In Part 20, found here http://www.diatribune.com/... and here http://www.dailykos.com/... , we found evidence that the foundation laid by former White House senior education advisor Sandy Kress for his No Child Left Behind may be crumbling under the weight of corruption and its own twin rackets, testing-and-assessment and supplemental educational services. Through those rackets, corporate elites close to the administration and family of George W. Bush have collected billions of dollars in business and profits. While fighting natural market forces, those elites are also fighting to protect the gravy train, which is why they’ve hired Kress, now a corporate lobbyist, to shore up support for his statute as Congress considers reauthorizing it this year. It’s an uphill climb, as more and more items reported by the mainstream media reveal no accountability, scandal and corruption by the insiders left in charge when Kress left the Bush administration – including Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, Kress’s helpmeet in all-things-NCLB.
(To review the series from the beginning, click here http://www.diatribune.com/... or here http://www.dailykos.com/... . And regular readers should feel absolutely free to send these texts and links to their friends, neighbors, co-workers, family members, church pastors, elected leaders, teammates and even to members of their local media. It’s a certainty that every single community in the nation is affected by the viruses placed by Sandy Kress in NCLB. Everyone deserves to be informed.)
It’s no wonder, then, that Kress’s number-one friend, George W. Bush, is finding it hard to keep good conservatives on board with his signature education policy. In the 1990s, Kress and Spellings (then still known as Margaret LaMontagne) tutored Bush in education matters and both carried and covered for his flawed education notions in the Texas State House. When BushCo relocated to Washington in January, 2001, he brought Kress and Spelling with him to adapt the so-called Texas Miracle – now widely acknowledged to have been a Texas-sized morass instead – for federal adoption. They succeeded royally, even co-opting Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy’s commitment to improving the quality of education for minorities particularly, by promising full funding of the statute in exchange for Kennedy’s championship of the bill. (Shamefully, the Bush team reneged on that promise, then denied ever making it, leaving Kennedy to twist in the wind.)
But as soon as NCLB was enacted, Kress ditched Bush for unfettered moneymaking in the private sector, and he’s reportedly done very, very well at making money. Spellings, then a domestic policy advisor, went on to succeed Secretary of Education Rod Paige. Today, with Kress carrying filling sandbags for the nation’s business community and Spellings bailing out a sinking boat fast as she can, there’s no one left from the original team to rally the right wing of Congress to trust Bush’s orders and to row together. Both Gerald Bracey, the famously knowledgeable education researcher – and famous critic of NCLB and the Bush administration’s education policies generally – and David Broder, vaunted dean of the Washington press corps, have observed, using Broder’s words, a "backlash" against NCLB.
Among the first to identify the malaise was Robert Bluey of Human Events, a publication of the right-wing Heritage Foundation; Bluey couched the behavior of the wayward conservatives as "rebellion."
"Conservatives on Capitol Hill have openly rebelled against President Bush's signature education initiative. Last week, they unveiled legislation that would let states opt out of many requirements of No Child Left Behind in order to pursue alternative, performance-based education strategies," he writes. "The revolt started brewing in early January, when Senators John Cornyn (R.-Tex.) and Jim DeMint (R.-S.C.), two of Bush's biggest supporters, publicly dissected problems arising from the No Child Left Behind Act at the Heritage Foundation. Last week, the senators teamed with Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R.-Mich.) to introduce legislation known as A-PLUS (the Academic Partnerships Lead Us to Success) Act."
Bluey’s editorial bent reflects the Libertarian view of NCLB: that the statute is an imposition on state and local governments, and that DeMint’s proposed legislation will solve the problem:
The trio has already rounded up more than 50 House co-sponsors of the bill, including two members of the GOP leadership: Minority Whip Roy Blunt (Mo.) and Chief Deputy Whip Eric Cantor (Va.). In the Senate, Republican Conference Chairman Jon Kyl (Ariz.) has signed on, along with Sen. Sam Brownback (R.-Kan.), a 2008 presidential candidate, and Sen. Mel Martinez (R.-Fla.), who serves as general chairman of the Republican National Committee.
