Greg Palast explains why No Child Left Behind sucks

[Karmadillo]

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=101&ItemID=9514

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I can't say that Mr. Bush doesn't offer better options to the kids stamped failed. Under No Child Left, if enough kids flunk the tests, their school is marked a failure and its students win the right, under the law, to transfer to any successful school in their district. You can't provide more opportunity than that. But they don't provide it, the law promises it, without a single penny to make it happen. In New York in 2004, a third of a million students earned the right to transfer to better schools -- in which there were only 8,000 places open.

New York is typical. Nationwide, only one out of two- hundred students eligible to transfer manage to do it. Well, there's always the Army. (That option did not go unnoticed: No Child has a special provision requiring schools to open their doors to military
recruiters.)

Hint: When de-coding politicians' babble, to get to the real agenda, don't read their lips, read their budgets. And in his last budget, our President couldn't spare one thin dime for education, not ten cents. Mr. Big Spender provided for a derisory 8.4 cents on the dollar of the cost of primary and secondary schools. Congress appropriated a half penny of the nation's income -- just one-half of one-percent of America's twelve trillion dollar GDP -- for primary and secondary education.

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There are no "better options" for failing children, but there are better uses for them. The President ordered testing and more testing to hunt down, identify and target millions of children too expensive, too heavy a burden, to educate.

No Child Left offers no options for those with the test-score mark of Cain -- no opportunities, no hope, no plan, no funding. Rather, it is the new social Darwinism, educational eugenics: identify the nation's loser-class early on. Trap them then train them cheap.

Someone has to care for the privileged. No society can have winners without lots and lots of losers. And so we have No Child Left Behind -- to produce the new worker drones that will clean the toilets at the Yale Alumni Club, punch the cash registers color-coded for illiterates, and pamper the winner-class on the higher floors of the new economic order.

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[rwork]

1. NPR yesterday

They discussed NCLB. A teacher called in and said his school received a $1,000,000 grant. He said he could'nt see what they got for their money.They were presented with catalogs from 6 corporate distributors with which to buy educational materials.With no other alternatives. He said they could have used the money to hire 40 new tutors.

[rman]

3. yet more taxpayers money going to corporations

aint the "free market" great.

[rman]

2. So GOP's ploy to destroy education is coming along nicely

We don't want there to be "to much of of a good thing" now, do we?

[necso]

4. Good piece by Mr Palast. /nt