A really nice piece that offers the case of Bush Pioneer, Randy Best, as the quintessential education profiteer among an illustrious collection of slime bag snakeoil salesmen and ideological pitch men and women. Among the cast: M. Spellings and Charles Miller. Here is a small clip:

. . . . launched in 1994, Voyager was Best's first foray into the business of education. After three decades of making money the old-fashioned way, the serial entrepreneur says he caught the philanthropy bug. He launched Voyager as a nonprofit that offered after-school programs as a way to keep latchkey kids engaged in learning. Yet after two years of sluggish growth, he switched to a for-profit model and hired school superintendents from Dallas and a nearby suburb to pitch the program to their former colleagues. Business picked up, and Best became a believer in a market-driven approach to social problems. "If you become a for-profit, then every single person in the organization is incentivized to do what you are trying to do," he explains. "Their rational self-interest is at stake; it is not just always trying to do something for the greater good."

Voyager enjoyed an enviably cozy relationship with its customers. After Texas' education commissioner intervened to help the company dodge child care regulations, competitors complained that it had cashed in on its connections. In 1998, Best and his investors donated more than $45,000 to Bush's gubernatorial reelection campaign. (Best says they supported Bush "because he was billing himself as the education governor," not because they expected anything in return.) That August, Bush dropped in on a Houston elementary school and spoke in front of a Voyager banner. Touting the benefits of for-profit after-school programs, he called for $25 million to fund them across the state.

Voyager's friends in high places were not enough to make it profitable. But by staying close to Bush and his allies, Best learned of new, bigger opportunities. In the mid-'90s, Charles Miller, a Voyager investor and Bush campaign donor, worked with the governor's office to design a new state reading program, the Texas Reading Initiative. Miller's team—"this small little mafia," as he puts it—included Bush's adviser Margaret Spellings and several others who would go on to occupy key positions in Bush's Department of Education in Washington. By 1998, Best had reinvented Voyager as a reading program, hiring researchers who'd worked on the Texas Reading Initiative or had ties to its designers.

Best says the idea for the new direction came from his own experience as a dyslexic and his interest in cutting-edge literacy research. "I think Voyager copied from a lot of the things we did with our reading initiative," Miller says. "Voyager saw that and just got in the draft, so to speak."

In 2000, Best and Miller signed up as Bush Pioneers, pledging to raise at least $100,000 for the governor's presidential run. When Bush entered the Oval Office, his education team included several people with connections to Voyager—and some who went on to work for Best. They set out to implement a revolutionary new policy that, despite the talk of smaller government, essentially put Washington in charge of setting state education standards. Miller helped select former Houston schools superintendent Rod Paige, a longtime Voyager booster, as secretary of education. Bush made G. Reid Lyon, a reading researcher who had consulted on the Texas Reading Initiative, his unofficial reading czar. Lyon cowrote the section of No Child Left Behind that created Reading First, a $6 billion program to fund state literacy curricula that drew upon "scientifically based reading research"—exactly what Voyager had been selling back in Texas. . . .

The rapacious and callous uncaring of the neolib/neocon test-and-punish ed reformers has reached a new level of depraved prominence as school starts back once again with more children suffering under the burden of poverty, no health care, and neglect. The hollow rhetoric by the accountability and testing crowd can no longer mask the devastating realities of struggling families as recession grinds on and the spectre of depression looms. While the wishful thinking liberals and the bare-knuckled conservatives continue to pitch their bankrupt notion of world-class standards and no-excuses accountability plans for American schools, the schools, themselves, are going bankrupt and the children of the foreclosed are dumped on the streets. What will be next, a bowl of soup for a passing score?

From Sam Dillon at the NYTimes:

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — With mortgage foreclosures throwing hundreds of families out of their homes here each month, dismayed school officials say they are feeling the upheaval: record numbers of students turning up for classes this fall are homeless or poor enough to qualify for free meals.

“We’re seeing a lot more children in poverty,” said Lauren Roberts, spokeswoman for the Jefferson County school system, a 98,000-student district that includes Louisville and its suburbs.

At the same time, the district is struggling with its own financial problems. Responding to a cut of $43 million by the state in education spending and to higher energy and other costs, school officials in Jefferson County have raised lunch prices, eliminated 17 buses by reorganizing routes, ordered drivers to turn off vehicles rather than letting them idle and increased property taxes.

