Spellings Pulls A Gonzales

Alexander Russo's blog commentary from This Week in Education was recently picked up by the Huffington Post. Here's his take on Spelling's Capitol Hill performance last week.

The only thing saving Education Secretary Margaret Spellings

from drifting into Alberto Gonzales territory

right now is, well, Alberto Gonzales.

If it weren't for the fact that everyone's attention is focused on him, more folks would notice that Spellings has been up to some very Gonzales-like things over at the Department of Education. (You can watch a video of the testimony here.)

In response to the growing litany of reports and investigations surrounding misdeeds in the multi-billion-dollar student lending industry, Spellings has, somewhat unbelievably, claimed that she lacked the authority to take on the lenders and universities who were manipulating the system for financial gain.

In response to the scandal surrounding an early literacy program called Reading First, which independent reports have found full of conflicts of interest and unwise if not illegal implementation, Spellings argues that she wasn't Secretary then and that everyone involved - former Secretary Rod Paige, former Assistant Secretary Gene Hickock, and others - has left.

True, Spellings wasn't Secretary back then when Reading First was headed off the rails. But it's not like she wasn't there. Before becoming the EdSec, Spellings was head of the Domestic Policy Council, which oversees education from the White House.

And yet, Spellings claims clean hands.

"It would have been impossible for me to have been intimately involved with oversight of all those programs," she said last week in Los Angeles about her responsibilities at the DPC. It's a response that comes awfully close to Gonzales infuriating claims to have not been involved in the Attorney General firings, and to not remember key events.

The Gonzales-Spellings similarities don't end there.

Like Gonzales, Spellings is continually vexed by a former employee who contradicts her account of events. For Gonzales, it's Kyle Sampson. For Spellings, it's Chris Doherty, the former head of the Reading First program, who was summarily dismissed when things started to heat up.

Doherty claims that the White House was intimately involved in every step of the implementation of the program, which allegedly violated federal statutes by excluding certain reading programs from being used. ("Four Officials Profited From Publishers, Report Finds," The Washington Post)

But none of this has led to the type of bipartisan piling-on that Gonzales has endured, nor the calls for her resignation...

For her part, Spellings has done her best to address the allegations against her management of these programs, and to divert attention when she can't. She announced the departure of one top student lending official on Tuesday, just before she was scheduled to testify. ("Federal Student Loan Official Is Resigning", The New York Times) She encouraged the House passage of a student lending "sunshine" law the day before she was to appear, which took much of the steam out of the Thursday proceedings. ("House Passes Ban on Gifts From Student Lenders", The New York Times)

This editorial from the New York Times underscores the point:

“It’s not our fault.” That’s what Education Secretary Margaret Spellings seemed to say while testifying before Congress last week about her department’s failure to halt the payoffs, kickbacks and general looting of the public treasury by a lending company that collected nearly $300 million in undeserved subsidies. But that doesn’t track with the federal Higher Education Act, which clearly authorizes the secretary to disqualify from federal programs lenders who employ payoffs, kickbacks and unethical practices like those that have been found to be commonplace in the college lending business.

Gingrich decries bilingual education. Equated with "the language of living in a ghetto"

"The government should quit mandating that various documents be printed in any one of 700 languages depending on who randomly shows up" to vote, said Gingrich, who is considering seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. He made the comments in a speech to the National Federation of Republican Women.

"The American people believe English should be the official language of the government. ... We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people learn the common language of the country and they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto," Gingrich said to cheers from the crowd of more than 100.

This from the Huffington Post.

Bush's Alamo: Public Schools

Dan Brown writes about the impact of NCLB on his 4th grade classroom in the Bronx. His slice of life ran in the Huffington Post.

"P.S. 85, like most public schools in poor neighborhoods, is desperately short on quality teachers and classes beyond the bare bones; art and music are nonexistent for most classes and a rare period of physical education runs like a farce..."

"...Eddie is going through his fourth year in fourth grade because of rampant absences and standardized test failures. I need to get him engaged in school, somehow invested in his own achievement. He loves to draw and has a remarkable, natural talent for perspective sketching. I want to take down some of the mandated bulletin board material in order to put up an exhibit for his art. If he is recognized for his talent, maybe he'll be more inclined to participate in his education. But the last time I tried to finesse the bulletin board mandates, I got reamed by my compliance-obsessed assistant principal. How can I help Eddie?" ...

"...The stakes are high in inner-city schools, not for administrators and bureaucrats, but for the students. Children perpetually teeter on a precarious ledge--will they succeed in school and build self-worth, or become disenfranchised and drop out? Tragically, despite all the best efforts to help children by most teachers, the federal government, via the No Child Left Behind legislation, is taking a buzzsaw to the education and empowerment of voiceless, unwitting children. "

"...The stakes are high in inner-city schools, not for administrators and bureaucrats, but for the students. Children perpetually teeter on a precarious ledge--will they succeed in school and build self-worth, or become disenfranchised and drop out? Tragically, despite all the best efforts to help children by most teachers, the federal government, via the No Child Left Behind legislation, is taking a buzzsaw to the education and empowerment of voiceless, unwitting children.

