Dr. Estrop is not making up the NCLB privatization meme. His arguments are clearly established in the political discourse, propaganda efforts, special interest instigations of our times.
Dr. Estrop is a public educator, who believes in the mission of public schools within the American democratic tradition. He's in a battle for public opinion. Like it or not, it comes with the territory of his position. I commend him for drawing attention to the structural agenda and public education model through which he labors. I would expect nothing less from a public school superintendent. He has put the community on notice about strategic threats to its assets.
To paint him as a self-interested whiner is to lead us astray from the substantial challenges and political stakes at hand.
There’s ample material to support the fact that Dr. Estrop’s point about NCLB and privatization can be argued by reasonable people.
Wikipedia captures salients that resonate with several of Dr. Estrop’s points:
• NCLB is designed to set the stage for the eventual privatization of the U.S. public school system: reports about struggling schools sour public opinion and may cause more and more voters to question the viability of public education.
• NCLB violates conservative principles by federalizing education and setting a precedent for further erosion of state and local control. Libertarians and some conservatives believe that the federal government has no constitutional authority in education.
• NCLB is a covert flushing mechanism developed by Rod Paige to eliminate the Department of Education by requiring unreachable high standards to fail a disproportionate amount of schools and reduce the amount of federal funding handed out so that eventually the individual states would pay entirely for their school system and defederalize all education (which some might see as a good thing).
• Students with learning disabilities do not receive extra help when taking the standardized tests, and can jeopardize the assigned rating the entire school is given.
• Students who are learning English as a second language are expected to take the standardized tests and show proficiency equal to their English-speaking peers, when it is proven that English-Language-Learners take between 5 and 10 years to "catch up" to grade-level proficiency.
For more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Child_Left_Behind_Act
Barbara Miner, writing for In These Times, offers this:
“Not surprisingly, there is escalating concern that NCLB will be used to label all of public education a failure, thus paving the way for privatization via for-profit private management companies and vouchers for private and religious schools.
Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont, a former Republican who became an independent in large part because of the party’s hypocrisy on education, has called NCLB “a back door to anything that will let the private sector take over public education, something the Republicans have wanted for years.â€Â
What makes the Bush agenda so dangerous is that it weds conservatives’ fever for privatization to fundamentalists’ devotion to religious education. Both groups see a chance to capture large chunks of the roughly $350 billion spent annually on K-12 public education.
Bush has left it to Secretary of Education Rod Paige to take the vanguard in denigrating public schools while extolling religious education. “All things being equal, I would prefer to have a child in a school that has a strong appreciation for Christian values where a child is taught to have a strong faith,†said Paige, according to the news service of the Southern Baptist Convention in April 2003. “In a religious environment, the value system is set. That’s not the case in a public school where there are so many kids with different values and different faiths.â€Â
A quarter-century ago, Ronald Reagan launched the conservative counterrevolution with his winning mix of conservative economic policy and right-wing social agendaâ€â€and masking it all with warm and fuzzy rhetoric. Since then, hard-core Republican policies have gained strength and now dominate all three branches of government.â€Â
For more:
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/a ... l_children
Corpwatch sheds this light:
“Under NCLB, if a school fails to improve math and reading test scores within three years, a portion of its federal funding will be diverted to "parental choice" tutoring programs further weakening the schools ability to improve. These outsourced programs are run by private companies such as Educate Inc. owner of Sylvan Learning Centers whose revenues have grown from $180 to $250 million in the past three years and whose profits shot up 250% last year.
Ironically, while school districts will be required to certify that the percentage of their teaching staff who have teaching credentials is increasing, private tutoring companies, the replacement recipients of tutoring funds, will be under no such requirement to prove that their staff even have such credentials.
The big impact of NCLB still lies in the future. Like the so-called welfare reform act, it will be some years down the road that the real price will be paid. After five years, the act requires that low-performing schools be converted to charter schools, turned over to a private management company or be taken over by the state.â€Â
For more:
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=11543
Let’s look at Lakewood over the next decade. With plenty of churches on the way out, there are multiple sites for charter schools intent on capturing public school dollars.
I am not saying that public school teachers should get a free pass. In fact, I believe that they should make every effort to reside in the city and contribute to the norms with their human capital. Otherwise charter schools with Lakewood residents will likely create compelling value propositions for parents, students and taxpayers.
Bottom line is all public traditions are under attack. There are grounds for attack.
Those who labor in public institutions must be attentive to the struggle; they must energetic enough to discern a path beyond their own self-interest, creating value and serving the public good in ways that the free market does not.
Kenneth Warren
