school's out forever

The next couple of Chris Bell posts are gonna be a sort of good cop/bad cop thing. First, the bad cop. I did ask Bell about education as Demophoenix stated. And, like Demo, I was kindasorta trying to ask about funding. I was also (bad liberal! bad liberal!) kindasorta asking about states' rights.

Problem is, my questions didn't get answered that way.

I wanted Bell to discuss the current battles that are going on between various states and the federal government over No Child Left Behind and standardized testing. Several states are already finding that the federal government's unfunded requirements (which will only grow more draconian and probably more unfunded over the next ten years) are impossible to meet. Texas is currently being fined hundreds of thousands of dollars because more students with learning disabilities were exempted from the TAKS than are allowed under NCLB. Utah has passed a state law to allow school districts to ignore provisions of Nickeby that conflict with state law. And Connecticut is suing the federal government over the whole mess. So it's not just Texas, and its not just Shirley Neely.

Bell took the opportunity to discuss his "moonshot": a rather vaguely worded "goal" of having the best educational system in the United States within a decade. Of course, that brings us to about the time that the worst of Nickleby's "average yearly progress" requirements kick in.

Bell wasn't too specific about how this would happen other than the vague don't-like-standardized-tests-but-have-to-have-some-measurement. And some "that doesn't have to mean cookie-cutter solutions, doesn't have to mean one-size-fits-all." I'd honestly like to hear the details but I also wanted my questions about funding answered. So I started, "As written, Nickleby is one-size-fits-all and is cookie-cutter. . . " I wanted to finish, "if we can't meet these requirements, how will you make up the money the feds take away?"

But Bell cut me off, bristling, that "what Shirley Neeley is doing is finding ways to exempt kids to get around the law so schools can look better than they are. I've seen them do it. We can't do that."

At that point his position was clear, as was the fact that he needs to do some more thinking about his education policy. I just finished up by asking if he was actually maintaining that we could have his moonshot and Nickleby, too. He said we could.

Of course, the whole thing about schools finding ways to exempt students is becoming as much a part of right-wing mythology as the old welfare queens were. I hate to see us feed into that. There are slews of learning disabled kids, abused kids, and newly-arrived immigrants that need to be either a) more flexibly tested, or b) served by programs that will need money to function. And what would Virgil Van Camp say if we suddenly started throwing more money at teaching English to immigrant kids?

We educators are doing our best to serve all the kids, we're doing it without enough money, and we're being used as a scapegoat by politicans of all political persuasions. I've seen us do it.

SPACEDARK