The legislation challenges the "unworkable status quo of No Child Left Behind," said a spokesman for DeMint, who believes the five-year-old education law is a "one-size-fits-all federal approach" that often hampers, rather than assists, local school districts. The underlying goal of A-PLUS is to reduce the federal government's role in education and eliminate the bureaucracy resulting from No Child Left Behind.
When No Child Left Behind was signed into law five years ago, an overwhelming majority in Congress hailed the measure. But conservative members remained silent. They were concerned that the President's original proposal, which focused on local control of schools, had morphed into something entirely different after making its way through the congressional sausage machine.
Now five years old, the No Child Left Behind Act is once again center stage in Congress. Last week, Sen. Teddy Kennedy (D.-Mass.) and Rep. George Miller (D.-Calif.) hosted a joint hearing on reauthorizing the law.
Liberals such as Kennedy and Miller urge spending more federal money on education -- despite the fact that federal spending has risen an unprecedented 25% under NCLB. Hearing frustration back home from parents and teachers, conservatives know that throwing even more money at the problem wouldn't solve anything.
In his Heritage Foundation speech, DeMint said the A-PLUS bill would offer states greater flexibility in meeting the bureaucratic requirements of No Child Left Behind. He compared it to the approach used successfully with welfare reform -- letting states serve as laboratories of change.
"No Child Left Behind started with some good ideas, but what Congress didn't mess up, the bureaucracy has messed up," DeMint said. "There is so much absurdity now within No Child Left Behind that it's going to be difficult to tweak it and fix it. We need to look at a way to allow states to get out of it in a way that would let them do it responsibly."
Conservatives see the bill as an opportunity to establish clear-cut priorities that return more power to local schools and reduce Washington's involvement in education.
Given the weakened political position of conservatives, it might not appear that A-PLUS has much of a chance. But five years of No Child Left Behind has left even the law's former supporters apprehensive about reauthorizing it in its present form -- much less plowing even greater sums into the program "as is."
From Bluey’s vantage point, a conservative like Roy Blunt of Missouri made a mistake when voting for NCLB in 2001, but is making amends by supporting this "more" conservative revision. Confused? Bluey explains:
Consider Blunt, who in 2001 was one of the most prominent supporters of No Child Left Behind. Today, he has buyer's remorse. In running for his leadership post last November, Blunt called it the one vote he wished he could have back.
"Now my view is that any time you can solve the problem closer to where the problem is, you're going to have a better solution," Blunt said. "Particularly with elementary and secondary education, the focus ought to be on moms and dads and local school districts if kids are in public school, not on Washington, D.C., or even in state capitals. You need to be always looking as to how you have those decisions closer to home."
Blunt's sentiments are shared not only by members of Congress, but also by parents and teachers across America who, after five years of No Child Left Behind, yearn for greater flexibility and less bureaucracy.
While Bluey flies the general anarchist banner and celebrates the proposal that happens to come closest to the Heritage Foundation’s bent, education researcher Gerald Bracey sticks to the devil at hand for his own diagnosis of the NCLB breakdown.
"On the surface, the No Child Left Behind law reflected an orgy of bi-partisanship, passing Congress 487-48. In January, 2002, President Bush eschewed the usual Rose Garden fanfare and flew to Hamilton High School, Hamilton, Ohio where he signed the bill flanked by George Miller (D-Ca.), Teddie Kennedy (D-Ma.), Judd Gregg (R-Vt.), and John Boehner (R-Oh.) (Hamilton is in Boehner's district; in addition, Boehner had tried on six separate occasions to get vouchers back into the bill)," Bracey is quoted by blogger John Fontanella here http://nonclb.blogspot.com/... .
(In his profile, by the way, Fontanella boldly and appropriately states, "I am a public school teacher who believes in public education. I also believe that the conservative business community and the Business Round Table in particular is out to destroy public education in America.")
"At this ceremony, less than three months after 9/11, the applause Bush received was described as ‘deafening’," Bracey states. "Later in the day, Bush went with Kennedy and Gregg to related celebrations in Massachusetts and Vermont."
He continues:
Fissures in the unanimity façade soon appeared. The bill was not two weeks old when Democrats attacked it as underfunded. "It's really a 'left no money behind for education budget'" groused Miller. Kennedy said Bush had betrayed him.
Now, with the law up for reauthorization, the cracks that were there all along have widened as various posses ride off in all directions, including some surprising ones. Miller, who, I am told, is a real hardass on school accountability, wants to reauthorize the bill with little or no change. Bush and Ed. Secretary Spellings have forcefully argued for reauthorization although it is not clear how strong their voices will be when push comes to shove.
Other players include the Chamber of Commerce and the Center for American Progress whose unholy alliance was discussed in my blog "The Center for American Progress: Progressively Regressive?" At the Center, education is honchoed by Cindy Brown, a steering committee member on the Chapter 1 Commission that reported out in 1992. That report essentially described NCLB without all the punitive specifics. But it was all there--adequate yearly progress, results-based accountability, choice, closing or restructuring low-performing schools, etc. It just sat there waiting for Bush adviser Sandy Kress and Spellings with the help of Education Trust head, Kati Haycock, to put the nasty touches on it (In a recent interview with Education Next, Kress thanked the Trust for being such a courageous ally). Haycock was also on the steering committee of the Chapter 1 Commission. While 9 of the 28 members filed minority dissents, Haycock and Brown were not among them.
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On February 15, 2007, ten Democratic Senators, led by Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, wrote to Kennedy and other members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension Committee that while they support school accountability, "We have concluded that the testing mandates of No Child Left Behind in their current form are unsustainable and must be overhauled significantly during the reauthorization period beginning this year." They offered a series of changes to make the law more "sensible."
The most surprising development--certainly to Bush--is the revolt by 57 members of the House and Senate. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), a longtime opponent introduced a bill that would let states opt out of many of the testing provisions, something that on the surface would appear to render the Dodd-Ehlers bill moot. "So many people are frustrated with the shackles of NCLB," said Senator Jim DeMint (R-S.C). House Minority Whip, Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), who voted for the law first time around now opposes it because, he said, it shifted "control of public schools to the federal government more dramatically than he ever imagined."
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Hoekstra's bill sent Washington Post editors howling: "The proposal would let the states choose whether to meet federal testing mandates--and, incredibly, allow them to tap into millions of dollars of federal education money without ever having to show any results" (hey, just like the Supplemental Educational Services providers do now). That the New York Times didn't emit a similar squeal can only mean that Brent Staples is on vacation.
The voice of the mainstream media’s Washington press corps himself, columnist David Broder, outlined the internecine dissatisfaction with NCLB in his column on March 22 under the title, "Battling the ‘No Child’ Backlash." President Bush, Broder wrote, doesn’t need another fight with his political base, but he has one in the reauthorization debate.
Still, Broder misses the corruption undergirding the statute, and he goes about his commentary as if the law genuinely meant to do what it said it meant to do.
"The backlash against No Child Left Behind has been building almost from the moment it was enacted in the winter of 2001-02 as one of Bush's first legislative successes," he writes here http://www.washingtonpost.com/... . "By requiring annual tests in the elementary grades in English and math and by demanding that schools show that all students, regardless of background, are making progress toward proficiency, the program sought to eliminate racial and ethnic disparities and lift overall performance toward world-class standards."
"But parents," he notes, "complained that the emphasis on testing basics was narrowing the curriculum for bright students and that the rankings were not making allowances for the poverty or language limitations of many kids who were failing."
Missing the corrupt foundation of Kress’s law isn’t Broder’s greatest failing: He openly laments the possibility that the Bush-Kress treatment of Lyndon Johnson’s ESEA might be overturned by Congress. To add insult to injury, he conjures the mythology of Chester Finn, a leftover of Ronald Reagan’s self-hating Department of Education, to boost his view.
"...the remedy [Republicans] are recommending seems drastic -- and the abandonment of the first serious national effort to raise standards in the schools would be disastrous," he writes. "Under the Republican proposal, states could, at their own initiative, opt out of the law's requirements while continuing to receive their share of the billions the federal government invests in elementary and secondary schools. To measure progress in the schools, states could use their own standards."
