Bush's plan for schools
Save public education by destroying it
By Gene
Clancy
Using the catch phrase "No Child Left Behind," President
George W. Bush is proposing to leave millions of children and
youths behind--especially the poor and children of color.
Posted as a blueprint for educational reform, Bush's highly
touted plan is nothing less than an attempt to wreck the public
schools by diverting public funds into private and
religious-based schools.
The plan actually proposes taking federal money away from
the neediest schools and giving it to more affluent,
"successful" schools.
The Bush administration has called education reform its
"number one priority." But the financial backing for this
priority is suspect.
The plan calls for new federal school spending of $10
billion a year. But Bush's proposed tax cut for the wealthiest
1 percent of Americans will cost $36 billion a year. Another
$30 billion a year will be devoted to abolishing the estate
tax, half of which will go to 2,400 families.
Bush also wants to continue developing the "Star Wars"
missile-building program started under Reagan and continued by
the Clinton administration, which the Congressional Budget
Office estimated will cost at least $60 billion a year.
There is not much question that the educational system in
the United States is deplorable. It is characterized by old,
decaying buildings, scarce textbooks and other school supplies,
acute shortages of qualified teachers, institutionalized racism
and discrimination against children from oppressed communities.
The class-based educational system features gross differences
in funding for and quality of education between poor and
oppressed and the more affluent communities.
The Bush educational program offers little other than words
to solve these problems. In fact, a brief perusal of the Bush
plan shows that behind its high-minded phrases and platitudes
is a vicious attack on the public-school system and poor and
working people generally.
Using standardized testing,
vouchers to destroy public schools
A good example of George W. Bush's double talk is Title I of
the proposed education reform plan. Called "Achieving Equality
Through High Standards and Accountability," it proposes
rigorous testing of fourth- and eighth-grade students every
year to determine whether a school is "low-performing" or
not.
Once identified, a school would then have three years to
improve before it would have its funding reduced. Leaving aside
the question of whether standardized testing of students is a
good measure of school performance, the pitifully small amount
of money allocated to such schools practically guarantees their
failure.
Instead of pouring funds, personnel, equipment, and all
kinds of other attention into improving education at these
schools, the "crime" of being poor and underfunded to start
with will be used to justify slashing their budgets even
further.
Conversely, schools in which the students do well on tests
will receive "bonuses." The Bush administration knows, as does
everyone else, that the already under-funded big-city schools
are at a disadvantage in this competition.
How does such a policy of taking money from poor public
schools and giving it to more affluent schools promotes
"equality"?
An equally vicious proposal is in Title IV--Promoting
Parental Options and Innovative Programs. After a school has
been designated as "non-performing" for two years, federal
funds will be used to enroll students in "higher performing
public or private schools."
Public schools would be required to publish "report cards"
showing how their students performed on standardized tests.
This provision is nothing more than an oblique way of
introducing a system of school vouchers across the United
States.
Posing as a form of "parental choice," school vouchers have
the effect of draining money from the public schools and
funneling it into private or religious schools.
In the Bush proposal, $1,500 per student could be taken from
a public school and used for private-school tuition. Even
proponents of vouchers admit that this amount would not be
enough to allow poor children to attend private schools. It
would, however, give a big boost to private schools at the
expense of public schools.
Moreover, the private/religious schools would not be obliged
to accept all who applied. For example, they could refuse to
accept students with handicapping conditions or special
needs.
In practice, this would resemble the "cherry-picking"
practices of some Health Maintenance Organizations that make
big profits by insuring only healthy people and excluding
anyone who might actually need medical care.
Not only could the "higher performing" private and religious
schools that would be the recipients of these public funds
refuse to accept students. They would not be subject to the
same testing procedures as the public schools they are
replacing.
Understandably, supporters of public schools across the
United States have vigorously opposed this plan.
