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Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 22

by Mandevilla

Community

(This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday, May. 18, 2007 Friday, May. 18, 2007 at 10:12:35am PDT

In Part 21, found here http://www.diatribune.com/... and here http://www.dailykos.com/... , we learned from various sources that the bipartisan majority that adopted the original No Child Left Behind as drafted and promoted by former White House senior education advisor Sandy Kress in 2001 was fragmenting as the debate for reauthorization of Kress’s law begins this year. Columnist David Broder drafted an entire column on the conservative "backlash" against the measure, and the Heritage Foundation threw its support to a replacement bill that would take withdraw federal participation from public education. At the other end of the spectrum a U.S. News and World Report writer predicted it was "unlikely" that the bill would be changed much in the current debate. But none of these dug beneath the surface to find the corruption in the twin rackets embedded by Kress in the original statute, the testing-and-assessment racket and the supplemental educational services racket, through which corporate elites close to the administration and family of George W. Bush have collected billions of dollars in business and profits.

Those elites are circling the wagons now, fighting to preserve the gains they’ve made in federal profiteering. To that end, they’ve hired Kress, now a corporate lobbyist, to work his magic once more and cobble together another bipartisan coalition to win reauthorization with few changes beyond a major expansion into high schools. It’s a tall order.

(To review the series from the beginning, click here http://www.diatribune.com/... or here http://www.dailykos.com/... . And regular readers should feel absolutely free to send these texts and links to their friends, neighbors, co-workers, family members, church pastors, elected leaders, teammates and even to members of their local media. It’s a certainty that every single community in the nation is affected by the viruses placed by Sandy Kress in NCLB. Everyone deserves to be informed.)

Even the National Council of Churches hopped into the fray in March, calling for more flexibility in the reauthorization of NCLB. Various statements by these clergy offered a vastly different picture of the law than its descriptions by Kress, Spellings, Bush and company.

The plight of American public schools under NCLB, the omnibus federal law is, "indifference, isolation, and invisibility." So said the Rev. Bernice Powell Jackson, a UCC minister who is president of the North American region of the World Council of Churches.
"In the days of Ruby Bridges, those who supported school integration were in the streets. Those who opposed school integration were in the streets. Today, no one is in the streets," said Jackson. "Schools labeled failing, face closure. No one in the streets...Good teachers burning out, buying supplies out of their own pockets. No one in the streets," she told nearly 100 attendees at the event.

"To get past the indifference, get past the isolation, get past the invisibility, we've got to wake up and dream...of new coalitions dedicated to taking back our public schools," said the Rev. Jackson. "We've got to wake up and dream of schools where children of all races and all incomes go to school together and thrive...where testing is but one way of measuring achievement."

The NCC presented a formal statement, called "Ten Moral Concerns in Implementation of the NCLB Act," which can be found here http://news.ucc.org/... . But this statement, like those made by others seeking to reform the law, continues to address NCLB at face value, ignoring its foundation of corrupt profiteering. In essence, these reforms and others seem only concerned with pruning the dead buds and dying branches of a rotted bush, rather than digging into the ground to find what’s infecting the roots.

That’s not to say that NCC’s suggestions aren’t valuable public policy recommendations; they are. But taking Sandy Kress’s NCLB only at face value validates its corruption. No one reading the three most important principles identified by George Wood, director of the Forum for Education and Democracy, in his keynote address to the NCC’s national meeting, would be moved to call a Congressman and demand an end to the private-sector profiteering that undergirds the law.

First, "America operates one of the most inequitable educational systems among industrialized nations...Any federal legislation must address this debt and insure that every child has access to equitable school resources, facilities, and quality teachers."
Second, "our current reliance upon high-stakes standardized testing is designed not to educate, but to punish...Legislation should provide for a richer, more sophisticated view of what our children are learning."

And third, "the appropriate federal role is to insure equity, not to run local schools. Reauthorization should insure that those closest to children, their parents and teachers, have the most to say about life in the classroom."

Valuable principles, all, but they miss the corruption at NCLB’s roots.

