Presented by the Religious Freedom Coalition of the Southeast

"There ought to be limits
to freedom..."

— George W. Bush,
commenting on the website
www.gwbush.com

QUOTE OF THE MONTH: "I'd make it a goal to make sure that local folks got to make the decision as to whether or not they said creationism has been a part of our history and whether or not people ought to be exposed to different theories as to how the world was formed... Children ought to be exposed to different theories about how the world started."

- mister education, President-Elect George "Dubya" Bush, giving us a migraine.

THE EDUCATION SNAFU IN TEXAS WHEN GEORGE "DUBYA" BUSH WAS AT THE HELM!!!

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 3:31 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- While President-elect Bush touted his education record in Texas, his nominee for education secretary pointedly told Congress the state had done little to help rebuild badly deteriorated schools.

``I see little hope that the state will soon come to our aid in any significant manner,'' Houston school superintendent Rod Paige said 18 months ago in House testimony. He also challenged a public-private bonds idea that Bush supported in his presidential campaign.

Also, just last October, Paige and eight other big city superintendents made clear they did not share the Republican congressional leadership's opposition to paying prevailing local wages in school construction projects. The GOP leaders' opposition -- and Democratic insistence that prevailing wages be paid -- killed a school construction financing bill.

The ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Charles Rangel of New York, said Paige's views ``differ from many conservative Republicans'' and expressed hope that ``he can help persuade Republican leaders to be open-minded towards bipartisan ideas like school modernization bonds.

Paige submitted written testimony on June 30, 1999, in favor of tax breaks that would have allowed school districts to pay no interest from their own treasuries on construction bonds. He told the Ways and Means Committee that inadequate school buildings ``may be the most serious facilities problem facing large urban districts.''

Lindsey Kozberg, a spokeswoman for President-elect Bush's transition team, defended the former governor's education record in Texas.

``Governor Bush's administration did oversee creation of two very significant programs for assisting school construction,'' she said. The programs, running into the hundreds of millions of dollars, are to assist schools with their debt from construction bonds.

``The president-elect and Dr. Paige agree that school construction is an issue for schools. Each of their views on education stems from a common principle: that each child can learn and that disadvantaged children need to have access to quality education,'' Kozberg said.

She said assistance to Houston was affected by a Texas Supreme Court ruling that said poor districts must not be left out in allocation of school funding.

Submitting testimony on behalf of Houston schools and a coalition of the nation's largest urban districts, Paige evaluated several bond subsidy plans before the Ways and Means Committee in 1999 -- and was consistent in his criticism of state aid for school construction.

``The state of Texas has done little to assist districts such as Houston over the years,'' Paige said in his testimony. He said that ``little money has been put into the big districts for facilities'' in the state. He urged ``a major federal investment.''

Paige also said public-private partnerships called ``tax-exempt private activity bonds'' were not the best solutions for helping public schools with their construction costs. Yet, those bonds were favored by Bush in his campaign as the answer to help struggling districts in school construction.

The partnership program, which currently does not apply to public school construction, uses private contractors to build public facilities and lease them to the government entity. Bush proposed including school construction in the program, pointing out that districts would save money because private contractors could do the job cheaper.

Paige told Ways and Means lawmakers the private activity bonds would not provide one-tenth the aid as other proposals.

The bond subsidy concept remained alive through 2000, right up to the time Congress adjourned at year's end. The proposal was by then sponsored jointly by Rep. Nancy Johnson, R-Conn. and Rep. Charles Rangel of New York, senior Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee.

The plan died because of the disagreements over the payment of prevailing wages. Republicans leaders called the language a payoff to big labor while Democrats insisted the provision would pay construction workers a decent wage.

Paige and eight other urban school superintendents addressed this issue in an Oct. 17, 2000 letter to then-Ways and Means Chairman Bill Archer.

``Given the combined strength of our national economy and the presence of existing state and local prevailing wage laws, we believe this opposition to be without substantial merit,'' the school chiefs wrote in opposing the GOP leadership stand.

Writing that they doubted that construction costs would increase, the superintendents expressed hope the provision ``will not outweigh the overwhelming national need'' to improve school facilities.

