Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [137]
* Name changed at subject’s request.
* Black folks in Houston are used to the system working against them. Around the time young George W. Bush was chilling out in a classroom at the exclusive, private Kincaid School, the public schools in Houston, where summers are like Managua without the breeze, were just getting air-conditioning. After a school-board debate about who gets air-conditioning first, a board member proposed following the alphabet. The city’s African-American high school campuses at the time were Wheatley, Worthing, Yates, and Washington.
* Texas excludes students in juvenile detention and students whose whereabouts are unknown from dropout records, along with two dozen other categories of nonschool attenders. It’s also one of very few states that count students who pass the GED test as graduating students.
* In May 2003, Paige distinguished himself for the first time by setting off a controversy about his observations on Christian values. Paige told a reporter, “But, you know, all things being equal, I would prefer to have a child in a school where there’s a strong appreciation for values, the kind of values that I think are associated with the Christian communities, and so that this child can be brought up in an environment that teaches them to have strong faith and to understand that there is a force greater than them personally.”
* This backlash is precisely what the education privatizers on the extreme Republican right are after. Consider the comments made by an ideological dim bulb in the Oregon senate when the state’s schools were cutting staff and reducing the number of school days by two weeks a year for lack of funding. “I tell any parent who will listen to run—not walk—to remove their children from public schools. . . . Nothing could be worse for the future of America than consigning all our youths to the public education arena,” said state senator Charles Starr—chair of the Senate Education Committee.
* The Bushes and the McGraws go way back, with family ties The Nation followed to the 1930s, when Joseph and Permelia Pryor Reed turned Jupiter Island, Florida, into a haven for old money from the Northeast. At times there were so many Old Yankee blue bloods on the island it seemed as though a Louis Auchincloss novel were taking place. The Meads, the Mellons, the Paysons, the Whitneys, the Lovetts, the Harrimans—and Prescott Bush and James McGraw, Jr., vacationed together.
Their relationships on nonprofit boards are as insular and incestuous as a Sunday afternoon of croquet at the Harrimans’. Harold McGraw, Jr., is on the board of the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy and just happened to win a presidential literacy award from Poppy Bush in the early nineties. The McGraw Foundation gave education secretary Rod Paige its Educator of the Year award while he was superintendent of schools in Houston. Paige delivered the keynote speech at McGraw-Hill’s “government initiatives” conference in spring 2002. Harold McGraw III and another McGraw-Hill board member served on Dubya Bush’s transition team. Barbara Bush’s former chief of staff left the first Bush White House to work for McGraw-Hill and is now back on Laura Bush’s staff. And McGraw-Hill’s former VP for global markets is John Negroponte. The same John Negroponte who was utterly blind to death squads and torture while he was U.S. ambassador to Honduras and is now back in public service as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
You will not be amazed to learn that McGraw-Hill became the big corporate player shaping education policy in Austin while Dubya Bush was governor of Texas. After their consultants wrote the statement of principles for the Texas Education Agency and designed the state’s reading curriculum, McGraw-Hill claimed the biggest market share in the state’s huge textbook market.
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