On January 8, 2002, President George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind into Law.
NCLB, as it was known, is the worst federal education legislation ever passed by Congress. It was punitive, harsh, stupid, ignorant about pedagogy and motivation, and ultimately a dismal failure. Those who still admire NCLB either helped write it, or were paid to like it, or were profiting from it.
It was Bush’s signature issue. He said it would end “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” It didn’t.
When he campaigned for the presidency, he and his surrogates claimed there had been a “Texas miracle.” There wasn’t.
All that was needed, they said, was to test every child in grades 3-8 every year in reading and math. Make the results for schools public. Reward schools that raised scores. Punish schools for lower scores. Then watch as test scores soar, graduation rates rise, and achievement gaps closed. It didn’t happen in Texas nor in the nation.
The theory was simple, simplistic, and stupid: test, then punish or reward.
Congress bought the claim of the Texas miracle and passed NCLB, co-sponsored by leading Republicans and Democrats, including Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts and Congressman George Miller of California.
Congress mandated that every student in every school must be proficient on standardized tests of reading or math or the school was a failure, facing closure or privatization by 2014. NCLB was a ticking time bomb, set to destroy American public education by setting an impossible goal, one that almost every school in every state would ultimately fail.
It was the largest expansion of the federal role in history. It was the largest intrusion of the federal government into state and local education decisiomaking ever.
It was the stupidest education law ever passed.
Bush’s original proposal was a 28-page document. (I was invited to the White House ceremony where it was unveiled; at the time, I was a member in good standing of the conservative policy elite). By the time the bill passed, the new law exceeded 1,000 pages. A Republican Congressman from Colorado told me that he thought he was the only member who read the whole bill (he voted against it.)
NCLB took the place of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, a component of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” Program. The primary purpose of ESEA was to send federal funds to the poorest districts. (During the Clinton administration, ESEA was renamed the Goals 2000 Act and incorporated the lofty education goals endorsed by the first Bush administration.
To learn more about this history and why NCLB failed, read my book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.” To learn more about the negative effects of NCLB, read Daniel Koretz’s new book, “The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better.” To learn more about the unintended negative effects of accountability, google Richard Rothstein’s monograph “Holding Accountability to Account.”
This is what we got from NCLB: score inflation, cheating, narrowing the curriculum, obsession with test scores, more time devoted to testing, less time for the arts, physical education, history, civics, play, and anything else that was not tested. Among other consequences: demoralization of teachers, a national teacher shortage, more money for testing companies, and less money for teachers and class size reduction.
We also got a load of “reforms” that had no evidence to support them, such as closing schools, firing teachers and principals because of low scores, handing schools with low scores over to charter operators or the state.
NCLB, in turn, led to its ugly spawn, Race to the Top, which was even meaner and more punitive than NCLB. Race to the Top turned up the heat on test scores, making them the measure of teacher quality despite decades of social science that refuted that policy. More teachers and principals were fired, more public schools were closed, enrollments in professional education programs plummeted across the country.
NCLB was the Death Star of American education. Race to the Top was the Executioner, scouring the land with a giant scythe in search of teachers, principals, and schools to kill if student scores didn’t go up.
When the law was passed, I went to an event at the Willard Hotel in D.C. where key senators discussed it. One of them was Senator Lamar Alexander, former governor of Tennessee, former U.S. Secretary of Education (for whom I worked as Assistant Secretary of Education in charge of the Office of Education Research and Improvement). At the end of the panel, when it was time for questions, I asked Senator Alexander whether Congress really believed that every student in the nation would be proficient by 2014. He said that Congress knew they would not be, but “it’s good to have goals.”
So NCLB demanded that schools meet goals they knew were impossible. People were fired, lost their careers and reputations. Schools were closed, communities destroyed. Because “it’s good to have goals.”
Sixteen years ago, NCLB became law. It was a dark day indeed for children, for teachers, for principals, for public education, and for the very nature of learning, which cannot be spurred by incentives or mandates or punishments or rewards.
“You measure what you treasure,” I was told by Arne Duncan’s Assistant Secretary for Thinking.
“No,” I replied, “that’s exactly what cannot be measured.” Love, honor, kindness, decency, compassion, family, friends, courage, creativity. No standardized test measures what matters most. I do not treasure what standardized tests measure.
Farewell, NCLB. May you, your progeny, your warped understanding of children and learning disappear from our land, never to be recalled except as an example of a costly failure.
