Nation in need of drastic solution to No Child Left Behind Act

Herewith, we have over the past three weeks identified numerous problems guaranteed by the No Child Left Behind Act if it is allowed by this nation's citizens to continue. We have explored how, through the act, the executive branch of the federal government has overstepped the bounds of its power and intruded into state and local authority domains, doing so to exploit Children. We have examined how rigorous testing instead of proper educational resourcing will likely lead to macro-level failure, failures that will be easy to blame on the children rather than those truly responsible. And lastly, we have unearthed the true colors of this act, exposing it as flatly racist and class-discriminatory to the extent that it has dragged the state of education over a century into the past. Borne primarily of objective logic and unbiased reasoning, these assertions leave the reader with little doubt of their legitimacy, but they nevertheless leave hungry the desire for constructive answers, resolve, or simply even hope for the future. After providing Circle readers with three weeks of only assaults on educational policy, I plan to deliver sustenance for satisfying these resulting hungers. Understanding how to creatively reform society, beginning with surgically depositing No Child Left Behind into the waste basket, requires that we first understand what exactly the act is functioning to accomplish. Though in the past I've written extensively about what this act cannot realistically hope to achieve (improving education), I will, for the benefit of those inclined to accept the role of advocates and agents of social action, share what I believe are the goals of those who enacted NCLB.

No Child Left Behind, beneath all the elaborate bureaucratic veils of deception and distortion, is a conscious, conceited assault against public education, an effort to shift education into the corporate sector, to privatize it, so that wealthy friends of politicians can squeeze profits through the manipulation and exploitation of children's education.

Though no public figure will ever say so, we know this to be true; it is self-evident after all. We know from years of living under this oversized monstrosity of a government that the decision makers and policy writers within it are and have historically been motivated by only one thing: making money. Efforts toward privatization plague nearly every aspect of public spending and social programs; in many they've already succeeded. Even some components of civil society once thought to be impregnably public have ceded at least some ground to these efforts, and in a most grotesque, dehumanizing fashion. The best example I can readily think of involves the war in Iraq. The government's contracting of Blackwater International to deploy private soldiers constitutes perhaps the most bluntly unethical and illegal act of privatization history has ever seen. Stephen "Scott" Helvenston, Mike Teague, Jerko Zovko, and Wesley Batalona could testify to this if they hadn't been killed in Fallujah (31 March, 2004), deaths they may've personally staved off were it not for their being tragically under-armed and under-equipped by a corporation concerned more about maximizing profit margins and minimizing overhead than protecting the lives of soldiers -trademark priorities of a privatized mindset.

The evidence supporting my belief transcends merely the observed tendencies of our corrupt government; follow a simple chain of logic from the legislation itself to its most likely long-term effects and you'll find that privatization is almost an unavoidable end. There is, undeniably, an elite group of entrepreneurs who desperately want to get their hands on the taxpayer dollars that become public education funds (this same elite group choreographs what goes on in Washington; their interests are represented over the people's). The orientation of the act is not cooperative in the slightest sense; it is extremely authoritarian in nature, literally threatening educators and students with stiff consequences should they fail to perform. When public education districts fail to meet NCLB's standards -as surely they will considering the refusal of government to match their expectations with appropriate resources- those districts, along with the fate of the children who attend them, will transition into the hands of corporate greed and suffer the effects of corporate-minded decision-making, the very same that got those four Blackwater soldiers killed.

Though I'm confident broadly-privatized education will be presented to the public as the solution to all its pedagogical problems, nothing could be further from the truth. For several simple reasons, education needs to be kept public. Private education institutions, it is important to remember, are, in essence, the incubators of social inequality. In time, they will also contribute significantly to the loss of individual power and the descent of emphasis from proper subjects in favor of those thought to be more important by whatever private forces influence these new education systems. It is also highly significant to recognize that the government is, at least in theory, accountable to the public; corporations are not. They can operate freely and independently from progressive education legislation that has taken generations of fighting to acquire for our children. Privatization will effectively neutralize the hard-earned victories of over a hundred years of activism with the effortless swipe of a pen. These are the issues at stake; these are the reasons we must wrestle public education from the jaws of predatory politicians and prevent it from being consumed by the oversized megacorporations that will most certainly convert it to waste.

Realizing and appreciating the magnitude and urgency of these injustices is important, but acting on realizations is another thing unto itself. Dissuading government from behaving against public interest is becoming an increasingly difficult endeavor (implicit testimony to who government actually represents), but it is not impossible. Exemplary victories exist, though at this point they are not as large scale as are the crimes they combat, but they are still hard-won and significant. The Civil Rights Project of Harvard University has actually researched and written a comprehensive account of individual cases that have been brought against the federal government and won; it also goes into detail about how to take education back from those who have stolen it. The document, called "The Unraveling of No Child Left Behind: How Negotiated Changes Transform the Law", can be useful, but not as useful, I believe, as grassroots action. People need to get involved with education. If we want our children, and indeed all children, to have the highest quality education possible, we must be vigilant about hunting down and exterminating anything that attempts to undermine this goal. This sort of vigilance requires social action, solidarity with teachers and administrators, involving the kids themselves in the struggle to protect their own education, and overall a side-by-side forward movement of each of these groups in an effort to restore democracy and resist oppressive legislation like No Child Left Behind.