Likewise the honorable work done by educators across the nation, like Fairfax County (Virginia) Superintendent Jack Dale, continues to treat the symptoms of a sickened system rather than cure the illness itself.

Jack Dale is no anti-testing zealot, shielding the little ones from the reality of a competitive world. He's not out there with the activists who believe the No Child Left Behind revolution in American schools has turned education into a grim, mechanistic culture.
But the superintendent of Fairfax County schools, who presides over one of the highest-achieving systems in the land, has taken a stand at the schoolhouse door: "The last thing I'm going to do is subject some third-grader to tears because someone's standing over them saying, 'You must complete [this standardized test], you must complete.' That's not happening. Let them fire me for it."

As reported by Marc Fisher of the Washington Post here http://www.washingtonpost.com/... , Dale and other superintendents in northern Virginia are taking a stand against NCLB’s requirements that "newly arrived immigrant children... take the same reading test that other kids take."

And the response from the Department of Education? "Oh, yes, you will -- and if you don't, you'll lose $17 million in federal dollars," Fisher writes.

Fisher gets the surface of NCLB exactly correct:

No Child Left Behind is built on a mirage. At some point that's always just over the horizon, the law assumes, all children in the nation will miraculously read and compute at grade level, simply because they have been tested and tested and tested again. The theory is that somehow, when told the exact number of children who are lagging in achievement, teachers will agree to render the magic that they have thus far withheld and -- poof! -- those kids will become smart, cooperative and productive.
As we get closer to that utopia, it's becoming ever more clear that Some Children Remain Behind and that, gadzooks, Not Every Child Is the Same. Oh, and this: Staking everything on a test doesn't produce a flowering of inspired teaching, but rather what Dale, a former math teacher, calls an "obsessive focus on tests."

"You focus obsessively on multiplying two-digit numbers," he says, "as opposed to how to apply that knowledge in the real world and how to play with mathematics in a creative way."

But by keeping the focus on the false challenge that ties Dale and other superintendents – and millions of parents, teachers and students – into knots, Fisher, Dale, the NCC and others are continuing to give corporate lobbyist Sandy Kress, and the corporate elites profiteering from NCLB, including Bill Bennett, Brother Neil Bush, Bush family friend Harold McGraw III and Bush Pioneer Randy Best, a free pass to continue whistling past the wreckage at the schoolyards, and continue cashing their checks. At the bedrock of these headaches and heartaches is a simple truth: For those who created this odious law, the goal was never to educate children, the goal was to make money.

It’s the profit margin of these corporate giants, and their cozy connections to the Bush administration, that threatens Dale’s career.

"I've been warned that to speak frankly in this area is not wise personally or professionally," Dale says. But he's speaking anyway, because, as a good teacher, he knows that "we don't succeed well when we go punitive. You need standards, but they should be aspirational; it needs to be about incentives, not punishment."

And just as Jack Dale is facing professional risks – and probably stress-related health risks – because of demands of NCLB, the testing-and-assessment companies are facing risks to its profit margin. Guess which one of these problems will more likely be addressed by the White House during this year’s reauthorization debate?

Critics pounced on Harcourt Assessment Inc., which lost most of its $44.5 million state contract over delays -- caused by everything from shipping problems to missing test pages and scoring errors -- that made Illinois the last state in the nation to release scores used to judge schools under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
But experts say the problems are more widespread and are likely to get worse. A handful of companies create, print and score most of the tests in the U.S. and they're struggling with a workload that has exploded since President Bush signed the education reform package in 2002.

"The testing industry in the U.S. is buckling under the weight of NCLB demands," said Thomas Toch, co-director of Education Sector, a Washington-based think tank.

This came from a March 25, 2007, report on CNN titled, "Experts: Testing companies "buckling" under weight of NCLB." Notice that no article has been published on how children, parents, teachers and administrators are "buckling" under the weight of NCLB. The plight of the folks affected by a bad law isn’t really the point, is it? Accountability is a one-way street when the administration makes deals with the private sector, and we all know who got burdened with the accountability and who didn’t.