Thank you, Diane. NCLB has destroyed lives in so many ways.
I dunno. Yes, NCLB was bad, and, yes, it threw the door wide open for the intrusion of the federal government into education policy which paved the way for future laws. But compared to RttT, I think NCLB was pretty tame. It was, after all, pretty easy to game, since the law didn’t specify what tests or what would be tested. I think RttT was worse because it all but mandated Common Core, Common Core aligned tests, and teacher evaluations tied to said tests. Granted, RttT wouldn’t have been successful if there wasn’t a need for waivers from NCLB, so I get that they are all tied together. It’s a toss-up.
Many great points, Dienne. I think the point that without NCLB there is no RttT gives it the edge. But like you note, it’s all tied together. To me, RttT is simply a continuation of the same legislation (and so is ESSA).
What made RttT dangerous was that it was promulgated by an administration that was a nominal, but not actual, friend of teachers and public schools, which made opposition from public education’s natural constituencies much more difficult.
That was also the sinister brilliance of the Overclass supporting Obama in 2008: it short-circuited the best chance in one hundred years to re-orient the direction of government and investment, a chance that Obama willfully threw away.
Absolutely agree, Michael. For similar reasons, I have an even more negative reaction to Secretary Arne (NBA Celebrity All-Star Game MVP) Duncan than I do for Secretary Betsy DeVos.
Or another way to put it, “I dunno. That malignant tumor I had in my (name body part of choice here) was bad, yes, it threw the door open to spreading malignancies to other parts of my body, which paved the way for my eventual painful death. But compared to those malignancies that went into my brain and respiratory system, that tumor was pretty tame. It was, after all, pretty easy to identify and the treatment was much more focused. I think the subsequent malignancies were worse because of the all the additional treatments and side effects. Granted, the additional metastases would not have been so devastating if there wasn’t that first tumor to begin with, so I get that they are tied together. It’s a toss-up.”
Sorry, Ohio teacher, not a good point in this “argument.” It succumbs to the American disease of trying to rank everything, making distilling any issue into meaningless sophistry. It is what it is and we have to deal with reality and its consequences, not pointless, subjective rants that do nothing to add to the conversation.
Fair enough, Greg. Like I said, I consider them all to be the same legislation.
President Obama spoke at a big event in DC, attended by Bush Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings. He saluted her and said Race to the Tip builds on the foundation of No Child Left Behind. Now, that’s bipartisanship.
I could have sworn you were ignoring me.
I do think it’s interesting that you need to tell another commenter what s/he should find relevant or pointless. Personally I trust other people to make those kinds of decisions for themselves.
I look at Greg’s comment more as a concurrence than a dissent, Dienne. I forgive his tone as a lashing out at the legislation rather than at us commenters.
President Obama’s remarks are (and continue to be) discouraging, Diane.
I do believe it was my comment that Greg was referring to as a “pointless, subjective rant that do[es] nothing to add to the conversation”. Greg is certainly free to correct me if I’m wrong.
Ah! Okay. Probably easier for me to let go as lashing out. I just don’t see much difference between your comment and Greg’s (with no offense intended towards Greg, who must find tension between them). Both policies are devastatingly horrendous (and ESSA really isn’t much of an improvement).
Ohio teacher, not lashing out at all. Just pointing out another ad nauseam example of fanatic sophistry from our commentator. I do try very hard to ignore these taunts and made the mistake of reading this comment this morning. I ignore them because there is a consistent pattern of sophistry—spurious reasoning, being contrarian for contrarian’s sake—that does not add one iota of reasoned analysis to this forum I treasure greatly.
You are quite correct in pointing out that there is little difference in our points. I would argue there is none. But our commentator chooses to devolve over and over again into finding some reason to argue or rank which injury is a degree worse than another and make that a reason for disagreement. This is the kind of mindset that argues for doctrinaire purity and anything that does not meet this subjective standard must have less than pure motivations. It is similar to the essential element that made the Stalin purges, the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the most egregious excess of the East German Stasi or Ceausescu’s Romania possible—not being pure enough was in and of itself a betrayal or evidence of moral and intellectual degradation. We see this with repeated sentiments like, to paraphrase, “but, Hilary”, “Democrats are just as corrupt as…”, and the arguments made above in this post.
