Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [41]
“Kennedy got rolled,” said a veteran Washington education lobbyist.
The Senate voted to restore some of the funding Bush reneged on, including $1.5 billion to special education and $5 billion in Title I funds. Moderate Senate Republicans got the message from home and joined Democrats in ignoring Bush’s niggardly education budget. Kress defended Bush’s budget cuts, saying there is “always a difference in what’s authorized and what’s ultimately appropriated.” Kennedy “knew better,” said Kress, “and his public position is not an honorable one.” Not so, said Kennedy staffer Jim Manley. “The senator expected President Bush to live up to the funding commitments he made a year earlier.”
“They’re spending less money on education reform than they were offering Turkey to accept U.S. troops,” said Paul Houston.
The late Paul Wellstone was one of nine lonely members of the Senate to vote against Bush’s bill. When these reforms kick in, Wellstone warned, school administrators are going to be “screaming ‘What have they done to us?’ ” Less than six months after the memorial service for Paul and Sheila Wellstone, school administrators were in fact screaming. The Department of Education’s advance man in New England probably owes his life to the fact that The New York Times education reporter attended a hearing in Vermont, where school administrators wanted blood. Did the suits in Washington really believe 100 percent of students would pass the test? “That remains to be seen,” said federal ed’s man in Montpelier, Michael Sentence. “How do you defend a law that gives the federal government unprecedent[ed] control over ‘failing’ schools—that tells local schools when they must fire their pupils and teachers—even though it pays a small fraction [7 percent] of public education costs?”
Obviously, not very well.
The Republican chair of Vermont’s House public-ed committee demanded major changes. Vermont Democratic senator James Condos asked why a state with the most successful testing-and-assessment system in the nation was being asked “to dump our education system.”
“Can the federal government be flexible?”
“Probably a lot less flexible than people were looking for,” Sentence said.
From New England to the Old South, school administrators received the law with the same lack of enthusiasm. An elementary school principal in the Mississippi Delta questioned the “fire the coach” logic in the law. “If we fail to show progress, the principal can be fired. They can even dismiss the teachers and superintendent.” Principals dismissed from underperforming schools can only work at another underperforming campus. “Why are we going to do better at another low-performing school?” he asked.
The principal began his school year six teachers short on a campus where the classrooms are filled with some of the most economically disadvantaged children in the nation. The state accountability system took the economic levels of students into account when it tested them. Under the new federal education law, his students are expected to compete with children from Hancock County, where a NASA facility is located. “Their educational level is always going to be higher than ours. If you have children from families in the $70,000 level, it’s easier to make progress. We don’t have those kids. Many of our students have never been outside of this county. They’ve never gone on family vacations, where kids can learn so much from travel. Even with Head Start [which the Bushies are trying to dismantle] and kindergarten, they are not ready for the first grade.” The critical element for these schools is money—precisely what Bush failed to deliver in his education-reform bill.
The hallways in this Mississippi school were clean, orderly, and quiet. Every classroom this veteran principal walked into (unannounced) ten minutes after