COMPARISON OF SCORES FROM TEXAS EDUCATION TEST WITH NATIONAL TEST SHOWS NO IMPROVEMENT IN TEXAS SCHOOLS DURING BUSH GOVERNORSHIP

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS | 10/24/2000

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Texas schoolchildren may be soaring on their high-stakes, statewide test, but their progress in national testing is about the same as students in other states, a new report says.

Gov. George W. Bush, the Republican presidential elect, has long touted the gains in reading and math scores on the mandatory statewide test, the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills.

In their paper Tuesday, researchers at Rand, a California-based think tank, suggest those scores may be misleading.

The report immediately drew heat for its narrow focus on the state of Texas, its seeming contradiction with an earlier, more comprehensive Rand study praising the state's academic achievements, and its release just two weeks before a tight election between Vice President Al Gore and Bush, governor since 1995.

``It's findings are erroneous,'' said Bush spokeswoman Karen Hughes. ``The timing is highly suspect.''

Rand President James A. Thomson said timing of the paper's release was based only on completion of peer reviews and revision. ``We don't produce findings for political reasons,'' he said.

Lead author Stephen P. Klein said his research singled out Texas because its state test scores rose sharply and were widely publicized. The work began last spring and was funded by the think tank and not outside groups, he said.

The paper came as Gore was attacking Bush's Texas record, and the Democrats jumped on its findings.

``We all hope and pray for miracles, but they are not occurring in the Texas school system,'' Gore running mate Joseph Lieberman told reporters Tuesday.

The report compares scores from Texas' own test with Texas students' performance on the National Assessment of Academic Progress, a national sampling test used voluntarily by 44 states.

Looking at how fourth- and eighth-graders scored in reading and math from 1994 to 1998, it found that Texas children made higher gains on the state test than on the national test. For instance, Texas fourth-graders improved in reading from 1994 to 1998 at about the same rate as other children nationwide, but the state tests showed far greater gains in reading.

``We do not know the source of these differences,'' wrote the authors, but added a ``reasonable explanation'' is that ``many schools are devoting a great deal of class time'' to test preparation. The Texas tests are used to decide whether children move to the next grade or graduate -- and to reward or punish their schools, mostly through funding.

The report said the starkest differences between Texas students' performance on the state test and the national test were among the race gaps between white and minority children. On the national test, the race gap was large and increased slightly. The Texas test showed a much smaller gap, decreasing slightly.

Bush had declared a U.S. ``education recession,'' citing national test scores, while calling gains on his own state's test ``the Texas miracle.''

Lieberman said the new comparison of Texas' test to a national sample was fair: ``Other governors are not running for president and they have not been claiming they've overseen a miracle in their state education systems.''

AP - September 14, 2000  3:48 a.m. ET

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) -- The majority of Texas charter schools suffer from a lack of accountability, poor academic performance, high teacher turnover and mismanagement, according to a report from a religious right watchdog group.

Since charter schools were approved by the Texas Legislature in 1995, the state has closed or revoked the charters of 12 schools for a variety of financial or staff troubles. Another 12 were returned to the Texas Education Agency for similar reasons.

``Charter advocates have tried to keep the spotlight on the handful of schools that have produced encouraging academic results, but reality keeps intruding on their story with the wreckage of one charter school after another coming to light,'' Samantha Smoot, executive director of Texas Freedom Network, said Wednesday.

The group's findings are similar to those contained in a study commissioned by the State Board of Education and the Texas Legislature and released this summer.

That study, done by the nonprofit Texas Center for Educational Research, said that charter school teachers are generally less experienced and paid less than their public school counterparts.

About 27,000 of the state's 4 million public school students attend charter schools. Last year, the state spent $115 million in public funds to finance operating charter schools.

This fall, 163 will be open in Texas.

Publicly funded, open-enrollment charter schools, which are free of many state regulations, were touted by Gov. George W. Bush and others as a way to encourage educational innovation. Proponents have said the program has spawned many successful schools but needs time to work out growing pains.

A Bush spokesman said that the Texas Education Agency and State Board of Education have tightened charter rules since the program was approved in 1995.

``Charter schools are still bound by the Texas accountability system and if a school isn't performing well, parents are always able to move their child to another school and the Texas Education Agency can take steps to address problems at the few charters that have had problems,'' spokesman Mike Jones said.