I should and will ignore these in the future and not fall into the trap I did today. The real world is not made up of simple classifications and categories. We often have to balance competing and incongruous ideas to move forward. Just because we value pluralism, for example, does not mean we can hold some fundamental beliefs or vice versa. There is no unitary, monistic view of the world if we choose to live in democratic republics. There is no room for ideological conformity (or purity) in the real world. And there is no need to get doctrinaire about rhetorical details to find reasons to divide us when our fundamental views on important issues are, for all practical purposes, aligned.
Although RTTT was not “an education law passed by Congress.”
Okay, fair point. Guess I had lost track of that fact. Thanks for the reminder.
That’s exactly the point that Diane made (which is also posted in Huffington Post) – Quote: NCLB, in turn, led to its ugly spawn, Race to the Top, which was even meaner and more punitive than NCLB. Race to the Top turned up the heat on test scores, making them the measure of teacher quality despite decades of social science that refuted that policy. More teachers and principals were fired, more public schools were closed, enrollments in professional education programs plummeted across the country.
NCLB was the Death Star of American education. Race to the Top was the Executioner, scouring the land with a giant scythe in search of teachers, principals, and schools to kill if student scores didn’t go up.” End quote
Diane points out that RTTT was worse than NCLB. But there would not have been RTTT without NCLB in the first place. So where’s the disagreement with Diane?
Ed reformers are holding a DC event on national ed reform. Devos is attending.
There are two charter lobbying groups invited- three if one includes The Center for Reinventing Education.
You know how many representatives from public schools are invited?
Zero. Not one representative or advocate for public schools.
90% of schools and 90% of families are simply not welcome at national ed reform planning sessions. Our schools will be impacted by the decisions of the Best and the Brightest! However. Our advocates and representatives aren’t permitted to speak. Not good enough to sit at the table with these geniuses.
Public school families have no representation in DC. It’s as if we don’t exist. It’s really outrageous that these people have so captured and narrowed the debate they now decide who is permitted to speak. The echo chamber won’t get any pushback, that’s for sure! No dissenters allowed in the club!
http://www.aei.org/events/bush-obama-school-reform-lessons-learned/
Always appreciate your info and insight, Chiara. Absolutely on point.
Am I wrong in believing that Ed Reform legislation brings to mind Orwell’s book “Animal Farm”?
All starting with the GOP and then the Dems taking it to the top….now it’s just a free for all. Both sides had their hand in this nightmare because of special interest groups looking to make a quick buck from education tax dollars. When you mess with children, old people and the infirm, whatever Being you choose worship will have a very hot place for you to spend the rest of your eternity after death.
Don’t forget that when the Senate was revising NCLB IN 2015, eventually replacing it with ESSA, Senator Chris Murphy introduced an amendment to preserve the worst aspects of NCLB, and every Democrat—including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—voted in favor of the Murphy amendment. Fortunately, the Republicans voted it down and killed AYP, thus ending the mandate of raise-scores-or-die.
Don’t forget Sen Patty Murray (D) HELP Ranking Member.
Standing ovation, Diane.
Thank you.
“You measure what you treasure”? Are you sure that wasn’t a dirty joke?
It was not a joke at the time, but I take your point. Is it like little hands?
Yes, I was thinking that if it was a man who said it to you, he might have been inappropriately referring to measuring his, uh, hands, his male hands. The reason is that, other than measuring height with marks on a doorpost as ones child is growing up, I cannot think of a way people measure what they treasure. People don’t measure their loved ones. It doesn’t make sense, unless it was a silly double entendres or just something that rhymes. I guess you had to be there.
Like everything the so-called reformers say, that quote is grotesquely false.
What is much more relevant is Peter Drucker’s statement that, “What can be measured, can be managed.”
The emphasis on testing and quantitative measures is in essence a hostile takeover of education, a means of stripping control from stakeholders on the ground, and putting it in the hands of technocrats whose purported expertise – a vicious joke if there ever was one, since everything these people do is a failure in pedagogical or child development terms – masks the greed, will-to-power and contempt for the public of the Overclass.
Here’s another echo chamber update:
“Honestly, I never see [WEAC officials] in the Capitol anymore,” GOP Sen. Luther Olsen of Ripon, a key member of the Legislature’s education committees for decades, told the State Journal. “I don’t even know who their lobbyist is.”
Wisconsin has charter lobbyists at the statehouse. They have voucher lobbyists at the statehouse.
