In Part 18, found here http://www.diatribune.com/... and here http://www.dailykos.com/... , we returned our attention to former White House senior educator advisor Sandy Kress, whose rewrite of Lyndon Johnson’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act turned that statute into an automatic teller machine for the corporate elite cozening to the administration and family of George W. Bush. For the past few years, Kress has been paid to lead his corporate masters to that ATM, but most recently has been hired to help them protect it from scrutiny and harm by a rational Congressional majority. Since the law is up for reauthorization this year, business profiteers worry that Kress’s twin rackets – testing-and-assessment and supplemental educational services – might be jettisoned and, with them, billions of dollars in private sector profits. While some recent public appearances garnered chilly responses for the architect of No Child Left Behind, the Hoover Institution gave him a warm reception in March.
(To review the series from the beginning, click here http://www.diatribune.com/... or here http://www.dailykos.com/... ).
"The accountability provisions were built on the foundation of the 1994 Improving America’s Schools Act," Kress told an unnamed reporter for Education Next, an organ of the Hoover Institution. "The goal was to build muscle where there was little or none, drawing on ideas in place in states like Texas. Education Trust was deeply involved, as were key members of Congress from both sides of the aisle. Reformers had come up with choice ideas and notions of flexibility in return for improvements in performance. There was healthy discussion on both sides."
Note the even, genteel tone of Kress’s commentary, as if he’s aware the questions here will be softballs, his answers will be brushed lovingly by an editor before publication, that the "question-and-answer" format will blissfully exclude the naysaying of opposing viewpoints. This interview occurred sometime this spring and was published on or around March 10. Coming on the heels of several contentious appearances, and articles in which opponents of NCLB and its twin rackets were given even time, this interview with "EdNext" must have seemed like climbing between warm flannel sheets on a snowy, windy night. One imagines a cozy setting, the interviewer reading questions from a card and hanging on Kress’s every thought.
Indeed, "EdNext" couched its interview with Kress behind this adoring introductory paragraph:
With the due date for the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) right around the corner, Education Next thought it apt to probe the lessons learned in the five years since the act’s passage. After all, as the cliché goes, if we don’t learn from history we are bound to repeat its mistakes. In that spirit, this past summer we conducted an e-mail interview with Sandy Kress, a lawyer and former school board member who, as a domestic policy advisor in the White House, served as President Bush’s chief negotiator during the original NCLB debate. We asked him about the genesis of key aspects of the federal law, whether its crafters foresaw any of its major glitches, and what he thinks of NCLB’s prospects going forward.
The reader may infer correctly that this means the interviewer asked nothing about the twin rackets Kress embedded in NCLB, the testing-and-assessment racket and the supplemental educational services racket, except, in the latter case, as an odd substitute for "choice," the codeword for vouchers. We’ll get to Kress’s answer to that soon enough. And the reader may infer correctly that the topic of profiteering in general was avoided, and the topic of the long list of Bush administration and family acolytes collecting handsome rewards for their investment in the president’s well-being specifically was avoided. There is found in the entire interview no mention of the price tag of this profiteering, now climbing well into tens of billions of dollars. There is no mention of the scandals uncovered in Reading First, the presumed intellectual cornerstone of Kress’s crowning achievement, by the Inspector General’s office, and no mention of the mealy responses to those scandals by Kress’s former helpmeet, Margaret LaMontagne, now better known as Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings. And of course, there would be no mention whatsoever of Kress’s recent work as a corporate lobbyist serving those receiving the greatest largess from NCLB, or his most recent retention by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to protect the business community’s entitlements under his twin racket scheme.
All in all, it was a garden-variety, color-by-numbers celebrity interview, the sort that might be ginned up by a campus newspaper to follow a guest lecturer’s appearance. For that reason, we’ll skip the worst of the thin material. Masochists can find the entire interview online here http://www.hoover.org/... .
Consider this exchange, in which Kress opines that too few parents are politically active. Is he more exercised because too few parents are engaged in the political debate over education in America, or because too few support his flawed creation? Hard to tell. But it’s really of little consequence anyway, as Kress invests full confidence in his masters, the business community-turned-education reformers, to lead the way:
EdNext: Would you now concede that "parents of middle- and upper-income youngsters" are not going to "take care of their interests politically in the states by insisting on appropriate standards"? What’s Plan B if we want to raise standards? Can the federal government do anything to help?
SK: I do believe that education standards for our youngsters depend heavily on the will of politically active parents. If they have low expectations, there will be low standards, and there’s nothing government can or will do to change it.
