Accountability and Vouchers:

Bush's Contemptuous Plans for Our Public Schools

On January 23, President George W. Bush delivered his education bill to Capitol Hill, entitled "No Child Left Behind." Congress recently passed the act in a bipartisan effort, which Bush has now signed into law. It entails students from grades 3-8 being tested annually in mathematics and reading. The schools that have good scores on the test will be rewarded, while the ones that do poorly or do not show adequate progress within three years will be left to rot.

Bush plans to give vouchers to students at these poor schools so they have the choice to attend another school--particularly private schools. He has said that this is aimed at aiding the African-American and Latino students in our inner-city schools that are not doing well.

This plan may sound wonderful since it holds schools accountable for the student's progress and offers minority students a choice of schools to which they want to attend. However, it is really just another cracked-up conservative idea to promote their values, leaving behind schools that desperately need funding, and inhibiting the education of students in inner-city schools so that their situation is more hopeless than before.

To base vouchers on standardized test scores is biased against the minority students in the first place. These standardized tests from private corporations can be answered in many different ways when perceived from different cultural or economic backgrounds. One answer to a specific question may be the most correct answer for a student who is a minority or from a lower-class income family, but it is not the answer that the test considers correct. Here is an example of the question from a standardized test at a 4th grade level:

When is a baby most happy?

When it is:

1. eating
   
2. sleeping
   
3. laughing
   
4. crying
   

So where does the money come from when it is handed to private schools through vouchers? This money is taken directly out of the funds of the public school system. These schools are struggling in the first place because of the lack of funding from a property-tax based system. When an area has low property value, there will not be as much money from property taxes, hence a lack of money to fund the school. In these struggling schools, there is a shortage of up-to-date textbooks, qualified teachers, and adequate buildings. The teachers that bear the burden of teaching in these schools are crying out for help since they have outdated textbooks and computers (if they have any computers at all).

Many of these inner city public schools do not pass basic building code standards, but are used because there is nowhere else to educate the students. For instance, most of Cleveland's inner city schools have leaks throughout the building. Some of them do not even have bathrooms in the building and the children have to go to outhouses to use the washroom. Instead of taking the money away from these public schools through vouchers, money should be funded directly into these schools for textbooks, technology and improvement of infrastructure.

When schools are held accountable for these tests, teachers are going to be pushed to teach to the tests. This will cause many other problems in the efficiency of the educational system. The article "No Child Left Untested" from Z Magazine notes, "The research over the past two decades indicates test based education reforms do not lead to better educational policies and practices. Indeed, such testing often leads to educationally unjust consequences and unsound practices."

The article goes on to describe how test-based educational reforms cause "teacher and administrator de-professionalization, loss of curricular integrity, increased cultural insensitivity, and disproportionate allocation of educational resources in to testing programs." The test themselves do not test critical thinking or application of knowledge of what the student has learned. This create a more apathetic and passive individual, instead of a self-empowered critical one.

Ultimately, vouchers are going to help destroy poor public schools. But what happens to the students that get the vouchers? They are pushed to go to private schools of their choice. In Cleveland, where the voucher system has been implemented, 99.4 percent of recipients of vouchers go to private schools. This is loaded with problems. In Milwaukee, which is considered the bedrock for the voucher system, the accountability towards voucher schools (private schools) is so bad that there has not been any academic data collected in six years from these schools. When students are moved to these voucher schools, there has not been any push to find out if these students are succeeding any better than when they were at the public school. Bilingual education is not offered as prominently as it is in public schools. Since it is a private school, due process does not apply and they can expel a student if they please. Also, private schools are not accountable to what they charge for tuition. Vouchers are not going to make private schools free of charge to the recipients.

This whole notion that Bush aims his plan at helping the African-American and Latino students who are in failing schools is very suspicious. The voucher program implemented in Cleveland does not specifically help minority groups over whites. In Cleveland, 71 percent of the students in the public school system are African-American, yet account for only 53 percent of the voucher students. Whites make up 19 percent of the students in the Cleveland's public schools, but 29 percent of the recipients of vouchers.

The most disturbing part of Bush's plan for education is that it is unconstitutional. Nowhere in the Constitution is the federal government delegated authority over education. The executive and legislative branches are granted many powers, but the regulation of education is not one of them. Furthermore, the Tenth Amendment declares any powers not specifically accorded to the national government as implied powers of the state government. The jurisdiction of education has historically remained predominantly in the hands of state and local governments. Bush has no legal right under the Constitution's delegation of powers to dictate the direction educational reforms might take. Why should the American public allow presidents like Bush to make crucial decisions over public education, when the supreme law of the land has denied him that right?

This plan clearly does not produce the results that Bush has set out for our struggling schools or students. If one looks past the compassionate rhetoric that Bush and other conservatives have spit out about accountability and vouchers, it is easy to see that it does nothing to help struggling schools or the students in those schools. It gives the test writers a larger economic base to make more profit causing competition among schools. This is not what struggling schools need.

Schools are not businesses and should be treated as ones. Competition does nothing to help schools to work towards the educational needs of the students. They need more funding along with cooperation and collaboration from state governments and communities to understand what needs to be done to help these schools out of the awful situation that they are in. Bush should keep his nose out of educational reform since the Constitution does not grant him this power. Bush can always be counted on for showing contempt for the American people and the nation's public school system.