The Jefferson County system is typical this school year.

As 50 million children return to classes across the nation, crippling increases in the price of fuel and food, coupled with the economic downturn, have left schools from California to Florida to Maine cutting costs. Some are trimming bus service, others are restricting travel, and a few are shortening the school week. And as many districts are forced to cut back, the number of poor and homeless students is rising.

“The big national picture is that food and fuel costs are going up and school revenues are not,” said Anne L. Bryant, executive director of the National School Boards Association. “We’re in a recession, and it’s having a dramatic impact on schools.”

Louisville’s pain is minor compared with the woes of some cities. Detroit has laid off at least 700 teachers, Los Angeles 500 administrators and Miami-Dade County hundreds of school psychologists, maintenance workers and custodians.

Schools in many states have cut bus stops to save diesel. Districts in California and Ohio have gone further and eliminated bus service either completely or for high schools, leaving thousands of students to find their own way to school.

In Maine, officials worried about the cost of heating their classrooms this winter have restricted travel for field trips to save money. Districts in Louisiana, Minnesota and elsewhere have taken a more radical measure and adopted four-day school weeks. Hundreds of districts, responding to higher food prices, are charging more for cafeteria meals.

In interviews, educators in many states said they were seeing more needy families than at any time in memory. Two charities in suburban Detroit announced in August that they would hand out student backpacks, attracting hundreds of families.

“They went through all 300 backpacks in three hours, boom, and that was that,” said Kathleen M. Kropf, an official in the Macomb Intermediate School District. “We’re seeing a lot of desperate people.”

There were no giveaways for Jacci Murray, 28, a single mother in West Palm Beach, Fla., who said she lost her job six months ago. Ms. Murray bought pencils and crayons for her son, Cameron, who is in the second grade, from a discount bin at Office Depot. Saying she felt “cheap and broke,” she pored fretfully over her school supplies list, afraid to waste gas by making more than one shopping trip.

“It’s been tough this year,” Ms. Murray said. “I’m depressed about school.”

And so are many educators.

West Virginia officials issued a memorandum recently to local districts titled “Tips to Deal With the Skyrocketing Cost of Fuel.” Last week, David Pauley, the transportation supervisor for the Kanawha County school system, based in Charleston, met with drivers of the district’s 196 buses to outline those policies. Mr. Pauley told them to stay 5 miles per hour below the limit, to check the tire pressure every day and to avoid jackrabbit starts.

The Caldwell Parish School District, in northern Louisiana, took a more sweeping approach to saving fuel by eliminating Monday classes. The district joined about 100 systems nationwide, most of them rural, that in recent years have adopted a four-day schedule.

The district’s superintendent, John Sartin, said the move should save $145,000 in a $15 million budget. The decision, made in June, came after crude oil prices had risen for 29 consecutive days, Mr. Sartin said.

“People here worry that they won’t have enough money to last through the month,” he said.

Similar concerns in the Southern Aroostook Community School District in Maine have delayed adoption of the budget.

“We’ve tried to pass it twice, and we’re trying a third,” said Terry Comeau, the superintendent, who has restricted field trips and taken a bus off the road.

“People are saying, ‘I don’t want my taxes to go higher; I need the money to pay my bills,’ ” said Mr. Comeau, adding that one worry is that heating costs will soar this winter.

The problems in many districts can be traced to battered state budgets. According to a July report by the National Conference of State Legislatures, 31 states had budget gaps totaling $40 billion, and many had cut school financing.

California still has a $15.2 billion budget gap, although many districts there have made cuts, including Los Angeles Unified, which sliced $400 million from its $6 billion budget in June partly by laying off 500 administrators and secretaries, though no teachers.

Many districts are serving increasing numbers of needy students. In Mobile, Ala., the number of homeless students tripled to about 2,500 at the end of the last school year from 850 in the 2006-7 term.

“And our numbers are going to be a whole lot higher this year,” said Larissa Dickinson, a school social worker there. “We’ve had phone call after phone call from families evicted over the summer.”

Officials in districts in a half-dozen states reported similar surges. . . .