Having said that, I think that the business community and education reformers must do everything they can to educate citizens, opinion shapers, and civic and political leaders about the urgent need to set higher standards. Our young people will have a limited future if we fail at this challenge. Indeed, the very future of our country and our way of life depend upon our success.
This next question hinted at a real issue for discussion among rational people, and had a real interviewer been conducting the dialogue, Kress’s puff of a response wouldn’t have been let to stand. Instead, Kress pivoted from the question, blamed the victims of NCLB for the statute’s structural disintegration, and slipped in some advertising for his masters, the producers of reading curriculum content:
EdNext: How did science wind up becoming a "kind-of" content area for NCLB, while history did not? Were there concerns that curricula might be narrowed or other subjects might be squeezed out by the focus on math and reading?
SK: We thought that getting reading and math right was a good first step, so we started with the idea that enhanced accountability ought to be geared to reading and math. There was support in the Congress for going further with respect to science, at least as to the testing. That extension passed in the House and was retained in the bill. There wasn’t comparable advocacy for history. Also, conservatives watched any extension with an eagle eye. So NCLB went as far as it could.
Curricula only narrow when poor teachers and/or administrators allow that to happen. It’s pathetic. Poor practitioners do this and then blame it on NCLB. Ridiculous. If math and reading are professionally and effectively taught, there’s plenty of time for other courses. Indeed, science, history, poetry, and so much other material can be utilized significantly in the effective teaching of reading.
An intelligent observer might suggest that one reason science was excluded was the deep disagreement among conservatives around the teaching of the theory of evolution. Had science been included in the original bill alongside reading and math, the entire enterprise might have been doomed as the Dobson-Robertson crowd demanded its pound of flesh from the administration and the keepers of Congress. By excluding it from equal billing, Kress and company sidestepped an internecine war. Perhaps the treatment of history curricula was similarly disposed, as interested parties prefer their own version of history to be the one true version taught in schools.
Which brings us to the Holy Grail of the right wing: vouchers. Kress appropriately reports that the right wing in Congress wanted vouchers included in the statute in 2001 but that pragmatism won the day; they took a bill that broadly supported public school choice and opened the floodgates for private supplemental educational service providers rather than hold out for victory in an unwinnable war for publicly-funded private school vouchers. The goal, after all, was the subversion of public funds to private entities, and they achieved it through supplemental educational services anyway. Notice, however, that Kress gets his talking points about "choice" – the euphemism for "vouchers" – into the conversation nonetheless.
EdNext: How was it decided to have public choice precede supplemental services—and are you surprised by current interest in reversing that order?
SK: Public-school choice comes before supplemental services in NCLB for a very interesting reason. Conservatives pointed to a legal requirement in an earlier appropriations law that created public-school choice after schools failed to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) for two years. While conservatives liked supplemental services, they weren’t going to "lose a year" in getting to public-school choice in NCLB.
I’m not surprised that many want to get to supplemental services first. It seems a more natural next step. The key point for me, however, is that these parental choices need to be given life! They need to be enforced.
Asked what he thinks might be achievable in the reauthorization of his law, Kress lays out the gameplan of the Business Roundtable, or the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, if you like. Says Kress:
We built a formidable coalition that we’d be very fortunate to replicate in the upcoming reauthorization.
The next effort will have its own challenges and opportunities. While some on the left will resist further reform, protecting certain special interests, and some on the right will resist "federal involvement," we now feel the pressure of global competition in ways that were only hinted at in 2001. The Chinese and the Indians would get a big boost just as they’re muscling up their K–12 and higher education systems if the U.S. lightens up on standards and accountability.
See, China and India are nipping at our heels, boys. Ignore that they’re home to the world’s largest populations living in poverty and poor health, and ignore too that America is the wealthiest, strongest economic and political superpower in the recorded history of the universe. Those reality-based facts distract attention from the bigger picture. We may just hit the snooze bar one too many times and wake to find ourselves outdone by them. That’s precisely why we need to keep our multi-billion-dollar testing-and-assessment racket, and our multi-billion-dollar supplemental educational services racket, humming like Swiss clocks. Without those rackets funneling public dollars into the private sector, we’ll wind up speaking Chinese and paying for gas with rupees.
And, while we’re discussing changes to NCLB, suggests Kress, let’s not only scrap all talk of eliminating these twin rackets, but let’s EXPAND those rackets into the high schools of America! Let’s have MORE billions spent on testing contracts, MORE billions spent on assessment contracts, and MORE billions spent on unaccountable supplemental educational services, and MORE consequences for those schools/districts/states that don’t toe the line. Now is not the time to stop and measure the value of our private-sector investment, but rather the time to double and triple that private-sector investment!
