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Re: The Injurious School Culture Enforced by High-Stakes Testing
Posted:
Nov 22, 2012 4:26 PM
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On Thu, Nov 22, 2012 at 8:14 AM, Haim <hpipik@netzero.com> wrote:
> So, according to David Denby, the leader of the Democratic Party and the most socialist President of The Republic in living memory conspires with the "conservative wing" of the Education Mafia, exactly to what end is not clear. They are aided and abetted by governors (among whom are many Democrats) and mayors (almost all of whom are Democrats), and the Republican Party is at the bottom of it all, never mind that NCLB was written almost single-handedly by a lion of the Democratic Party and a champion of the Education Mafia, one Senator Ted Kennedy, RIP.
>
This is just yet more fact-denying mythology hatched in the pit of
economic conservatism.
NCLB was actually mostly written by Republicans associated with the
Bush. Here is some proof:
http://dianeravitch.net/2012/05/21/corporate-reformers-love-lofty-goals/
Quote: "(By the way, if anyone wonders, I was not an architect of
NCLB. I wasn't involved at any point in writing it. That distinction
goes to Sandy Kress, Margaret Spellings, Education Trust, and maybe
even Rod Paige, who was Secretary of Education.)"
Although Kennedy is listed as one of the four legislative authors of
the bill, there are two Republicans listed as authors, John Boehner
and Judd Gregg, and it was Bush's first main legislative push, one of
his personal babies.
In fact, corporate interests were behind the creation and writing of
NCLB - in the following article, just look at the long list of
corporate crony Republicans and business groups involved, based on the
Republican and conservative "outcome-based education":
http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/12-bush-profiteers-collect-billions-from-no-child-left-behind/
Quote:
"The architect of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), President Bush's first
senior education advisor, Sandy Kress, has turned the program, which
has consistently proven disastrous in the realm of education, into a
huge success in the realm of corporate profiteering. After ushering
NCLB through the US House of Representatives in 2001 with no public
hearings, Kress went from lawmaker-turning on spigots of federal
funds-to lobbyist, tapping into those billions of dollars in federal
funds for private investors well connected to the Bush administration.
A statute that once promised equal access to public education to
millions of American children now instead promises billions of dollars
in profits to corporate clients through dubious processes of testing
and assessment and "supplemental educational services." NCLB-the
Business Roundtable's revision of Lyndon Johnson's Education and
Secondary Education Act (ESEA)-created a "high stakes testing" system
through which the private sector could siphon federal education funds.
The result has been windfall corporate profit. What was once a cottage
industry has become a corporate giant. "Millions of dollars are being
spent," says Jack Jennings, director of the Center on Education
Policy, "and nobody knows what's happening."
The wedding of big business and education benefits not only the
interests of the Business Roundtable, a consortium of over 300 CEOs,
but countless Bush family loyalists. Sandy Kress, chief architect of
NCLB; Harold McGraw III, textbook publisher; Bill Bennett, former
Reagan education secretary; and Neil Bush, the president's youngest
brother, have all cashed in on the Roundtable's successful national
implementation of "outcome-based education." NCLB's mandated system of
state standards, state tests, and school sanctions has together
transformed our public school system into a for-profit frenzy.
Kress, former president of the Dallas School Board, began "A Draft
Position for George W. Bush on K-12 Education" as early as 1999.
Working successfully with then-Governor Bush in Texas for years, the
Democrat bolstered bipartisan support behind the compassionate
marketing promise to "leave no child behind" through the adoption of
high state standards measuring school performance. Signed into law in
early 2002, NCLB dramatically extended the federal role in public
education, mandating annual testing of children in Grades 3 to 8,
providing tutoring for children in persistently failing schools, and
setting a twelve-year timetable for closing chronic gaps in student
achievement. Having then crafted the legislation, Kress transitioned
from public servant to corporate lobbyist, guiding clients to the
troth of federal funds. By 2005 he had made upwards of $4 million from
lobbying contracts.
While the Business Roundtable maintains that the high-stakes tests
administered nationwide hold schools accountable to "Adequate Yearly
Progress," NCLB has instead benefited the testing industry in the
amount of between $1.9 and $5.3 billion a year. NCLB requires states
to produce "interpretive, descriptive, and diagnostic reports," all of
which are provided at a price by members of the industry. Among these
are the top four or five players in the textbook market, including the
Big Three-McGraw-Hill, Houghton-Mifflin, and Harcourt General-who
have, since the passage of NCLB, come to dominate the testing market.
Identified by Wall Street analysts in the wake of the 2000 election as
"Bush stocks," all three represent owners like Harold McGraw III, who
has longstanding ties to the Bush administration and the lobbying
efforts of Sandy Kress.