Charter school students also scored far below average on standardized tests than their traditional public school counterparts.

Only 59.1 percent of charter school students passed the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills exam in the 1998-99 school year, according to TEA data analyzed in the study. That compares to an overall state average of 78.4 percent during the same period.

Proponents say it is difficult to fairly compare the academic performance of charter school students to their public school counterparts.

``Charter schools are serving many poor and at-risk students who wouldn't even be in school if they didn't have charter schools as an alternative,'' Jones said.

SEE:
Texas Center for Educational Research:
http://www.tasb.org/tcer/charter/index.html

Texas Education Agency: http://www.tea.state.tx.us

Texas Freedom Network: http://www.tfn.org

Bush's Texas "experiment with the public-private hybrids called charter schools is producing disappointing results. A report submitted to legislators this week showed that, in general, students fare poorly at the state's charter schools, which now number about 175. The lawmakers also heard grim descriptions of havoc created when a mismanaged charter school closes its doors with little warning....Survey data from the Texas Center for Educational Research indicate that, generally, charter school test scores are inferior to those of the schools their students left. The data also show that charter school teachers are poorly trained and underpaid, that turnover rates for staff and students are high and that dropout rates at charters are nearly 15 times the statewide average.  Dunnam said he found particularly significant the study's paired comparisons of similar groups -- children in charter schools compared to a specific peer group in a nearby traditional school. In four of the five cases studied, academic performance at the charters was worse than at the comparison school. "This is a direct `apples to apples' comparison that we've not seen before," said Dunnam, chair of a House education subcommittee on charters.

"Proponents tout charters as an escape route from low-performing public schools, an option particularly vital to disadvantaged minority groups. The schools are said to offer the advantages of private institutions, but with no tuition.  Parents told researchers they chose charters in search of moral-values instruction, higher test scores and better discipline. What they find may not be what they sought, said researcher Catherine Clark, attempting to explain why 65 percent of students enrolled in charter schools for at-risk students didn't return. "Charters may not be what they expected," she said. They may not be what taxpayers and legislators expected, either. The experiment is still new, having begun in Texas [by Bush] in 1995, and research should continue. Meanwhile, the state must pick up the pieces when fledgling charters fail and firmly discourage those who view schools as places to make a quick profit off tax money." --Austin American-Statesman, 8/10/00

"LOVE died. POWER failed. HOPE was abandoned, and FAITH just faded away," writes Mary Alice Davis in the 8/13 AAS. "These optimistically named schools were among seven that relinquished or lost their state charters in these wobbly first years of the [Bush] charter school experiment. Last year, Texas had about 140 charter schools, the hybrid institutions that since 1995 have used public money to operate as loosely regulated public schools with the independent attitudes of private facilities.  The number is likely to rise to 175 this school year, with about 25,000 students who have eschewed public or private schools to see if tuition-free, state-chartered, alternative education suits them. It's the nation's fourth-largest charter experiment. So far, the results have been generally disappointing, occasionally heartbreaking and, in a few well-publicized [by Bush] instances, heartwarming." For example, when Bush wanted to publicize his support of charter schools, recently, he went to the successful KIPP Academy in Houston, and abandoned all discussion of LOVE, POWER, HOPE, and FAITH. The failure of the latter charter schools represent the rule in Texas. KIPP is the exception.

Take the Emma L. Harrison Charter School of Waco, not too many miles from Bush's new ranch in Crawford, Texas. "After the debt-ridden school abruptly closed in late 1999, about 90 percent of the school's pupils had to repeat their grade, estimates Bob Browning, the veteran educator the state dispatched to monitor the situation. He found a school with no governing body, insufficient food for children's lunches, untrained teachers who hadn't been paid in months, unpaid bills and a whiff of fraud.  Inflated attendance figures had been used to wrest significant overpayments from the state and $300,000 had been spent -- in the educator's delicate phrase -- 'on areas not germane to instructional services.'"

Here are the conclusions based on surveys and presented last week to a Texas House subcommittee looking at the performance of Bush's charter school system:

"* Charters are touted as a way to rescue children the public schools would assign to "failing" institutions with sorry test scores.  But data presented to the committee by researcher Catherine Clark showed that most often children are sent to charter schools with even lower scores.

