White House Redefines “Failing School”

by David Safier

Let’s check in and see how Bush’s War on Public Education is going.

Based on the news that the White House has begun scaling back the rules on No Child Left Behind, I’m going to guess, it isn’t going much better than Bush’s War on Terrorism.

Here’s a little history, if you haven’t been following the right wing’s War on Public Education. The original plan began during the Reagan and Bush 1 years. The idea was to create a nationwide voucher system that would help the affluent and semi-affluent afford high cost private schools, while the middle class would be taught in some form of second tier private or semi-private school. Eventually, the hope was that the current public schools would become holding tanks for poor children who had nowhere else to go.

No Child Left Behind was conceived as a way of spotlighting the failures of public schooling. The testing system was so unforgiving that even successful schools could be labeled “failing.” The thinking was, as the number of failing schools mounted, people would come to “realize” that public education cannot be made to work.

But there was a second part to the plan, and it didn’t turn out the way they hoped. Charter schools created in states like Arizona, along with private schools paid for by vouchers in a few test states, were supposed to perform magnificently on the national and state tests. That would prove that the private sector could create a better school. Bingo! The end of public schooling as we know it.

But that’s not what happened. Study after study has confirmed that, as a general rule, private and charter schools don’t do a better job educating their students. Some do better than the public schools, and some do worse. Though the U.S. Secretary of Education tried to suppress or downplay the reports, they became common knowledge. Not even the Bush people could cook these books, though they tried.

So they couldn’t make their case. Meanwhile, schools are still being labeled “failing” that are attended by children of the wealthy and influential, because, if even one segment of the school population is performing below standards, that pushes the school into the “failing” category. Wealthy and influential parents don’t like that. So a plan is slowly being put into place that would only label schools with a number of groups who have low scores as failing schools.

After years of testing and who knows how many millions of dollars spent, we have discovered that schools attended by poor children from poor families have more problems educating their students than schools attended by children from wealthier families, and we need to do something to bring up the low performing schools.

I must congratulate the U.S. Department of Education for discovering the obvious.

AIMS, of course, is part of the same test-’til-you-drop agenda, and its expectations have been scaled back too, so students can fail the AIMS test and still graduate high school.

I don’t know how much money Arizona has spent on AIMS or the Feds have spent on No Child Left Behind. I know it’s a lot. At a time when school districts are underfunded and looking at massive layoffs, it’s pretty obvious we have wasted precious education dollars with meager results. The only consolation is, it could have been worse. They could have succeeding in destroying public education entirely.