http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/02/20-1
Even so, there doesn’t seem to anything that can satisfy the demands of the extremists now in charge of corporate education reform in many states, including Tennessee and Wisconsin. Appeasement clearly has not worked, and the war that is now being waged in Wisconsin and elsewhere on teachers and other workers shows an insatiable hunger that cannot be satisfied by more attempts to preserve a place at the table as the chair is being pulled out from under every teacher’s professional organization across the nation. One can make a strong argument, in fact, that the Obama Administration’s early embrace of the Bush education agenda has encouraged the Far Right to move farther right faster, thus opening up public education to threats that are now shocking in their ferocity, velocity, and callousness.
The pending anti-teacher bills speeding through legislative committees in Nashville, Columbus, Trenton, and other state capitols have finally stripped away the fig leaf of “reform” that has previously tried to cover an otherwise naked attempt to achieve corporate control of K-12 education. The harsh measures against teachers, children, and their schools have never been about real achievement or real accountability or real choices or even real “economic competition in the global economy,” per the mantra of the Business Roundtable. The great majority of the increasingly-draconian reforms have deformed our schools, in fact, as they serve to mask takeover and control strategies that have placed a stranglehold on teachers and principals and school boards who work in pressure cookers as they strive to achieve the unachievable that gets even more so with each testing season.
When Gerald Bracey, David Berliner, and a handful of other researchers and educators began saying 10 years ago that NCLB was designed to created failed schools, most people wrote them off as nuts. Now that understanding of the impossible Adequate Yearly Progress targets is common wisdom among school board members, parents, and, yes, even some politicians who see that Adequate Yearly Progress has always meant progress toward dismantling public schools. Teachers of poor children have known this in their souls since 2002, but most of them have been so busy trying to perform the impossible that they have not had the time or energy to look inside the political realities that have driven these deforming reforms.
The NCLB chimera with its social justice and civil rights packaging has disguised for too long a monstrous assault on the most vulnerable that leaves achievement gaps gaping as more of the test and punish reforms turn urban teachers against their students, whose scores will determine if their teachers keeps their jobs. We are reminded, finally, at this late date that NCLB represents the vehicle for the realization of the Reagan education agenda for replacing public education with “free market solutions.” Not new, not a conspiracy, just an agenda forgotten in all the lovely rhetoric about not leaving children behind. A soft padding for a hard fist, which exactly describes the corporate KIPPs and the KIPP knock-offs that will replace the urban public schools unless citizens decide otherwise.
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