Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

Media Matter For America shines a spotlight on a January 13, 2006 "20/20" which seemed to view education through privatization-colored corrective lenses:

"Stossel presented skewed 20/20 segment on "stupid" public schools:

    Summary: ABC's John Stossel presented a "special report" on the failure of American public schools that included a series of misleading claims, a lack of balance in reporting and interviews, and video clips apparently created primarily for entertainment to argue for expanding "school choice" initiatives such as vouchers and charter schools."

Meanwhile, writes Talk To Action's Dr. Bruce Prescott, many on the Christian right - including powerful factions in the Southern Baptist Convention - are agitating for the wholesale pullout of children from public schools.

But,The centerpiece of the strategy to destroy America's public schools may in fact be the No Child Left Behind Act.

A recent analysis predicts that 3/4 of Massachusetts schools will fail to meet the provisions of the "No Child Left Behind" act when it goes into full force in 2014 - despite the fact the Mass. schools rank among the highest in the nation.

Further, 1/4 of U.S. schools currently fail to meet the provisions of the No Child Left Behind act:

Paul Basken, for Bloomberg News and run by the Washington Post reports:

More than a quarter of U.S. schools are failing under terms of President Bush's No Child Left Behind law, according to preliminary state-by-state statistics reported to the U.S. Department of Education.

At least 24,470 U.S. public schools, or 27 percent of the national total, did not meet the federal requirement for "adequate yearly progress" in 2004-2005. The percentage of failing schools rose by one point from the previous school year. Under the 2002 law, schools that do not make sufficient academic progress face penalties including the eventual replacement of their administrators and teachers.

The results raise doubts about whether the law is working and its results are fairly calculated, said Michael Petrilli, vice president for policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a Washington-based research group.

Now, the January 2006 DOE funded NCSPE  University of Illinois cited previously suggests that public schools are performing - in fact - comparatively rather well, and Kevin Drum, for Washigton Monthly, ventures there an explanation for the dysfunctional nature of the NCLB act, its perverse outcomes: "the Bush administration wants to see lots of public schools labeled as failures. It's basically a long-term plan to erode the public's faith in public schools and thereby increase support for private schools and vouchers."

Indeed, this suggests a dual strategy by the Christian right to defund and delegitimate America's public schools while James Dobson, Al Mohler, Laura Schlessinger and others advocate that parents to pull their children from the public school system. Dr. Bruce Prescott, on Talk To Action, discusses the prospect of the wholesale pullout of Southern Baptists

People For The American Way - as of 2003 - has detailed the Christian right's "removal strategies" :

By dramatically downsizing the constituency of public schools, a mass exodus campaign would reduce public schools' ability to mobilize support for funding and reforms. Over time, this could lead to a de facto privatized system.

Citizens for Excellence in Education, based in California, has initiated a program called "Rescue 2010" that urges all Christian parents to take their children out of public schools "as soon as it is feasible and possible." In a 1998 fundraising letter for Rescue 2010, CEE founder Robert Simonds wrote that "it is a massive job to get Christians to transfer their darling children to Christian or home schools, but it can be done."85

Directed by E. Ray Moore, Exodus 2000, a campaign similar to Rescue 2010, established a Web site urging Christian parents to abandon public schools. Moore's effort has received publicity and support from D. James Kennedy, a Florida televangelist and leader in the Religious Right movement. 86

Under the leadership of its founder and president, Dr. James Dobson, Focus on the Family, echoed the messages of other removal campaigns. Speaking on his daily radio program Dobson stated, "In the state of California, if I had a child there, I wouldn't put the youngster in a public school ... I think it's time to get our kids out."87

Talk-show host Laura Schlessinger lent her support to the removal campaign in April 2002. "Take your kids out of public schools," Schlessinger told her radio audience of an estimated 15 million listeners.88

These "removal" advocates have also received support from others such as Marshall Fritz of the Alliance for the Separation of School and State who praised Dobson for his "courageous and insightful" statement.89 Columnist Joseph Farah has also urged parents to withdraw their children from public schools, acknowledging that "I am promoting a radical idea here." Farah added that parents whose children attend public schools should understand "why I don't want my kids anywhere near your kids."90

If parents of the Southern Baptist Convention and others of the Christian right pull their children out of America's public schools, what sort of education will they receive ?

According to Dr. David C. Berliner, it will be - at least - a substandard one:

 "Educational Psychology Meets the Christian Right: Differing Views of Children, Schooling, Teaching, and Learning" [ 1996 ], Berliner finds the educational theories espoused by the Christian right "cannot be supported by modern psychology" and that "The school curriculum used in many fundamentalist Christian schools was also analyzed and found to be limited, biased, and sometimes untrue." :

[ study summary ] Among the most unrelenting contemporary critics of public schools are members of the Christian Right, some of whom seek the destruction of public education. The theories of child rearing espoused by the Christian Right are analyzed in this article. They emphasize physical punishment, the breaking of children's will, and obedience to authority. Such theories cannot be supported by modern psychology. Furthermore, these child-rearing practices are totally incompatible with the constructivist models of learning that form the basis for the educational reforms undertaken by science, mathematics, and social studies educators. The school curriculum used in many fundamentalist Christian schools was also analyzed and found to be limited, biased, and sometimes untrue. The arguments made against outcomes based education and whole language programs were found to be confused and chaotic. The antagonism of the Christian Right to these programs is based on a fear of losing control over their children's thinking, rather than any compelling empirical data. It is concluded that many among the Christian Right are unable to engage in politics that make a common school possible. They may be unable to compromise and live with educational decisions rejecting a pluralistic democracy keeping separate church and state.

Public education's success may also prove its undoing. When this nation was being torn apart by racial divisions, the schools were pressed into service to solve our differences. The courts ruled that "separate, but equal" schools were inherently "unequal." They were. So, segregation ended and all of America's public schools were integrated. Soon, after only a few courts had to issue orders sending school buses to collect children and integrate schools, it looked like the public schools had solved our racial problems. In places they did, but in too many places the problem merely took on another guise. Religion in the South played a big role in segregation. In time, it learned to shift the frame of reference for its beef with public education from race to culture. After integration, middle class whites moved to the suburbs and took the tax dollars that paid for public education with them. At the same time, conservative churches started private religious schools and an entire Home School movement blossomed. Meanwhile, affluent whites went on putting their children in private academies and complained all the more about the tuition they were paying to see that their children had the advantage of a superior education. After a while, minorities began advancing socially and started moving to the suburbs where the schools were funded and still considered "good." Then, demands for school "vouchers" began to swell and more conservative churches started private religious schools. As middle class suburban schools became more and more integrated, political movements were launched to protest taxes, starve the schools of funding, take control of school boards, and regulate public school systems into oblivion. Through it all, "conservatives" have droned on and on relentlessly about America's supposedly failing public schools. Today, calls for "vouchers" can be heard everywhere you turn. If present trends continue, "vouchers" for private education will soon be replacing the system of public schools that our nation has been developing for two centuries.