President Obama released plans Saturday to overhaul the No Child Left Behind law, embracing the main thrust of the right-wing education plan adopted under the Bush administration, while proposing modifications that would in many cases make even greater inroads into the principle of universal, high-quality public education.
Most significantly, the administration plan would change the funding mechanism established in the bedrock Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), one of the last major progressive reforms enacted in the United States, substituting grants awarded on a competitive basis for a formula that awarded funded largely based on population.
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State governments are using Race to the Top as a pretext for wholesale attacks on job security and wages. In Florida, for example, the Republican-controlled state government is pushing for the adoption of a new state law, SB 6, that would require new teachers to take five-year probationary contracts, followed by a series of one-year contracts, meaning that teachers could face firing every school year. The law would also exclude salary from collective bargaining, with all salary determinations made by the state.
No Child Left Behind amended ESEA by favoring charter schools and other forms of privatization, and mandating a regimen of testing that has made it increasingly difficult for public school teachers to provide a well-rounded education for their students, rather than “teaching to the test” to insure that students meet the arbitrary benchmarks set by the law.
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One significant change was to abandon the goal of 100 percent student proficiency in math and reading by 2014, which was used by President George W. Bush and the late Senator Edward Kennedy to give a reformist gloss to the bipartisan agreement that produced the 2002 law. There will be no goal of 100 percent proficiency―which amounts to an admission that many millions of working class youth will be condemned to functional illiteracy and innumeracy.
Instead, the Obama plan offers a deadline of 2020―four years after Obama would leave office if elected to a second term―for all graduating high school students to achieve “college or career readiness.” This has a clear class significance: the children of the privileged layers will go to college, while large numbers of working class youth, without basic literacy and math skills, will be slotted into “careers” that would be nothing but an endless series of low-wage, unstable jobs.
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Rank-and-file teachers who posted comments on a union blog were angered by the Obama plan. One teacher wrote, “I am disappointed that we, as a union, are merely ‘disappointed’ with the president and Arne Duncan. We should be OUTRAGED.”
Another asked, “What do you think would happen to your country’s education system if the largest teachers’ union had a strike for one day to make sure what we are saying is heard? I bet parents and politicians would listen! Is there anyone in up there in NEA who is brave enough …?”
They'd be fired for not working and replaced by the thousands of scab teachers who are already out of work. Because teachers are a dime a dozen, districts and politicians can treat them like shit.
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