As Chester E. Finn Jr., a conservative who once worked for the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and a group of other education specialists wrote recently, most state standards "were mediocre-to-bad ten years ago," before No Child Left Behind, "and most are mediocre-to-bad today. They are generally vague, politicized, and awash in wrongheaded fads and nostrums. With a few exceptions, states have been incapable (or unwilling) to set clear, coherent standards, and develop tests with a rigorous definition of proficiency."
Finn and his colleagues at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, an education think tank, are critical of No Child Left Behind and the Education Department for getting too deeply enmeshed in the day-to-day routine of schools, instead of emphasizing the goal of proficiency in key subjects and encouraging states to find their own best methods of teaching, then testing for results.
As the legislation comes up for renewal, thoughtful legislators of both parties, such as Ted Kennedy, George Miller, Buck McKeon and Mike Castle, are working with Margaret Spellings, the secretary of education, to apply the lessons of the past to the specific provisions for the future.
The president, who has disdained compromise with the Democrats on Iraq policy, or the budget, or much of anything else, finds himself dependent on Democratic help to rescue this notable domestic initiative. He is lucky that they are still willing to give it.
On the same day that Broder’s lament is published, Sandy Kress himself played the president’s chief optimist in comments given to the Christian Science Monitor.
Noting the support for NCLB among conservatives was "fraying," the Monitor sought the counsel of various experts on the topic but published the thoughts of Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and – again, so soon – Chester Finn first. "This is a critical year," the Monitor quoted Spellings from a speech given to urban leaders in Washington the previous week. "It's very important that we perfect and tweak NCLB as we move forward. There are lots of forces aligning on both sides of the poles to unravel or unwind NCLB, but I don't think that's going to happen."
"It's pretty obvious that the consensus that led to (NCLB) six years ago is unraveling," it quotes Finn here http://news.cincypost.com/... . "How badly it unravels over what period of time is what we don't know yet."
The junior senator of Bush’s home state, John Cornyn of Texas, drew the focus back to intrusion by the federal government in state and local affairs. "We must move education decisionmaking out of Washington closer to where it belongs - with parents and teachers," Cornyn says.
And Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, doing his best to draw wayward conservatives back to the fold, waves the "voucher" flag again in a printed statement for the Monitor: "As the No Child Left Behind Act comes up for reauthorization, House Republicans will challenge Democrats to explain why we can't provide more choices for parents and more local control for states and communities that are willing to commit to increasing student achievement."
It is predictable that members of Bush’s own party would ignore the corrupt rackets embedded in NCLB – the testing-and-assessment racket and the supplemental educational services racket – but even the token Democrats interviewed by the Monitor focused solely on the fact that Bush has consistently under-funded his education plan.
While federal funding for public schools has increased by a third since the law was enacted, it still has been underfunded by some $70.9 billion, below levels authorized by law, say critics ranging from top Democrats to education associations and teachers unions.
"Year after year, the president sends us a budget that comes nowhere close to funding No Child Left Behind at an adequate level," said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, who chairs the education subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, at a hearing on NCLB funding last week. The president's budget for fiscal year '08 underfunds the law by $14.8 billion, he adds. "The numbers have gotten almost laughable."
Democrats also aim to revise aspects of how the law is implemented, including revising strategies for turning around low-performing schools. Of some 90,000 public schools, about 9,000 have been targeted by NCLB as needing improvement. "We want to make turning around our most struggling schools a priority in this reauthorization," says Roberto Rodriguez, senior education adviser to Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., who chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. That panel is considering shifting to alternative measures of "adequate yearly progress," including models that account for the improvement of individual students over a school year, rather than whether they meet target proficiency standards.
Then, the Monitor turns to the man himself, former White House senior education advisor and architect of NCLB, now corporate lobbyist Sandy Kress, for the final word.
"There is still strong middle ground for NCLB," says Sandy Kress, a former top Bush education adviser, who now consults with education and business groups. But he warns that the opt-out proposed by Republicans could sink the reauthorization. "Republicans used to stand for rigor and standards, but no money for education. Now they seem to be for the money, but no standards."
