Peter Greene writes about the sad sad story of Sandy Kress, the lawyer who is widely acknowledged as the architect of No Child Left Behind.
Kress went from power and fame in D.C. to lobbying for Pearson in Texas.
Then when Texas abandoned Pearson, Kress was really sad.
While almost everyone in the nation agrees that NCLB was a disaster, at least three people disagree: Presdent George W. Bush, Margaret Spellings, and Sandy Kress. Every once in a while, Kress publishes an op-ed piece about the greatness of a federal law that imposed standardized testing on every student in public school from grades 3-8. He did it again, and Peter takes his claims apart, one by one.
“The Bottom Line
“Sandy Kress got it wrong in Texas, and he got it wrong with No Child Left Behind, a program that virtually nobody holds up as an example of a great government program that achieved great things. And unlike some reformsters who have shown a willingness to say, “Okay, some of this just isn’t working,” Kress keeps on insisting that we are on the brink of educational disaster and people have to use his great ideas right now!
“We’ve been field testing test-centered accountability for almost twenty years– long enough that entire generation of children have been educated while soaking in the stuff– and we have nothing to show for it but corporate profits, people abandoning the teaching profession, and educational results that show the gaps created when schools dropped actual education in order to prep for the Big Standardized Test. We have tried Kress’s ideas. They have failed.
“I’m not going to argue that the Texas legislature has the answers. But they are not going to find the answers by listening to Sandy Kress.“
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Sandy Kress is irrelevant to any meaningful discussion of education. He is another big mouth interloper that understands nothing other than figuring out ways to transfer public funds into private pockets. Kress has made a lot of money trying to destroy a public institution. Everything he has supported from NCLB to so-called miracles has failed to produce positive outcomes. Why would anyone with a rational mind trust a lobbyist? They are paid representatives, not experts.
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Amen!
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Indeed, retired teacher.
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Another lawyer. There is a difference between law and Justice, just as there is a difference between religion and morality.
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yes; and a big difference between actual philanthropy and VENTURE PROFITS.
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NCLB lives on in ESSA.
The federal interventions in NCLB went beyond the idiocy of the testing and AYP calculations and consequences. The whole enterprise of federal support for educational research was placed into quests for Best Practices.
“Best practices” were defined as (a) aligned with national and state standards for achievement, {b) “scientifically proven” to be least costly and with best outcomes, and (c) “able to be applied, duplicated, and scaled-up” for wide use. This absolute faith in one-size-fits methods and means of education was embedded in the law another way.
In NCLB, “scientific proof” meant that evidence for best practices had to come from experimental research, with random assignments of students to “interventions.” That “kids as lab rats” model of research became the gold standard. Qualitative research, giving attention to nuances in teaching and learning, was ruled out as a major source of insights (ESRA Title I). The aim of the law bearing on research was to produce a limited set of off-the-shelf teaching methods, guaranteed to work and available from a USDE affiliated Web site, “What Works,” at http://www.w-w-c.org/.
NCLB also authorized funds for charter school expansion including construction and tax-subsidized financial schemes for charter school loans. It authorized federal funds for “faith based initiatives.” I wrote about the law twice…seems like an eternity ago except that so much is retained or made worse in ESSA. “No Child Left Behind in Art?” (2004), Arts Education Policy Review, 106(2), 3-17. http://people.uncw.edu/caropresoe/EDN523/chapmannclb.pdf and
(2007). “An Update on No Child Left Behind and National Trends in Education.” Arts Education Policy Review 109 (1): 25-36.
ESSA’s mischief is being played out in state plans with DeVos sending mixed messages about criteria for ratings. She outsourced guidance on submitting plans to the Council of Chief State School Officers. That group is now acting as a cheerleader for specific plans, one of these New Mexico. https://www.ccsso.org/resource-library/developing-comprehensive-state-plan-pursuant-every-student-succeeds-act-tool-0
Charter-friendly Bellwether Education Partners got into the rating game for state plans. In Ohio a representative from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation structured the “stakeholder meetings and surveys, rigging the flow of conversations about ESSA plans to exclude facts and comments about the persistent charter school frauds. ESSA retains a lot of the worst in NCLB while putting states in charge of working with the ESSA” mix of nudges and incentives to expand for-profit programs, charters, and more.
I see that the Trump administration is considering a move to consolidate the Department of Education and Department of Labor. Who knows? The economic worth of public education seems to have become the only focus of policy thinking from conservatives and free-marketers who see no contradiction in their love for tax-subsidized job training. Mind-sets for career-readiness are to be cultivated in preschool and kindergarten. https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-to-propose-merging-education-labor-departments-1529533148.
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My favorite quote from P Greene’s blog post:
“Kress points out that once again we’ve been smoked by Estonia and Poland… Do PISA scores correlate to anything important…? If we raise our PISA scores, then what benefit will the USA garner other than the chance to instruct the US ambassador to Estonia to go tell Estonians, “In your face, bitches!”
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Bethree, you don’t understand the Estonian threat to our future! Their military! Their space program! Their technology!
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