Nation in need of drastic solution to No Child Left Behind Act
Daniel Black
Issue date: 10/26/06 Section: Opinion
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.
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.
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