December 17, 2004
More yelps of pain...
It's beginning to dawn on people that NCLB is a revolution about to happen. Orrin pointed to this article...
The Perfect Law: No Child Left Behind and the Assault on Public Schools, by Gerald W. Bracey
Imagine a law that would transfer hundreds of billions of dollars a year from the public sector to the private sector, reduce the size of government, and wound or kill a large Democratic power base. Impossible, you say. But the law exists. It is Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 2001, better known as the No Child Left Behind law (NCLB).
The Bush administration has often been accused of Orwellian doublespeak in naming its programs, and NCLB is a masterpiece of a law to accomplish the opposite of what it apparently intends. While claiming to be the law that-finally!-improves public education, NCLB sets up public schools to fail, setting the stage for private education companies to move in on the $400 billion spent annually on K-12 education ($500 billion according to recent statements by Secretary of Education Rod Paige). The consequent destruction or reduction of public education would shrink government and cripple or eliminate the teachers' unions, nearly five million mostly Democratic voters. It's a law to drool over if you're Karl Rove or Grover Norquist. The Perfect Law, in fact, as in The Perfect Storm...
I don't think Mr Bracey quite understands. I think NCLB is NOT an attempt to destroy public schools for the benefit of the private sector (though some of that will likely happen). It's about CHOICE. Giving choice to parents, so schools have to please parents to keep students. That's something far more interesting...
Bracey points out that the standards set by NCLB will be almost impossible to meet. Hmmm. If they are impossible to meet, I guess there will have to be some compromises down the road. Let me make a prediction. When/if the compromise happens, schools will be allowed to ease the standards a bit where they pinch...but only if parents are also given more choice about which public schools their children go to.
Grover Norquist doesn't quite get it either. He has chortled about how the reforms Republicans are pushing are perfectly calculated to injure key elements of the Democrat coalition. Tort Reform, for instance, would hit those vile animals of the Plaintiffs Bar, (the "Trial Lawyers") who are perhaps the biggest of the Dem contributors. But the Republicans didn't calculate this, they didn't choose the reforms; the reforms chose the Republicans. They called us forth from minority-status obscurity. Such reforms are pressing and urgent precisely because the Democrats can't touch them, and have been ignoring them for decades.
If NCLB does hurt the teachers' unions, that will be a splendid by-product. Those people are evil. They oppose every attempt to fix our schools. And the dirty secret is that they are not teachers—a lot of them aren't. In many public-school systems, only about half the employees are teachers—with the other half mostly a massive clog-up of bureaucrats and administrators. That's why those systems are money-sinks, and why increases in school-funding never seem to fix things. But all those educrats belong to the "teachers" unions, and always claim that any attack on their perks is an "attack on our schools."
And if the by-product of harming the unions is harm to the Democrat party, that will also be an excellent spin-off of NCLB. The Dems have been deeply corrupted by those unions, raking in huge campaign contributions in exchange for damning poor and minority children to blighted lives.
But what Bush is after is choice.
Posted by John Weidner at December 17, 2004 08:00 AM | TrackBackPublic schools and teachers' unions are doomed to an endlessly downward spiral by their own demographics. And any damage is self-inflicted. Consider:
Schools pay miserably. Everywhere. This forces people who actually want to earn enough to live on (and maybe even prosper a little) to seek work not-in-schools. This leaves slots open for people who are either underqualified to actually do high-paying work or who don't care as much about money as they do about an ideal. Most teachers are the 2nd income earners in a family, so they don't feel the pressure of low pay as much as those who are 1st income earners. Because there are always people who will take high-stress, low-paying teaching jobs (for whatever reasons), schools are able to keep paying less than market rate for talent. Return to the top of this paragraph . . .
If schools ever started paying good money to teachers (and eliminated tenure), truly skilled men and women would flock to the profession, and they would demand the same things other groups of true professionals demand: pay for skill, bonuses, awards, recognition. They would also accept as a matter of course that they should have to routinely demonstrate their worth, by means of certification AND testing, as do doctors, lawyers, nurses, sociologists, counselors, accountants, and so on. Of course, this would put a lot of hard-working mediocre people out of work.
It would also change the demographic a little. But not too much, I think, because people who like to teach children tend to be more accepting of other people, maybe a little more liberal in their thoughts than those who live and strive purely for profit. What would change for certain is the idea that mediocrity is acceptable. If high-achievers were teachers, students would be taught the ideals of high achievers. They would see people doing what they teach; there would be expectations of excellence, or at least of sincere effort.
Unfortunately, just as it was when I was in school, while some teachers demand excellence, they are outnumbered by the mediocre. I remember with pure fondness those teachers who demanded my respect and who made me work hard. I remember with disgust those who let me slide the whole year, allowing me to waste that part of my life. Most teachers I don't remember at all. I am sure this is true for most people who have attended public schools in this country in the past 50 years.
If schools paid more and eliminated tenure, our whole society would change for the better. It really is that simple.
-SangerM
"But the Republicans didn't calculate this, they didn't choose the reforms; the reforms chose the Republicans. They called us forth from minority-status obscurity. Such reforms are pressing and urgent precisely because the Democrats can't touch them, and have been ignoring them for decades." Bloody brilliant. I'll be linking to this one soon.
