In Part 19, found here http://www.diatribune.com/... and here http://www.dailykos.com/... , we read the color-by-numbers interview given by former White House senior educator advisor Sandy Kress to Education Next, an organ of the Hoover Institution. In it, Kress delivered his hazy-heroic view of his rewrite of Lyndon Johnson’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act, now called No Child Left Behind. In his account of NCLB’s birth and growth, there is no mention of profiteering by corporate elites nuzzling the Bush administration and family, no mention of the billions funneled from public schools to the private sector, no mention of the scandals plaguing Reading First, the cornerstone of Kress’s education boondoggle. And, of course, there was no mention of Kress’s design of the twin rackets found inside NCLB, the testing-and-assessment racket and the supplemental educational services racket. This was Kress in soft light, as he might have been interviewed by Barbara Walters, not Kress in broad daylight, tailed by Mike Wallace.
(To review the series from the beginning, click here http://www.diatribune.com/... or here http://www.dailykos.com/... ).
No construct erected on premises of lies, deceit and even malice can stand long; the faults inherent in the design are bound to be found out, and natural forces sooner or later weaken and bring down the whole enterprise. Rarely will a single event deliver the final blow, but rather a hundred or a thousand little fractures combine and reach critical mass. In the case of NCLB, it appears that critical mass is near, and those cowering inside its walls feel the inevitable.
It really isn’t fair to say that the change in power effected by the voters in November, 2006, turned the tide against Kress’s NCLB – untold millions of moments shared between administrators, parents, teachers and students since 2001 have led to the sea change. But it might be fair to say that the shift in Congressional control has drawn back the curtain on the foundation’s flaws, and Democratic "inspectors" in the national legislature are now able to shine a spotlight on the structural damage.
Corporate elites who have profited mightily from Kress’s machine for five years have seen the change in weather, and they’re scrambling to shore up the weak beams. We already knew that Kress has worked since 2002 for Akin Gump, the global lobbying powerhouse, lobbying on behalf of a who’s who of testing-and-assessment giants: NCS Pearson, McGraw-Hill, and Education Testing Service, the folks who bring you the SAT and the numerous standardized tests administered to students in public schools across the land. But this week we’ve learned that Kress has also been retained by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the national business community’s arm in Washington, D.C. Why the U.S. Chamber? And why Kress?
It’s Kress’s crowning achievement as a policymaker that’s up for review by Congress this year. It’s the twin profiteering rackets he embedded in that law which are now subject to scrutiny. So the possibility exists that a rational Congressional majority might eliminate those rackets from the statute. And who has benefited most from them? Not America’s schoolchildren, but rather America’s corporate elite, who have already siphoned untold billions of dollars from the federal treasury through NCLB.
So who would be best positioned to protect those tunnels into the NCLB gold mine? It would be the man who designed those tunnels in the first place: Sandy Kress.
But evidence suggests that the scrutiny of a rational Congress alone may not be the only threat to Kress’s NCLB. The same market forces to which his masters’ hearts are synchronized are tolling the bells.
In Part 19, we offered some reality-based fact data gathered by Thomas Toch of Education Sector, found in a report called "Margins of Error" here http://www.educationsector.org/... . Toch’s organization uncovered some of the structural flaws in the testing-and-assessment racket. Here’s an excerpt:
It’s a demanding process under the best of circumstances. "Hundreds of people have to touch every item," says Gary Cook, a research scientist at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Education Research, who served as Wisconsin’s testing director and as vice president of state accounts at Harcourt Assessment.
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The testing industry is facing these challenges in a time of tight budgets and thin margins.
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But schools and school systems are buying far fewer of the major norm-referenced tests in the NCLB era of statewide testing. Sales of such tests are down 30 percent to 70 percent, says Cook.
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...this intense competition has led to more pressure on profit margins. Princeton-based ETS lost $18 million on its first NCLB testing deal, a three-year, $175 million contract with California, the nation’s largest market, says Anthony Carnevale, a former ETS vice president.
