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NCLB: Unfunded AND fraudulent

Is the No Child Left Behind Act an unfunded federal mandate, as many of its critics have maintained? Well, maybe not, at least technically. Here's Gerald Bracey's take on it:

" It's not that NCLB won't cost the states a bundle more than it provides: It will. It's a matter of definition. States receive funds via NCLB if they agree to its terms. Thus, by definition, it's not a 'mandate.' "

With states strapped for cash, what choice do they have other than to accede to the arduous demands of NCLB? All states run Title I programs, and for certain schools, federal money makes up a significant chunk of their operating budgets. In that sense, the federal law is a mandate.

Either way, the attacks on NCLB keep coming. The latest is a hefty report from FairTest. If you're so inclined, you can download the complete report in pdf format from the website. Or you can just read the executive summary, which sums up the failings of NCLB quite nicely by highlighting the two false assumptions undergirding the act:

1.) Boosting standardized test scores should be the primary goal of schools. This assumption leads to one-size-fits-all teaching aimed primarily at test preparation, and it works against efforts to give all children a high-quality education.

2.) Schools can best be improved by threatening educators with harsh sanctions, since poor teaching is the primary cause of unsatisfactory student performance. Threats may get teachers to focus narrowly on boosting test scores. They fail, however, to address the underlying problems of family poverty and inadequate school funding that are major reasons why many students start off far behind and never catch up.

I like the part about failing to address family poverty and inadequate school funding.

The report goes on to prescribe what should be done instead of the limited standardized testing currently required by the law--- namely, a battery of performance assessments that more adequately measure real student learning.

Kind of like what I experienced yesterday at the 4-H Wildlife Stewards Summit.

The politics of ecology

I just got back from a gig at Seth Lewelling School in Milwaukie, the 4-H Wildlife Stewards Summit, where I listened to and evaluated the presentations on environmental issues and projects by elementary students from throughout the state.

I was blown away by the sophistication and depth of knowledge of what I heard, all from public school students in grades three through six. A group from Warrenton on the Oregon coast, for example, shared an exquisitely rendered map of an "enclosed ecosystem" salmon habitat under construction
on the K- 8 school campus. Their work has earned them federal grants worth $13,000.

Another group from Lookingglass School near Roseburg, in the heart of timber country, is in its ninth year of an environmental restoration and study project. They used a Power Point presentation plus a a pictorial display to augment their incredibly articulate oral explanations of what they had acomplished. And what they had learned.

I told a colleague afterwards that it would be a good thing if our local politicians got their larded "behinds" into the public schools more frequently to see what was actually going on, much of it good, despite the ever decreasing financial support they receive from the government.

I figured it was also a good time, after this morning's experience, to revisit the disastrous environmental policies of the Bush Administration, starting with this letter to the Oregonian a couple of days ago:

Look at Smith's role with salmon

Tuesday, May 25, 2004

Oregonians opposed to the Bush's administration's effort to reduce protection for our endangered wild salmon by inflating their surviving numbers with their hatchery cousins ("U.S. backs protecting wild runs of salmon," May 15), should direct their attention to Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore.

It was Smith who proposed Portland attorney Mark Rutzick to be senior legal adviser to the National Marine Fisheries Service.

As The New York Times (May 15) editorialized, "(I)n drawing up the new policy, the (National Marine Fisheries Service) ignored scientists who urged that the [distinctions between wild and hatchery salmon] remain in place. It relied instead on a Washington-based political team whose key player was Mark Rutzick, a former timber industry lawyer."

Rutzick's record as a hired gun for lumber companies and other opponents of environmental protection explains why he was appointed to his current position of power, and voters should hold Smith accountable for the consequences.

That's from Michael Munk of Reed College (the son of a former political science professor of mine at PSU).
His letter adds credence to my post about the wholesale assault of the Bush Administration and members of Congress, including Smith, on the Endangered Species Act. Here's an article on Mark Rutzick in the Tacoma News Tribune which accuses Rutzick of being "anti-Endangered Species Act", not surprising since Rutzick "has frequently represented the American Forest Resource Council, a Portland-based timber industry group that has filed a steady stream of
lawsuits challenging federal forest policy."

I can only take solace in the hope that our future leaders will be more environmentally intelligent. Based on what I saw this morning, I think that hope is entirely justified.