When Education Sector surveyed 23 states in 2006, it found that 35 percent of testing offices in those states had experienced "significant" errors with scoring and 20 percent didn't get results "in a timely fashion."
Illinois saw more problems this month, when students took achievement tests that contained as many as 13 errors, officials said. Illinois isn't the only state that's experienced difficulties:

Oregon's Education Department complained that a computerized test was plagued by system problems. Test company Vantage Learning later terminated its contract with the state, claiming it was owed money, and the state sued the company for breach of contract. Now, thousands of students who haven't completed online exams will take them in May the old-fashioned way, using paper and pencil.

Connecticut last year fined Harcourt $80,000 after a processing error caused wrong scores for 355 students in 2005. While that's a fraction of the state's 41,000 kids who took the test, state officials had to notify 51, or nearly a third, of all districts that some of their students got the wrong scores. The problem came a year after the state canceled its contract with another company, CTB/McGraw-Hill, after scoring problems caused a five-month delay in reporting scores.

The Texas Education Agency passed 4,160 10th-graders who initially failed the math section of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills in 2003 after officials discovered a test question had more than one correct answer.

Pearson Educational Measurement apologized last year after it reported more than 900,000 Michigan results weeks late. In 2003, previous vendor Measurement Inc. delivered 3,400 MEAP scores months late and nearly 1,000 results went missing.

Alabama education officials said a testing company mistakenly failed some schools while passing others that should have failed, due to scoring problems on the 2005 assessment test.

The number of students tested has risen sharply since the No Child Left Behind Act took effect. Illinois, for example, used to test only third, fifth and eighth graders but now tests students in third through eighth grades.

To meet NCLB requirements, states administered 45 million reading and math exams during spring 2006. At the end of the 2007-2008 school year, they will give about 56 million tests because they must add a science exam at the elementary, middle and high school levels.

As we noted in Parts 3 and 4 of our series, former White House senior education advisor Sandy Kress, the man who drafted No Child Left Behind for the Bush administration, then shepherded it through Congress in 2001, is now employed by Akin Gump, the global lobbying powerhouse in Washington, D.C., where one of his corporate clients is Pearson Educational Measurement. And we noted in Part 5 of the series that Harold McGraw III, CEO of publishing giant McGraw-Hill, has longstanding financial and social ties to Bush and his family.

Well, guess what CNN says about the state of competition among testing-and-assessment companies in America:

The NCLB testing industry is dominated by four companies: Harcourt of San Antonio, Texas; CTB/McGraw-Hill based in Monterey, California; Pearson Educational Measurement of Iowa City, Iowa, and Riverside Publishing of Itasca, Illinois.
"It's not entirely a monopoly, but it is an oligopoly, with very little regulation," said Walter Haney, professor at the Center for the Study of Testing Evaluation and Educational Policy at Boston College.

One of those four companies is represented on Capitol Hill by the man who drafted NCLB, and one of them is run by a man whose family connections to George W. Bush and his family span three generations.

And how much do these four companies stand to collect in federal funds through Kress’s NCLB?

From 2002 to 2008, states will spend between $1.9 billion and $5.3 billion to develop, score and report NCLB-required tests, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office.

It’s all about the money.

Know why I say that? Because if the goal was the improve the education of America’s schoolchildren, the Secretary of Education would be raising hell up one side of Capitol Hill and down the other about the flow of federal funds through NCLB to the private sector. But what is Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings doing?

"Instead, Secretary (Margaret) Spellings has largely washed her hands of this problem, said it's a state problem, which is a peculiar ... response because it's the federal government that has required the states to take these actions," Toch said.

She’s washed her hands of the problem. Because it’s not about educating kids. It’s all about the money.

Oh, and there is the matter of Spellings’s distraction by Reading First, the presumed intellectual cornerstone of NCLB. Reading First costs the federal government a billion dollars a year alone, before we consider the billions flowing through the testing-and-assessment racket or the supplemental educational services racket. Its two – TWO – administrators were caught by the Inspector General’s office bending, twisting, wringing, shredding, maybe even breaking federal law to make sure the money they managed would get to the right recipients, and the only response Spellings could manage to give Congress was, It happened before I got here; it’s somebody else’s fault.