The New York Legislature has a rare opportunity to restore public control to the public schools of New York City. A future without Bloomberg's boot on the backs of students, parents, and teachers is a possibility "too devastating to contemplate"--only for Bloomberg. If Albany likes the testing-for-dollars sweatshops that Bloomberg has inspired as education for the poor, here's the chance to re-up. From NY Times:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg expressed confidence on Tuesday morning that legislators in Albany would, with “a lot of information and prodding,” renew the 2002 state law that put the mayor in charge of the schools. Then he added, ominously, “The alternative is too devastating to contemplate.”

Setting the tone for the school year in the first hour of the first day, Mr. Bloomberg, visiting Public School 62 in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx, pointed out some differences between the start of this school year and of those before he became mayor.

Books, he said, routinely arrived weeks after classes began, and budgets were not doled out fairly, but today, “Accountability has been established at every level of our school system, and everything flows from there.”

Yet even amid the warm feelings of his annual first-day tour, there was a taste of the kind of opposition he might face in his quest to have the law renewed. . . .

Not to pick on Ohio, of course. The new study by Youngstown State professor, Dr. Randy Hoover, could be replicated in any state in the nation. The simple truth is that, regardless of the standardized test being used, the most reliable predictor of scores is family income. What surprises me most is that Dr. Hoover should be surprised--where has he been!

And what disappoints me most is the continued denial of state departments of education that economic privilege largely determines test scores. Do these numbnuts really believe that screening for cultural bias in test questions will change the advantage enjoyed by the advantaged? What will it take will expose the testing scam to those running it as the most reliable instrument for social sorting and continued oppression of the poor?

From the Dayton Daily News:

By Scott Elliott

Staff Writer

Sunday, August 31, 2008

DAYTON — A Youngstown State professor's study of testing data suggests Ohio cannot validly claim schools are improving or slipping based on state ratings and says the achievement gap between black and white students is exaggerated.

Randy Hoover's research showed Ohio has a large poverty gap in test performance between poor students and their wealthier classmates, regardless of race or ethnicity.

Hoover said the correlation of nonschool factors like median income with test performance was off the charts.

"This is an extremely high correlation for social science research," he said. "I've never seen anything this high."

Hoover's findings support a Dayton Daily News 2006 study of test performance and poverty in Ohio's 610 school districts that produced similar results. For that study, the newspaper's computer analysis of the impact of several student characteristics on test scores found median income of the district had by far the most powerful impact on its test performance.

Hoover's study went further. The three factors he found were most likely to predict test performance were the percentage of single parent wage earners, the percentage of poor children and the median family income in the district.

Combining those factors for what Hoover called the "lived experience index." He found they were responsible for at least 61 percent of a district's test performance.

. . . .

Karla Warren, a state education department spokeswoman, said the study does not fairly reflect efforts to ensure tests treat students of all wealth levels and ethnicity evenly.

"The Ohio Department of Education doesn't support the findings of this study, and we stand by our tests," she said. "Our tests undergo a detailed review process."

But Hoover argues the study shows Ohio draws invalid conclusions about the quality of school districts by using tests that largely measure how poverty impacts each district. . . .

No doubt the greatest influence in shaping my adamant secular humanism and active disdain for all kinds of religious marketers, profiteers, crackpots and panhandlers was my own childhood force-feeding of the hellfire and damnation variety of holy-roller Pentecostal revivalism from age 10 to 13. I can still see Brother Jack frothing at the mouth as he spoke in tongues and hear the crash of pews as Sister Black is felled by the Power that leaves her quivering on the floor totally blanked out in a psychosexual seizure.

So it was with a gouge of recognition that I watched Sister Palin the other day offer her acceptance speech. She even has the big-bun-it's-sin-to-cut-your-hair-hairdo to go along with her Pentecostal bring-on-the-end times-commitment that will fit well with her total lack of foreign policy knowledge. And she is all for creationism in the public schools, except for the fact that there won't be any public schools for long if she and Gramps are elected.

From PoliGazette:

Palin has been religious all her life. When she was a teenager she and her family were all active in the local church,the Wasilla Assembly of God Church. She was baptized here during those years as well.

Today she sometimes worships at ‘the Juneau Christian Center, which is also part of the Pentecostal Assemblies of God.’ Her home church, however, is ‘The Church on the Rock, an independent congregation.’

Palin is well known in Evangelical circles for her strong opposition to gay marriage and abortion, and her desire ‘to see creationism discussed alongside evolution in schools.’

By ELISSA GOOTMAN

The Bloomberg administration, which has made accountability the watchword of its overhaul of public education, is asking elementary school principals across the city to give standardized tests in English and math to children as young as kindergartners.

In an e-mail message sent on Monday evening, the Education Department’s chief accountability officer, James S. Liebman, urged principals to join a yearlong pilot program with five testing options for kindergarten through second grade, including timed paper-and-pencil assessments in which students record answers in booklets for up to 90 minutes, as well as ones in which teachers record observations of individual students on Palm Pilots.

Mr. Liebman, the architect of the city’s much-debated program of assigning schools letter grades of A through F, said in his message that because New York — like most of the country — now begins formal testing in third grade, the system does “not give schools credit for this foundational work or provide you with the means to evaluate the effectiveness of your K-2 programs.”

The pilot program, which will cost $400,000 and was not publicly announced, is already inciting outrage among some educators and advocates who worry that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s efforts to overhaul the school system have been overly focused on standardized testing.

While the federal No Child Left Behind law has required schools nationwide to administer tests starting in the third grade since 2002, Mr. Bloomberg has gone further, using test scores to determine school grades as well as bonuses for teachers and principals. The administration has also expressed interest in using test scores to determine teacher tenure, an idea that is being blocked by legislators in Albany.

Throughout the city and across the nation, teachers and parents have protested the increasing time spent on testing — and test preparation — particularly in elementary grades, where critics say that development of children’s creativity has suffered. Some experts question the effectiveness of such assessments for very young children, where lessons about sharing and socialization are sometimes considered as important as facts and figures.

“It sounds like a downward extension of whatever’s good, but also what’s bad about standardized testing in the higher grades, with more risk because we know that standardized testing isn’t appropriate at those ages,” said Lorrie Shepard, dean of the School of Education at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “Now they’re venturing into territory where many more people say that the negative will far outweigh any positive.” . . .

The annual PDK poll is out, and if there is anything that stands out at first glance, it is how NCLB has been effective in smashing public confidence in the public schools. While 3 out of 4 Americans believe NCLB has done nothing to help their local schools, that does not alter the fact that NCLB is crushing public confidence, with 60% giving public schools a "C" or worse. From MarketWatch:

Last update: 6:30 a.m. EDT Aug. 21, 2008

ALEXANDRIA, Va.,, Aug 21, 2008 /PRNewswire-USNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Americans want educators, not politicians, to work with the new president to improve NCLB

According to a statement by Gene R. Carter, Executive Director of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, results from the 40th Phi Delta Kappa International (PDK)/Gallup Poll of the "Public's Attitudes Toward the Public Schools" send a clear message
about the need to improve U.S. education:

-- Fewer than 2 of 10 Americans believe No Child Left Behind (NCLB) should continue without significant change. Only 1 in 4 think the legislation is helping their local schools.

-- Americans fear U.S. schools are not keeping up in today's global economy. About half gave schools in Europe and Asia grades of As and Bs, compared with the more than 60 percent who assigned U.S. schools grades of Cs or below.

-- The vast majority of the American public--77 percent--feels the new president should rely on educators for advice about how to turn around our flailing education system.

The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) represents a wide spectrum of educators--classroom teachers, principals, district administrators, curriculum developers, college professors, and others--who know what's best for our children. Our members' on-the-ground understanding of how to improve student achievement is the basis of ASCD's policy recommendations for improving NCLB.

A cornerstone of NCLB is the assessment of students and schools. But the law's current assessment and accountability system relies heavily on standardized tests that provide just a snapshot of student knowledge and ability at a single moment in time. When the PDK/Gallup Poll asked Americans to choose the assessment method they believe provides the most accurate picture of student achievement, more chose examples of student work and teacher observations than test scores. And 80 percent of Americans think school performance should be measured by student academic progress instead of the percentage of students who pass a state test.

