who understands the importance of pursuing one's passions will step up to the plate and take a stand on NCLB. His son is in my daughter's class and the next time I see him, I think I will ask him.