April 17, 2006
The name game’s not their thing
Our Fine President just loves to dole out the names. The whole press corps gets giddy when he gets chummy and uses some sort of pejorative nickname to address them. But of course it’s the grand names he and his people give to their programs that create the most laughs. In true Orwellian newspeak fashion he created the Clear Skies Act to help polluters continue their fouling of our precious breathing gas, and his Healthy Forests plan is all about making the forests a healthy place for the timber industry. The PATRIOT ACT was all about curtailing the ideals of the American Patriots and his operation Enduring Freedom is really about replacing one kind of military oppression with another.
Now No Child Left Behind, his love letter to standardized testing, is coming apart at its always ironic seams. With all its oversized pricetags, complicated rules and fancy punishments the program was a misguided daydream of an attempt to measure success in education and mightily smite any educator who dares to leave a child ignorant of the contents of the shiny new standardized test. Of course the program never worked from its start as one-size-fits-all might work for baseball caps but really doesn’t work in the world education. Lots of kids were bound to be left behind and critics have always pointed this out. But until recently I wasn’t aware that the states were leaving plenty of these children behind on purpose and the feds knew about it and looked the other way.
It seems that using one of those famous Texas-sized loopholes, schools can simply not count the scores of small minority populations. See the law requires specific percentage gains every year from every single racial category because we just love lumping everyone into lots of little categories and groups. But with the ability to not count the small minority groups, schools don’t have to deal with those pesky extra racial categories in their test scores. Historically it’s minority students who have tended to perform the worst on these sort of tests so this loophole is extra convenient.
The numbers are a bit stunning. One in every 14 scores are not counted in the racial categories, making the idea of tracking student progress this way a ludicrous endeavor. This time it’s the states who are defending the practice while the aptly named Education Secretary Spellings provides the administration’s obligatory, “Oh my, we had no idea the problem was this awful. How could things have ever gone so wrong from out plans and dreams?” The states are saying that since the students’ scores are counted in overall statistics they are not forgotten, and by the way we did count the scores of 23 million students so those 1.9 million we left out pale in comparison.
Now Our Fine President praised this special categorical success tracking once remarking in 2004 “It’s really essential we do that. It’s really important. If you don’t do that, you’re likely to leave people behind. And that’s not right.” His mastery of the plan’s simple and descriptive title aside, here he makes another point he fails to back up. Of course he could avoid the embarrassment of such ironic program names if he’d just give them generic nicknames like he does the press corps. It’s much harder find the tragic failure of the education initiative affectionately dubbed “Lefty” than the current batch of catchy monikers he’s using to identify his plans.