Kress explains:
A few major areas I hope will receive attention during reauthorization are college/workplace readiness, including the promotion of more rigorous standards; greater accountability at the secondary level; more sophisticated policy and greater accountability for improving teacher effectiveness, particularly at the late elementary and secondary levels; a broadening of attention to math and science as well as to history; and refinements in AYP to focus greater attention and improvement on the persistently failing schools by offering real choices to parents of students stuck in such schools.
High-school reform should include setting higher standards that lead students to graduate ready for college and good jobs. ... There should be at least one assessment near graduation that measures readiness for college and the workplace. Appropriate consequences should be established.
Particular attention must be paid to dramatically improving education in the late elementary and middle grades. Math and science education in those grades is thoroughly inadequate. Youngsters are showing up in huge numbers at high school, totally unprepared for the rigor of the current curriculum, not to mention the even more rigorous curriculum that must be put in place to meet our graduates’ needs.
We must go much further in improving teacher quality. The highly qualified teacher provisions have been helpful but are primitive. The next round must get to measuring teacher effectiveness based on student achievement, promoting professional development that is based on research and effective practice and improves performance, providing incentives for teachers who are effective, and requiring removal of teachers who, even with solid professional development, can’t or don’t improve. States must do something about the pathetic state of affairs in too many colleges of education, and proven alternative sources of teachers must be encouraged.
...
Further, I’d be willing to reserve the tougher consequences (choice and supplemental services) for the worst 15 percent or so of schools in the state. The states could define which schools these are as long as improving performance of low-income youngsters is central to the criteria. Other schools not making AYP would face other consequences. But, in return for this flexibility, states and districts would be required to give all parents of students in the 15 percent schools the choices we intended, including private school options as a last resort. Failure to provide these choices to youngsters in pervasively failing schools should be subject to severe sanction.
Whew. More assessments. "Appropriate consequences." Math and science education is "thoroughly inadequate." Students show up "totally unprepared." Federal teacher quality provisions are "primitive." Colleges of education are in a "pathetic state of affairs." "Tougher consequences" are needed. Schools are "pervasively failing" and need "severe sanction." Kress’s language sketches something like the worst Soviet system at the height of the Cold War, not the public education system of the wealthiest, strongest economic and political superpower in the recorded history of the universe. And six years after drafting the most extensive overhaul of the statute that governs federal investment in public schools, these are his judgments and recommendations? One wonders when the goosestepping should commence.
This is not to say that there is no room for improvement in education. Certainly there is. But it’s striking that decisions governing the education of children are made not by practitioners, but by politicians and quasi-politicians whose first priorities appear to be the padding of campaign-donor bank accounts in the private sector, not the education of children. It seems so simple: Change the inputs, and the outcomes will follow.
But that’s not likely to happen under the present regime, and Kress openly longs for his regime to be strengthened, not replaced.
Because, you know, China and India are hot on our heels.
EdNext: What one compromise would you most like to have back? Were you all aware at the time that the absence of vouchers might weaken support for the law among conservatives?
SK: Yes, we knew quite well the importance of choice to conservatives. Our choice provisions were very important to us. Your question assumes we compromised on vouchers. This is not true. We fought for our proposal and found insufficient support for it or anything like it to pass. There were far more than a majority firmly against us in each and every congressional forum than there were for us and the undecided combined. That lack of basic support made it impossible to pass all we proposed. We never compromised on choice. There were votes on a variety of choice proposals. Other than public-school choice and supplemental services, they all went down by significant margins. The lesson here is simple: we advocates of choice need to build far greater political support.
Finally, if any reader is looking for the responsible party for the under-funding of NCLB by tens of billions of dollars in promised appropriations, Kress tells us to look no further than himself AND Margaret Spellings, who were "in the middle" of the funding discussion that reportedly led to Democrats committing to the bill in exchange for the White House’s promise of full funding. Kress doesn’t remember it that way:
EdNext: What was your understanding of the deal on funding? Democrats claim that the president promised them full funding of NCLB. True?
SK: I was right in the middle of the "deal" on funding. Margaret Spellings and I worked on it daily. The president was thoroughly involved, as were the secretary, [budget director] Mitch Daniels, and other key officials in the White House.
The negotiation was rather simple. The Democrats wanted a significant increase in actual spending on ESEA, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, along with reform. We had a lengthy back-and-forth on appropriations. We got to $4 billion. The administration stuck by the deal and negotiated hard with its allies on the appropriations committees, and this very large initial increase was agreed to. We all had expectations for the future. There is no doubt that Democrats wanted more each year. I wanted the beneficiaries of the increased spending to embrace the reforms, or support even greater reforms. But the actual "deal" was for the additional $4 billion (see Figure 2).
