The Republican leadership in the U.S. House of
Representatives has worked a tremendous disservice on its members and the
American children, parents, and taxpayers. Yesterday, after heavy
wrangling by Republican leadership, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 5,
the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB).
By failing to eliminate or even curb the federal testing
mandates, the bill instead serves the testing industry rather than the people.
Under NCLB, that industry has grown to a $2 billion per year enterprise.
As reported by PR
Watch:
School testing corporations have spent at least $20 million
on lobbying along with wining and dining—or even hiring—policymakers in pursuit
of big revenues from federal and state testing mandates under “No Child Left
Behind” measures and the Common Core curriculum, according to new analysis
detailed in this Reporters’ Guide by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD).
Sadly, standardized tests provide very
little instructional value, take up an enormous
amount of true instructional time, and
cost the states enormous amounts of money.
Furthermore, H.R. 5 amounts to an assault on child privacy
interests. It removes protection against socio-emotional profiling in the
statewide assessments (eliminating NCLB’s prohibition against including
assessment items that “evaluate or assess personal or family beliefs and
attitudes”). Not only does it fail to protect against psychological data-gathering,
it actually dictates the type of Brave New World assessments that operate by
compiling and analyzing psychological profiles on children. Unlike NCLB,
H.R. 5 also requires assessment on behavioral/skills-based standards rather
than solely academic standards.
H.R. 5 also grants the U.S. Department of Education power
that it had appropriated for itself to advance its Race to the Top and NCLB
waiver processes. There, the Department used grants and waivers to usher
the states into the Common Core. Those
mechanisms were not guaranteed, as Texas never surrendered, but they were
highly coercive and effective against just about every other state. Under
H.R. 5, money is tied to the Department’s approval of a state education plan.
The state plan must include an accountability structure based upon the
adopted standards and assessments to ensure “that all public school
students graduate from high school prepared for postsecondary education or the
workforce without the need for remediation.” The Department used this
same language to define alignment with the Common Core Standards and required
it for approval of NCLB waivers and grants. (H.R. 5 reinforces this
alignment criteria by including that language again in its Statement of Purpose.)
The use of this language in H.R. 5 gives the federal government a
powerful tool to push states to keep Common Core or, just as happened to
Indiana, “re-branded” standards similar to Common Core.
Leadership points to language in the bill prohibiting
federal overreach. However, that language replicates existing
prohibitions – prohibitions that did not stop the federal government from
driving Common Core into the states. There is a central problem with
these prohibitions: they lack an enforcement mechanism for the states and leave
the Department as the judge and jury of its own actions.
It is appalling that the Republican House of Representatives
passed this 800-page bill – one of the most far-reaching pieces of domestic
legislation – without holding many, if any, town hall meetings. Certainly, the
effort that leadership spent arm-twisting its membership would have been better
spent encouraging its members to meet with their constituents and giving them
time in which to do so.
Is institutional arrogance rife across all three branches of
the federal government?
Emmett McGroarty is the executive
director of APIA Education
Comments
The US House voted to send $124
billion to the US Department of Education to waste on further destroying US
education. Jody Hice, (R-GA) US House District 10 was the only “no vote” from Georgia. All the rest need to be replaced in November
2016.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party
Leader
Source:http://thepulse2016.com/emmett-mcgroarty/2015/07/09/house-republicans-betray-common-core-moms/
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