The Republican Party Moves To Further Debilitate Public Education

Last Saturday we marveled at how the Republicans were able to hoodwink the American people again, this time passing John Kline's reauthorization of the Bush Family's No Child Left Behind Act, disguised as the innocous-sounding "Student Success Act." Although hated by parents, teachers, students, Democrats, Republicans and independents, it passed the House 218-213. 

Every single Democrat voted NO, but only 27 Republicans had the guts to cross the aisle against the threats from Boehner and McCarthy and vote the way their constituents wanted them to. GOP phonies and cowards who have railed against No Child Left Behind to the voters-- like Joe Heck (R-NV), Joe Barletta (R-PA), Joe Pitts (R-PA), Steve Knight (R-CA), Bruce Poliquin (R-ME), Fred Upton (R-MI), Mike Coffman (R-CO), Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Dave Reichert (R-WA), Robert Dold (R-IL), Rod Blum (R-IA), Ryan Costello (R-PA), Carlos Curbelo (R-FL), Dave Jolly (R-FL), Jeff Denham (R-CA), Lee Zeldin (R-NY), John Katko (R-NY) and Peter King (R-NY)-- followed Boehner like meek sheep despite the outrage back in their home districts from teachers and parents.

Thursday the Senate took up their version, Lamar Alexander's so-called Every Child Achieves Act (S.1177). It passed with wide bipartisan approval, 81-17. Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz were among the few senators willing to oppose it. It is widely seen as a compromise, but in partisan terms it's more a Republican victory than a Democratic one. 

The big losers, as usual, will be American students.

One of the losses Democrats are sorest over is their accountability amendment, which the Obama administration hoped would be included in the final legislation. The National Education Association opposed the legislation, as it stated the accountability measures were too close to No Child Left Behind and would punish schools rather than offer support. Alexander read the NEA’s statement on the Senate floor Wednesday in support of a no vote.

Booker, who offered the amendment along with Warren and Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), said, “I cannot in good conscience support a bill that falls short of investing in the potential and promise of all of our children, especially New Jersey’s most vulnerable students.”

The amendment that would have required states to intervene in schools where subgroups of students, such as students of color, low-income students and English-language learners, had achievement gaps.

Several civil rights groups, urged a no vote on the legislation after the amendment failed to pass, such as The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law.

“In years past, ignoring these students or segregating them was a moral stain on our nation and that remains true. But today, it is also a recipe for economic disaster. We have been hopeful that there was a path forward toward redeeming the ESEA so that it could live up to its legacy as a civil rights law intended to equal the playing field for vulnerable students but that hope did not materialize yesterday when the senate voted down accountability,” said Nancy Zirkin, executive vice president of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights in a conference call before the legislation’s passage.

The universal pre-K amendment offered by Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) also did not pass. It was one of the last few opportunities Democrats had to include one of their top amendments in the legislation. Alexander had previously voiced his concern about how the amendment would be paid for. The amendment required $30 billion to be distributed through block grant funding, which would go to 4-year-olds from low-income families, or families who earn $48,000 for a family of four. States that provide high-quality universal pre-K to 4-year-olds already could extend their programs to 3-year-olds. States receiving that funding would provide subgrants to school districts, licensed child care settings and Head Start programs that must live up to certain quality standards. It would have been paid for through closing a corporate inversions loophole.

“States already spend money through Title I on early education. This proposal is like a familiar ring. It’s like a national school board … It’s a national school board for 4 year olds, it’s common core for Kindergarteners,” Alexander said in opposition to the amendment.

Even though the universal pre-K amendment didn’t make it through, there was some expansion of pre-K included in the legislation.

...Democrats fought to keep the portability amendment as well as school vouchers out of the legislation. Alexander and Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) offered amendments to include these provisions in the bill. The portability amendment would have slowed states to allocate Title I funds to districts based on the number of poor students who attend, but the White House criticized the idea saying that 25 percent of school districts with high concentrations of poverty, above 25 percent, would lose as much as $700 million in federal funds while low-poverty districts would gain as much as $470 million.

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), offered an amendment that would let the federal government create a grant program for schools that become “community schools,” or schools that provide wraparound services such as health care and extracurricular activities all year. Alexander said the program wouldn’t add anything that wasn’t already provided in the bill-- a common refrain from Alexander throughout the period during which Democrats offered amendments on pre-k and other programs. Still, the amendment passed.

