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By Root 479 0

stick around for the tests aren’t exactly reading Faulkner and solving quadratic equations. Listen to almost any teacher in the state of Texas and you’ll hear a story about valuable classroom time lost to drills that prep students for the test. About art teachers compelled to drill a half hour each day for the test. About English teachers required to start every class with a drill that teaches students to underline the central ideas in short paragraphs. About testing consultants who charge a stiff fee to help principals get campus scores up by telling teachers to focus all their drilling efforts on “the bubble kids”—the ones in the small “bubble” of scores just below passing. (Forget the children at the bottom—you’ll never get their scores anywhere close to the magic passing number.) About a small school district spending $20,000 on prep handbooks for the TAAS, the recently replaced Texas Assessment of Academic Skills.

Heard about Guerrilla TAAS? A neat little test-attack-skill handbook with a camouflage cover. “Cool,” say the kids. “Cami.”

There’s more.

The guerrilla consultants show up at schools to lead Guerrilla TAAS pep rallies. They wear camouflage combat fatigues. Even the principal and assistant principals get to suit out in camouflage—all included in the price of the Guerrilla TAAS package.

“Hey, guys, we’re going to teach you how to kick this test’s butt.”

Some miracle, huh?

Is there a papal nuncio in the house?

THERE WAS NO place for educators like McNeil, Valenzuela, and Haney in the planning of the No Child Left Behind law (isn’t it grand how a campaign scripted by a burn-their-crops-and-kill-their-children guy like Karl Rove comes up with such sweet-sounding titles for bad bills?). The Bushies believe education reform is the business of the business community.

The new law is filled with accountability standards and provisions for “sanctions” of underperforming schools. One testing-company CEO told a gathering of Wall Street analysts that Bush’s education law “reads like our business plan.”

No surprise.

Some critics would say the Bushies believe education law should be written not only by big business but for big business. This is not new. Schools have always been profit centers for publishing companies. It’s no surprise that the business lobby has a pack of dogs in the education-legislation hunt. But this deal was done Texas-style. The New Yorker’s Nicholas Lemann worked in the Great State and understands who’s in charge. After he wrote about the education law, Lemann explained Texas political culture to PBS’s Frontline: “Clearly in Texas, I think more than nationally, business has been the prime mover behind standards. But the context there is, business runs everything in Texas more than it does nationally. I remember once, when I worked at Texas Monthly [in the early 1980s], the editor went on vacation, and he asked me to write the editor’s column, which was in effect the editorial that month. So I wrote it, and I had some line like, ‘The highest purpose of government is to help people who are unable to help themselves.’ And the political writer for Texas Monthly went insane over that. It was really interesting. He came in and said, ‘We can’t publish that. We can’t publish that.’ And I said, ‘Why is that?’ He said—and this guy is a Democrat—’Because the highest purpose of government is to help business. Everybody knows that.’ ”

The business-driven standards-and-accountability movement in public ed is, of course, bigger than Texas. In an article published in The Nation shortly after the No Child law passed Congress, Stephen Metcalf wrote that the Bush education revolution “is the culmination of a decade of educational reform spearheaded by conservatives and business leaders.” Metcalf compared educational plans drawn up by the boys at the Business Roundtable to the goals Horace Mann and John Dewey defined for public education: “to fashion a common national culture out of a far-flung and often immigrant population, and to prepare young people to be reflective and critical citizens in a democratic