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"With three or four companies bidding, one always has a reason to low-ball to get into the state," says Kahl of Measured Progress. Pearson won a three-way competition in 2005 for Michigan’s testing business with a $48 million bid on a three-year contract. The second company, Data Recognition, bid $84 million, and the third, Measurement Inc., $114 million.
Market forces delivered such bad news to Sir Crispin Davis, CEO of the global Anglo-Dutch company Reed Elsevier, that he announced in February his company would sell the Orlando, Florida-based Harcourt Education, the largest part of Harcourt General. You may not recognize Reed Elsevier, but it owns LexisNexus and produces medical and legal publications.
Reporter Richard Wray of the Guardian of London wrote here http://business.guardian.co.uk/... that Reed Elsevier bought Harcourt General in 2000 for $4.5 billion but has lost almost half that value, estimated now to be worth $2.5 billion. Why? "... the unit’s performance has been erratic," Wray writes.
Across London at the Daily Telegraph, reporter Alistair Osborne put it more sharply here http://www.telegraph.co.uk/... :
Its vexatious assessment business has suffered after losing part of a contract with the Illinois education board as a result of delays in delivering tests. "Testing has underperformed and we got some things wrong," Sir Crispin admitted.
Back at the Guardian, Wray explains, "Harcourt produces textbooks for US schools and grades exam papers. Profit dropped by a fifth last year - the only part of Reed to go backwards - with problems in its testing division. But Sir Crispin, announcing a 5% increase in annual profits to just over £1bn, said the company will be attractive to buyers and could form the basis for consolidation. It competes in the US with McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin and the market leader, Pearson."
And he offers this nugget:
Analysts welcomed the decision. Collins Stewart analyst Simon Wallis said: "The education division has caused Reed Elsevier shareholders the most heartache over the last couple of years.
"Other media businesses have recently announced business units up for sale, only to embarrassingly come back to the market to say they'd received no high enough bids. However we have greater confidence in Reed Elsevier to successfully dispose of education at a good price."
Did you catch that? Market-watchers are pleased that the publishing conglomerate can "successful dispose of education at a good price."
It beggars belief that we’ve come to this point, where "education" is a commodity now traded on the open market.
Wray adds a bit of history:
Harcourt General can trace its lineage back to a New York publisher that brought TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf and George Orwell to America. Harcourt Brace & Company was founded in 1919 and the following year it had its first bestseller, The Economic Consequence of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes. The company then moved into textbooks. By 1960, when the business went public, it led the market in US high schools.
The business was snapped up in 1991 by a company that had started life in the 1920s as a cinema operator, Smith Theatrical Enterprises. Founded by Philip Smith, the company moved into multiplexes. In 1993, the merged firm changed its name to Harcourt General. The Smith family owned 28% when Reed Elsevier bought it in 2000.
Two weeks after Sir Crispin’s offer to sell Harcourt Education came a pair of equally awful notices back here at home.
"A key provision of the 2002 No Child Left Behind law–its mandate that struggling schools offer low-income students free after-school tutoring–has gone almost completely unmonitored, a study released by the Center on Education Policy finds," writes Elizabeth Weiss Green in U.S. News and World Report here http://www.usnews.com/... .
Green is talking about the supplemental educational services racket embedded by Kress in NCLB, the racket that requires poor school districts to set aside a percentage of their federal funding to pay private-sector companies to tutor students after school. As we’ve already mentioned in our series, the racket relies on paper-thin quality-control systems to drain federal funds from public schools and use them to prop up a private-sector education market.
But, as usual, Kress’s name is nowhere to be found in the report.
Private tutoring companies have jumped to take advantage of the law's "supplemental education services," or SES, provision, which divvies up a pot each year estimated to be as large as $2.5 billion. But though companies produce rosy reports, very few states and districts have any idea whether the tutoring is actually helping students learn. More than two thirds of states told CEP they have a tough time monitoring SES programs for quality and effectiveness, and three said they are "not at all" able to monitor them.