Toni Morrison and the pernicious fruits of racism

As I mentioned yesterday, Toni Morrison writes about the black experience in America as truly and honestly as any writer I know, including Mark Twain, who wrote the Great American Novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, about slavery and the ignorant white culture that supported it, as seen through the eyes of the title character, Huck Finn, and its archetypal hero, Nigger Jim.

The Bluest Eye is Morrison's attempt to deal with the issue of "racial beauty". The book was inspired by the memory of an elementary school classmate saying she "wanted blue eyes". Here's how Morrison describes the book:

"The Bluest Eye was my effort to say something about that; to say somehting about why she had not, or possibly ever would have, the experience of what she possessed and also why she prayed for so radical an alteration. Implicict in her desire was racial self-loathing. .... Who made her feel that it was better to be a freak than what she was?

... "I focused therefore on how something as grotesque as the demonization of an entire race could take root inside the most delicate member of society: a child; the most vulnerable member: a female."

In his 1999 review of The Bluest Eye, Cat Moses cites the effect of blues music on the book's narrative tone and structure:

"Morrison has stated that her narrative 'effort is to be like something that has probably only been fully expressed perhaps in music... ' The Bluest Eye is the genesis of her effort 'to do what the music did for blacks, what we used to be able to do with each other in private and in that civilization that existed underneath the white civilization'. "

The blues music culture pioneered by poor rural blacks was once as reviled by mainstream whites as the hip-hop culture of young urban blacks is today. Only today, the white mainstream includes many middle class blacks as well.

Ironically, Toni Morrison graduated in 1953 from Howard University, the site of Bill Cosby's contentious and controversial remarks.

Walking in the shoes of the poor, the downtrodden, the unfortunate... the different!

The Oregonian published this opinion piece in the form of a letter to a debt collector from Ruth Rodgers, a laid off high tech worker who once pulled down a six figure salary as a software development team leader.
She found work as a medical receptionist, then as a certified nursing assistant. Working a seven day week, she now earns in that week what she used to earn in a single day. But she has also learned empathy:

"That's because, along the way, I've learned that no matter how bad things get, there's always someone who's worse off than me. I've learned compassion. I don't jump to conclusions about people."

"I look panhandlers in the eye now and smile at them. If I don't have a coin to share, I can at least acknowledge their humanity. Who am I to judge them or make assumptions about how they got to be where they are?"

Ruth Rodgers is the anti-Neil Goldschmidt, whose "perspective" was "warped" by hanging out exclusively with the rich and the powerful, the movers and the shakers, the elite. Ruth Rodgers once had money; now she struggles to pay her bills. Neil Goldschmidt was once a Legal Aid lawyer and a public servant; now he's a millionaire corporate consultant. Rodger's journey taught her empathy for the less fortunate. Goldschmidt's path led him to money and influence, and ultimately, to shame.

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Bill Cosby may be an example of another rich and famous celebrity who's lost touch with the common man, in this case the Black common man. His recent speech at Howard University, and another at Stanford, blasted denizens of the black lower class for failing to take advantage of the opportunities afforded them by Brown vs. Board of Education and the martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement.
Here's part of what he said at Howard:

" 'Ladies and gentlemen, the lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal. These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids – $500 sneakers for what? And won't spend $200 for 'Hooked on Phonics.'

"He added: 'They're standing on the corner and they can't speak English. I can't even talk the way these people talk: 'Why you ain't,' 'Where you is' ... And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. And then I heard the father talk. ... Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. ... You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth.' "

Cosby may be on the far side a growing generational, cultural, and, yes, economic chasm that separates him from "the lower economic people" he criticizes. But he apparently is not alone. Middle Class journalist
Cynthia Tucker says that "... much of black America, especially its middle class, is ready to have that conversation. In that sense, Cosby's speech was a watershed event -- a sign that black America is now comfortable enough with its accomplishments to discuss its shortcomings."
And conservative Thomas Sowell, who has always seemed a bit embarrassed by his race, says that when comparing Blacks to whites to Asians, "the differences among all these groups are in one four-letter word that you are still not supposed to say: work." For more of the same, click here and here.

Others disagree, of course. Joe Rodriguez
of the San Jose Mercury News says the criticisms are too simplistic:

"Too many gangs and drugs in the neighborhood? Just say No.

Poverty got you down? Just get married.

