The NCLB scam

I don't think Steve Sailer quite gets it, either. The whole point of NCLB is to ultimately empower the states to dissolve duly-elected local school boards, and take over local public school districts. It's not about "getting students to be proficient;" it's about state (and probably ultimately federal) control of education - which traditionally in the US has been highly local. The way NCLB is written, it's simply not possible for every student in every district to score "proficient." Sailer points that out. But he doesn't go further - WHY would lawmakers structure NCLB in that way? It's not because they're stupid. It's because it doesn't matter whether they're Democrats or Republicans - both recognize subsidiarity and local control as their biggest "enemies." They want to replace the local school board with faceless state or even federal level bureaucrats in charge of schools. Then, when the states control the school systems - it becomes very easy to "privatize" them. Like prisons, schools can be "contracted out" to the lowest bidders, and run on for-profit lines. Sounds crazy? Read NCLB, and follow the money.

Bugg, I wish it were that simple, I really do, and I also wish I could call Stefanie paranoid, at least a little. But, with my wife's 30+ years of experience here in Philadelphia, including the recent (5 years ago) state takeover, I have to say Stefanie is right, at least in theory... the "practice" here is much too close to her description.

Then, when the states control the school systems - it becomes very easy to "privatize" them. Like prisons, schools can be "contracted out" to the lowest bidders, and run on for-profit lines. This sounds great to me! We could: 1) open up schools to non-union choice 2) give each parent a voucher so they can pull move their kid to whatever school they want Actually, I bet Sailer would suggest giving all kids an IQ test each fall, and then compare end-of-year knowledge test scores against two factors: the kid's IQ and who his teacher was. And it's a great idea. In a single year the great teachers (who are the only ones who matter in education) would be very visible, and those folk could demand twice the salary in a free market. Those teachers who produce could operate with no administration or oversight - even out of rented space or large homes. Parents would flock to them with their vouchers. Our state pays over $10k per kid. A good teacher could teach 10 kids at their home and take home $100k with zero overhead. No more government schools. Of course, the liberals would scream bloody murder: who cares about the kids when they would lose their local brainwashing center and that union money!

Gretchen, I respect your opinion, but I also respectfully suggest you read up on the beginnings of public education in the US. It is directly connected to two major influences: the transition from agrarian to industrial, and the passage of child labor laws. Before we had a strong public education, we had alot of illiterate citizens. Without PE, chances are excellent that we would have lost WWII, and possibly WWI. The current incarnation of PE is full of holes and corruption, no doubt. It's purpose, though, has never changed, and I ask you to at least understand the roots of that purpose.

One other thing (for Stephanie) -- Local school districts are also government. I am as obligated to pay the taxes that my school district assesses as I am to pay Uncle Sam. Do you _really_ mean that government should not tax to pay for education of the bulk of its citizens?

I've read extensively on the beginnings of public education in this country, including John Taylor Gatto and other authors. Its genesis goes further back than the transition to an industrial society and child labor laws--those situations were used to further entrench government schooling in the public's mind. Government schooling really began with the attempt of Protestants to 'teach' the Bible to Catholic children (and therefore educate them into Protestantism) in New England. There are stories of school officials rounding up Catholic children on Cape Cod and forcibly taking them to school. At the time of the American Revolution our country had about a 98% literacy rate, with most children taught reading, writing and arithmetic at home. If more schooling was desired, the parents sent the child to a private school (like the Boston Latin School) or hired a tutor. One had to be proficient in Latin before entering Harvard, and many young people entered university at around age 16 or so. I'm not sure what sources Franklin is relying on for his information. Literacy rates actually began falling when government schooling became entrenched in this nation. Today it stands at around 75%, which is shocking by any standard. To suggest that WWI and WWII would've been lost if there had not been public education is quite a stretch and I would like to hear some reasoning on that. And Franz, we've had a large, and largely permanent, underclass for several generations now. Universal government schooling is actually fostering it through insane identity politics, multi-culturalist curriculum, and failed teaching methods. I do say that citizens should not be taxed to pay for the education of its citizens. In all the world State schooling of young people was not done unless the State wanted to build a military (Sparta and Prussia), or severely control and restrict the freedom of its citizens (communist China), etc. Education was and should be the purview of the family. Some families will fail to educate, but we see that now don't we? Even with government schooling there is still a segment (and growing) of parents who fail to ensure that their children are educated. Only liberals think they can force everyone to do the right thing if they just had enough money or control. I resent having to pay thousands of dollars a year to a school system that is a failure in every way. Our local schools are crumbling physically, and test scores are in the mud (for the nth year in a row). My tax dollars go to support a bloated and corrupt bureaucracy that never delivers on a single promise. Every year or so they come out with another program that is going to turn things around and yet it never does. I choose to educate my two children outside of the government system and do so quite well on less than a thousand dollars per year. My local government school needs over $10,000 per pupil and yet our high school students are testing near the bottom in Math and English.