ASCD educators stand ready to help the new administration improve U.S. education policies. Will the next president work to recast the definition of a successful learner from one whose achievement is measured solely by academic tests to one who is knowledgeable, emotionally and physically healthy, civically inspired, engaged in the arts, prepared for work and economic self-sufficiency, and ready for the world beyond formal schooling? If not, he will jeopardize both our kids' future success in the workplace and our country's future success in the global marketplace.

For complete results from the PDK/Gallup Poll, visit http://www.pdkpoll.org. To access ASCD's 2008 Legislative Agenda, visit http://www.ascd.org/legislativeagenda.

Founded in 1943, ASCD, a nonprofit association, is one of the largest professional development organizations for educator leaders. It provides education information services; offers cutting-edge professional development for effective learning, teaching, and leadership; and supports activities to provide educational equity for all students. ASCD's membership of more than 175,000 includes principals, teachers, superintendents, professors of education, and other educators from 119 countries. The Association also has nearly 60 affiliates throughout the world.

SOURCE Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development

 http://www.ascd.org

But rest assured, the owners of this specialized form of insanity are not deterred by the facts or their own research. They will forge on, into the new frontier, where the profit motive has replaced moral and intellectual virtue, where science, politics, and humanity itself are traded like the commodities they have become. From the NY Times:

Offered up to $1,000 for scoring well on Advanced Placement exams, students at 31 New York City high schools took 345 more of the tests this year than last. But the number who passed declined slightly, raising questions about the effectiveness of increasingly popular pay-for-performance programs in schools here and across the country.

Students involved in the program, financed with $2 million in private donations and aimed at closing a racial gap in Advanced Placement results, posted more 5’s, the highest possible score. That rise, however, was overshadowed by a decline in the number of 4’s and 3’s. Three is the minimum passing score.

The effort to reward city students for passing Advanced Placement tests is part of a growing trend nationally and internationally, and one of several new programs in New York, to experiment with using financial incentives to lift attendance and achievement.

The results, scheduled to be formally announced on Wednesday, are likely to be closely examined by both enthusiasts who herald such programs as groundbreaking innovation and detractors who deride them as short-sighted bribes that threaten broader educational progress. . . .

Peter Campbell has the scoop:

The Associated Press ran a story on August 12, 2008, citing a report from the Government Accountability Office that revealed that two-thirds of U.S. corporations paid no federal income taxes between 1998 and 2005. About 25 percent of the U.S. corporations not paying corporate taxes were considered large corporations, meaning they had at least $250 million in assets or $50 million in receipts. And, according to the report, about 68 percent of foreign companies doing business in the U.S. avoided corporate taxes altogether over the same period.

How ironic in the age of No Child Left Behind that the GAO - the Government Accountability Office - would be the one that would point out corporate America's lack of accountability when it came time to paying the bills in this country.

It's clear to me that we have a Corporate Achievement Gap here. What is the Corporate Achievement Gap? The Corporate Achievement Gap is the difference between what taxpayers paid into the general coffers -- for roads and bridges, for schools and fire trucks -- and what 25 percent of U.S. corporations did not put in. This gap is an achievement gap because it underscores the potential for achievement if only these corporations would help fill this gap.

But they are simply not doing their part, not shouldering their load, not paying their dues.

Right now, the US federal government pays for between 7 and 10 percent of the total budget for public preK-12 education. The other 90 to 93 percent is paid for by state and local taxpayers.

Imagine, if you would, what kind of impact there would be if the US federal government doubled its current investment in public education from about 10 percent to 20 percent. Imagine the difference this could make.

In his amazing book Class and Schools, Richard Rothstein wrote:

All told, adding the price of health, early childhood, after-school, and summer programs, (the) down payment on closing the achievement gap would probably increase the annual cost of education, for children who attend schools where at least 40% of the enrolled children have low incomes, by about $12,500 per pupil, over and above the $8,000 already being spent. In total, this means about a $156 billion added annual national cost to provide these programs to low-income children.

These are 2003 - 2004 data, and they're probably not completely accurate. But these numbers at least give you an idea of what it might take to actually close the educational achievement gap. They give you the sense that closing the educational achievement gap might actually be something that could be done.

But before we can close the educational achievement gap, we must first close the Corporate Achievement Gap.

Teachers and schools are being held accountable. It's time to start holding corporations accountable, too. We must demand that they contribute to the health and well-being of the country by paying their fair share.