Thanks to ed reform they now have no advocates for public schools at the statehouse.
They’re silencing public schools. Marginalizing them. Excluding them from debate.
Is it any wonder public schools have fared so poorly under ed reform governance? 90% of families have no voice. It’s as if public school families don’t exist.
It certainly cuts down on disagreements, though! Only lock step privatization supporters get a voice. No wonder they all agree. They silenced anyone who disagrees with them.
http://isthmus.com/opinion/opinion/weac-teachers-union-survive/
I think what I love best about ed reformers is how few of these people attended public schools or send their children or grandchildren to public schools.
The people who set policy for public schools? None of them set foot in public schools.
Private school graduates set education policy for 50 million public school families. People who have utter contempt for public schools and public school students are IN CHARGE of our schools. I don’t think a public school graduate can get hired in DC at this point- these ridiculous snobs wouldn’t even consider the resume.
Is anything more “ed reform” than holding a “summit” on “ed reform- lessons learned” and deliberately and carefully excluding anyone from a public school?
They don’t want any critical feedback on their policy. They want a room full of cheerleaders.
So TRUE, Chiara. The deformers just want approval for their warped out ideas.
Anniversaries like this are a great time to reflect on how—and if—our thinking and attitudes have changed. Admittedly, when NCLB became law, I was peripherally interested in the issue. I, like most of us, was still reeling from September 11th and had a hard time thinking clearly. As I recall, I didn’t think much of this because Ted Kennedy was behind it. I figured, he knows education policy and if he’s behind it, I won’t get riled up about it. Give it a chance.
If anything, the history after NCLB, which, as one not in education anymore, did not become clear to me until I became, so to speak, reacquainted with Diane. I sensed in the first year of the Obama administration that something was wrong and “The Death and Life…” started to put the dots together for me; understanding the failure of education policy and it’s consequences was a keystone to understanding most policy initiatives.
The only good thing, if one call it that, that came out of NCLB, which this anniversary reminds me, is that I no longer take blanket endorsements of public figures with whom I generally agree as a copout to be intellectually lazy. If anything good could have come out of this, I think it has reinvigorated a sense of healthy skepticism in many of us, which is essential to fostering the civic virtue among citizens that is needed to participate in politics and government. But it’s a heavy price to pay and too many of us remain numb to reality.
I’ll pat myself on the back for seeing NCLB for what it was the moment I saw it. I’m sure I was on high alert from “the soft bigotry of low expectations” remark. I very much appreciate Diane’s point that those who still favor the legislation either wrote it, profited from it, or were paid to support it.
Since you are incredibly well informed about education, both in the classroom and policy, it doesn’t surprise me that you saw it for what it was from Day One. As for your your summation of Diane’s point, I absitively, posolutely concur. When I talk to colleagues and others who don’t pay attention to education politics and policy, I encourage them to do so because it has become, at least for me, the “canary in the coal mine” to help understand politics and policy at every level. Profiteering off of policy is not new, but it has been refined, distilled and been kept hidden out in the open better in education than in any other issue of which I am aware. That’s why the value of Diane’s writing and the community she’s created through this blog is essential and valuable to us as Americans, not just as education advocates.
Completely agree, Greg. And I try to get everyone I can to subscribe to this blog.
I will note where I was taken by surprise. Prior to NCLB, our students had to take standardized tests, but you could count on the government to do whatever was necessary to declare victory. Cut scores were set to show schools were great, students were improving, and teachers were doing well. Yes, we wasted some time (1 week? 2 weeks?) preparing for the tests, but they were generally innocuous. NCLB turned this on its head. All of a sudden, teachers and schools were a scourge. I wasn’t prepared for this whiplash.
I don’t remember where I read a critique of the idea that the nation would be addressing “the soft bigotry of low exceptions” through testing, but the remark made that apparently this “soft bigotry” was now going to be turned directly into the HARD bigotry of labeling kids and shutting down their schools stayed with me.
Give them credit. They got rid of the soft bigotry when they turned it into hard bigotry
EXACTLY.
NCLB marks the beginning of harmful, misguided education policy, and we have continued on the wrong path ever since. Today our policy is influenced by the false belief that free market privatization is a solution, and yet this trend only creates more problems. There is no evidence supporting any of these free market approaches, but we continue because these views of held by wealthy entrepreneurs that buy influence to support these approaches. The only option for supporters of public education is to target complicit representatives for removal from office during the next election cycle.
