How the "Cons" Are Screwing Middle Class Children, Parents and Our Nation's Future by Destroying Public Education

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By Thom Hartmann (about the author) Page 2 of 2 page(s)

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Testing has gone from being insignificant-basically just IQ tests-during the Golden Age of the middle class to being a million-dollar-a-year industry in the Reagan eighties to a multibillion-dollar annual industry after the passage of NCLB. They've used it as a way to privatize another part of education.

Combine that with the relentless pressure for school vouchers, the federal aid programs to religious schools, and the ongoing conservative assaults on every teacher's union contract that comes up for renewal and you get it that they want to destroy public education by completely privatizing it. The result will be that the rich won't see any difference (they're already sending their kids to private prep schools like Andover, where both George Bushes went), the poor will be left with a few token dregs of education, and the middle class will be squeezed even harder.

No Child Left Behind has really sped up this process. Once a school district accepts the federal money for NCLB, it has to agree to the federally mandated and corporate-run scoring system. And if your school fails the test twice in a row, you have to give kids the option of going to another school and then pay for their transportation. But there is no money budgeted to pay for that transportation. And every kid a school loses means fewer state and federal dollars for that school.

What school districts are finding is that they are getting screwed. The state of Utah, for example, one of the most conservative states in the Union, has refused to abide by the requirements of the law. And other states may soon follow.

The real problem with NCLB, however, is not that it is underfunded. The problem is the assumption that you can commodify education at all. You can't.

The No Child Left Behind Act, and other school-privatizing schemes, is really a blowback to a nineteenth-century "create kids for the factories" model of education. Teaching for the test is the worst thing you can do. Want to teach a child to hate learning? Drill them and you'll do that.

Different kids learn in different ways. The most powerful thing a teacher can do is not to make sure that a child has memorized a test but rather to ignite in that child a passion for learning, a love of knowledge. It's to bring back their natural curiosity.

Children love to learn. In just their first few years, they learn a language, how to interact in a family, and a million details. Kids don't fail-schools fail. And part of that failure is the result of the cons' meddling with our schools in an effort to break them so that they can say, "See? We told you public education isn't any good. Now let's hand it over to the business sector." And then we're back to the old rigid caste system in which the only people who get a good education are the children of the wealthy and the corporate elite.

Education is not a consumer product. Schools are not a commercial activity. They are part of the commons and essential to a functioning democracy. We have an obligation to make education work because we are creating the future of our country in our schools.

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Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning New York Times best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk program on the Air America Radio Network, live noon-3 PM ET. more...)

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