With Margaret Spellings getting in a final safari in Africa before she turns in her keys, and as the rest of the incompetent Bush cronies at ED are cleaning out their desks and working on their resumes, the White House has simply side-stepped the Departent of Education and issued its own propaganda response to a recent New York Times piece by Sam Dillon on the impossible testing targets that NCLB uses to undercut the public schools.

In a Letter to the Editor published yesterday, Domestic Policy Director, Karl Zinsmeister, both lied and dissembled in making claims regarding reading scores during the NCLB reign of terror:

Over the last five years, 9-year-olds in the United States have made more progress in reading than in the previous three decades combined. Achievement gaps between white and black students in reading and math are now the narrowest they have ever been.

The first sentence by Zinmeister is simply a bald-faced lie. Here is NAEP's own chart showing average reading scores for 4th grade students. It shows a 2 point gain since 2002. Before NCLB became law, between 2000 and 2002, there was a 6 point gain. (Click to enlarge chart).

And here is the NAEP chart on 8th grade reading averages, and the picture is even worse. It shows scores actually dropping a point since 2002. (Click to enlarge chart).

In terms of the achievement gap being the narrowest it has "ever been," the final chart from NAEP shows the reality. In 2002, there was a thirty point gap in 4th grade reading scale scores. That gap for 4th grade reading has narrowed by 2 points since 2002, even with the draconian full-time test prep chain gang teaching that has replaced caring teachers and balance curriculums in schools with mostly minority and/or poor students. (Click to enlarge chart).

It is long past time that these liars, dissemblers, and epistemological thugs be run out of Washington on a rail.

From the Bolivar News in Bolivar, MO:

Bolivar R-1 Board of Education members unanimously threw their support behind a board resolution supporting the No Child Left Behind “Recess Until Reauthorization” Act at the board’s monthly meeting Thursday.

The NCLB Recess Until Reauthorization Act, or House Resolution 6239, is sponsored by Congressman Sam Graves and would call on the U.S. Congress to reform the NCLB Act. The resolution expresses the board’s support for Graves’ proposal, which would suspend the NCLB until it can be reformed and provide relief to school districts such as Bolivar facing penalties under the law.

“I feel strongly that we should go ahead and do it,” board member Mona Coleman said.

“I don’t think we should consider not doing it, we just need to do it,” J.R. Collins said.

Superintendent Dr. Steve Morgan said the board was not giving up on the children who were meant to be helped by NCLB, but that they were recognizing the demands of NCLB need to be re-evaluated and changed.

The resolution was proposed by the Missouri School Boards’ Association, which sent out a mailing about it to its members across the state. Brent Gann, communications director at MSBA in Columbia, said, “What we’re wanting to do is collect these resolutions, and when we have all of them that we think we’re going to get, we’re going to send them to our congressional delegation.” . . . .

No one remembers that the SAT was designed to predict the success of college applicants. It is now simply an "objective instrument" used to justify the expansion of privilege and status for those who can afford it. Most have even forgotten that NCLB was billed as a tool to give extra help to struggling schools, while everyone can see that it now functions as a "scientifically-based" tool to shutter the public schools and segregate the poor in prison-style testing camps run by zealots with tons of tax-deductible corporate cash.

Now the College Board is rolling out a new product to do for the 8th grade what the SAT did for the senior year: turn the final year of middle school into a testing hell camp for the pushy parents who can afford the tutoring needed to prepare their Caitlins and Seths to ReadiStep their way up the backs of less financially-endowed classmates whose high school expectations will be mailed to them in a College Board envelope before they ever enroll in a high school. Thus we become able to separate even earlier the human capital from the human liabilities, which was the point of the old school eugenics movement as well.

From the NYTimes:

Amid growing challenges to its role as the pre-eminent force in college admissions, the College Board on Wednesday unveiled a new test that it said would help prepare eighth graders for rigorous high school courses and college.

The test, which will be available to schools next fall, is intended only for assessment and instructional purposes and has nothing to do with college admissions, College Board officials said.

“This is not at all a pre-pre-pre SAT,” Lee Jones, a College Board vice president, said at a news conference. “It’s a diagnostic tool to provide information about students’ strengths and weaknesses.”

The College Board, which owns the SAT and PSAT, made its announcement when an increasing percentage of high school students are taking the rival ACT and amid mounting concern over what critics call the misuses of the SAT and ACT and other standardized tests in college admissions.

Those critics dismissed the new test for eighth graders as just what Dr. Jones said it was not: “a pre-pre-pre SAT.” . . .

A clip from a sad, yet insightful, commentary by high school teacher, Demitrious C. Sinor, at truthdig:

. . . .Amid perhaps the most important presidential election since 1932, the statements about education by our presidential and vice presidential candidates, even in the face of our current economic crisis and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, stuck with me more strongly than any other utterance in the debates. There is no secret why: I am a high school teacher. The night of the final debate, I was exhausted. My feet were aching—a consequence of standing on the job for the better part of 10 hours every day as a teacher of United States history. I wanted to relax, but my mind was racing; there is a lot to think about these days.