* Charters are more "racially distinct" than the schools their pupils left. Children from all ethnic groups gravitate to charter schools in which their group is more predominant than at their previous schools.

* Mobility among charter students is high. More than half the students don't return. Dropout rates at charters dramatically exceed state averages.

* Staff turnover at charter schools is higher than the state average, and pay is below average. Accreditation is uncommon.

* Data comparing groups of similar students [was used] to contrast performance in charter schools with that in nearby conventional schools. In four cases out of five, performance was worse in the charter schools.'The public schools show better results, any way you slice it,'" the chairman of the subcommittee said.

There are two obvious problems with Bush's charter school program. First, it was hastily put together under the direction of the Governor's office to satisfy the pressure put upon him by the voucher/anti-public school forces who support him politically and contribute handsomely to his campaigns. Like too many other plans initiated by Bush, not only was it done under political pressure, but it also avoided providing oversight and safeguards. Secondly, the charter program is, in effect, one more attempt to privatize a part of the governmental system that does not lend itself to privatization, thus creatiing a solution with more problems than it solves. "The state doesn't limit the total number of charters -- although the data suggest a slowdown would be prudent. To fuel growth in charter schools, management companies are being created to site and run schools. Officials of two, ABS Management Co. and Advantage Management Co., addressed lawmakers last week. [The House subcommittee chariman] summarized the corporate approach as similar to locating a new convenience store: Do the demographics, zero in on a likely market and find someone to create and market a school there.... LOVE, POWER, HOPE and FAITH have faded.   CAUTION shouldn't." When you model an educational system after a convenience store, you end up with what is most often found at convenience stores--gas, junk food, overpriced services, and underpaid workers. --Politex, 8/14/00

"I am terribly confused, and I'm turning to Bush Watch in my hour of need. I have complete faith that Bush Watch and its readers can help me with my problem and restore my equanimity. "Juntos pedemos," as they say in Houston. I'm counting on you all. I've been spending an enormous amount of time (several hours, in fact) trying to understand what, exactly, it is that Bush the Younger is saying about education. This is, after all, the issue on which all the pundits seem to agree that Bush has actual ideas, with actual content, which are not quite as ludicrous as, say, his tax cut or his long-standing championship of photogenic breast cancer activists. Education, in other words, is supposed to be where we're gonna fish or cut bait. After the rising tide lifts all the boats. Or something like that. I warned you that I was confused.

Anyway, as I understand it, Bush's education "reforms" involve four key ingredients: mandatory standardized testing, funding sanctions against public schools, the creation of charter schools, and a voucher program. There appears to be a fairly complex relationship among these features of the plan:

1. Testing. The public schools will use mandatory, constant, standardized multiple-choice tests in order to determine whether the students know the things that are on the tests. Some of us used to think that tests were relevant to "reforms" only insofar as those tests measured the success or failure of the reforms in question, but it appears that this is some liberal fantasy nourished by people who don't understand Texas. Bush's idea appears to be that the schools can continue to do whatever it is they've been doing for generations, but as long as the kids pass a test, we have "reformed." Because we have "results." The result is the reform. I mean, the reform is the result. I mean, is "tautology" too big a word for a Yale-trained historian to cope with?

2. Funding sanctions: In order to make sure those test score reforms keep providing feel-good press for the Bush campaign, public schools face losing their Title I money if they don't make the grade. This is fair because, after all, if the school is so poor that it can't afford enrichment programs, well-stocked libraries, art and music instruction, computer labs, and so on, it can, after all, just adopt the TAAS and NAEP tests as its curriculum and spend all year drilling the kids in nice boring multiple-choice skills. Surely there isn't a school so poor it can't manage to do that, so this means that we have a "level playing field"--after all, it's obvious that all that fancy stuff the rich suburban schools have isn't helping those kids pass their tests. If a given public school is so dumb--or so full of left-wing commie holdouts actually certified by universities as "curriculum experts"--that it can't even figure out how to teach to the test, who would want to say it shouldn't lose its funding? We could hardly expect Governor Bush to agree to the proposition that ill-prepared idiots with unenlightened ideas should just continue to have money thrown at them.