YES, VOTE and VOTE WISELY. Also we can vote with our money and how we spend our time.
Host screenings for “Backpack Full of Cash.”
NCLB, fifteen years later: is our children learning?
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
One of the ironies of this legislation was that conservative friends of mine who were teachers blamed all of NCLB on Ted Kennedy. Then along came Duncan and Obama and they saw no reason to ever take a democrat seriously. School policy seemed to them to be just one more government overreach.
Nonwithstanding my disagreement with them over the role of the federal government, I have a hard time arguing with my friends who see all evil lodged in an active federal government. Moderate republicans like Alexander and moderate democrats seem to agree only on one thing, that I the teacher bear the responsibility of the failure of America. That does not get my attention.
I will cast my teacher vote for the next candidate who argues for the return of the teacher to a position of authority in our society, complete with a salary that is befitting authority and is paid for by those who have benefited most.
It is good to have goals but goals that are unachievable are unethical. They are unethical because they cannot be ‘universalized’ and cannot be prescriptive (take ye or in this case do ye). The former is that we should apply it everywhere the same and the latter is we must be able to do it.
These types of goals put too much strain on agents (the people that must carry them out), especially if jobs are at stake.
Laws should be based on good ethical theories not on sentiment. Again, any federal law dealing with education is unconstitutional anyway.
Thank you for this post.
Sometimes politicians like Ted Kennedy can make mistakes. If Kennedy had lived would he have doubled down on reform like Obama did or would he have recognized the problems?
I thought this was interesting:
“Don’t forget that when the Senate was revising NCLB IN 2015, eventually replacing it with ESSA, Senator Chris Murphy introduced an amendment to preserve the worst aspects of NCLB, and every Democrat—including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—voted in favor of the Murphy amendment. Fortunately, the Republicans voted it down and killed AYP, thus ending the mandate of raise-scores-or-die.”
It seems obvious to me that love of education reform is not just what “Democrats” do but what SOME Democrats do and that group includes progressives and moderates both. And it does not include some Democrats and perhaps some Republicans.
Presumably every Democrat or progressive politician who supported the “raise scores or die” in the past didn’t do so because they were corrupted by donations from billionaires. Presumably some were and continue to be simply misguided and believe they are doing a good thing. Are those politicians redeemable or do we hold their previous support and unwillingness to fight hard for public schools against them and support a true pro-public school democrat to defeat them in the primary?
Thank you, Diane. I always thought NCLB was bad (suspicious) in the beginning but I couldn’t explain why, since high goals are good and some testing is necessary for accountability and measurement of student achievement. But NCLB’s goals were so massive that they were unreachable. No school could meet its goals. All were bound to fail. Which is exactly the point. Years ago–after some thought–I reached the conclusion that NCLB was designed precisely to damage public schools by creating failure and then measure that self-induced failure. Measurements were needed to document public school failure so that the alternative–privatization through vouchers and tax-credit scholarships–would be seen as a better choice and thus widely instituted. For many reasons, only upper middle class and wealthy taxpayers can afford to use vouchers and tax-credit scholarships, so the working poor and lower middle class students–mostly minorities today–would be left in financially-strapped and segregated schools. I have long believed that NCLB had a secret ulterior motive: to create an education system that reinstituted segregation and increased economic inequality. The “conservatives” in the Bush administration knew that it had to be sold to liberals and democrats as a program to benefit all students to get them to buy in, and they foolishly did. I remember years ago explaining this to liberals interested in education and they thought I was wrong at best, crazy at worst. But now it is widely accepted that liberals and school reformers were scammed and NCLB was really a long con that has almost succeeded (17 states now give public tax money to private schools, 85% of which are religious, and most of these are Fundamentalist). The current push for “school choice” is similar: it is a scam. There is no good choice but simply a program to increase financial inequality and racial segregation.
late and long again.
Shortly after NCLB was making news, I downloaded the whole law in order to trace the implications for educators in the arts. I put together a summary of key points with many red flags. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ740190
Recently, I was looking for the federal role in pumping up STEM as if the nation depended on education in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematic more than anything else…ever (unless you go back to the post- Sputnik National Defense Education Act).
In any case, I found the STEM legislation: PUBLIC LAW 110–69—AUG. 9, 2007 ‘‘America COMPETES Act’’ or the ‘‘America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science Act’.
