Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [43]
So the answer to Dubya Bush’s widely quoted question “Is our children learning?” is yes. At least some of them is. If you want your child to be part of the group that is, see to it that she is middle class, preferably white (wealthy is even better), and that she attends a school where Title I is not her principal’s principal preoccupation.
Who else wins with Bush’s education-reform bill?
Our testing business is positioned to provide comprehensive testing at both the state and at the school district level; as states build new accountability systems to test students in grades 3–8, we will provide full service support. We are the primary assessment provider in Indiana, Colorado, and New York, three of the first five states whose accountability systems have already received federal approval. States will continue to require support in managing many aspects of their assessment and accountability systems, including research, alignment, development, production, scoring, reporting, and most importantly, tracking. We can also provide strong support for the annual yearly progress requirement and we can do that with our new Web-based tracking system and we have the software to help disaggregate the assessment data which is all so important, making sure where some of the intervention and some of the remedial initiatives need to be focused. (McGraw-Hill Earnings Conference Call, January 28, 2003)
Our newly developed sales force has been meeting with districts to review the supplemental services opportunity that’s associated with the No Child Left Behind legislation. In the fourth quarter, we experienced a surge of preimplementation activity and consequently, we expect to begin to see large-scale programs this spring, Q2. The pipeline for supplemental-service programs is growing steadily and we expect a significant increase overall in program activity by the fall of this year, which will be Q4. We’re currently approved in 23 states to supply services under the act. Operating income for education solutions was $2.3 million, which is 32 percent below last year, and was expected as we reinvested in our sales force and the development of the infrastructure to support No Child Left Behind. (Sylvan Learning Systems Earnings Conference, February 20, 2003)
The devil’s in the details and the profits are in the small print. “It’s a great day for education, because we now have substantial alignment among all the key constituents—the public, the education community, business and political leaders—that results matter,” said an educator at Bush’s January 2001 White House education summit. The educator was McGraw-Hill chairman Harold McGraw.*
Six hundred sixty-six pages of legislation Paul Houston calls the largest federal intrusion in the history of public education is about to change your kids’ lives, and only the publishers are pleased.
They get their cut because the law drives demand for “product.” There’s just not a lot of money to put in the classroom.
After the publishers gorged themselves at the public education trough, there was a light dessert for the Christian right, as the Bushies linked public piety to the money they were putting into education. In February 2003 the Department of Education sent out a warning that if schools did not allow students time for “constitutionally protected prayer,” they could lose their federal aid for the poor. Now, that’s sure to get reading levels up.
At about the same time, Michigan got word that if it doesn’t test all recently arrived immigrants