The flowing federal money paired with very little oversight is "a recipe for disaster," says Jack Jennings, CEP's president.
"You have people's tax dollars that are going out the door, and nobody knows how much is going out the door, and nobody knows whether it's resulting in any good," Jennings says.
In fact, at least two school districts have studied the programs, but their findings have not been encouraging. A 2006 study by the Los Angeles Unified School District found that SES programs improved test scores minimally, but just in elementary and middle school students, and most significantly (though still very little) for students attending a district-provided program that no longer exists.
The Chicago public schools study, conducted in August 2005, found similar results; tutored students showed reading score gains of just 1.09 points, compared with an average 1.06 points gained citywide (1.0 is a full year's growth). Tutored students' math scores grew less than a full year's expected gain, and less than the citywide average.
Both programs are expensive. For the 2005–2006 school year, Chicago planned to set aside $50 million to pay for the tutoring programs, the report said. For the 2006–2007 school year, LAUSD has set aside $56 million, according to the district's SES coordinator.
Each SES provider uses the money differently, setting the hours it will serve each student according to the fees it will charge the district. So while one company might charge under $20 per student and provide 80 hours of service, another will charge nearly $80 and provide 21 hours. The Chicago study found that expensive and inexpensive tutoring companies generated about the same gains.
Private companies draw different conclusions, boasting widespread satisfaction and report cards lifted whole letter grades higher. Education Station, a major private provider, says its pre- and post-tests show that just 30 hours of instruction during the 2003–2004 school year produced gains of 28 percent improvement in math and 13 percent in reading.
But the law calls on states, not school districts and companies, to monitor the programs' effectiveness, and the state administrators charged with that task say they are ill-equipped to fulfill it. Few, if any, have conducted studies on the programs' performance effects, and few are likely to be able to do so in the future, the CEP study found. Reasons cited by school districts include insufficient staff and inadequate federal funding.
Green notes that NCLB is subject to reauthorization this year, so hearings are scheduled to weigh the statute’s provisions. "But talk so far," she writes, "has focused on teacher-quality provisions and school choice, not the SES provisions.
Then there was this note from reporter Diana Jean Schemo of the New York Times: "Under attack for improprieties uncovered in its showcase literacy program for low-income children, the Department of Education will convene an outside advisory committee to oversee the program, known as Reading First, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said Wednesday."
Remember that Reading First is the presumed intellectual cornerstone of NCLB, the reading curriculum program that was investigated by the Inspector General last summer. Schemo writes here http://www.nytimes.com/... that Spellings didn’t enjoy a warm reception at the Senate subcommittee hearing on the topic.
In about a half dozen reports in recent months, the department’s inspector general detailed irregularities in the program, which awards $1 billion a year in grants to states to buy reading materials and teacher training. The reports also found that federal officials overlooked conflicts of interest among private contractors who advised states applying for the grants. Ms. Spellings said her office’s general counsel would examine the records of contractors accused of conflicts of interest, and remove those with actual conflicts from any role in the program.
Her promises came as Reading First faces growing attacks while heading for reauthorization. Representative David R. Obey, Democrat of Wisconsin and chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said this week that the problems with the program "make it even more difficult to persuade a number of people, including me, to vote to renew programs like No Child Left Behind," of which Reading First is a part.
Acknowledging that "there’s certainly room for improvement" in Reading First, Ms. Spellings told the Senate panel Wednesday that her department had removed the program’s leaders; expanded its staff to seven employees from two, to reduce its reliance on so many private contractors with the potential for conflicts; and accepted all the recommendations of the department’s inspector general.
Spellings reportedly beat a hasty retreat from the hearing room following her own grilling, so she missed the testimony of Dr. Robert Slavin of Johns Hopkins University, the man credited by the Inspector General with bringing the corruptions of Reading First to light. Slavin is the developer of a reading curriculum called Success for All, which was strong-armed out of several states by Reading First. Schemo writes that Slavin wasn’t impressed by Spellings’s late conversion to honorable conduct.