For all Congress' fussing around the edges, most concerned voters were only interested in one amendment-- the one that lost, which would have allowed school districts to opt out of the compulsory over-testing. This will create a major roadblock when the two bills come up in a joint House-Senate committee.

Minnesota Reactionary John Kline Manages To Reauthorize Hated "No Child Left Behind"

Everybody hates No Child Left Behind, right? (Except Jeb!, whose family has made a fortune off it.) Democrats hate it, and most Republicans say they hate it. But it was reauthorized-- albeit with the narrowest of votes, 218-213-- on Wednesdsay. 

Twenty-seven Republicans bucked their party leadership and voted against the bill introduced and pushed down America's throat by the most anti-education chairman of the Education Committee in American history, John Kline of Minnesota. His misleadingly titled "Student Success Act" drove a diverse segment of Republicans running across the aisle, from libertarians like Justin Amash (R-MI), Thomas Massie (R-KY), and Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) to right-wing extremists like Jody Hice (R-GA), Ron De Santis (R-FL), Ken Buck (R-CO) and Louie Gohmert (R-TX) to mainstream conservatives like Chris Gibson (R-NY) and Frank LoBiondo (R-NJ).

Kline had to call on Speaker Boehner and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy to help him force Republicans to back this bill, which is hated by parents and teachers everywhere across the country and which they had already failed to pass earlier in the year because of massive GOP opposition. Wednesday's roll call was facing defeat too until McCarthy and Majority Whip Steve Scalise sent out the GOP whip team to twist arms and get weak-minded Republicans to change their votes and betray their constituents. 

Boehner couldn't even deliver a single one of his pet Blue Dogs or New Dems on this, not even Kyrsten Sinema (AZ), Patrick Murphy (FL), Collin Peterson (MN), Henry Cuellar (TX), Sean Patrick Maloney (NY), Gwen Graham (FL), or Brad Ashford (NE), the absolute bottom of the Democratic barrel, all more likely to vote with Boehner than with Pelosi. But not this time.

Conservative lawmakers had pushed for the adoption of several amendments allowing schools to opt out of No Child Left Behind requirements. Only one of those amendments, from Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.), was adopted, with lawmakers voting 251-178 to allow parents to exempt their children from testing.

“Parents are becoming increasingly fed up with such constant and onerous testing requirements, as well as the teachers,” Salmon said during floor debate.

A separate proposal from Reps. Mark Walker (R-N.C.) and Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) would have allowed states to opt out of No Child Left Behind and still receive federal funding. That amendment failed 195-235, as 49 Republicans aligned with Democrats to defeat it.

...The 2002 No Child Left Behind law, which included a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), expired in 2007. Congress has not passed legislation to extend it since then.

Since 2011, the Obama administration has been issuing waivers from No Child Left Behind in response to demands from governors and school districts.

Both the House and Senate bills prohibit the Department of Education from exerting control over state academic standards. The provisions would apply to Common Core, which establishes English and math standards for all grade levels through high school.

On the left, civil rights groups are objecting to a provision in the House bill that they fear will deprive schools with low-income populations of adequate funding. The measure would allow federal funds provided to high-poverty localities to “follow” students who transfer to another school, even if they enroll in a wealthier school that doesn’t have as tight a budget.

Democrats said the amendments allowing states to opt out of No Child Left Behind heightened their concerns that disadvantaged students would be shortchanged.

“The amendment would literally let states just take the money and run,” said Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.), the top Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee.

The revolt from conservatives and unanimous opposition from Democrats stands in contrast to the original 2002 law, which was hailed as a major bipartisan compromise between Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), then the chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), and President George W. Bush.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is the only Republican running for president in 2016 who supports Common Core. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who once endorsed the standards, announced this year that his state would eliminate them.

One of the confused, waffling Republicans who was running around like a chicken without a head during the debate was Antelope Valley sad sack Steve Knight, the only L.A. congressman to vote to reauthorize No Child Left Behind, which is hated in Simi Valley, Santa Clarita and the Antelope Valley. His main opponent for the seat, former U.S. Marine and L.A.P.D. officer Lou Vince was astounded to see Knight betray the community.