We have seen a “bailout” of corporate and Wall Street swindlers, with the working class being forced to pick up the tab. The administration has continued to escalate defense spending while cutting taxes, never seeming to consider the dire social, international and economic consequences. With all the burdens being loaded upon Americans today, we deserve a break. Struggling homeowners deserve a break, not the devastation of foreclosure. Hardworking families deserve a break, not the shock of unemployment. And public educators deserve a break, not the damaging mandates of program improvement and the threats of state takeover that have fallen on my high school and countless others like it due to the draconian quotas of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Sadly, NCLB doesn’t care about strong relationships in the classroom; NCLB cannot measure smiles, teamwork, camaraderie or the overcoming of adversity. It doesn’t allow for creative and authentic assessments and engaging activities in the classroom. And, tragically, it has demanded that we educators check our hearts and souls at the classroom door. . . .

Kohn takes on the anti-culturalists in the reddest of the red states. From the Salt Lake Tribune:

Rising test scores are no reason to celebrate, author Alfie Kohn told teachers at the Utah Education Association (UEA) convention on Friday.

Schools that improve test scores do so at the expense of other subjects and ideas, he said.

"When the scores go up, it's not just meaningless. It's worrisome," Kohn told hundreds of educators on the last day of the convention. "What did you sacrifice from my child's education to raise scores on the test?"

Kohn, who's written 11 books on human behavior, parenting and schools, spent nearly two hours Friday morning ripping into both established and relatively new education concepts. He slammed merit pay for teachers, competition in schools, Advanced Placement classes, curriculum standards and testing - including Utah's standards and testing system - drawing mixed reactions from his audience.

"Considering what we hear a lot, it was pure blasphemy," said Richard Heath, a teacher at Central Davis Junior High School in Layton.

Kohn called merit pay - forms of which many Utah school districts are implementing this year - an "odious" type of control imposed on teachers.

"If you jump through hoops, we'll give you a doggie biscuit in the form of money," Kohn said.

He said competition in schools destroys their sense of community. Advanced Placement classes, he claimed, focus more on material but don't do much to deepen students' understanding. He said standardized tests are designed so that some students must always fail or they're considered too easy, and often the students who do poorly are members of minority groups.

"We are creating in this country before our eyes, little by little, what could be described as educational ethnic cleansing," Kohn said. He called Utah's standards too specific and the number of tests given to Utah students "mind-boggling."

He called on teachers to explain such problems to parents and community members.

"The best teachers spend every day of their lives strategically avoiding or subverting the Utah curriculum," Kohn said. . . .

Yesterday's story by Sam Dillon in the Times offered an exemplary case for education historians and policy people to use in examining how the corporate media cover education issues that they would prefer to ignore. Three weeks after Science published a study by Dr. Rich Cardullo and his colleagues at UC Riverside on the effects of NCLB's AYP testing demands and the "nearly 100 percent failure of all schools by 2014," the NYTimes finally became the first prominent paper to grudgingly notice. Their front-page coverage (cont'd on A14), in fact, misses the primary finding of the Cardullo study that most people would find shocking if the New York Times or the L. A. Times could leave their unwavering "take names, kick ass" editorial support for NCLB on the shelf long enough to report the news. None of the following information from Science Daily found its way into the Dillon's NYTimes piece (and I cannot believe the printed story is the one that the reporter filed):

"For most schools, the greatest risk of failing AYP lies with ELA proficiency," said Cardullo, a professor of biology. "It is the Socioeconomically Disadvantaged and English Language Learner subgroups within the schools that are most likely going to fail to meet AYP in California. Given the weakness of ELA progress, no doubt more emphasis needs to be placed on ELA. But what we emphasize in our paper is that schools are also in need of support in mathematics since the current data trends, if not altered, predict nearly 100 percent failure of all schools by 2014 in meeting AYP."

Not that there was anything really new about this Cardullo peer-reviewed finding of 100 percent failure rate. Dr. Bob Linn, former President of AERA, presented and published the same predictions five years ago based on his own analysis. I know because I was at CREATE in Memphis in 2004 when he brought his well-traveled slides (pdf) there. In fact, Dr. Bob Linn appears in yesterday's story near the end of the piece on A14, but the 100 percent failure rate that he has talked about for five years is conspicuously missing from the Dillon story. Not a word.

Instead of reporting on the guaranteed failure rate of public schools and the accompanying erosion of public support by a manipulated and unsuspecting public (hey, hockey moms and Joe Sixpacks!), the Times yesterday chose to focus on the states' various lengths for their testing fuses as we move toward the 2014 explosion that is never mentioned in the Times story. After all, the Times Editorial Board is in the tweek-and-repeat NCLB camp, and their support for cheap charter chain gangs in urban centers is not to be compromised by too much of the harsh truth. The Times graphics department is even called upon to show which states are taking the slow fuse route and which ones have decided to instill heartbreak, demoralizaton, and nervous breakdowns in their children and teachers before 2014. Four big charts!! with the underlying message that the long fuse states are cheating themselves from the quick suicide that they deserve.

Here is the chart from the Cardullo study (Download the high-resolution JPG version of the image) that the New York Times refused to publish, the one that tells all the truth that the Times refused to print. The Times did not even offer a link to it. Pathetic.

Had the Times chosen to report the indisputable fact that NCLB was designed to show school failure, they would have been forced to acknowledge their own continuing complicity in the child and teacher abuse that business, government, and media have agreed upon "to make the U. S. competitive in the world economy." If there has ever been a bigger bunch of idiots in charge of our future, I have not found it yet in all my study. That reminds me--I will have a Olbermanesque Special Comment on Margaret Spellings this evening, I hope.

Last updated 10:40 AM

In the coming months there will be a renewed conversation about education. Here is a good start from J. E. Robertson at Food for Thought:

. . . .Standardized testing has a role to play, but it is blind because it ignores, necessarily, the human element. Its role is to do that. But if we make it the centerpiece of our education policy, then we strip from our educational system the very thing most valuable about it: the goal of making for each student an optimal future, in which she can shape her own destiny.

There has to be a person-to-person experience, in which the content of an educational process is humanized, impassioned, made to come alive, in which one mind engages with another, and the student learns not just about the question-and-answer process, but also about what makes that intangible quality that is the intellect, what empowers the individual to apply what is learned and to interpret the abstract terrain of thought and consequence.

Our educational system cannot be about programming students for testing. Aside from the fact that this is nothing more than building a system designed to cheat itself —the tests are supposed to examine cognitive ability, not test-taking preparation—, it undermines the most necessary aspect of a successful educational system: that of cultivating intellectual curiosity and the willingness to test the world's claims against one's own judgment and comprehension.

This may be one of the most fundmental areas in which we need to reform our common culture: we are not educating test-takers, we are educating human beings. And a free citizen, capable of accessing all the benefits of a free society, must have at the core of his self-awareness, an intellect that knows it can be applied, that it can assess, relearn, inquire, challenge and distinguish between ideas, the less good and the better.

Editorial from T.H.E. Journal:

BARACK OBAMA for president.

I say this with equal parts gravity and enthusiasm, and after a great amount of consideration. It's certainly not something I am in the practice of doing. In my long tenure at T.H.E. Journal, I have aggressively advocated for the education and technology communities, but have stayed clear of endorsing candidates for office. It can be bad for business, as well as a little presumptuous. But this country can no longer afford to have tepid support for technology in education from the federal government, when all other facets of our-- and the world's-- economy and society are leveraging technology to make changes in how they operate. . . .

Read the rest here.

Reggie Dylan has an important piece of work at Dissident Voice. Here is a small taste:

. . . . In many ways Locke High School concentrates the utterly failed education system that “serves” the oppressed people in the urban cores of this country. In 2005 only 332 Locke students graduated from a class that, as ninth-graders, had 1,318. Only 143 students qualified for admission to the University of California and Cal State University systems. In March, 2005 a 15-year-old girl died after being shot in front of the school.

Even before the fight at Locke became national news, the L.A. school district had signed a contract agreeing to turn complete control of Locke over to a private charter school organization known as Green Dot Public Schools. (A charter school is a public school run by a private business or organization.) This isn’t the first charter school in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). And it’s not the first of Green Dot’s charter schools in L.A.; they already operate twelve small charter schools. But this is the first time that any charter operation has been given sole responsibility for providing the public education that high school students receive in a section of a major urban ghetto.

This high-profile experiment in privatization is being looked to by the powers-that-be as a potential model for a radical transformation of the public education system in the most oppressed communities of the proletariat, especially Blacks and Latinos, not only throughout L.A., but nationwide. The Los Angeles Times wrote in a recent editorial, “[I]f it succeeds, Green Dot will have created a blueprint for public schools.”1

And a lot of people at Locke—parents, the teachers and administrators who stayed on, many students, and people all over—are hoping that Green Dot will actually be the model for “closing the achievement gap between black and Hispanic students and their white and Asian peers” that the sales pitch of the charter school movement promises.

Green Dot aims to produce a small number of students from inner city schools who will help fill the need for “knowledge workers” in this society—people who work with information, such as engineers, analysts, marketers, etc. And for those who do make it into the “knowledge worker” strata, to serve as a political and ideological force to shore up this system of exploitation and inequality—including by providing a basis to claim that “anyone” can make it in this system; a cruel lie when in fact, for millions and millions of youth in the inner cities, their so-called “opportunities” are the streets and a likely early death, prison, or the military. . ..