Specifically, it was designed to fail poor children. It was designed to take money away from their schools as “underperforming” so that the money could be given to more deserving (middle class) schools. And furthermore, it was deliberately designed so that schools attended by poor children can’t succeed.
At least, that is the impression I get from reading this very depressing article at The Atlantic by Meredith Broussard.
The first depressing thing I noticed while reading the article was the horrific effect that the NCLB testing regime has had on the curriculum. In order to pass the tests, you must buy the exact textbooks that have the answers expected for the questions on the test — even if those answers aren’t actually correct if a subject matter specialist looks at them. And answers from other textbooks that aren’t worded exactly the same will be marked wrong even if they’re actually technically correct. What a soul-deadening experience this must be for our children, nevermind the teachers who know that they’re not going to be judged on how well their students can perform in real life, they’re going to be judged by how well their students memorized what’s on the test. Our children are being taught that school is solely about memorizing what is going to be on the test — a soul killing experience that teaches no learning or reasoning skills that will persist beyond school days, and fosters a hatred of all things school on the part of both students and teachers.
But the article wasn’t about that, exactly. It was about how poor schools are deliberately set up to fail the tests. See, to perform well on the tests, your students must be studying the exact textbooks that contain the answers… and for many inner-city school districts like Philadelphia PA, the textbook budget is ZERO dollars.
Yes, ZERO. As in, they are NOT going to be studying the exact textbooks that contain the answers, because they don’t have any textbooks new enough to have the answers. Their book rooms are a mishmash of textbooks scavenged from other schools (I know when I taught in an inner city school I paid close attention to what the neighboring suburban school district was throwing out, because that was going to be what we used for our textbooks the next year), and assembling a complete set of textbooks for any given classroom is half the battle for teachers. They end up calling teachers in their subjects all over the city to see if any of those teachers have a couple of extra copies of the 8th grade math textbook that they scavenged from the dumpster at the suburban middle school last year. No joke. Been there, done that, got the scars to prove it.
So let’s recap: 1) NCLB punishes inner city schools if their students don’t pass the standardized tests. 2) NCLB does not provide money to inner city schools so that they can buy the materials needed for their students to pass the standardized tests. So… what am I supposed to conclude, other than that NCLB was deliberately set up to punish poor children and take away their school money to give it to more “deserving” middle class kids in the suburbs?
Of course, to do that, it had to force a mind-numbing curriculum onto the suburban students… but maybe that was a feature, not a flaw. I report, you decide. As that fine faux news channel often says ;).
– Badtux the Depressingly Unsnarky Penguin
In India, some students say they’ve got a RIGHT to cheat on tests because of answer-specific books like that.
According to one young woman with the most excellent name of Pinki Singh, “If you really want to know the truth there’s no point in studying properly. You just need to buy one of the cheat books sold in the bazaar and learn the answers. In my first year doing history I tried to study properly, but my seniors just told me: ‘Buy the cheat books.'”
So the same scam goes on in Amerika as it does in corrupt, underdeveloped India. But wait! The money that The System doesn’t spend to educate children when they’re young, it invests in them later when they enter the prison-industrial complex. Winner, winner, student dinner! For the PIC corpos, though, not the kids.
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Since two authors of NCLB were George W. Bush and John Boehner, I suspect the main purpose of the bill was to kill public education altogether. They and their cohorts have made no secret of their scorn for public schools and teachers.
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I thought it was proof of the GOPs’s contempt for learning in general. Lizard people don’t want the peons to learn things like science or math, they they might think for themselves and see the lizard people are the enemy. Keep the peons stupid and happy with their junk food and reality TV, and the lizard people are safe to plunder on.
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…”soul killing experience…”
Doesn’t that pretty much describe america for the last 30+ years?
endless war, war crimes, mass murder and now extrajudicial murder of american citizens,
ignore the poor and the destruction of the middle class,
crumbling infrastructure,
a political class responsive only to the corporations and uber-wealthy,
massive corporate corruption and criminality with little or no punishment,
militarization of the police for when the proles finally try to change things,
the war on (some) people who use (some) drugs,
the selling of our politicians courtesy of a ignorant and condescending scotus.
Shall I go on?
WASF!
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The idea goes beyond the middle class. It is intended to facilitate the transfer of public tax dollars to for profit charter schools so that even middle class schools come up short of money. Our recent Teabagger gov.candidate Carl Paladino has since bought a seat on the Buffalo Board of Ed where he rules on charter school contracts, including the six schools he has a financial interest in. To be fair to him, he has said he limited his return on investment to 10%. They don’t even try to hide it anymore.
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You don’t bother spending money to educate serfs. The Philadelphia School system is the model of what these folks want. Serfin’ USA…
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You read the wrong science fiction books, knightwork. Their belief is that the magical Free Market Fairy will educate children if we take that eeevil gubmint out of it, just like in their favorite science fiction books. Ignoring the fact that those are fiction books. And ignoring the fact that it has never worked like that, ever, in any real society, where no public education means a large percentage of the population will be uneducated. No, they want to believe, as Montag points out above it is in their own selfish short-term self-interest if they believe, and it’s amazing what you can believe if there is profit doing so, isn’t there?
Plus some of these people really are evil, like the man I met at a Republican Party get-together in Houston in 1990 who claimed that poor children chose to be born to poor parents and thus he shouldn’t be taxed to educate those poor children because it was their own poor choices that caused them to be poor. At which point I was staring aghast at him like, what the fuck? Did the man not know where children come from? Like, that whole man inserts penis into woman’s vagina thing and nine months later the baby pops out, with no choice involved on the part of the baby, which, like, doesn’t even exist when the man is busy inserting his penis into the woman’s vagina? But the guy had children, of course he had to know where babies come from, right? That was the point at which I realized that there is a considerable number of the members of the Republican Party who are not simply stupid. They are fucking nuts. In an evil sociopathic sort of way. They believe things that are literally insane, and don’t even see how their own reality contradicts that, indeed, you point it out to them, and you are the bad guy as far as they’re concerned. I’m not sure what to do about crazy sociopaths in position of power. Other than not put them in positions of power. Which seems to be a problem nowadays…
– Badtux the Magic Thinking Penguin
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Tux, take a look at Arizona. The legislature underfunded education during the Great Recession, were taken to court over it, and are now claiming poverty if they are forced to pay it back. At the same time they were underfunding the public schools, they passed legislation allowing business to contribute for ‘school tuition” to (private/charter) schools, and get a tax credit. Of course the best funded schools are in the ‘right’ areas, and thus have the most money available.
Right now, we’re looking at a 500+ million dollar budget deficit for 2015, and over double that for 2016. Add in the money the court could tell them to restore to eduction, and this place is gonna need a whole lot of Free Market Fairy Dust to fill that hole. Our governor-elect has surrounded himself with like-minded folk to ‘go over’ the budget line by line before he takes office. I’m sure, since he pledged not to increase taxes, the money will somehow come from other budget areas which his campaign backers and other sufferers of “affluensa” won’t care about.
My only consolation about the whole budget/education thing is that the previous (R) administration built this mess, and the future (R) administration is gonna have to deal with it. No blaming the (D)’s for taxing everyone and recklessly spending like a drunken sailor – not that they won’t try, come 2016.
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