I firmly believe that a solid educational foundation is the most important gift we can bestow upon a child. A good public education sets a child up to succeed in the future and live a good life. No Child Left Behind is a flawed piece of legislation that has proven time and time again that it does not further our children's education in a meaningful way. Congressman Knight's vote sets him apart as he is the only member of Los Angeles' congressional delegation who voted in favor of this bad piece of legislation. As the Congressman of the 25th District, I would work tirelessly to prioritize the interests of our families and of our children in order to ensure that every child has a right to good, solid public education. No one deserves better than our children.

Angie Craig is the progressive Democrat taking on Kline in the southeast Minnesota district he's been misrepresenting for so long. She's making genuine education reform a major plank of her platform. Right after Kline's bill eked out its narrow win on Wednesday, she issued this statement:

Everyone agrees that federal education policy is in urgent need of reform and John Kline was tasked with reforming No Child Left Behind with the Student Success Act. Sadly, the bill he wrote, and the House passed today, was less reform and more giveaway to the radical conservative fringes of his party.



The bill not only maintains the excessive focus on standardized tests, but also eliminates much needed accountability and action to lift up struggling schools. Even worse, Kline’s bill included a voucher-lite 'portability' program that could lead the federal government to move millions of dollars in school funding from the neediest schools to the wealthiest. Even as he attempts to move federal funds away from the schools that need them most, Kline’s bill locks in devastating cuts to those same resources for public schools.

If John Kline and the extreme right wing of his party are not going to fund our public schools and invest in students and teachers, the least they could do is to protect the students while they’re in the classroom. Unfortunately, the Student Success Act doesn’t include provisions, such as those introduced by Sen. Al Franken in the Senate, from the Student Non-Discrimination Act, which would codify anti-discrimination protections for LGBT students in to law.



In his attempt to appease radical conservative attempts to cripple federal education policy, John Kline has failed our students, teachers, and families. We can and must do better.

UPDATE: Congress' Education Big Mistake

Los Angeles Congressman Ted Lieu (D-CA) explained his vote a little after the fact-- but it is well worth playing close attention to: "I am a strong believer that every child, no matter their zip code or background, should have an equal opportunity to succeed. Unfortunately, HR 5, the poorly named Student Success Act, does not achieve this goal. The bill cruelly takes away money from students most in need. For instance, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) would lose around one fourth of its funding under this bill, due to the Title I portability provision, despite the fact that LAUSD has a poverty rate of 70%. I also find the reduction in funding for students with disabilities extremely short-sighted and downright mean."

Republicans Vote To Further Defund Public Education

Not a single Democrat voted for John Kline's anti-education bill, H.R. 5. It passed Friday, 221-207, a dozen Republicans crossing the aisle and voting with Team Pelosi. The bill, which Kline and the rest of the GOP zombies call the Student Success Act, was supposed to rewrite No Child Left Behind. If anything, they've managed to make a terrible law even worse.

Even Obama's way too corporate Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, couldn't stomach it. He said that beside locking in crippling cuts to education funding. it “marks a retreat from high standards for all students and would virtually eliminate accountability for the learning of historically underserved students-- a huge step backward for efforts to improve academic achievement.” The Senate will never pass this garbage and Obama said he would veto it if it ever reached his desk.

The 12 Republicans who voted NO, are mostly in purple districts where it's hard to get away with voting for this kind of crazy-ass legislation. (It is worth noting, however, that Congress' most anti-education Member, Louie Gohmert, also voted NO, but he voted NO because he opposes public education completely. 4 Libertarian-types who also oppose public education-- Justin Amash (R-MI), Tom Massie (R-KY), Walter Jones (R-NC) and Sam Graves (R-MO)-- voted against the bill as well. The other 7 Republicans are in districts where voters could hold them accountable for anti-education votes:

• Chris Gibson (R-NY)- PVI= D+1
• "Mikey Suits" Grimm (R-NY)- PVI= R+2
• David Joyce (R-OH)- PVI= R+4
• Frank LoBiondo (R-NJ)- PVI= D+1
• Tom Reed (R-NY)- PVI= R+3
• Dave Reichert (R-WA)- PVI= R+1
• Jon Runyan (R-NJ)- PVI= R+1

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights sent Kline a letter explaining their opposition to his discriminatory bill which reverses the role of the federal government in protecting equal opportunity and access for all students to a quality education. In part:

The Leadership Conference believes that the merit of an education bill is determined by its treatment of the most disadvantaged among us and the “Student Success Act” proposes to marginalize underserved communities even further by completely removing the federal focus on the achievement of underprivileged students. Specifically, H.R. 5 eliminates accountability for the achievement and learning gains of subgroups of disadvantaged students who have long struggled against the bigotry of low academic expectations. H.R. 5 also eliminates performance targets; permits federal funds targeted for vulnerable groups of students such as ELLs and Native American students, to be reallocated for other purposes; fails to address school climate issues adequately; and disregards disparities in access to college preparatory coursework and access to higher education. The Student Success Act is an anachronism and would once again allow states to ignore disparities in education for children of color, low-income students, students with disabilities, and ELLs. This would be devastating for these communities and for our nation as a whole; therefore, we strongly urge you to vote against the “Student Success Act,” H.R. 5.

The [George] Miller substitute proposes a strong reauthorization that holds states, districts, and schools accountable for student learning while providing the freedom to adopt innovative and effective reforms and interventions to support the achievement of all students. For example, it requires states to adopt Common Core Standards; requires improvement in both overall performance and closing achievement gaps between groups of students; sets meaningful performance and graduation rate targets; improves school climate by requiring low-achieving schools to reduce their suspension and expulsion rates; creates greater resource equity by closing the state “comparability loophole,” and requires states to address resource inequities; and ensures that state and local education agencies provide struggling schools the supports and interventions they need to improve.

In backward southern districts like Gohmert's most people don't care about public education-- or even understand what it is. They get all the education they need from their pappy, their church, their CB radio and Glen Beck. But there were 20 non-Confederate Republicans who voted to defund education and who represent districts where parents very much do care about public education and do pay attention. These 20 Republicans could be defeated if the DCCC used education as an issue against them:

• John Kline (R-MN)- PVI= R+2
• Peter King (R-NY)- PVI= R+1
• Gary Miller (R-CA)- PVI= D+5
• Mike Coffman (R-CO)- PVI= D+1
• David Valadao (R-CA)- PVI= D+2
• Rodney Davis (R-IL)- PVI= even
• Fred Upton (R-MI)- PVI= R+1
• Joe Heck (R-NV)- PVI= even
• Michael Fitzpatrick (R-PA)- PVI= R+1
• Jeff Denham (R-CA)- PVI= R+1
• Tom Latham (R-IA)- PVI= even
• Buck McKeon (R-CA)- PVI= R+3
• Bill Young (R-FL)- PVI= R+1
• Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL)- PVI= R+2
• Jim Gerlach (R-PA)- PVI= R+2
• Mike Rogers (R-MI)- PVI= R+2
• Charlie Dent (R-PA)- PVI= R+2
• Erik Paulsen (R-MN)- PVI= R+2
• Frank Wolf (R-VA)- PVI= R+2
• Tim Walberg (R-MI)- PVI= R+3

Bolded names are Republicans whose districts Obama won in 2012 and/or 2008. Oh... all of them! I guess that wily, reptilian Steve Israel has some long-term plan for them... or something.

In NYS's education war, Diane Ravitch asks: "Will we ever break free of our national addiction to data?"

Wow, Governor Andrew does education reform too! (As
anti-progressively as he does most everything else.)

"Of course, teachers should be evaluated. They should be evaluated by experienced principals and peers. No incompetent teacher should be allowed to remain in the classroom. Those who can't teach and can't improve should be fired. But the current frenzy of blaming teachers for low scores smacks of a witch-hunt, the search for a scapegoat, someone to blame for a faltering economy, for the growing levels of poverty, for widening income inequality."

-- Diane Ravitch, in "No Student Left Untested" (see below)

by Ken

The educator and education specialist Diane Ravitch is, as I'm sure many readers know, one of the most visible and vocal resisters of the new orthodoxy in educational "reform": a system based on standardized testing. I just wrote about the first part of a new two-piecer she's written {"With such powerful forces for mis-education arrayed against actual learning, is there any hope for American education?"), highlighting the radically different educational system Finland has put in place, with radically more hopeful results ("Schools We Can Envy," in the March 8 NYRB), and while waiting for the second part, in which she indicated she would be taking down the Teach for America program, I'm just catching up with a NYRB blogpost from earlier this week in which Ravitch tackled the latest development in the long-running battle for more uniform testing and teacher rating based on test results, which now has support both from long-standing educational reactionaries and from these phony-progressive fake-reformers who seem to desire nothing more fervently than to reduce all education to standardized-test preparation. It's the same coalition that brought us the abomination of Leave As Many Children As Possible in the Dust movement, and it has no more prominent champion than Fake-Education Secretary Arne Duncan (and, presumably, the president who appointed him).