That’s courage.

Leaders in Congress had a different response, according to reporter Stephen Sawchuk of Education Week (the magazine requires a subscription to get its online content and I don’t have one, so I have no link to share; I’m thankful to the folks who shoot me the text, however):

Education Department officials and contractors made suggestions to four states to adopt specific core reading programs or reading assessments under its flagship Reading First program, a widely anticipated Government Accountability Office report found. Democratic education committee leaders Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and Rep. George Miller, D-Calif, released the report Friday in advance of the GAO.
The findings confirm part of a 2006 ED Office of Inspector General audit. But they do not address OIG allegations that ED officials and panelists on the Reading First state application expert review team had conflicts of interest due to ties to certain commercial reading programs. Instead, the report attributed the incidents to poor ED oversight. The agency "failed to develop comprehensive written guidance and procedures to ensure that its interactions with states complied with statutory provisions" in the No Child Left Behind Act prohibiting federal influence over curricula, the GAO auditors wrote.

Like the OIG report, the GAO findings are expected to influence a series of upcoming congressional hearings on Reading First. The hearings could impact the program's future in the NCLB reauthorization, including Reading First's requirement that core reading programs align with the findings of the 2000 National Reading Panel report, also known as scientifically based reading research. Specifically, the report found four states received suggestions by ED officials or contractors to adopt specific reading programs or reading assessments. The report does not identify any of the states or the officials GAO interviewed.

And what do Congressional leaders intend to do about this and other corruptions in NCLB?
"Democratic leaders pledged to continue their investigation into the program," Sawchuk writes.

"I'm committed to making any changes needed to safeguard the program from abuse," Kennedy said in a joint statement with Miller.

I can think of several suggestions to begin that process, but here’s a quick one: Hire someone OTHER THAN the creators of Reading First to evaluate the corruption in Reading First.

Oops. Looks like I was too late with my suggestion.

"The government contractor that set up a billion-dollar-a-year federal reading program for the Education Department and failed, according to the department's inspector general, to keep it free of conflicts of interest is one of the companies now evaluating the program," writes the Associated Press here http://www.washingtonpost.com/... on March 31. "Reading First, part of President Bush's signature No Child Left Behind education law, provides intense reading help to low-income children in the early elementary grades. RMC Research Corp. was hired to establish and implement the program starting in 2002, under three contracts worth about $40 million."

At least Congressional leaders are aware of the connection now, and they’re opposed to it. That’s a start.

"If it's true that RMC was also hired to evaluate the effectiveness of the very program it was hired to help implement, then the conflict of interest could not be any clearer," Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House education committee, said Friday.
"It's a classic case of the fox guarding the chicken coop," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who chairs the Senate education committee.

The inspector general found that federal officials intervened to influence state and local decisions about reading programs, a potential violation of the law. RMC did not return calls seeking comment. Nor did Abt Associates, a contractor based in Cambridge, Mass., that hired RMC as a subcontractor.

Just in case there’s any question about whether the goal of NCLB is improving education or whether it’s really all about the money, CNN helps us figure it out here http://www.cnn.com/... on April 1.

RMC's share of the $31 million evaluation contract, signed in 2003, is about $1.5 million, said Education Department officials. The department declined to immediately provide a copy of the contract.
"Their role in the overall study sort of is proportional to the amount of money they received," said Ricky Takai, associate commissioner of the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, part of the department's research arm. "They do have a very circumscribed role."

Neither RMC nor Abt returned calls seeking comment.

Here’s a hint: It’s all about the money.

Is there anyone in a position of power and authority who will get that point and begin naming names?

Well, yes and no. I’ve found one who goes further than anyone else has yet. And who is it? Here’s a hint: Stay tuned for Part 23.

And to review our progress, click these links, cross posted at Daily Kos and Diatribune:
Part 1 http://www.diatribune.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...