If you got married and you're still poor, then don't have kids until you can afford them."

And Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Village Voice weighs in with this:

"Race still matters, but largely the problems of black people today are the problems of poor people. In his last days, Martin Luther King turned his attention to class, a focus Cosby's brethren airbrushed away. They could march on Washington every 10 years without having to march on their own drug-riddled corners. They ignore the ghetto or, when emboldened like Cosby, shit on it."

In the final analysis, Cosby, like the doctor married to the lawyer in his sit-com, is something of an elitist.

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The best book I've read on the insidious effects of racism is Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye.
More on that later.

Prescience

As I predicted on May 19, Michael Moore did indeed win the top prize at Cannes for his documentary film Fahrenheit 9/11. That's a first, too. A documentary has never before won the Palme D'or. Here's Moore's reaction.

Remember how Moore was roundly criticized for his "boorish" remarks about our "fictional president" in his Oscar acceptance speech at last year's Academy Awards? Well now he has respectable company in the person of E.L. Doctorow (famous American author) who was nearly booed off the stage for daring to criticize Bush in his commencement speech at Hofstra University. Seems that it's a no-no to insert politics into a graduation speech.

Maybe it's just me, but I would rather listen to a Doctorow political screed than the long-winded and forgettable oration of Sen. John Warner that I had to endure at the William and Mary graduation a few years back.

Goldschmidt and cronyism

"...when you spend all your time with people with money, your perspective gets warped."

That's Steve Novick in an opinion piece in yesterday's Tribune defending the practice of raising large amounts of money by local candidates (Francesconi, mainly) in order to get the message out.  (Click here to read Novick's opinion.  Click here to read the opposing viewpoint which advocates public financing of elections, like they do in Arizona.)

Novick's quote, however, more aptly characterizes Neil Goldschmidt's transformation from crusading young Legal Aid lawyer to millionaire consultant for Northwest Natural, defender of Portland General Electric, and local shill for the proposed successor to Enron/PGE, the Oregon Electric Company.  The relatively unknown and charismatic outsider has become the consumate insider, the most prominent local mover and shaker of them all.  In the process, he became not only influential, but rich.

In "Neil's Network", the Tribune describes an astonishing web of interconnectedness that made Goldschmidt the easily the highest of Portland's high and mighty.  The article also reveals a dizzying, and disconcerting, revolving door which ushered public servants (mainly Goldschmidt appointees) into lucrative private sector postions, and in some cases, back again.  It's a veritable "political-industrial" complex.

Take longtime Goldschmidt friend Tom Walsh, for example.  Although it might literally make your head spin, see if you can follow this:

"Former head of Walsh Construction, large local construction firm involved in numerous city and TriMet-related projects. Chairman of Oregon Transportation Commission. Former director of TriMet. Director of Oregon Electric Utility Co., formerly chaired by Goldschmidt, which is seeking to buy PGE from Enron. Married to political consultant Patricia McCaig, chief of staff for then-Gov. Barbara Roberts (Goldschmidt’s successor)."

Let's see.  Walsh moved from private construction to public transportation and back to the private sector as a board member of the Oregon Electric Company.  And he's married to former Metro Councillor, and now political consultant, Patricia McCaig.

Plus he worked for Governor Barbara Roberts.  Now there's a man he knows who to call when the going gets tough, as it undoubtedly will, as the Public Utility Commission deliberates on whether to OK the sale of Enron/PGE to Texas Pacific Group, the big-time investment firm behind the Oregon Electric Company.

One can surmise that Walsh's judgment may be slightly skewed by hanging with Portland's power brokers.  Or that, in Novick's words, his "perpective" may have gotten "warped".

 

The whistle blower from Houston

What do Jim Francesconi and I have in common? We both finished second in  our respective races for public office, which isn't too bad considering the number of candidates we each faced.

Unless of course you spent $22 dollars per vote, as Francesconi did.  I spent maybe 13 cents for each of mine.

But this isn't about Francesconi and me.  It's just a clever segue into one of my frequent rants on No Child Left Behind and, in this case, about our current Secretary of Education, Rod Paige, who perfectly reflects the incompetence and dishonesty of the Bush Administration.