Anyone who's been following the governorship of Andrew "Don't Confuse Me with My Dad" Cuomo will be unsurprised to learn that the governor is a die-hard enthusiast of fake-reform, and is able to use as cover the large quantity of federal funds available only with test-blessed strings attached. It's not easy for reactionaries to get traction in New York State political matters, but with Governor Andrew at the helm, they don't have much to complain about.

"No Student Left Untested"

Diane Ravitch


Last week, the New York State Education Department and the teachers' unions reached an agreement to allow the state to use student test scores to evaluate teachers. The pact was brought to a conclusion after Governor Andrew Cuomo warned the parties that if they didn't come to an agreement quickly, he would impose his own solution (though he did not explain what that would be). He further told school districts that they would lose future state aid if they didn't promptly implement the agreement after it was released to the public. The reason for this urgency was to secure $700 million promised to the state by the Obama administration's Race to the Top program, contingent on the state's creating a plan to evaluate teachers in relation to their students' test scores.

The new evaluation system pretends to be balanced, but it is not. Teachers will be ranked on a scale of 1-100. Teachers will be rated as "ineffective, developing, effective, or highly effective." Forty percent of their grade will be based on the rise or fall of student test scores; the other sixty percent will be based on other measures, such as classroom observations by principals, independent evaluators, and peers, plus feedback from students and parents.

But one sentence in the agreement shows what matters most: "Teachers rated ineffective on student performance based on objective assessments must be rated ineffective overall." What this means is that a teacher who does not raise test scores will be found ineffective overall, no matter how well he or she does with the remaining sixty percent. In other words, the 40 percent allocated to student performance actually counts for 100 percent. Two years of ineffective ratings and the teacher is fired.

The New York press treated the agreement as a major breakthrough that would lead to dramatic improvement in the schools. The media assumed that teachers and principals in New York State would now be measured accurately, that the bad ones would be identified and eventually ousted, and that the result would be big gains in test scores. Only days earlier, a New York court ruled that the media will be permitted to publish the names and rankings of teachers in New York City, even if the rankings are inaccurate. Thus, the scene has been set: Not only will teachers and principals be rated, but those ratings can now be released to the public online and in the press.

The consequences of these policies will not be pretty. If the way these ratings are calculated is flawed, as most testing experts acknowledge they are, then many good educators will be subject to public humiliation and will leave the profession. Once those scores are released to the media, we can expect that parents will object if their children are assigned to "bad" teachers, and principals will have a logistical nightmare trying to squeeze most children into the classes of the highest-ranked teachers. Will parents sue if their children do not get the "best" teachers?

New York's education officials are obsessed with test scores. The state wants to find and fire the teachers who aren't able to produce higher test scores year after year. But most testing experts believe that the methods for calculating teachers' assumed "value-added" qualities—that is, their abilities to produce higher test scores year after year—are inaccurate, unstable, and unreliable. Teachers in affluent suburbs are likelier to get higher value-added scores than teachers of students with disabilities, students learning English, and students from extreme poverty. All too often, the rise or fall of test scores reflects the composition of the classroom and factors beyond the teachers' control, not the quality of the teacher. A teacher who is rated effective one year may well be ineffective the next year, depending on which students are assigned to his or her class.

The state is making a bet that threatening to fire and publicly humiliate teachers it deems are underperforming will be sufficient to produce higher test scores. Since most teachers in New York do not teach tested subjects (reading and mathematics in grades 3-8), the state will require districts to create measures for everything that is taught (called, in state bureaucratese, "student learning objectives") for all the others. So, in the new system, there will be assessments in every subject, including the arts and physical education. No one knows what those assessments will look like. Everything will be measured, not to help students, but to evaluate their teachers. If the district's own assessments are found to be not sufficiently rigorous by State Commissioner of Education John King (who has only three years of teaching experience, two in charter schools), he has the unilateral power to reject them.