EdNext: So there was no deal on out-year spending? Even in the president’s FY 2003 budget proposal, which was released less than a month after he signed NCLB (and which flatlined funding for the law)?
SK: The deal was for the one-year increase during FY 2002. You’ll recall that beginning with FY 2003 there were terrible fiscal pressures due in part to the economic downturn and to the cost of the war on terror. ...
Ah, the war on Terra. I expected him to say that we were building our defenses against China and India, who are nipping at our heels, which is why the White House couldn’t keep its commitment to fully fund its signature education plan. Guess I was stuck on a different set of talking points.
Such is Sandy Kress’s version of his role in NCLB, the hazy, flattering view rather than the well-lit, forensic view. Absent are thoughts of pillaging public funds for private sector gain, absent are the promises made in pitched negotiation across the aisle. In his remembrance of things past, Sandy Kress is defender of the faith, redeemer of the failed, architect who would raze Lyndon Johnson’s Great-Society commitment to public schoolchildren and replace that solid edifice with a resort for the likes of Harold McGraw III, Bill Bennett, Brother Neil Bush, Randy Best, Ed Kame’enui, Chris Doherty, et cetera, et cetera, all for the good of the nation. If realizing his dream requires that we destroy ourselves and our children, well, a good Western omelette requires that we break a lot of eggs.
But for those who need a dose of reality-based facts in their daily diet of NCLB, here are some reality-based outcomes of Sandy Kress’s real role in imposing NCLB on America’s schools, thanks to a 2006 report by Education Sector and its co-director, Thomas Toch. The full report is found online here http://www.educationsector.org/... :
Ever wonder how much is spent annually on developing, publishing, administering, grading and reporting the statewide tests required by Sandy Kress’s NCLB?
Or which private-sector companies benefit from that federally-mandated expense?
Did standards and accountability not already exist before Sandy Kress came to Washington with George W. Bush?
Were there not enough tests and assessments established by previous administrations?
And, are American students tested more often today than at any time in the nation’s history?
The answers, thanks to Mr. Toch, are:
Total expenditures for developing, publishing, administering, grading, and reporting NCLB-required statewide tests, Eduventures estimates, will be $517 million in the 2005-06 school year. Some testing company executives peg the number somewhat higher, at $700 million to $750 million, still a small portion of the approximately $500 billion the United States spends on public elementary and secondary education annually.
A handful of companies capture some 90 percent of the statewide testing revenue, Eduventures estimates. They include Pearson Educational Measurement, a subsidiary of London-based publisher Pearson PLC; CTB/McGraw-Hill, a division of the New York-based publishing and information conglomerate McGraw-Hill Cos.; Harcourt Assessment Inc., owned by Anglo-Dutch publishing giant Reed Elsevier; Riverside Publishing, a division of the privately owned publisher Houghton Mifflin Co.; and the nonprofit, Princeton-based Educational Testing Service (ETS), best known as maker of the SAT college-admissions test. They are "full-service" companies that create tests; align them with state standards; ensure they are technically sound; publish, distribute, and score them; and analyze results.
NCLB built on the Clinton-era accountability measures. It more than doubled the amount of testing required of the states, from three grade levels to seven; it established much tighter deadlines for introducing new tests; it required that results be broken down by a range of subgroups of students in every school; and, most significant, it linked serious consequences for schools to student test scores. Today, under NCLB, more students are tested more often than at any time in the nation’s history, and the stakes are far higher.
Just for kicks, you might scan earlier chapters of our series to see which of those companies are represented by Kress as a lobbyist.
Of course, we’re not finished. The reauthorization of Sandy Kress’s NCLB has only just begun, and there’s a good deal more to consider here. Congressional hearings have been held, finally. Recriminations abound. Press releases name names. And, though none has yet mentioned him by name, some presidential candidates are weighing in on Kress’s twin NCLB rackets, while many others have yet to realize they even exist.
So, stay tuned for Part 20.
And to review our progress, click these links, cross posted at Daily Kos and Diatribune:
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 1
http://www.diatribune.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 2
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http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 3
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http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 4
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http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 5
http://www.diatribune.com/...
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Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 6
http://www.diatribune.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 7
http://www.diatribune.com/...
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Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 8
http://www.diatribune.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 9
http://www.diatribune.com/...
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Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 10
http://www.diatribune.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 11
http://www.diatribune.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 12
http://www.diatribune.com/...
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Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 13
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Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 14
http://www.diatribune.com/...
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Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 15
http://www.diatribune.com/...
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Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 16
http://www.diatribune.com/...
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Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 17
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Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 18
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