Schools Matter: Privatization: Remembering the Real Purpose of NCLB

Schools Matter: Privatization: Remembering the Real Purpose of NCLB:

Privatization: Remembering the Real Purpose of NCLB

Although the education scholars who had looked closely knew it, and hacks like Sandy Kress and Margaret Spelling who designed it knew it, the general public did not, and most still do not know.  EVen after the article below appeared in Time Magazine in 2008, many folks still view NCLB as a well-intentioned but failed effort. 

We know, of course, that NCLB was never designed to achieve its ostensible goal to close the achievement gaps.  But it did succeed mightily in achieving its unacknowledged goal of privatizing great swaths of the public education landscape.  At a time when corporate apologists are trying to paper over the privatization extravaganza that NCLB initiated, it is worthwhile to recall this piece.

And so, "No Child Left Behind: Doomed to Fail?" by Claudia Willis:

There was always something slightly insane about No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the ambitious education law often described as the Bush Administration's signature domestic achievement. For one thing, in the view of many educators, the law's 2014 goal — which calls for all public school students in grades 4 through 8 to be achieving on grade level in reading and math — is something no educational system anywhere on earth has ever accomplished. Even more unrealistic: every kid (except for 3% with serious handicaps or other issues) is supposed to be achieving on grade level every year, climbing in lockstep up an ever more challenging ladder. This flies in the face of all sorts of research showing that children start off in different places academically and grow at different rates.
Add to the mix the fact that much of the promised funding failed to materialize and many early critics insisted that No Child Left Behind was nothing more than a cynical plan to destroy American faith in public education and open the way to vouchers and school choice.

Now a former official in Bush's Education department is giving at least some support to that notion. Susan Neuman, a professor of education at the University Michigan who served as Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education during George W. Bush's first term, was and still is a fervent believer in the goals of NCLB. And she says the President and then Secretary of Education Rod Paige were too. But there were others in the department, according to Neuman, who saw NCLB as a Trojan horse for the choice agenda — a way to expose the failure of public education and "blow it up a bit," she says. "There were a number of people pushing hard for market forces and privatization."

Tensions between NCLB believers and the blow-up-the-schools group were one reason the Bush Department of Schools Matter: Privatization: Remembering the Real Purpose of NCLB: