This post is one of Jan Resseger’s best, most trenchant analyses of the robust and evil plot to defund public schools. She explains how the federal government—through No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top—drove federal Test-and-Punish practices and laws into the states. Even though those two vast federal programs failed, they remain alive in the states. Their “success,” if you can call it that, was in discrediting public schools and promoting privately-managed charter schools and vouchers.

The transformation of education from a civic obligation to a consumer good accelerated the passage of voucher legislation. Meanwhile the rhetoric of “saving poor kids from failing public schools” has quietly disappeared. Red states are lifting their income limits on voucher eligibility to make them available to all students, rich and poor. Despite research showing that vouchers are worse for poor students than the public schools they left, red state legislators are undaunted. Despite evidence that most vouchers are claimed by students already enrolled in private schools, red states continue to expand them. In effect, the rationale for privatization is no longer to fund a better alternative to public schools, but to hand public money to a clamorous interest group: private school parents.

Jan Resseger begins:

The federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), passed in 2002, embodied school reform premised on the theory of test-based accountability—the requirement of high-stakes standardized tests for all students and the application of sanctions for schools unable to raise test scores. The idea was that if you threatened schools with closure or threatened to turn them into charter schools or threatened to punish teachers if their students’ overall scores were low, you could make the teachers work harder and somehow raise an entire school’s test scores. It was an experiment whose proponents believed all children could be made proficient by 2014.

By 2013, those of us who support our nation’s public schools knew the experiment had failed. Even the Congressional supporters of No Child Left Behind knew it had not worked; they created waivers for the growing number of school districts unable to guarantee all students would be proficient in 2014. In 2015, when Congress reauthorized the federal education law as the Every Student Succeeds Act, the new law reduced federal punishments, while it still required the states to test students every year and create plans to turn around low scoring schools. Test-and-Punish school reform did not end, however. Its remnants remained in the state policies that had been mandated by NCLB and Race to the Top and had been enacted in state laws.

Today after two decades, it is clear that overall test scores have not risen; neither has the stated goal of corporate school accountability—closing achievement gaps—been accomplished. Diane Ravitch explains that test-and-punish school accountability, “overlooks the well-known fact that test scores are highly correlated with family income and are influenced more by home conditions than by teachers or schools. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of public schools were closed because of their inability to meet high test score goals. All of the closed schools were in impoverished communities. Thousands of teachers were penalized or fired because they taught the children with the biggest challenges, those who didn’t speak English, those with severe disabilities, those whose lives were in turmoil due to extreme poverty.”

State politics has now, however, made it even more difficult to push back against the forces attacking public schooling. The federal legislation was designed to drive a test-and-punish agenda into the state legislatures. No Child Left Behind began by mandating testing and sanctions. Then Race to the Top bribed states to enact their own sanctions for low-scoring schools and punish teachers by tying their evaluations to their students’ test scores. And ESSA continued requiring testing all students and required states to devise turnarounds for the lowest scoring schools. While under No Child Left Behind and the early days of Race to the Top advocates across the states could collaborate nationally to push back against the federal policy itself, the school reform battle in recent years has devolved to the state legislatures which enacted the federal requirements idiosyncratically into their own laws. Right now we are watching the state takeover of the public schools in Houston, Texas and Oklahoma’s threatened takeover of the Tulsa public schools, at the same time we are watching the consequences ten years later of the closure in 2013 of 50 public schools in Chicago’s poorest African American neighborhoods.

Test-based, punitive school reform has also dangerously discredited the nation’s public schools. The school accountability movement created the concept of “failing schools,” persistently condemned the schools in urban America, and accelerated the drive for school choice and privatization. Twenty years of school reform has culminated in the vast expansion of school privatization in the form of vouchers. This year, 12 states—by my count, and I may have missed some—have enacted or significantly expanded state-funded private school tuition vouchers at the expense of public school funding: Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah, and Wisconsin.

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