Last evening I was listening to Mark Shields on the News Hour talk about the last days of American involvement in Vietnam, when the optimistic and reality-defying propaganda was replaced by laying blame for the failure of our imperialistic hubris on the Vietnamese people who were the victims of our failed policy. Shields pointed out that the same is happening now in Iraq, as right wing bloviators line up to disparage the Iraqi people, themselves, for not accepting our goal to set up for them a culturally-blind dollar-ocracy that we might patronize for the next fifty years while draining away their oil supply.
While I watched David Brooks continue to flinch as Mark Shields wound up his points, I could not help but link those insights to the Bloomberg News piece yesterday, which reported on the most recent “research” by the right-wing crap tanks to lay blame on schools, teachers, and children for the devastating debacle of NCLB’s failed policy.
We may, however, take consolation in this orchestrated blame game, for it signals an acknowledgement by the corrupt perpetrators inside and outside of ED that the NCLB war on the public schools is an acknowledged failure. Here is a taste (stand by with a glass of water to wash it down):
WASHINGTON -- The federal No Child Left Behind law has produced only limited educational improvement because local school officials have too much power to resist change, a nationwide series of studies has concluded.“Too much power to resist change”—that's too rich! How about something more accurate like “too little power to resist an overreaching onslaught that would eventually be brought to its devastating conclusion by the dawning awareness of the American people, who came to understand that their educational system was being destroyed, their teachers pushed into becoming jailers, and their children turned into test-taking automatons who knew little and understood less.”
The 12 studies, produced by researchers in eight states for the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, credit the five-year-old law with creating some school improvement, but doubted that it can solve some of the most intractable problems.
