Commentary––

Education Reform: Simply A Fraud

By William A. Collins

Pols do play us,

All for fools;

When they say,

They’ll fix our schools.

Educators, for the most part, are very nice folks. In my grandmother’s terms, they wouldn’t say boo to a goose. For that reason most are quietly buckling down to meet the ridiculous requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). A feistier bunch would be shouting at the president, “Liar, liar, pants on fire!”

A few, of course, are indeed shouting, but most simply don’t do such things. Neither, worse luck, does the press. It solemnly reports on each additional school that stumbles over one of the law’s Byzantine technicalities, reveling especially at the troubles of rich suburban towns. Thus neither educators nor media are doing what desperately needs to be done, namely standing on a table and shouting, “Fraud, Fraud!”

The White House presumably counted on this docility when it first conjured up the act. Education, by constitutional design, is very decentralized, and thus largely voiceless. The press, in turn, is owned chiefly by conservative investors, not a likely bunch to wage an outraged protest. Thus these foolish and impossible unfunded mandates are devastating our schools, but there is no amplified voice of dissent.

Congress didn’t mind that at all. With no responsibility for education, it loved the chance to pontificate about unfit schools without having to pony up any of its own treasure to cure them. To cap it off, Washington churlishly swiped the bill’s very title from the Children’s Defense Fund, which really does try to beef up schools.

It might be that the protest is stronger in states with Democratic governors. In Connecticut, though, both our current and former education commissioners have loyally soldiered on, explaining how our state will survive. No one believes them, of course. Real education continues to dwindle as all hands mass on deck to teach to the dreaded test. The central cities, with no prayer of meeting federal standards, await with alarm the approaching punishment phase. First they will be ordered to allow students in failing schools to transfer to better ones in town. Well, there probably aren’t any better ones, and in any case they’ll be full.

Next they’ll be ordered to close failing schools and reopen them with new staff. But with no new money. Teachers will thereupon rotate from one failing school to another. After that dodge, a dramatic state takeover will be ordered, a job for which the state has no desire, talent, or resources.

The last cynical step, prudently assuming that all else has failed, will be to order the towns to offer school vouchers. Since these will be of modest value, many will end up at religious schools, which was the main point of the whole enterprise in the first place. That’s what a hardy band of the president’s religious supporters crave, and will most likely get, if he stays in office. No money for Head Start, preschools, nutrition, tutoring, computers, books, school nurses, or anything else. Just vouchers.

Luckily there are available local defenses. Cheshire, Marlborough, and Somers have already sent back the piddling federal education money they were receiving, telling the White House to stuff it. Other prosperous towns will presumably soon do the same.

Texas, that fraudulent school system upon which NCLB was originally based, has a more comprehensive defense. It simply makes its state test (comparable to our CAPT) so easy that anyone can pass. Hence, no penalties from Washington. Then it gives other specialized and localized tests to find out what it really wants to know about the kids. So why not do that here? Texas did it to make George Bush and Rod Paige (now US Education Commissioner) look good. We could do it to evaluate individual skills and shaky schools. But without a big chunk of new money to help poor kids, all those sad schools will just keep on failing anyway.

(Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.)