I nearly blew a gasket last night reading over Education Secretary Rod Paige’s twisted criticism of his political opponents while defending Bush’s No Child Left Behind law. Let’s see if I can write about it without hyperventilating.
Paige had the audacity to argue that NCLB is a logical extension of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark school desegregation court case of 1954.
The Brown decision “began a process to make our citizens and our institutions fully respect every American citizen,” Paige opined. Bush’s NCLB, Paige added, “is the next step after Brown. It addresses latent segregation, a de facto apartheid that is emerging in some of our schools.”
In fact, he argued that those of us who criticize Bush’s education proposal are on the same side of history as those who supported segregation in the 1950s.
“I find it staggering that the very critics — the very critics — and organizations that fought so hard for civil rights could leave minority children behind,” Paige said. “Why? Is it because their opposition is about power, about politics, about pride? It’s clearly not in the best interest of the children.”
Must…resist…urge…to…scream…
I find it startling, to say the least, that Paige would lecture Bush critics about the moral foundations of No Child Left Behind. If the law is so extraordinary in fighting a “de facto apartheid,” why, exactly, did the Bush administration and congressional Republicans decide to underfund their own education proposal by more than $7.5 billion this year alone? Was it a higher priority to devote that $7.5 billion to tax cuts for millionaires instead of addressing “latent segregation”?
And if Paige’s passion for the education law is driven by NCLB’s alleged support for breaking down social barriers, it might interest the Education Secretary to know that the education law actually penalizes schools with more diverse student populations. The Center for American Progress noted a New York Times article this week that explained that failing schools were “designated not because tests had shown their overall achievement levels to be faltering, but because a single student group — disabled learners or Asian students, for example — had fallen short of a target. As a result, the chances that a school would be designated as failing increased in proportion to the number of demographic groups served by the school.”
Beyond this, however, NCLB is facing criticism from across the country and from across the ideological spectrum for a simple reason that has nothing to do with racism: the damn thing just doesn’t work.
As the LA Times noted this week, “Conservatives and some school officials around the country are upset about what they regard as a big-government, top-down approach to reforming education — one that has imposed strict testing standards on schools and threatens to tag many of them as failing. Liberals, many of whom had worked closely with Bush in 2001 to pass the measure, are lambasting him for providing inadequate federal funds and leaving many school districts forced to dig into their own pockets.”
Indeed, the Bush administration for which Paige works has done so poorly in following through on its earlier education commitments, many states are fighting the White House and/or opting out of federal funding for education altogether.
* A school district in Pennsylvania, which is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, is actually suing the Bush administration for not following through with enough money to cover the demands of the law.
* Three Connecticut school districts have rejected federal money rather than comply with the red tape that accompanies the law.
* Several Vermont school districts have shifted federal poverty money away from schools to shield them from federal sanctions mandated by NCLB.
* The Utah Legislature is considering a bill that would prohibit state school districts from accepting federal education funds because of NCLB’s flaws.
* North Dakota, Indiana, and Ohio have all required studies to see whether the new federal spending matches the new required costs.
To hear Rod Paige tell it, all of this controversy is driven not by the overwhelming mismanagement of the administration’s education policies, but because critics nationwide — from state lawmakers, school administrators, and members of both political parties — are unconcerned about the “best interests of the children.”
If Paige actually believes such bitter nonsense, he’s completely lost his mind.
The No Child Left Behind law is not an extension of the civil rights struggle; it’s an ineffective education policy pushed by an administration more concerned with funding Halliburton than America’s public schools. If families truly want leaders for education in this country, we’ll have to do better than Rod Paige and George W. Bush.