I've written about Paige before and how he rode the bogus "Texas education miracle" into national office (Joe's School, Dec. 4).  But after hearing Al Franken interview Bob Kimball, the Houston educator who blew the whistle on the fraudulent numbers on student success coming out of that district, I felt compelled to revisit the issue.  And I came across this article by Jim Trelease, who quotes the NY Times Michael Winerip on Houston Superintendent Rod Paige's efforts to get the schools to report "miracle numbers", like a "zero percent' dropout rate:

"As for those who fail to make their numbers, it is termination time, one of many innovations championed by Dr. Paige as superintendent here from 1994 to 2001. He got rid of tenure for principals and mandated that they sign one-year contracts that allowed dismissal 'without cause' and without a hearing.    

"On the other hand, for principals who make their numbers, it is bonus time. Principals can earn a $5,000 bonus, district administrators up to $20,000. At Sharpstown High alone, Dr. Kimball said, $75,000 in bonus money was issued last year, before the fictitious numbers were exposed."

And I discovered that Bill Moyers had interviewed Bob Kimball last October on Now.  In response to the notion that Houston is the model for the Bush education plan, Kimball said this:

"If it is the best school district in the United States, this country is in serious trouble.

Al Franken says that Bush, because he believes in "testing and phonics", considers himself knowledgable about education.  That "knowledge" led him to "hire a guy that cheats."  Rod Paige, the cheater, reflects, in Franken's words, the "basically fraudulent" character of the entire Bush Administration, an administration that is "riddled with corruption" and "filled with crooks and liars." Here's another take on Paige and the Houston "miracle".

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While we're discussing education. today's Tribune ran this article on the effort to provide more full day kindergarten programs in Portland. 

The article focused on Grout Elementary-- where I went to kindergarten so long ago I can't remember the teacher's name.  But I do remember it was half day.  Or was it?  Grout  now runs two half-day kindergarten classes, and one full day program.  Apparently Portland doesn't have the money to fund all day kindergartens in every elementary school.  Since research clearly shows the benefits of early childhood education on future academic performance, that's a problem -- and a reason why I ran for the school board as a vocal advocate of adequate funding for public schools.  What we have now is something like educational apartheid:

“In many schools, the only way you can get (a full-day program) is if there are 20 to 25 parents who are willing to pay for that extra half-day staff person,” said school board member Bobbie Regan. “It’s a pretty inequitable system.”

We can assume that the schools which can muster the support of 20 to 25 parents to pay, out of pocket, for additional services are located in the more affluent Portland neighborhoods.

What is truth?

Conservative critics of filmmaker Michael Moore delight in pointing out his "uncomfortable" relationship with the "facts" in the stories he tells, mainly in his movies. Just look at the facts, they say, and you know he's distorting the truth. Or not telling the truth at all.

In Bowling for Columbine, for example, bankers didn't actually hand out guns in the bank. The two student shooters weren't actually in bowling class the morning of the Columbine massacre. The plant in nearby Colorado Springs didn't actually make the missiles. And in the famous Wesley Clarke-Peter Jennings flare-up in the Democratic primary debate, George W. Bush wasn't actually a deserter, by military definition, as Moore supposedly claimed.

Well let me point out that Michael Moore is not an essayist. He's not a journalist, nor is he a logician. He's a movie maker. You can hold a Joe Conason (Big Lies) factually accountable for what he writes, but that's because he is a journalist who uses reason based on facts to present what he believes to be the truth.
The same can be said of Ann Coulter, or Bill O'Reilly. Michael Moore is also concerned with truth, but his approach is different. He's not concerned with winning a debate. He wants people to see the America that he sees.

Moore sees an America where banks lure customers with the promise of free guns, where students can be in a bowling class one day and wreak violent havoc the next, where one of the biggest employers near Columbine High School is part of a vast national defense establishment manufacturing parts for nuclear missiles. Moore's America is led by a man willing to send soldiers off to war, but who in his own youth was unwilling to fight in Vietnam.

These same conservative critics are already taking shots at Moore's new movie, Fahrenheit 9/11, without even having seen it. Film critics who have seen it, however, are telling a different story. They like it. Kenneth Turan of the LA Times says that what Moore has "given us is an alternate history of the last four years on the U.S. political scene... ." Desson Thomsen in the Washington Post calls it Moore's "most powerful film since "Roger & Me... ."

