Rotten Apples In Education Awards, 2003

[LWolf]

DU has a weekly "top ten conservative idiots." Gerald Bracey has an annual "Rotten Apples in Education Awards." It will be posted at his site some time this week:

http://www.america-tomorrow.com/bracey/EDDRA/

These snips are from an advanced copy he sent out to a group of educators opposing high-stakes testing, of which I am a member. It's a long document, 21 pages worth, a fun read and actually contains a great deal of information about issues in education with citations of some 75 or so articles and books. I'm only snipping a small fraction here; if you are interested, check back to the Bracey website, EDDRA, later today or later this week for the full version!

THE "THERE ARE ALREADY TOO MANY OLD PEOPLE IN FLORIDA" AWARD
TO:

JEB BUSH

In a move to encourage retiring teachers to live in less costly states, the Florida Board of Administration, one third of which is Governor Jeb Bush, voted to spend $174 billion buy debt-ridden Edison Schools, Inc., a company that has succeeded in lining the pockets of founder Chris Whittle but very few others. If Bush saw the irony of investing public school teachers' pensions in a company trying to destroy public schools, he did not acknowledge it.

Mr. Whittle benefited sweetly from the deal. His salary will rise to at least $600,000 from its current $345,000 with potential bonuses tacking on another 275 percent (his enthusiasm for working for $1 a year plus stock apparently having waned). Whittle retains 4 percent of Edison shares.

According to Eduventures, which tracks the "education industry," private investment in education fell from $2.9 billion in 2000 to $255 million in 2002. Whatta time to get into the market.

Excuse me, was all the Enron stock spoken for?

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THE "BECAUSE PIGLETS ARE CUTER THAN KIDS" AWARD
TO:

JEB BUSH


Bush opposed Florida's small-class-size referendum in the November 2002 election on the grounds that it would cost "at least $27.5 billion, which would require the Legislature to make some combination of drastic cuts in critical services to our most vulnerable citizens and enormous tax increases. Health, social services for children and seniors, and environmental programs would all be at risk ."

Critics thought Bush opposed the referendum because it would cost him face with brother George in their race to see who can cut taxes most. Jeb had pushed through $1.5 billion since election in 1998, including a $428 million package in 2002. More breaks were coming, but the passage of the class size referendum, along with a costly high-speed rail referendum would imperil his capacity to deliver them.

Just prior to the vote, Bush told a reporter he had "devious plans" to torpedo the amendment. Bush later explained that he was joking.

Some observers noted that Bush was not opposing the pregnant pig constitutional amendment referendum. Wags pointed out that some South Florida schools, were so crowded that if the amendment passed, pigs might be getting better treatment than kids (the amendment reads, in part, "It shall be unlawful for any person to confine a pig during pregnancy in an enclosure, or to tether a pig during pregnancy, on a farm in such a way that she is prevented from turning around freely)."

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THE "PARENTS DON'T NEED TO KNOW WHAT THEIR KIDS ARE TESTED ON"
AWARD TO:

JEB BUSH


Some Florida parents decided it was not enough to be able to see their kids' scores on the FCAT--the test Florida uses to evaluate schools. They wanted to see the tests, too. "We feel strongly that any test used to make life-altering decisions about children should be subject to scrutiny," said Gloria Pipkin, parent and founder of the Florida Coalition for Assessment Reform. Pipkin said such scrutiny is important because test-scoring companies make mistakes. She pointed to Minnesota where 8000 students were told they had failed that state's test when, in fact, they had passed--National Computer Systems (NCS) had used a faulty scoring key (Martin Swaden, the Minnesota parent--and lawyer--whose threat of a lawsuit finally persuaded Minnesota to let him see his child's test wherein he found the scoring mistakes, received "The Concerned Dad Doggedness Golden Apple Award" in the 13th Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education, Phi Delta Kappan, October, 2003. NCS should probably get something like the Ivan Boesky 'Greed is Good' Rotten Apple for its shoddy work).

Petitioning parents also wanted to know where their kids might have gone wrong in order to help them. Tough, said governor Jeb. "If you had to every year recast the test and redo the questions rather than rotate them, as is done now, it'd be millions of dollars." Governor Jeb did not explain how New York and Massachusetts manage to afford to release their tests each year.

One parent, Steven Cooper, sued, arguing that the test was part of his child's school record and thus reviewable by parents. The Florida DOE argued that the tests' questions are not official records or public documents. A circuit court agreed with Cooper, but the State won on appeal. The appeals pointed out that the Florida School Code lists only test scores--not the test questions--as part of a student's record. The Code also makes anyone who releases the FCAT guilty of a criminal act.

Cooper decided not to take his case to the Florida Supreme Court.

It might be terrible policy, but it's legal. And it removes at least one obstacle to further tax cuts by governor Jeb.

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THE "PRIVATIZATION FOX IS NOW IN THE PUBLIC EDUCATION HEN HOUSE"
AWARD TO:

NINA SHOKRAII REES,
U. S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

Ok, this could have gone to many denizens in DOE's digs, but Rees has been quite visible of late. For a number of years, Rees was content to spew forth ideology from the Heritage Foundation, nailed by Michael Kinsley as a "right wing propaganda machine masquerading as a think tank." Now she has taken it into the public sphere operating as the deputy under secretary for innovation and improvement in the U. S. Department of Education. There she anoints something or other as the "innovation of the week."

The happy recipient of this prize one week was Bill bingo-was-my-gateway-drug Bennett, and his K12, Inc. While one might wonder about the wisdom of a public official plumping for a for-profit company whose income is mostly from taxpayers' dollars, one could wonder even more about how Rees knew that K12 offers a "world class" curriculum. Could she, if asked, produce that great desideratum of the Department of Education, a corpus of "scientifically based research" that permits this conclusion?

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THE "LEAVE NO CHILD BEHIND MEANS MAKE 'EM VANISH" AWARD
TO:

THE LONE STAR STATE OF TEXAS

WITH THE WORM IN THE APPLE GRACED UPON THE

HOUSTON INDEPENDENT SCHOOL DISTRICT


This award takes its name from the title of an essay by politically incorrect Bill Maher in, of all places, the Houston Chronicle. Observing that when George W. Bush was governor of Texas the Houston schools listed their dropout rate as 1.5 percent, since revised to 40 percent (no doubt, I imagine, by some unemployed Arthur Anderson accountant), Maher pointed to the sheer chutzpah of Texas/Houston's claim. "If you call your law No Child Left Behind, it does take a special kind of Texas-size nerve to then treat those children like cards in a gin rummy hand where you get to ditch the two low ones, and where bodies just disappear like dissidents in Argentina."