Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [42]
The law, the principal said, fails to take into account the realities of teaching poor kids. He also repeated a criticism that is almost universal in the nation’s public schools. “This law has taken away all the creative part of teaching. We teach to the test. We’d be idiots not to. But school, real education, is not just about taking tests. Teachers know that. And so do the students. The politicians don’t.”
This beleaguered principal has his hands full. Ninety-six percent of his students qualify for federally assisted free lunches. Ninety-five percent of the population is African-American, as white kids flee the school to attend private “acadamies.” He is struggling to increase his campus test scores. And suddenly he is told he has to test his “sped” or special education kids with standardized tests prepared for their age level, rather than the their “mental age” or IQ. And the president pushing the testing has reneged on the funds needed to help the “sped” kids through testing and assist the entire population of a school full of kids facing the academic hardships created by extreme poverty.
A year after he signed it into law, Bush’s education-reform program is a tougher sell than Enron stock. The business community might love it, but school administrators aren’t buying. The bill that public-ed lobbyist Paul Houston and public-interest legislator Paul Wellstone bemoan as federal intrusion is greater than its many component parts because of the extraordinary leverage it gives the federal government. It is a constant Sword of Damocles hanging over the head of the principal of every school that receives Title I aid. It uses standardized tests not for their traditional use in education—to diagnose student deficits and needs and recommend remediation—but to punish the school for the students’ failure. Through it, the federal government can reshape curriculum, determine who keeps jobs and who loses jobs, which campuses are funded and which campuses are shut down. All of this is achieved with a modest federal investment that turns out to be far less than promised. The funding mechanisms in the bill, for example, provided no emergency relief for the 2002–2003 collapse of Oregon’s public-school system caused by a statewide budget crisis that became too bizarre for “Doonesbury” to parody. (Actually, some Oregon legislators credit Garry Trudeau with saving the school year by embarrassing the Legislature into emergency action.) The most cynical critics of the law see it as a Trojan horse by which public education will be privatized. And if all this sounds like liberal paranoia, let’s all get into group therapy with the twenty-eight school superintendents from Texas who are fighting their ex-governor’s No Child law.
In the end the big losers might end up being the “neediest” children Bush told Kennedy he wanted to help. They too may well be fooled twice. Once on money and once on the quality of instruction.
Since the 1970s, poor schools have been in court fighting for equity, trying to close the spending gap between poor and rich public schools. Kids from low-income families are always more expensive to educate, because they don’t show up at school “ready to learn,” as the first President Bush used to say. (Poppy Bush proposed funding more preschool programs to get them ready.) Poor kids almost always attend underfunded schools. So they went to court and sued for equity. In California, Texas, Illinois, and other states they finally got there. Now, just as they’ve arrived, these same schools are about to see their equity money siphoned away to pay private companies to teach their children.
Some kids will escape the grim, rote-and-repetition pedagogical model. Wealthy schools that don’t depend on Title I federal money will continue to provide kids with an enriched curriculum and learning experiences that make schools exciting and that