This agreement will certainly produce an intense focus on teaching to the tests. It will also profoundly demoralize teachers, as they realize that they have lost their professional autonomy and will be measured according to precise behaviors and actions that have nothing to do with their own definition of good teaching.

Evaluators will come armed with elaborate rubrics identifying precisely what teachers must do and how they must act, if they want to be successful. The New York Times interviewed a principal in Tennessee who felt compelled to give a low rating to a good teacher, because the teacher did not "break students into groups" in the lesson he observed. The new system in New York will require school districts across the state to hire thousands of independent evaluators, as well as create much additional paperwork for principals. Already stressed school budgets will be squeezed further to meet the pact's demands for monitoring and reporting.

President Obama said in his State of the Union address that teachers should "stop teaching to the test," but his own Race to the Top program is the source of New York's hurried and wrong-headed teacher evaluation plan. According to Race to the Top, states are required to evaluate teachers based in part on their students' test scores in order to compete for federal funding. When New York won $700 million from the Obama program, it pledged to do this. What the President has now urged ("stop teaching to the test") is directly contradicted by what his own policies make necessary (teach to the test or be rated ineffective and get fired).

No high-performing nation in the world evaluates teachers by the test scores of their students; and no state or district in this nation has a successful program of this kind. The State of Tennessee and the city of Dallas have been using some type of test-score based teacher evaluation for twenty years but are not known as educational models. Across the nation, in response to the prompting of Race to the Top, states are struggling to evaluate their teachers by student test scores, but none has figured it out.

All such schemes rely on standardized tests as the ultimate measure of education. This is madness. The tests have some value in measuring basic skills and rote learning, but their overuse distorts education. No standardized test can accurately measure the quality of education. Students can be coached to guess the right answer, but learning this skill does not equate to acquiring facility in complex reasoning and analysis. It is possible to have higher test scores and worse education. The scores tell us nothing about how well students can think, how deeply they understand history or science or literature or philosophy, or how much they love to paint or dance or sing, or how well prepared they are to cast their votes carefully or to be wise jurors.

Of course, teachers should be evaluated. They should be evaluated by experienced principals and peers. No incompetent teacher should be allowed to remain in the classroom. Those who can't teach and can't improve should be fired. But the current frenzy of blaming teachers for low scores smacks of a witch-hunt, the search for a scapegoat, someone to blame for a faltering economy, for the growing levels of poverty, for widening income inequality.

For a decade, the Bush-era federal law called No Child Left Behind has required the nation's public schools to test every student in grades 3-8 in reading and mathematics. Now, the Obama administration is pressuring the states to test every grade and every subject. No student will be left untested. Every teacher will be judged by his or her students' scores. Cheating scandals will proliferate. Many teachers will be fired. Many will leave teaching, discouraged by the loss of their professional autonomy. Who will take their place? Will we ever break free of our national addiction to data? Will we ever stop to wonder if the data mean anything important? Will education survive school reform?

#

McCain's Education Policies-- More And More And More George W. Bush

Remember before Bush managed to get into the White House when he was saying he would be pro-choice and pro-education and work with both parties to end bitter rancor in Washington? When he said he would have a modest foreign policy? He was lying the whole time and was already planning on wiretapping the whole country and invading Iraq and exploiting the partisan divide in the most violent way anyone has done since before the American Civil War. This was Rove's strategy and Rove has persuaded the Double Talk Express to drive down the same highway. McCain and his surrogates lie their asses off everyday trying to paint a picture of moderation. Will Americans let Rove fool them again?

This week McCain has donned this guise of the Education President. While everyone was focussing on Phil Gamm's slip of the tongue, exposing the true nature of the McCain economic vision, people may have missed what McCain's other hopelessly reactionary economic advisor, Carly Fiorina, was up to over at Meet the Press.

I absolutely agree that one size does not fit all in the subject of education, and that is why John McCain supports choice and competition, giving parents the choice as to how to best educate their children. He believes that No Child Left Behind was an imperfect piece of legislation. Nevertheless, there are things about it that have worked. We need to learn the lessons, fix the problems, fully fund it...