"They call it parental choice, but the private school
hand-picks and selects the student,'' said Diana Briseno
Herrera, a public-school teacher in San Antonio. "I would not
want my public tax money to be used like this." (Associated
Press, Jan. 23)
Both the American Federation of Teachers and the National
Education Association, the unions that together represent 90
percent of the nation's 3 million teachers, see public funding
for private-school tuition as a threat to limited school
resources.
While stating that "all non-public providers receiving
federal money will be subject to appropriate standards of
accountability," the Bush plan also guarantees that home
schools and private schools will be "protected". The plan
includes the stipulation that "federal requirements do not
apply to home schools or private schools. Protections in
current law would be maintained."
In other words, the "higher performing" private or religious
school would not have to prove that it was a better school. It
would be enough that the parent "chose" it.
Safe schools?
Under Title V of the Bush plan, states would be required to
develop a definition for a "persistently dangerous school" and
report on "safety" on a school-by-school basis. Once a school
is designated as "unsafe," vouchers could then be used to
enable the school's students to transfer to so-called safe
schools.
The students who are left behind in the "unsafe" schools
would be "helped" by a combination of: "character education"
including allowing religious organizations to receive federal
funds for after-school programs, anti-drug education, and
"making it easier for public school districts and local law
enforcement authorities to share information regarding
disciplinary actions and misconduct by students."
In other words, students' privacy rights will be invaded and
cops brought into the schools.
African American and Latino communities, already plagued by
the occupation of their communities by police, would be the
main "beneficiaries" of this new policy.
Attacking bilingual education
Under Title III of the proposed Bush blueprint for
education, schools in which most students do not speak English
as their native language would also be labeled as
"non-performing."
There are more than 3 million so-called Limited English
Proficient students in the United States. For most Spanish is
their first language. Denied the right to be educated in their
own languages, these students have to rely on bilingual
education programs that conduct classes in two or more
languages.
Right wingers and English language chauvinists have always
hated bilingual education, insisting that the only legitimate
goal of bilingual education is to teach students to speak
fluent English. Under the new Bush plan, any bilingual school
where most students do not learn to be fluent in English within
three years will have their funding cut by 10 percent.
Attacking the unions
An important goal of the Bush proposal is to weaken, if it
cannot eliminate, the teachers' unions and other unions in the
public schools.
In Title II of the Bush plan, called Improving Teacher
Quality, states and school districts are encouraged to use
their federal funds "to promote innovative programs such as
reforming teacher certification or licensure requirements;
alternative certification; tenure reform and merit-based
teacher performance systems; differential and bonus pay for
teachers in high-need subject areas such as reading, math and
science."
Many of these "innovative programs" are thinly disguised
policies to divide teachers. So-called merit pay, for example,
purports to reward better teachers by giving them higher pay,
thus improving the overall quality of teaching. Since the bonus
pay is almost always awarded to individual teachers, it tends
to undercut cooperative efforts to improve education, while at
the same time it promotes competition among the educational
staff.
Experiments with "merit pay" have been shown to have little
effect in helping students learn. It has, however often been
used to weaken unions by weakening the solidarity among
teachers and other workers.
Merit pay is even more ominous in the context of the Bush
education proposal. In the plan, 1 percent of the federal money
allotted to education would be given to the secretary of
education who could, at her or his discretion, give special
grants "to states that develop teacher assessment systems that
measure teacher performance using gains in student academic
achievement."
In other words, teachers would be judged--and
paid--according to how well their students performed on
standardized tests. Standardized testing would then become the
means for labeling teachers as "low performing" along with the
schools where they teach.
The public schools for poor and working people are so bad
that it is not surprising that many might feel that any
alternative might be better. But the severe problems in public
schooling in the United States cannot be solved by
privatization and market schemes of competition. Children and
parents in poor and working-class communities will not benefit
if teachers and the unions that represent them are weak.
If carried out, the Bush "blueprint" for education could
perhaps destroy the public schools--and leave poor children and
their parents with nothing but increased oppression.
The writer recently retired after 33 years in the public
school system in the Rochester, N.Y., area, where he was vice
president of AFT Local 3118.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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