Forget I asked, Gretchen. I read your post again.

Gretchen--how 'bout a cite for that statistic of yours, re 98% literacy? No doubt blacks and Native Americans are excluded from that!

Connie, It's been a while since I've done research on the subject, but here's a list of the books where I most likely came across that statistic. Sorry I can't be more specific at the moment: The Underground History Of American Education: A Schoolteacher's Intimate Investigation Into The Problem Of Modern Schooling by John Taylor Gatto Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling by John Taylor Gatto None Dare Call It Education: What's Happening to Our Schools & Our Children? by John Stormer Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville Here's a chronology of public education in America from the American History Teacher's Book of Lists by Fay R. Hansen. I skipped some of the entries, but thought these might be of interest: 1635 -- Boston Latin School begins classes. It is the first public secondary school in the America. 1638 -- The first 'reading' school in New Amsterdam (New York) opens. 1642 -- The Massachusetts General Court passes a law requiring parents and guardians to teach their children to read and understand the principles of religion. It is the first law of its kind in the English-speaking world. 1647 -- Massachusett's "Old Deluder Satan Law" requires every town of fifty or more families to support an elementary school and appoint a teacher to teach children to read and write... 1640s-1650s -- Two Latin grammar schools open in Virginia and a Catholic Latin grammar school opens in Maryland. 1689 -- The Friends Public School opens for boys in Philadelphia. 1704 -- The Church of England opens a school for blacks, American Indians, and whites in New York City. 1742 -- The Moravian Seminary, on the of the few elite schools for girls, opens in Bethlehem, PA. 1743 -- In Charleston, SC, Anglicans open a school for blacks. 1827 -- Massachusetts becomes the first state to order compulsory support of public education through taxation. 1830s --States begin to organize public school systems open to all. State school taxes and statewide requirements for attendance, curriculum and teacher training begin to widely appear. 1852 -- Massachusetts passes the country's first compulsory school-attendance law. 1865 -- The federal government establishes the Freedman's Bureau, a school system designed to educate former slaves.

John Taylor Gatto's work is really unsettling...in a good way.

Connie, the statistics don't say if 'people' were only white men living in New England. It states that literacy in the colonies at the time of the American Revolution was in the 90th percentile. You are making an assumption and would have to provide some evidence. My understanding is that women were taught to read and write in most cases, but not given a higher education. Undoubtedly, slaves were highly illiterate, although you can see that even in the very early 18th century there were schools being formed to teach them. Also, I don't think it quite fair to lump in American Indians as illiterate citizens, since they were not generally considered citizens of the colonies and still maintained their own culture and customs to a great extent. Also, I think you must provide some evidence to suggest that schools and states 'define away' children they don't want to count in their statistics. What schools and what states are you talking about? From what I've heard, the only labeling going on is the inflation of 'special ed' students, i.e., in order to qualify for more federal dollars and as a way of 'improving' percentages on testing results. You say, EVERY CHILD should be taught to read and compute basically. That goes without saying. We do not, however, live in a world that will ever be able to do right by every child. The question is how to do the most amount of good for the largest amount of children. NCLB and the government schools have an extremely poor track record.

Connie, your stats may or may not be more correct than mine. I did not 'make up' those stats as you accuse me, and went with the slightly lower one (90%) because I could back that one up. However, when you keep applying modern ideological standards to the past you are casting a shade on the truth. I have not disagreed with you that slaves and women were not given the same opportunities as the men. This is not cause for present anger, though. This is the way things were at that time. If women or blacks were denied an education today it would be a scandal of epic proportions. I don't believe it is fair to apply such a moral/social standard on the past. It was what it was. I do understand that you are wanting to get the big, inclusive picture, but that needs to be tempered by a cogent understanding of just who was considered a full citizen. Today, all people, regardless of race, creed, sex, are considered equal and deserving of equal opportunity. It was just not so in the 1700s, even though there were inklings of a growing moral/social awareness of the rights of women and slaves. So, I don't think you can fairly claim that yesterday's milieu of minority groups has the exact same claim to be counted as today's and judged by today's standards. We went through a civil war and the suffragette movement in order to get where we are today. Lots of blood, sweat and tears spilled in order to get here. I homeschool, too. My local district terms my children 'proficient' in reading, writing and math if they score in the 33 percentile on state tests. That is not only disingenuous, but downright immoral. NCLB, which allows local districts to set their own standards, is the same as letting the fox guard the hen house. If students today were proficient in Greek, Latin, the Classics, etc., I would certainly term them as educated as our forefathers. However, that is certainly not the case. Our best students may have a broad spectrum of knowledge, but not a deep one. We have many jack of all trades and masters of none, to our detriment. There are plenty of high school tests from the 30s and 40s floating around the internet, which when compared to today's proficiency tests make our students look like grade-schoolers. Isn't the question we're both asking: How do we provide a quality education to as many people as possible? I aver that NCLB has failed. And, the longer we keep segmenting our students into racial and ethnic categories (as a way of explaining the failure of the schools to educate them), the worse off they will be. Children are not handicapped by race, they are handicapped by low expectations and corrupt bureaucracies. There are too many exceptions to the 'rule' to keep spouting race as a reason for failure.