3. Charter schools: These are places to put students whose public schools haven't reformed. They differ from public schools insofar as, while charter school students must also pass the standardized tests, no one in the big bad government can tell the charter schools how to structure their curriculum in order to achieve that goal. As opposed to the public schools, who get their marching orders from a sinister cabal in Washington. Also, charter schools get to use inspiring names like "Life's Beautiful" and "Impact," whereas the public schools are stuck with things like "Warren G. Harding Elementary," which doesn't do squat for anyone's self-esteem.

4. Vouchers: This is the part where the rubber meets the road. If the public school fails to deliver a sufficent number of efficient test-takers, the state will divide up its Title I funding into $1,500 rain checks, which the parents of the schoolchildren can use in one of two ways: they can send their children to the charter schools, which will of course always meet the testing standards and will only cost $1,500 per year, or they can buy $1,500 dollars worth of tutoring, cramming classes, and test-taking software, provided by for-profit firms, in order to supplement the public school curriculum, in order to assure that the kids pass the tests, so that the public school gets its funding back, so that there isn't any $1,500 next year to help the kids pass the next test. . . . Am I getting this right? I never claimed to understand the "new math," so you may have to explain this to me very, very slowly.

In essence, it seems, there are two major possibilities for schoolchildren in Texas. They can attend public schools, where the teachers make a living wage, the parents don't have to pay tuition on top of their property taxes, there is public oversight of the curriculum, and the school may or may not be able to boost test scores without degenerating into some dumbed-down "teaching to the test" or playing redistricting-league math games with the passing score cutoffs. Or, they can attend charter schools, where the "entrepreneurs" make a killing, the teachers barely make enough to pay the rent, the parents pay tuition on top of taxes, there is no public oversight of the curriculum, and the school may or may not be able to boost test scores. With or without the ten commandments posted on every wall. Can anyone use the phrase "redistribution of wealth" in a sentence, class?

Of course, I'm probably not being fair when I wonder just what passing some standardized tests has to do with reform. The point that I'm missing, I'm sure, is that the TAAS and NAEP test scores themselves are not the issue; the issue is what might correlate with successful test taking. Like Texas's soaring SAT scores. Unprecendented gains in high school retention and college admissions. Surges in future earning power of high school graduates. A plummeting incarceration rate for juveniles. Happy and contented students. A generation of informed, articulate critical thinkers who can apply the ability to read complicated texts, apply logical analysis, and draw sophisticated conclusions to political campaigns, for the purpose of distinguishing between "reforms" and "bullshit."

I remember a favorite professor of mine once remarking of a particularly dim-witted politician, "you can look into his eyes and see clear to Wyoming." So I'm looking into Bush's education plan. Am I seeing "reforms" or Wyoming?

Politex Answers Doris in Des Moines. You're seeing Wyoming, Doris. Bush's problem, as usual, is that his saying something does not make it so. He's a MISINformer rather than a REformer. Two additions to what you wrote. First, kids could use the cash voucher to go to non-charter religious schools and private non-denominational schools as well as charter schools. Bush claims, however, that the religious schools could still teach their particular brand of religion to all students, and says he's confident he can have the laws changed to do so, thus breaking down the separation between church and state. Also, he has yet to address what happens when a non-public school is forced by law to accept physically and emotionally handicaped children from failed public schools without additional recompense but with directives to provide added facilities to deal with such handicaps. And what about those non-public schools that charge more than what the voucher provides? Requesting government grants for these additional needed funds would be a case of double-dipping, wouldn't it, but I can see that happening, further destroying public education. More likely, however, is that the private schools would not be required to take students without the money, the smarts, or the physical and emotional abilities thought of as "normal," further setting up the public schools for failure by shifting federal money from public to private schools without shifting the burden of educating every child. And if they were required to take all students, it would be on paper only. The rules would not be reinforced because, based on his Texas record, Bush would not provide the administration, the staff, or the funding to do so. Remember, a law is only as good as the determination to enforce it. Which brings me to my second point.