Here is one of the milder provisions.:
SEC. 1004. SEMIANNUAL SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, AND MATHEMATICS DAYS. “It is the sense of Congress that the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy should encourage all elementary and middle schools to observe a Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Day twice in every school year for the purpose of bringing in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics mentors to provide hands-on lessons to excite and inspire students to pursue the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields (including continuing education and career paths);
The next two provisions called for federal employees with STEM expertise to instruct and inspire children on these days, and to join in promoting STEM in higher education.
Here is one of the weird provisions of the Act:
SEC. 1005. STUDY OF SERVICE SCIENCE. (a) It is the sense of Congress that, in order to strengthen the competitiveness of United States enterprises and institutions and to prepare the people of the United States for high-wage, high-skill employment, the Federal Government should better understand and respond strategically to the field of Service Science.
SERVICE SCIENCE DEFINED.—The term ‘‘service science’’ means curricula, training, and research programs that are designed to teach individuals to apply scientific, engineering, and management disciplines that integrate elements of computer science, operations research, industrial engineering, business strategy, management sciences, and social and legal sciences, in order to encourage innovation in how organizations create value for customers and shareholders that could not be achieved through such disciplines working in isolation.”
With a little research I discovered that the concept of “SERVICE SCIENCE” has been marketed by IBM and enthusiasts since the mid-2000s. It is described as an academic discipline aimed at applying technology and science to “the service sector.” The drumbeat for schools to prepare students for “high-wage, high-skill employment,” began with vengeance in the late 1990s (also with a little help form the CEO of IBM).
The very last section of the America Competes Act actually anticipates the impending meltdown of the global economy. The “sense of the Senate” seems to be help us survive the coming financial implosion.
SEC. 8007. SENSE OF THE SENATE REGARDING CAPITAL MARKETS. It is the sense of the Senate that—(1) Congress, the President, regulators, industry leaders, and other stakeholders should take the necessary steps to reclaim the preeminent position of the United States in the global financial services marketplace;
(2) the Federal and State financial regulatory agencies should, to the maximum extent possible—
(A) coordinate activities on significant policy matters, so as not to impose regulations that may have adverse unintended consequences on innovativeness with respect to financial products, instruments, and services, or that impose regulatory costs that are disproportionate to their benefits; and (B) at the same time, ensure that the regulatory framework overseeing the United States capital markets continues to promote and protect the interests of investors in those markets; and
(3) given the complexity of the financial services market- place, Congress should exercise vigorous oversight over Federal regulatory and statutory requirements affecting the financial services industry and consumers, with the goal of eliminating excessive regulation and problematic implementation of existing laws and regulations, while ensuring that necessary investor protections are not compromised.
It is precisely on August 9, 2007, the day this bill was passed, that the financial meltdown of 2008 began. Members of the Congress, especially the Senate, new the nation was at risk–risk of a financial meltdown. On 9 August 2007, BNP Paribas became the first major financial group to have a “liguidity “ problem—no money to cover debt from sliced and diced sub-prime financial instruments.
The America Competes Act was passed under the administration of George W. Bush, with Margaret Spellings Secretary of Educaion. Something else happened within one month after the America Competes Act passed. The Mission statement of the US Department of Education was formally changed.
Here is what I found via the “Wayback Machine:” Changes in the website page History of USDE. See the difference in the words.
USDE Mission: September 10 2007. Despite the growth of the Federal role in education, the Department never strayed far from what would become its official mission: to ensure equal access to education and to promote educational excellence throughout the Nation. Last Modified: 07/31/2007
USDE Mission September 12, 2007. Despite the growth of the Federal role in education, the Department never strayed far from what would become its official mission: to promote student achievement and PREPARATION FOR GLOBAL COMPETITIVENESS by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access. Last Modified: 09/10/2007
The same mission statement is on the website today. Global Competition is the end-all and be-all mission of public education in the USA.
Pay attention to the date:
February 2002
The nation was still mourning.
No one from 9/11 forward was focused on anything but 9/11
and definitely not some new fangled “bi-partisan” education bill
Intentional tactic or not, it is why now – – more than ever – – we are fortunate for Dr. Ravitch and her blogs and the thousands of watchdogs across the country
Well-said, Wait, What?, well-said.
I tried commenting on this post but the comment disappeared. Funny it gets through now – there must have been some word or phrase that got it filtered.