"What's remarkable here isn't Moore's political animosity or ticklish wit. It's the well-argued, heartfelt power of his persuasion. Even though there are many things here that we have already learned, Moore puts it all together. It's a look back that feels like a new gaze forward."

Fahrenheit 9/11 will probably win the Palm D'or at Cannes. I for one can hardly wait to see it.

UPDATE:

Here's a Frank Rich column on Farhrenheit 9/11.

Pitts on Abu Ghraib

Read Leonard Pittts' column on the atrocities at Abu Ghraib prison, which says, in part:

"The events of the past three years have revealed something poisonous and mean in the American character. As much as we claim our struggle against terrorism is not a clash of cultures, not a war of Christendom versus Islam, there are too many times over these past months when it has seemed exactly that. And worse, when some of us have seemed eager for it, chillingly dismissive of the need to raise questions or speak cautions."

Survival of the fittest

On the same day that the Oregonian editorialized in favor of "investment in K-12 schools" and support for "universities and community colleges", it ironically ran a column by George Will that seems to disavow the importance of schools altogether.  The column describes the "hard- soft" vision of America in Michael Barone's ("America's foremost political anayst", according to Will) new book, Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for the Nation's Future . 

Hard America, says Barone, is one in which the private sector "fires people when profits fall and the military trains under live fire."  The country became "soft" in 1970 when "the prison population declined from 212,000 in 1960 to 196,000 in 1970."  It "hardened" in 2000 when the prison population reached 1.3 million.
Soft America is characterized by schools with "progressive values" and by lots of people on welfare.  Welfare reform in the 90's hardened America by throwing mothers off the welfare roles.  " And in the 1990s, welfare dependency -- and crime -- were cut in half. A harder, self-disciplined America is a safer America."  The same is true of "racial preferences" --affirmative action-- which "fences some blacks off from 'Hard America', insulating them in 'a Soft America where lack of achievement will nonetheless be rewarded.' " 

Let's be clear here.  Will/Barone believe that schools "soften" the country, while the military "hardens" it.

In short, "hard America" is one in which people are exposed to competition -cutthroat competition -and held strictly accountable for their actions, or inactions, as the case may be.  So much for compassionate conservatism.  Or any notion of compassion at all. 

Will's column does reveal where "hardline" conservatives are taking us-- backward a hundred years to a new "Gilded Age" of social Darwinism.  In this brave new world, it's every man for himself.  Only the fittest-- or most ruthless-- will survive.

Fortunately, Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor under Clinton, has a new book out (Reason: Why Liberals will take back America) to tell the other side of the story.

Reich calls pundits like Will and Barone "radical conservatives", or radcons.  According to Reich,

"The radcon version of prosperity rewards the rich, gives almost nothing to the middle class, and penalizes the poor. It is based on a market-fundamentalist faith that has deep roots in American history."

Part of that history includes the writings of Herbert Spencer:

"To Spencer, the marketplace was a field for the development of personal character. Only the fittest were able to prosper, because only they were able to muster the necessary resources to maintain themselves and their offspring.  It was Spencer, not Charles Darwin, who coined the phrase "survival of the fittest." It's almost startling to find how exactly Spencer's views are echoed by today's radcons. The America of the late 19th century went through a technological revolution. Today's social problems differ in many ways but the upheaval caused by today's technological revolution is no less dramatic."

Reich is wrong in one respect, however.  With the tax burden shifting almost exclusively onto earned income and away from unearned, or investment, income, it appears that the Bush plan rewards the "idle rich", not the hardworking entrepreneurs who help create new wealth.  The Bush plan rewards the "fortunate" rather than the fittest.  With the repeal of the estate tax, the fortunate are the ones who start with the fortunes.

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The Oregonian editorial, while admirable in its support of our educational institutions, was written by the same folks who endorsed George W. Bush and, by impllication, his tax policies.  If our daily newspaper is serious about adequate funding for public services, it needs to step up the pressure on our elected officials to enact meaningful tax reform.  That means demanding that our wealthiest citizens and corporations pay their fair share of taxes on the money they earn.  And that the property tax burden be shouldered more equitably by businesses.

One can commend the Oregonian for its support of the three recent temporary tax measures referred to the voters.  And for its opposition to Ballot Measure 5, the property tax limitation that has decimated local school districts. 

Too bad Willamette Week didn't raise its voice in opposition to the worst, and most damaging, ballot initiative in state history.