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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