"I haven’t seen the slightest glimmer of even intention to change," Dr. Slavin said.
Because schools had already chosen their readng curriculums, promises to clean up Reading First now meant little, he said. He compared them to finding eight innings into a baseball game with a score of 23 to 0 that the opposing team had been playing with cork bats.
"Then they say, ‘From now on, we’re using honest bats.’ " Dr. Slavin said. "I’m sorry, it’s 23 to nothing. You can’t just say, ‘From now on.’ "
But Spellings didn’t miss an opportunity to throw her predecessor, Rod Paige, under the bus once again. Although we’ve demonstrated that she bears at least equal culpability as Paige in the Reading First debacle, Spellings has become adroit at laying blame on those no longer in public service, claiming the mantle of reformer for herself. Odd that it took two years in her Cabinet seat and a full-blown investigation by the Inspector General for Spellings to realize that Paige and others had done such a shoddy job. One wonders whether she was paying even as much attention to Reading First in her first two years as Paige did during his own tenure. But we’re not the only one pointing out that Spellings might own the lion’s share of culpability for the Reading First mess, because of her role as Sandy Kress’s helpmeet in the White House.
Ms. Spellings has maintained, and said again under questioning Wednesday, that the problems with Reading First occurred before she became education secretary.
She denied accusations from a former political appointee at the department, Michael Petrilli, who said she had essentially run Reading First from her post as domestic policy adviser at the White House. Mr. Petrilli is now a vice president at a nonprofit education research foundation.
Asked about Madison, Wis., where educators gave up $2 million in Reading First money because they would have had to drop a so-called balanced literacy reading program that they said had been successful for the district, Ms. Spellings said she was unfamiliar with the particulars of Madison’s reading program. But she defended Reading First’s ground rules under her predecessor, Rod Paige, saying the program did not exclude specific reading curriculums, but intended only to ensure that they were backed by research.
The good folks at SchoolsMatter found a hero in Slavin, too. They wrote here http://schoolsmatter.blogspot.com/... ,
Reading First has been pumping a billion dollars a year to the Oregon Mafia for five years now, and the Lyon-Carnine-Good bosses now own the vast majority of the reading curriculums across America. Such sweeping change could not have been accomplished legally, as repeated reports from ED's OIG now show.
The victims of this crime wave are, of course, the children and the taxpayers. Learning to read for children across America, especially the neediest ones, has been turned into a behavioral chain gang that is more about shaping children's minds to mouth meaningless syllables than about instilling a love for books and for learning. This, of course, is a necessary component in the the third-worlding of America, where poor children are trained from an early age to accept any meaningless job they are destined to inherit under the directions of the oligarchs. The world is flatter and flatter, indeed!
Finally, finally, a little light of day is shining under the big slimy rock of Reading First. Yesterday the Cherry Blossom queen bowed, or is that cowered, before a Congressional committee looking into the sleaze, corruption, and law-breaking of Maggie's Reading First managers. She was there to make nice and assure Congress that she had cleaned up the entire mess.
It was left up to Dr. Robert Slavin, owner Success for All, to point out to those present that Spellings's assurances were simply more lies.
With developments like these making their way through the mainstream media, it’s no wonder that Kress’s number-one friend, George W. Bush, is finding it hard to keep good conservatives on board with his signature education policy. With Kress carrying sandbags for the nation’s business community and Spellings bailing out her sinking boat fast as she can, there’s no one left from the original team to rally the right wing of Congress to trust Bush’s orders and to row together. It isn’t just Gerald Bracey announcing the various breakdowns in the game plan; even David Broder, vaunted dean of the Washington press corps, reported on – in his words – a "backlash" against NCLB.
We’ll get to that in Part 21, so stay tuned.
And to review our progress, click these links, cross posted at Daily Kos and Diatribune:
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 1
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http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 2
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Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 3
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Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 4
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Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 5
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Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 6
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Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 7
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Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 8
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Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 9
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Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 10
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Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 11
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Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 12
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Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 13
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Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 14
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Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 15
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Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 16
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Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 17
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Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 18
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Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 19
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