"...NCLB, with its fixation on measuring success solely via high-stakes standardized testing, has created a poisonous culture of intimidation and compliance that hurts, not helps, needy students. "

New York Times to launch pay structure for Times Readers

The Huffington Post reports the New York Times will take its Times Reader feature (basically, an online edition of the newspaper for people who wish they were reading the print paper) out of beta on March 27th, at which point it will no longer be free. The cost - $14.95/month - will include TimesSelect membership.
The Times Reader is actually pretty great–a much more pleasant way to read the paper than at nytimes.com, complete with newspaper-like layout, great photo display, and easy navigation.

The Zero Percent Change of 100 Percent Success

By Gerald Bracey in the Huffington Post

"There is a zero percent chance that we will ever reach a 100 percent target," said Bob Linn at the March 13 joint House-Senate hearing on the No Child Left Behind law. The Washington Post identified Bob as the co-director of the Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing at UCLA and the University of Colorado. He had actually shown the impossibility of getting 100% of students to be proficient years ago by using wildly optimistic assumptions, to project 100% proficiency in12th grade mathematics166 years from now.

The article did not say that Bob is the most respected living psychometrician, a former president of both the American Educational Research Association and the National Council on Measurement in Education. But that is true. He's perceived as fair and objective. I can't imagine anyone accusing him of grinding an ax. I've known him since 1967 and the only negative thing I have heard in those years is that when he gives a speech he speaks too slow. In any case, those legislators damn well ought to have been listening closely.

"But because the title of the law is so rhetorically brilliant," Bob went on, politicians are afraid to change this completely unrealistic standard. They don't want to be accused of leaving some children behind." Indeed, US Deputy Secretary of Education Ray Simon actually said "We need to stay the course. The mission is doable, and we don't need to back off that right now." The Post article did not say if the audience groaned as Simon intoned these painful Iraq war slogans. I wonder if he also said "We can't cut and run."

What Bob didn't say is that behind that rhetorically brilliant title was a strategically brilliant plan to transfer huge sums of taxpayer money to the private sector through vouchers and the takeover of public schools by private corporations. Teddie Kennedy blocked the vouchers but compromised by permitting them to be replaced by Supplemental Educational Services. The SES deliver only a meager $2 billion of public funds each year.

"Are we going to rewrite the Declaration of Independence and say that only 85 percent of men are created equal?" This lame analogy from Lamar Alexander, mister-run-for-anything and currently a Senator from Tennessee. Of course, African Americans can tell you a thing or two about that, stemming from their 3/5 of a human reckoning in the Constitution. (For that matter the phrase' author, Thomas Jefferson, rejected it in matters academic, setting up a plan for education in Virginia whereby "twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually"). In any case equality was something we're endowed with by our creator, not something we attain by bubbling in answer sheets properly.

The whole proficient-or-left-behind dichotomy is, of course, phony. Achievement, reasonably defined, is a continuum, not part of an either/or. If we set the standard for "proficient" as a score of 80, would a student who scores 79 be "left behind?" To say so would be absurd, but that's how NCLB operates.

Moreover, the whole debate focuses on the wrong thing. From Jefferson's time through the 1940's the schools' function was civic. Jefferson argued that all governments degenerate and to prevent this, the people themselves needed to be educated. It is only in the post-Sputnik years that the focus has shifted, mistakenly, from education as necessary to preserve democracy test scores uber alles as necessary to get a job and keep America competitive in the global economy.
But test scores tell us little in the long run. A 1974 paper from the American College Testing Program stated, "We conclude that academic talent as measured by test scores, high school grades and college grades is not related to significant adult accomplishment. Though a certain level of academic talent may be necessary to complete medical school, for example, the grades of medical students appear unrelated to later success as physicians."

Thus, high-stakes testing as represented in NCLB, Texas' TAKS, Virginia's SOLs, Florida's FCAT, etc., is demoralizing and corrupting teachers and administrators by gun-barrel emphasis on something that is, in the long haul, trivial. One can only hope that some day in the future we will look back and ask "What were we thinking?

DePauw University Cuts Ties with Delta Zeta after Image Evictions

DePauw University severed its ties today with a national sorority that attracted controversy when it evicted two-thirds of its DePauw members late last year. The sorority called the evictions an effort to improve its image for recruitment, but the evicted women described it as a purge of the unattractive or uncool. See the New York Times article in the Huffington Post.