Connie, this reminds me of the many discussions and arguments I've had over the years over affirmative action statutes and regulations. The analogy is with quotas: the law does not mandate quotas, but it does allow them, and they became the default method of "compliance" amongst employers who were more interested in loopholes than in actual, merit-based, color- and gender-blind hiring practices. NCLB does not mandate "teaching to the test". But once you've investigated enough (my wife is a public school teacher, for over 30 years; we both know alot of teachers in a variety of places), you find that the default method is in fact teaching to the test, because the practical effect of NCLB is this: School admins are now afraid of lost funding. Parents have been told that there is a valid, objective measure of the performance of schools. NCLB mandates that test results are the primary measurement of school performance and a top criterion for funding decisions. Please forgive the sarcasm, but what the heck else would you expect a large bureaucracy to do when you hand their nuts to the hands of the laymen, and let them squeeze at will on the flimsiest pretext? My sarcasm is based on the measurable fact that children progress at different rates, and there is no more rational basis for using large-group test scores to judge a school than there is to look at a child and call him or her "average". Whether you care to blame NCLB or not, the reality is that arbitrary measurements are being used to enforce and administer the provisions of NCLB. Those measurements can be objectively proven to be false on any number of levels and in any number of ways. Take what I wrote in the first post on this thread: More pseudo-science concocted in the name of political expediency: if this year's batch of 8th graders score better than last year's batch, guess what? You've improved your school!!! Sarcasm aside, let me set up the analogy for you. Jonny is an ordinary kid, about mid-range in all development areas for his age. He likes school, but doesn't work harder at it than he has to. He scores an 80 out of 100 in his 8th grade achievement assessment in 2005. Sally is a prodigy. She played the piano at age 5. She reads music and her independent reading level is 3 years beyond her chronological age. With the same teachers as Jonny, in 2006 she scored a 98 out of 100. Did the teachers in that school suddenly get better, or can we just be reasonable and say objectively that Sally is a better student than Jonny? The real crime is not the law, but the rhetoric around the law that leads Jonny's parents to expect him to score as high as Sally, and encourage them to complain when he doesn't. My analogy is very simplistic; I concede that it requires fleshing out in some important ways.

Connie, It's a fair question, but I can't agree that it's the right question. Please bear with me for a moment. The first problem is in the politicization of public education. Philadelphia is a prime example: the state "took over" five years ago because of "budget concerns", in an atmosphere of several decades of political sabotaging of sincere attempts to do things like stabilize the funding source for schools (property taxes being just about the least equitable method around), formalize the professional criteria for teachers (it is about two steps behind Bar and CPA standards), and establish objective standards for everything from special ed (the statutes cover both challenged and gifted children) to the value of "enrichment" programs like music, theater and art. To be fair, I'd have to mention the continuing deterioration of special ed, that being my wife's area of expertise. It's gone from strict guidelines and targeted programs (and measurable success within each one) to a hodge-podge where emotional support kids are lumped in with the learning support kids, to the detriment of both. It started well before NCLB entered the picture. Um, and don't get me started on the whole unfunded mandate situation. Grinding teeth would be only the beginning. :) There are two things we should be working on. 1) Teaching that self-esteem is internal and independent. Students should be shown the value in trying their best and being proud of the results, whatever they might be, and parents should be educated in their children's particular variations in the map of child development. It's one thing to be disappointed in a lazy genius; it's quite another thing to push an average-range child to think that only genius-range grades are acceptable. 2) Recognize the depth and complexity of teaching, and set standards for teachers that reflect them. A balance is necessary; instead, "standards" have see-sawed between topical experts (who sometimes are terrible teachers) to over-trained child development experts who either don't know the material well enough, or think that being able to "diagnose" a child is enough. It's a complex subject. There are numerous holes to fill just in my attempt here to answer you. However, there are more complete answers out there, and they are individual schools that deliver the services their students need, offer enriched programs to challenge the gifted and make real strides in lifting challenged kids to proficiency that actually means something, like being competitively skilled for jobs, or having permanent solutions to their reasons for being challenged (chemical or trauma induced damage to short-term memory, impulse control, emotional control, the list goes on). My wife has been teaching special ed for over 30 years, and there is a long list of former students who come to see her with proud stories of being self-sufficient and happy in what they do and where they live. They were crack babies, severely abused children, children of children. You can't measure some successes with statistics, and that is the real failure of NCLB.