Jan Resseger, one of our most articulate and passionate advocates for public education, has started her own blog. She lives in Ohio, which is one of the states where the privatization movement is moving fast to take money from public schools and transfer it into private hands.
Please consider following her blog.
Here are her reflections on the the Republican proposal to reauthorize No Child Left Behind. Note that even though the Republicans want to shift control from the federal government to states and localities, their legislation is still obsessed with testing and setting targets based on standardized tests:
House Passes NCLB Rewrite Version
This morning in a highly partisan vote, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a Republican version of a No Child Left Behind (NCLB) reauthorization. However, a reauthorization this year remains unlikely because a version previously passed by the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee is vastly different in important ways, and it is unlikely the differences can be resolved. Whether the Senate version will even be brought to the floor this year remains in question.
The “Politics K-12 Blog” at Education Week is probably the best source of information aboutthe debate in the House this week and the bill’s passage this morning. The NY Times summaryof the bill and the politics of the NCLB reauthorization debate is excellent.
Here is a summary of the bill passed by the House this morning:
- Would maintain the annual standardized testing schedule of NCLB.
- Would continue to break out students’ scores by demographic groups and economics.
- Would eliminate the federal requirement that evaluation of teachers be tied to students’ scores on standardized tests.
- Would give states leeway in setting achievement goals for specific groups of students.
- Would cut federal education funding by locking in budgeting at today’s level, including the cuts imposed by the sequester.
- Would turn Title I, which now is directed to helping school districts meet the needs of poor children, into a block grant that would also encompass programs for English Language Learners, neglected and delinquent children, rural students and American Indian children. Many worry this would further deplete funding for all of these groups with special needs.
- Would end the competitive grant programs like Race to the Top and School Improvement Grants that have undermined the Title I formula and supported grant writers and consultants at the expense of direct investment in Title I schools that serve a large number or concentration of children in poverty.
- Would eliminate the requirement that, to qualify for federal funds, states must at least maintain current state funding levels for public education.
- Would permit Title I portability, permitting parents to carry federal Title I dollars to a different public or charter school if a student transfers to another school. This would tie the money to the child, not to the school providing service and would be a very significant change in federal funding. It is a sort of public school voucher program.
While the law would reduce the involvement of federal intrusion into local schools (positive in some ways), it would also reduce federal funding, and through Title I portability once again reduce support for public schools in America’s poorest communities and neighborhoods, further threatening the viability of such schools and undermining support for the teachers there.
Thanks so much to my wonderful sister-in-law for her indefatigable efforts on behalf of a true, quality education for all children. She is my hero and my role model.
It’s transparent that these so called “representatives” are bought and paid for by the testing industry and all of those hedge funders behind the privatization movement. What makes the US different from the most corrupt third world government? The lines are becoming fuzzier and fuzzier. We really need campaign finance reform before this country goes completely down the toilet.
Shearing a piglet provides a lot of squeeling and little wool.
“The U.S. government fears an informed American people, and an informed world public opinion, far more than it ever feared al Qaeda. What we’ve called “representative democracy,” since the rise of universal suffrage in the West a century or so ago, has been an elaborate exercise in securing the outcome desired by ruling elites — preserving an intersecting alliance of corporate and state oligarchies — while maintaining the fiction of popular rule.
This ruling class has maintained its power mainly through what Edward Bernays called “manufacturing consent” — carefully restricting the range of alternatives on the table and shaping public consciousness to see that restricted range as exhaustive. The range is bounded, basically, by the preferences of the left and right wings of the corporate elite. It encompasses only measures consistent with, and which can largely be carried out by the people running, the present structure of power. Anything else is deemed “extremist” or “silly,” beyond the range of thought of Serious People.
The basic structural presuppositions of this system are justified in terms of inevitability and necessity — because it’s the only conceivable way of efficiently organizing things. For the American people, a decentralized and horizontally organized society without centralized state power, Fortune 500 corporations, giant banks and millionaire CEOs must be as unthinkable as an Animal Farm without a class of pigs (well fed on apples and milk, of course) to manage problems beyond the competence of mere lower animals. It requires distracting the public from any awareness that “another world is possible,” or that the present system exists to serve not the public, but rather the interests of those running things.” Kevin Carson
I am confused; is this rewrite the Student Success Act or something different?
“Note that even though the Republicans want to shift control from the federal government to states and localities, their legislation is still obsessed with testing and setting targets based on standardized tests:”
Isn’t that one of the biggest issues with NCLB? Does the bill give more control to the states, but the states are still required to administer high stakes tests?
They also seem obsessed with having $$ follow the child as if any program is broken into per child increments.
That is what I found interesting and thought, too. But, remember…NCLB was created by a Republican.
Before the House passed the Student success Act, I managed to come across a descriptor of each of the various versions. While they all gave more power back to the states, all but one required the use of Common Core and all of hem required annual testing.
Let’s remember that it was a JOINT creation of Ted “Chappaquiddick” Kennedy and Bush. A plague on BOTH their houses.
Is the annual testing requirements in any of the versions more reasonable than what we have now?
This is just perpetuating the existing trend of punishment for low performing schools. It’s a vicious cycle, and this new bill will only give that cycle more momentum. You have schools struggling to “stay in business” because of lack of funding. Severely limited resources across the board negatively affect standardized scores for these schools. As a consequence, fewer resources are alotted to the struggling schools, causing their performance on an already convoluted and nebulous testing system to lower even more. And so the cycle continues.
IT’S SO FRUSTRATING.
Concerned Mom…I’m not really sure if the annual testing requirements in any of the versions would be more reasonable than we have now. Three out of the four versions involve Common Core, thus the Next Generation tests and I am not that clear what all they involve since my state has not used them yet. One of the two consortia’s tests–but I can’t remember which one–is supposed to be given more than once during the year and a combined score given when it has all been taken. I really don’t know about ACT’s Aspire which Alabama will be using. The fourth version of the Act which did not require Common Core required annual testing to be determined by the state. So if the went through, it would be up to your state to decide the amount of testing to inflict on students. I am also not sure which version of the Act passed in the House.
thanks for the info. I hope that since testing is down to the state level, it will be a bit easier to opt out or perhaps ask for less testing across the board.
Well, all that has passed do far is a House version. It still needs to go through the Senate, and lately, how many things manage to make it through both the Senate and the House? Besides, I think that I also read that Obama plans to veto the Act if it makes it to his desk. So states don’t have more control yet…we need to use election time to vote in some members who will help states regain the control.