‘No Child Left Behind’ Revokes Most-needed Funds; Punitive System Won’t Improve Schools

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17 October 2008 :: J.E. Robertson

Sen. John McCain brought back to life the question of whether or not the “No Child Left Behind” law was a good or a bad idea. He claims it was a good start, but foolishly glossed over the fact that the bill’s punitive “accountability” measures target the poor directly. Schools that most need funding are deprived of it, by the No Child Left Behind law, guaranteeing failure in schools that would otherwise be forced to struggle continually with scarce funding.

Pres. Bush’s most severe critics have accused him and the Republican Congress that helped him implement his education reforms of deliberately trying to create an educational “underclass”, in order to keep l0wer-end wages as low as possible and justify their 1o-year refusal to raise the minimum wage. This is speculation, of course, but the fact that stripping struggling schools of much-needed funds harms schools in low-income areas is clearly true, and is borne out by the facts.

There have also been accusations that such policies are similar to what happened in Texas, when then Governor Bush “privatized” the public education system, paying private contractors to manage public schools within a for-profit structure. This has not happened in most public schools, and states and municipalities retain most decision-making with regard to the schools, but that private education consulting or management firms have championed NCLB is clear.

The heart of the matter is that NCLB is fundamentally ill-conceived and unfair, especially if we consider that its expressed purpose is to reform American public schools so that all Americans enjoy the opportunity for the best possible education. Part of the problem is local funding, rooted in the state and municipal property tax system, which already imposes on most public schools a vast wealth divide that NCLB does not even pretend to deal with.

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Outside of Philadelphia, there are schools in wealthy townships that have not only radio but TV stations, faculty who have earned their PhD, and more than one football or track field. Just 10 miles away, on the margins of Philadelphia itself, it is possible to find schools where students may never own a bound text-book and work only from photocopies or from shared texts. Teachers are forced to pay for materials, and the “test-score” issue looms as a constant threat of funds being revoked.

When the Philadelphia school system found itself in need of an additional $50 million in funding to meet its needs, the administration of then Gov. Tom Ridge (later Homeland Security chief for George W. Bush) revoked $70 million in funding the schools already had, as a punitive measure for “failing schools”.

The funding gap was catastrophic for school quality and coincided with a steep increase in violence in the most troubled schools. But Ridge’s move was politically cunning, in that he then proposed he would offer the schools $70 million in “new” funding, if they took certain steps to “improve” conditions, according to a series of standards that may have been more ideologically driven than pragmatically informed.

Ridge contracted a private school management consulting firm to study the possibility of working with Philadelphia. After two years and millions spent, Edison Schools became the official management contractor for Philadelphia’s now “privatized” public schools. A report from 2002 notes the odd results:

Days before classes were to begin in September, trucks arrived to take away most of the textbooks, computers, lab supplies and musical instruments the company had provided — Edison had to sell them off for cash. Many students were left with decades-old books and no equipment.

A few weeks later, some of the company’s executives moved into offices inside the schools so Edison could avoid paying the $8,750 monthly rent on its Philadelphia headquarters. They stayed only a few days, until the school board ordered them out.

As a final humiliation, Chris Whittle, the company’s charismatic chief executive and founder, recently told a meeting of school principals that he’d thought up an ingenious solution to the company’s financial woes: Take advantage of the free supply of child labor, and force each student to work an hour a day, presumably without pay, in the school offices.

“We could have less adult staff,” Mr. Whittle reportedly said at a summit for employees and principals in Colorado Springs. “I think it’s an important concept for education and economics.” In a school with 600 students, he said, this unpaid work would be the equivalent of “75 adults” on salary.

What, ultimately, is the point of such an experiment? How is any reputable business expected to earn a serious profit by taking money predetermined to the dollar to be spent on specific public services costs? They can only profit if they withdraw money from that budget, for their own profits. In an environment where funding was already inadequate, and where new laws to “reform” the education system aim to reduce funding, this is not a morally or mathematically viable option.

One of the problems with NCLB is that the legislation was supported by conservative ideologues who view the federal Department of Education as socialist and a threat to democracy. They quite explicitly aim to eliminate any federal funding for education, and often misrepresent the role of federal funding, claiming it aims to indoctrinate the youth of the nation.

In fact, the federal role in education policy is intended to serve as a defense against unfair disparities in quality of public education. Partly informed by civil rights law and by judicial precedent on the question of school availability being a question of equality under the law, the federal education budget has always been intended to help raise the quality if education services available to communities across the nation.

No Child Left Behind turned that formula on its head, and in fact imposed a blanket system of “standardization”, which undermines local control, severely restricts the quality and scope of information available to American students, and imposes on the entire system a logic of cheating. Schools aims to “teach to the test” in order to raise scores, and even wealthy states like New Jersey are abandoning vital subject matter like social studies in order to focus on test-oriented teaching. [from Thought Possible, at Open.Salon.com]