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By David Allen Two election year 2000 phenomena heralded a shameful chapter in our history: Carl Rove's successful racist strategy in South Carolina's Republican primary and a partisan Supreme Court ruling 5-4 for George Bush to stop a Florida recount despite precedents, Florida election law, and a popular vote edge favoring Al Gore (Alan Dershowitz. Supreme Injustice. 2001). But the No Child Left Behind Act has intrinsic merits that elevate it well above the Bush-Cheney regime's impeachable legacy. That public school principals are accountable for Adequate Yearly Progress in student reading and math proficiency to taxpayers who pay the salaries, supplies, and capital outlays our schools consume to attain basic proficiencies is a minimal, necessary, and reasonable national policy. Yet NCLB has encountered universal resistance among entrenched educators from New Mexico Secretary of Education Veronica Garcia to Las Cruces social studies teacher Bill Varuola who would conceal failures and exaggerate successes by annual dances of smoke and mirrors. Consider the 2008-2009 DPS Accountability Report published as a Deming Headlight supplement on Sept. 27. David McSherry called NCLB and NM HB212 unfunded "mandates" that intrude upon his "local control". Fifty competing states can't write a coherent national law anymore than scores of competing school boards can write a coherent state law. NCLB is a mandate because the power to educate a state's children or tax base is neither "... delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited ... to the States" (Amendment X). DPS found enough staff assigning director of accountability Teri Trejo and her assistant to new duties using new computers in a new building the taxpayers had already funded. Next, consider what Secretary Garcia's "very narrow and sometimes unfair" NCLB metrics say about ten Deming schools. Ten "other indicators" were social factors indirectly related to proficiencies: an 84 percent graduation rate adequate in the high school, and 92 to 95 percent attendance rates adequate in nine lower schools. The remaining 360 indicators were arrayed in four columns where 180 were giveaways for 95 percent of students completing reading and math tests. The 180 reading and math performance metrics among 10 schools included 60 giveaways where schools had fewer than 25 Native Americans, Asian/Pacifics, or Blacks (sic), 18 giveaways where schools had fewer than 25 students with disabilities, and 2 anomalies from Red Mountain special education where test failures exceeded test participation. The district's overall AYP proficiency failures, 60 percent in reading proficiency and 70 percent in math, clearly arose from our local majority of Hispanic, ELL, and economically disadvantaged students rather than our local minority of Caucasians who met AYP or numbered less than 25 in all ten schools. Reading and math are not "narrow." They are fundamental advantages of civilizations over barbarian tribes. Reading gives access to the greatest minds in history since the Sumerians invented cuneiform about 3500 BCE. Mathematics is queen of the sciences (Latin "knowledge"). We have no physical, biological, or social science, i.e. knowledge, without mathematical models that make quantitative predictions and explain billions of measurements that confirm or refute specific hypotheses. The contention that AYP metrics are "unfair" is true in a narrow sense but false in a broad sense. We cannot fault schools for a flood of economic refugees who haven't migrated from their Spanish past to their English future. Children of recent immigrants score lower on English tests. But this is a transitional issue towards a future their parents chose. Succeeding generations of Hispanics, Asian/Pacifics, et cetera all compete on a linguistically level playing field that offers opportunities surpassing their ancestral countries. Como esta sus vicia en los Estados Unidos "unfair" Secretario Garcia? Dave Allen is a Deming resident. |
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