There you have it from the man who was well-paid to create the problem, and who is now well-paid to help corporations profit from the problem. Talk about being "for the money, but no standards."
Kress’s rosy optimism got the attention of Elizabeth Weiss Green, education reporter for U.S. News and World Report, who turned in this even-handed assessment – and also neglected to dig past the surface to the corruption Kress embedded in his statute. Writing on March 28, Green says it’s "unlikely" that critics will be able to "gut or dilute" Kress’s law:
When the Christian Science Monitor reported last week that No Child Left Behind, President Bush's signature education law, was "losing steam", Sandy Kress, a former Bush adviser, begged to differ. It was a bold denial: As the law nears its 2008 renewal deadline, it has faced attacks from the center, the left and even Bush's own party. The Monitor report mirrored end-of-days coverage from the last five years, which has pointed to "state revolts" and a snowballing "backlash". But, Kress says confidently, "I don't think there's any going back."
Kress, who oversaw the law's negotiation, might be expected to say that. He invested serious sweat into NCLB, the abbreviation favored by insiders (though one Montana superintendent prefers the phonetic acronym "nickel-bee"). Kress is also loyal, and NCLB is arguably Bush's most significant domestic policy accomplishment. It has transformed American public education, forcing all 50 states to rewrite their math and reading standards and setting consequences for schools that don't meet them.
But Kress's confidence is not just a matter of fidelity. No Child Left Behind may be the most hated policy this side of the Iraq war, but turning back on it would be nearly as difficult as exiting Baghdad. Politically, many lawmakers and lobbyists - from liberal Democrats to centrist Republicans, civil rights groups to big corporations - support the law. Practically (and maybe more importantly), even in the unlikely event that opponents manage to gut or dilute NCLB, the change would be moderate at best. Though critics lambaste NCLB as an attack on states' rights, the law is really a state-grown product of the movement known as standards-based reform. As a result, slaying the federal monster would still leave us with 50 local beasts.
So the fight to reauthorize Sandy Kress’s corrupt statute leaves hundreds of thousands of interests and activists re-aligning themselves, coalescing around one perspective or tactic, ranging from keeping things as they are (can you imagine: Republicans fighting for the status quo?) to abolishing the education law altogether (taking us all the way back to 1965, without a federal education investment whatsoever) and non-linear points across the board. Yet all take the statute at face value, which leads the mainstream media to do likewise, treating each new hint of corruption as a shock, something unexpected. Clearly, as our series has demonstrated, the corruption was the bedrock of the law; in fact, it could be convincingly argued that this public-dollars-into-private-hands corruption came to Washington looking for a vehicle, and the ESEA reauthorization of 2001 offered the corrupters some convenience.
So who will be the first to dig six inches below the surface of NCLB and find the tunnels Kress laid into a federal funding goldmine? Will it be the National Council of Churches? Will it be a good-government watchdog? Will it be an author of children’s books? Will it be a principled but lowly staffer for a Congressional subcommittee? Or will it be a presidential candidate who sits on the Senate Education Committee? Or might it actually be a mainstream media reporter after all?
We’ll get at least one step closer to the answer in Part 22. Stay tuned.
And to review our progress, click these links, cross posted at Daily Kos and Diatribune:
Part 1 http://www.diatribune.com/...
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Part 2 http://www.diatribune.com/...
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Part 3 http://www.diatribune.com/...
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Part 4 http://www.diatribune.com/...
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Part 5 http://www.diatribune.com/...
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Part 6 http://www.diatribune.com/...
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Part 8 http://www.diatribune.com/...
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Part 10 http://www.diatribune.com/...
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Part 11 http://www.diatribune.com/...
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Part 12 http://www.diatribune.com/...
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Part 14 http://www.diatribune.com/...
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Part 15 http://www.diatribune.com/...
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Part 16 http://www.diatribune.com/...
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Part 17 http://www.diatribune.com/...
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Part 18 http://www.diatribune.com/...
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Part 19 http://www.diatribune.com/...
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Part 20 http://www.diatribune.com/...
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