Other Kress clients, including Ignite! Learning, a company headed by
Neil Bush, and K12 Inc., a for-profit enterprise owned by Bill
Bennett, tailored themselves to vie for NCLB dollars.
Under NCLB, as school districts receive federal funding they are
required by law to hold 20 percent of those funds aside, anticipating
that its schools will fail to meet its Annual Yearly Progress formula.
When that "failure" is certified by test scores, the district is
required to use those set-aside federal funds to pay supplemental
education service (SES) providers. Ignite! has placed products in
forty US school districts, and K12 offers a menu of services "as an
option to traditional brick-and-mortar schools," including
computer-based "virtual academies," that have qualified for over $4
million in federal grants. Under NCLB, supplemental educational
services, whose results are being increasingly challenged, reap $2
billion annually.
Nationally, there are over 1,800 approved providers of supplemental
educational services, but little in the way of regulation. To the
contrary, Michael Petrilli, former member of the Department of
Education, purports, "We want as little regulation as possible so the
market can be as vibrant as possible." To that end, Kress is currently
lobbying on behalf of another bipartisan coalition to win
reauthorization of NCLB for another six years."
As for Obama being the most socialist president in US history - not
even close. He is LESS progressive than even Clinton, and less
socialist than our Founding Fathers.
Obama's health care bill is essentially the 1993 Republican Bob Dole
and Company health care bill put forth as an alternative to the more
progressive Clinton health care bill. And Obama dumped one of the most
important things to true progressives, true government-financed health
care like traditional Medicare Part A and Part B called the public
option. He dumped it in private negotiations with the drug companies
and the for-profit hospitals, trading it for their promise to not
campaign with their massive deep pockets against whatever was left.
Thus, by these measures, Clinton was much more progressive than Obama.
Obama is against the Clinton tax rates for all income below a quarter
million per year. A measure of progressivism is how far one is willing
to go to see government revenue as a percentage of nominal GDP match
the levels of the Scandinavian countries, the most prosperous
countries in the world (outside of Switzerland and a few city-states
like Luxembourg) as measured by per-capita nominal GDP. Obama's
stimulus bill was 1/3 tax cuts and there were other tax cuts of
Obama's like the payroll tax holiday and the 2010 extension of all the
Bush tax cuts (that are costing the US Treasury about 3% of GDP per
year, about a half trillion per year). Clinton cut no taxes but
instead just raised taxes (the biggest tax increase in history that
not only did not cause a recession but instead contributed to one of
the greatest expansions since WWII). The Clinton taxes caused US
government revenues to steadily increase during his presidency to
levels roughly equivalent to the highest levels in terms of percentage
of GDP (low twenties) since shortly after WWII. Thus, by these
measures, Clinton was much more progressive than Obama.
In terms of how they economically governed, democratic presidents have
become steadily less progressive since FDR, the most economically
progressive President in history. Going back to the fact that one of
the ways to measure progressivism is what they do to get government
revenues up as a percentage of GDP (as well as what they do in terms
of having social programs being purely government programs - and
federal and not state programs - and not merely subsidies to private
interests through such as vouchers or corporate middlemen - see Social
Security and Medicare Part A and Part B), FDR raised tax rates such
that the top brackets reached over 90%, and even capital gains taxes
were higher - there was more than one rate and some were very high. He
understood the need to finance Big Government of one was to have Big
Government. And consider again his Second Bill of Rights - here is
part of what this decent man said in 1944 during WWII when the outcome
hung in the balance a half a year before D-Day, in his last State of
the Union address, delivered as one of his fireside chats:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Bill_of_Rights
There is video of FDR giving this Second Bill of Rights - it was found
by Michael Moore during his research for his movie on the obscene,
ruthless, bloodthirsty horror devoid of all conscience that
unregulated big corporate capitalism has become in the US (think of
Romney's company - see the below). It is shown in this Wikipedia page
- - press the right-arrow to see it. See many versions of it also at
You-Tube by entering "Second Bill of Rights".
Finally, consider this fact: In terms of the power of central
government - federal government - the Founding Fathers were the most
liberal and progressive and even socialist bunch in US history. In
going from the Articles of Confederation to the US Constitution, they
implemented the biggest expansion of the size and scope and raw power
of the federal government in US history by far. And in terms of
government owning and operating business, they were our first
socialists by far and in a big way - see the fact that the US under
several presidents back then practiced raw socialism in terms of US
government owned and US government operated public banking:
"Mathematical economics - money is a generated resource (was
"Education spen"
http://mathforum.org/kb/message.jspa?messageID=7403816
"Financial socialism is not evil as conservatives would have us
believe - it was even practiced by the US government early in its
history, via government-created private banks that gave the US
government access to its profits so as to fund government via
significant other sources than taxes:
First Bank of the United States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Bank_of_the_United_States
"The Bank was created to handle the financial needs and requirements
of the central government of the newly formed United States, which had
previously been thirteen individual states with their own banks,
currencies, financial institutions, and policies.