Oh? McCain wants to fully fund No Child Left Behind now? How does that fit in with his "straight talk" about balancing the budget? And, it should be noted, he never has been interested in funding NCLB when he was voting in the Senate. According to the National Education Association, "Since 2003, McCain voted repeatedly against fully funding No Child Left Behind, resulting in an unfunded mandate that has continued to further tap local communities and states during an economic downturn." Educators, community leaders, state and local officials and parents who hate NCLB because of Republicans like McCain who have crippled it by turning it into a tragic unfunded mandate. McCain has exercised his leadership on this issue for 5 years. The result has been devastating and catastrophic.

Reg Weaver, president of the National Educational Association has gone beyond media talking points and looked carefully at McCain's actual proposals:

"McCain's plans have erased any doubts that he would continue the misguided policies of the Bush administration. The spending scheme recently outlined would reportedly save $100 billion, but it doesn't mention the critical casualties of those cuts: America's children. The move would take away even more resources from public schools that are already underfunded. Under McCain's scheme, 4.2 million disadvantaged children would be shortchanged in needed reading and math help due to the shortfall of $10.7 billion between the McCain plan for Title I and what was promised in the No Child Left Behind law.

"McCain's scheme would also shortchange states and schools by $12.5 billion by reducing services to 3.6 million children with disabilities. Like President Bush, who proposed $14.2 billion less than what Congress provided for education during his presidency, McCain's scheme has shown he is quite willing to mortgage our children's future.

"And No Child Left Behind has imposed heavy-handed requirements based on standardized testing, but the law has been underfunded by $70.9 billion since its enactment. If there is one section of the federal budget, one segment of the economy, that deserves continued and full support, it's public education. Public education is the backbone of a healthy economy and a healthy democracy, and McCain's scheme ignores that at our shared peril. All children deserve the right to great public schools to ensure that they become productive citizens who can compete in a global economy and succeed in the new industries of tomorrow. McCain cannot restore confidence in the future of our country by refusing to invest in our country's future leaders."

JOHN CORNYN SOUNDS A SOUR NOTE FOR EDUCATION

frustrated trombone player

When Senator Tester addressed a roomful of progressives in a friend's home the other night he mostly talked about weighty matters before the Congress-- war and peace in the Middle East, the Farm Bill, Americans' right to privacy. But at one point the conversation strayed to music. He spoke with great enthusiasm about learning to play the trumpet as a kid and how he almost became a professional musician. Before I could ask him if he was more a Dizzy fan or a Miles fan or what he thinks about Arturo Sandoval and Maynard Ferguson, he began talking about the tragedy of how No Child Left Behind has ruined obliterated music programs in public schools and how that could backfire because of the debilitating impact on future physicists, mathameticians, and engineers. When a group of Montana school superintendents and principals met with Margaret Spelling, Bush's Secretary of Education and the Grand Dame of NCLB, and voiced widely held opinions that cutting back on programs like music was damaging students she asked if they wanted her to start testing for music too. It's not why they requested the meeting.

John Cornyn (R-TX) has a very different point of view regarding public education and regarding music than Senator Tester. According Dana Milbank's column in today's Washington Post Cornyn took Lyle Lovett's appearance at the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday as an opportunity to talk about his own musical background. He complained that his parents "forced upon me trombone lessons" and that he was bitter because "the opposite sex was not attracted to trombone." I won't comment on the attraction of any particular trombone players.

The star-struck lawmakers competed to display their musical savvy.

"Texas has produced a large number of our nation's most famous musicians," Cornyn announced, and then proceeded to misidentify the father of Texas swing, the late Bob Wills of the Texas Playboys, as "Bob Willis." Murmurs spread through the crowd. "Excuse me! I don't know why I said Bob Willis," the embarrassed lawmaker apologized, before recovering enough to ask Lovett whether the singer Robert Earl Keen "was your housemate at Texas A&M?"

"We lived down the street from one another," Lovett testified. Without objection, this salient fact was entered into the record.

..."There hasn't been [a hearing] I've enjoyed personally as much in a long time," Cornyn, who singled out singer Ray Benson of Asleep at the Wheel, sitting in the first row and wearing a white cowboy hat."

At dinner the other night I asked Senator Tester if he thought that Republicans really want to destroy public education. He looked me straight in the eyes and said yes. We didn't discuss Cornyn per se but I might add that Cornyn has a perfect and unblemished voting record when it comes to funding public education-- a perfect zero. Since 2003 there are been 16 roll call votes involving public education and Cornyn has voted against education every single time. Although mainstream conservatives like Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Robert Bennett (R-UT), Kit Bond (R-MO), Thad Cochran (R-MS), Pete Domenici (R-NM), Chuck Grassley (R-KS), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Richard Shelby (R-AL) have on occassion put aside their fanatic partisanship to join with Democrats for the sake of children, Cornyn never has-- not even one time. He really does want to do away with public education and return America to a feudal society which, at the bottom line, is what contemporary Republicanism is all about. Bush's veto of the education and healthcare bill yesterday should be seen in this context

I don't know off-hand if Rick Noriega plays a trombone or any other instruments, but I spoke with him in August and I can tell you he's a huge music fan and that he has an outstanding record in support of public education. There is a clear and stark difference between Rick Noriega and John Cornyn and they will face off in a race for the U.S. Senate next year. Teaxs voters will get a chance to decide if they would like to move forward or backward. If you've already made up your mind and you want to go forward, surf over to Rick's Blue America page and give him a hand.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "BEWARE THE MAN DRUNK WITH AMBITION"-- TOM DELAY

Robert Novak isn't a literary critic-- we know exactly what he is-- and the erstwhile "Hammer" isn't exactly the kind of writer George Bush reads but No Retreat, No Surrender: One American's Fight is considered a book and is coming out and... well, if not Novak, who?

Not me. But I was happy to see the all vicious and even more frequently vindictive DeLay lashing out madly at everyone he's ever worked with. I don't know where he thinks he's going to find sympathy when they finally haul he carcass off to prison in the near future. Novak notices he "is an angry man after being driven from the leadership, from Congress and, so far, from public life by 'a concerted effort to destroy me legally, financially and personally.'"


And DeLay isn't just blaming Democrats and Texas lawman Ronnie Earle. We've all heard that before. What's new-- and most interesting-- here are his attacks on Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, Denny Hastert, and George Bush, his old comrades in arms. They all conspired against him-- and since he thinks he's the embodiment of American conservatism (I'll buy that)-- against the movement. This goes even beyond his claims that Gingrich was a totally incompetent Speaker of the House and unsuited to lead even the GOP, let alone the USA.

In describing Gingrich as an "ineffective Speaker," DeLay writes: "He knew nothing about running meetings and nothing about driving an agenda." He adds: "Nearly every other day he had a new agenda, a new direction he wanted us to take. It was impossible to follow him."

DeLay also declares that "our leadership was in no moral shape to press" for the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. Writing well before Gingrich's admission for the first time last week, DeLay asserts: "It is now public knowledge that Newt Gingrich was having an affair with a staffer during the entire impeachment crisis. Clearly, men with such secrets are not likely to sound a high moral tone at a moment of national crisis."

If you think that's nasty, he's far less kind to former Republican Majority Leader Dick Armey who he says was "so blinded by ambition as to be useless to the cause" and a "poor leader" who had "few fresh ideas." Armey, he asserts, "resented anyone he thought might get in the way of his becoming Speaker of the House. Beware the man drunk with ambition."

I'll restrain myself from the obvious but point to what Novak-- a huge DeLay fan-- brought up himself:

DeLay has been a subject of controversy on the right before. When American Conservative Union Chairman David Keene attempted to make DeLay the organization's Washington operative, four members of his board resigned. Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona, a leading conservative reformer, describes DeLay's leadership as concentrating on redistricting, fundraising and distribution of pork.

In light of this week's revolt on the far right against Bush's lame and completely botched education policies, there is one point DeLay makes worth examining (especially if you're a Republican, which I trust no one who reads DWT is):

Deriding Bush's self-identification as "a compassionate conservative," DeLay asserts that "he has expanded government to suit his purpose, especially in the area of education. He may be compassionate, but he is certainly no conservative in the classic sense."

What revolt? Over 50 Republicans in the House and Senate-- including House Minority Whip Roy Blunt and the House member with the furthest right voting record, Eric Cantor-- are introducing legislation today that would severely undercut what Bush thinks of as his signature domestic achievement, the No Child Left Behind Act. The bill allows states to opt out of its ridiculous and counterproductive testing mandates, something probably all states will do. Even Texas' lamest export since Bush himself, clueless Senator John Cornyn, suddenly decided to shirk his solid rubber stamp demeanor and strike out against The Empire on this one.