“Welcome to the city of Chicago, Mr. President.”
George Bush arrived in Chicago today to celebrate the sixth anniversary of No Child Left Behind.
The Chicago Sun-Times in their editorial welcomed the President with this analysis of his landmark domestic failure:
It has been six years since Bush signed the landmark No Child bill. Efforts to reauthorize it stalled last year, and he will likely be talking the law up today, touting its accomplishments.
He’ll find little to brag about in Chicago high school test scores.
Since the No Child law passed, average state test scores for high schoolers haven’t budged. In fact, reading scores for minority students and for poor students are lower than in 2003, a Sun-Times analysis found. There has been meaningful progress on the ACT since 2003, but white student gains outpaced gains made by black and Hispanic students.
Those numbers won’t improve, many in Chicago’s trenches say, unless the law is changed to address what stands in the way: inequitable funding, overcrowding, violence, truancy and the overwhelming effects of poverty.
“If they’re not willing to take these problems seriously … then NCLB is a waste of time,” said Andrew Martinek, a teacher at Gage Park High School, which saw a spike in violence after it absorbed a record number of freshmen in 2006. “They’re trying to force innovation without the tools.”
Fordham lies about Reading First. Perhaps they thought we forgot.
It was way back in Spring and Summer that the Reading First scandal broke. And so perhaps the great right-wing minds at the Fordham Foundation thought we had forgotten what a scam and a hoax the Reading First program of the Bush Department of Education was.
Maybe they thought we forgot about Randy Best, the millionaire contributor to the Bush campaign who was awarded the Reading First contract after giving the Bushies a hundred thousand dollars. Maybe they thought we forgot about Edward Kame’enui who got consultant fees from Best’s company and also received $400,000 in royalties from publisher Scott Foresman, which produced reading programs.
Congress, fearing a investigation that would touch Democrats and Republicans alike, cut funding to the program by 64 percent. Bush was forced to sign off on those budget reductions.
Writing for Fordham, Shepard Barbash, the former Mexico City bureau chief for the Houston Chronicle sheds a tear.
Barbash says Reading First
is among the most promising federal efforts to help the poor.
I don’t know about the poor, but the reductions sure cut into Randy Best’s income.