Officially proposed by Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury,
to the first session of the First Congress in 1790, the concept for
the Bank had both its support and origin in and among Northern
merchants and more than a few New England state governments. It was,
however, eyed with great suspicion by the representatives of the
Southern States, whose chief industry, agriculture, did not require
centrally concentrated banks, and whose feelings of states' rights and
suspicion of Northern motives ran strong.
The bank's charter expired in 1811 under President James Madison. The
bill to recharter failed in the House of Representatives by one vote,
65 to 64, on January 24, 1811. It failed in the Senate when Vice
President George Clinton broke a tie vote that February 20. In 1816,
however, Madison revived it in the form of the Second Bank of the
United States because of rising debts from the War of 1812 and
ineffective state banks."
Second Bank of the United States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Bank_of_the_United_States
"The Second Bank was chartered by many of the same congressmen who in
1811 had refused to renew the charter of the original Bank of the
United States. The predominant reason that the Second Bank of the
United States was chartered was that in the War of 1812, the U.S.
experienced severe inflation and had difficulty in financing military
operations. Subsequently, the credit and borrowing status of the
United States were at their lowest levels since its founding.
...
The bank had a unique relationship with the federal government that
gave it access to substantial profits. Its role as the depository of
the federal government's revenues made it a political target of banks
chartered by the individual states which either objected to, or
envied, the B.U.S.'s relationship with the central government.
Partisan politics came heavily into play in the debate over the
renewal of the charter.""
And consider the only place in the US that practices the socialism of
true government ownership and control of banking, the state of North
Dakota. The Bank of North Dakota was co-founded by an American
socialist. Read:
Socialism Thrives in North Dakota
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/04/22/socialism-thrives-in-north-dakota.html
How the Nation's Only State-Owned Bank Became the Envy of Wall Street
http://motherjones.com/mojo/2009/03/how-nation%E2%80%99s-only-state-owned-bank-became-envy-wall-street
Economy prompts fresh look at ND's socialist bank
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2011099461_statebank17.html
It is very interesting that, during this almost world-wide recent
recession, the only state in the US and the only economically advanced
country in the world whose economies kept growing like wildfire and
whose governments kept doing just fine financially, not experiencing
the financial crises of other state and national governments, were the
only state in the US that practices the socialism of government
ownership and control of banking and the only economically advanced
country in the world whose government owns and controls essentially
all banking in the country - North Dakota and China.
What so many brainwashed against any and all socialism don't realize
is that true government ownership and control of banking yields
results in an economy that just cannot otherwise occur.
One would be more loans to credit-worthy business than would other
occur, causing more economic activity than would otherwise occur and
therefore more job creation and, yes, more tax revenue than would
otherwise occur even with the same tax rates.
Another would be, via the central planning of where newly created
money in the central banking system goes and does not go, more growth
without inflation with larger expansions of the money supply than
would otherwise occur. Compare and contrast the central planning of
where all that newly created money goes and the lack of such central
planning: In the large money supply expansion in the US in the 1970's,
where the free market and no central planning was allowed to decide
where all that extra new money went, essentially 0% of that extra
increase in the money supply became extra growth and essentially 100%
of it became extra inflation. But in China, for about the 30 years
since about 1980, there has been the same large year after year
increase in the money supply but with the opposite result that
essentially 100% that extra increase in the money supply became extra
growth and essentially 0% of it became extra inflation. The reason for
this opposite result? Central planning by the central government
involving the creation, management, and investing of money, including
newly created money. This is worth noting because the Chinese central
government has for about three decades done something never before
done - achieved growth in an economy that is orders of magnitude
greater than that of the West but with essentially no more inflation
than that of the West.
Maybe those in the West who think public banking - government
ownership and control of the creation, management, and investment of
money - is oh so bad need to rethink things.
Google the paper "Is Government Ownership of Banks Really Harmful to
Growth?" by Svetlana Andrianova, Panicos Demetriades, and Anja
Shortland. They show that if anything, government ownership of banking
is associated with higher growth.
Google the article "The Secret of China's Miracle Economy: the
Government Owns the Banks Rather Than the Reverse" at thewebofdebt.com
website, taken from "list of articles" - also click the "public
banking" link.
In this light, it is good to remember my points in
"Conservatism, Marxism, and modern mathematical economic theory"
http://mathforum.org/kb/message.jspa?messageID=7615529
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