House GOP Betrayed Parents Passing the Student Success Act
The Republican leadership in the US House of Representatives has worked a tremendous disservice on its members and the American children, parents, and taxpayers. Yesterday, after heavy wrangling by Republican leadership, the House of Representatives passed HR5, the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB).
By failing to eliminate or even curb the federal testing mandates, the bill instead serves the testing industry rather than the people. Under NCLB, that industry has grown to a $2 billion per year industry. As reported by PR Watch:
School testing corporations have spent at least $20 million on lobbying along with wining and dining—or even hiring—policymakers in pursuit of big revenues from federal and state testing mandates under “No Child Left Behind” measures and the Common Core curriculum, according to new analysis detailed in this Reporters’ Guide by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD).
Sadly, standardized tests provide very little instructional value, take up an enormous amount of true instructional time, and cost the states enormous amounts of money.
Furthermore, HR5 amounts to an assault of child privacy interests. It removes protection against socioemotional profiling in the statewide assessments (eliminating NCLB’s prohibition against including assessment items that “evaluate or assess personal or family beliefs and attitudes”). Not only does it fail to protect against psychological data-gathering, it actually dictates the type of Brave New World assessments that operate by compiling and analyzing psychological profiles on children. Unlike NCLB, HR5 also requires assessment on behavioral/skills-based standards rather than solely academic standards.
HR5 also grants the US Department of Education power that it had appropriated for itself to advance its Race to the Top and NCLB waiver processes. There, the Department used grants and waivers to usher the states into the Common Core. Those mechanisms were not guaranteed, as Texas never surrendered, but they were highly coercive and effective against just about every other state. Under HR5, money is tied to the Department’s approval of a state education plan. The state plan must include an accountability structure based upon the adopted standards and assessments to ensure “that all public school students graduate from high school prepared for postsecondary education or the workforce without the need for remediation.” The Department used this same language to define alignment with the Common Core Standards and required it for approval of NCLB waivers and grants. (HR5 reinforces this alignment criteria by including that House GOP Betrayed Parents Passing the Student Success Act | Truth in American Education:
