A Nation at Risk

A year ago Congress overwhelmingly approved George W. Bush's education agenda, imposing new testing and school accountability mandates that are among the most sweeping federal interventions in the nation's classrooms in recent history. On top of the states' existing blizzard of testing and accountability measures, Bush's "No Child Left Behind Act" required states to impose yet another layer of annual testing of all schoolchildren from the third through the eighth grade, in both reading and math, in order to qualify for federal assistance to schools serving low-income students. Schools that fail to meet annual growth targets for test scores are embroidered with a Scarlet A, branding them a failing school. Parents of children "trapped in failing schools," as the Bush team has described it, are invited to transfer their children to supposedly better schools--in other words, the ones with better test scores.

The entire scheme is erected upon a pie-in-the-sky proposition: that turning public education into a pseudo-marketplace in which schools compete on the basis of test scores for their "customers," i.e., parents and their children, will not only improve educational quality across the board but also wipe out the thorny achievement gaps between races and classes.

The only catch to this seemingly elegant, market-driven solution to education reform is that there's virtually no evidence that it works. Indeed, after nearly two decades of such "reforms" at the state level following the 1983 diatribe against America's schools known as A Nation at Risk, the evidence is overwhelming that the Bush approach is, at best, counterproductive to the aims of education and, at worst, a cynical ploy to privatize the nation's public schools.

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