During his tenure as governor of Texas Bush has demonstrated that he's able to push through ill-conceived laws to satisfy one or the other group of his financial or social backers, but the laws never seen to provide for enough resources to police the potential lawbreakers or to provide for the administration of the laws even when its provisions are being followed. With respect to charter schools, what has resulted is schools teaching math by teachers and administrators who can't count. Too many Texas charter schools have folded because they spent a full year's worth of state-provided funds in the first few months of operation. One spent its funds without ever opening. Another simply closed down, leaving children and parents waiting for the doors to open one Austin morning. more

This is the side of the Bush educational record that he seems to have forgotten. If he really wants to reform something, he should begin by reforming his own mistakes. And it's not just education. It seems that every six months or so a state agency or a major branch of a state agency is faced with scandal because of poor administrative practices engendered by Governor Bush's willingness to pass laws coupled with his unwillingness to provide proper funding, staff, and oversight to administer the laws. more In too many of these instances the administrator under fire turns out to be a Bush friend, political acquaintance, or campaign contributor appointed by the governor, himself. Bush's poor governance is hardly what we need on the national level. --Politex, 3/22/00

The creator of Head Start is baffled by Bush's debate pledge that he would effectively abolish the country's most successful vehicle for early childhood education.

Oct. 4, 2000 | Salon | y Bruce Shapiro

Over his breakfast Wednesday morning, Edward Zigler was in a rage. Zigler, a Yale psychology professor and a legendary scholar of child development, was burning over two sentences delivered in the presidential debate Tuesday night by George W. Bush:

"Here's the role of the federal government: One is to change Head Start into a reading program.   Two is to say that if you want to access reading money, you can do so because the goal is for every single child to learn to read."

"I was stunned," said Zigler. "Doesn't the governor know a single thing about Head Start or about literacy? Head Start is today, and has been for 35 years, about preparing children to
read and be successful students."

Zigler should know. A scholar of education for 45 years, he was on the White House committee that in 1964 created Head Start for low-income preschoolers -- beginning with a model program a short distance from Zigler's office in New Haven, Conn., during the years when both Bush and Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Lieberman were Yale students.

Backed up by decades of studies attesting to Head Start's singular effectiveness, Zigler has spent the past generation alternately goading politicians in both parties to support the perpetually underfunded child development project and Head Start itself to do a better job.

Bush's pledge to "reform" Head Start -- which now serves over 800,000 children and their families per year -- was one of the most revealing comments by either candidate in Tuesday's debate. Although education is generally assumed to be the Texas governor's strong suit, showcasing his policy acuity and the compassionate side of his conservatism, Bush's caricature of Head Start suggests otherwise.

Bush would basically abolish the program as we know it. His proposal implies that the present-day Head Start is nothing but a "big-government social program" divorced from real education. In fact, Head Start is not one but thousands of community-based, early-childhood programs combining preschool and the social support needed to create strong elementary school pupils. Said Zigler: "The governor seemed to have no sense that health and nutrition are connected to reading ability, that the very strength of Head Start as a predictor of school success lies in its comprehensive nature."

Indeed, students' "readiness to learn" was reaffirmed as the primary goal of Head Start when its funding was last reauthorized -- by Newt Gingrich's 1998 Republican Congress.

Bush's promise of a top-down federal reworking of Head Start also runs against Republican dedication to local control: His proposal amounts to federal micromanagement of Head Start programs that traditionally are community run, with a heavy dose of local parent involvement.

"That sense of ownership is desperately important to families, and is one reason Head Start has persisted," Zigler said, "but there was no understanding of that in the comments by Governor Bush."

So what was Bush, the purported education candidate, up to Tuesday night? Was it simply to look "tough on education" the way Bill Clinton tried to look tough on crime? Perhaps. But his attack on Head Start also represented a coded genuflection to the party's more extreme social conservatives, whose influence on his campaign has remained in the shadows since the
Philadelphia convention.

For one thing, the Republican right has for years gone gunning for Head Start as a symbol of liberal social engineering. The administration of candidate Bush's father slashed what was supposed to be a five-year, full-time Head Start program to one year of half-days -- on paper radically expanding the numbers of children, but in fact precipitating a decline in Head Start quality so severe that by the beginning of the Clinton administration, Zigler himself was warning that 30 percent of Head Starts around the country were failing.

Indeed, one of Donna Shalala's first acts as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services -- and one of the Clinton administration's more notable successes -- was to turn this crisis around. Under Clinton, Head Start funding has more than doubled, to $4.66 billion. And Shalala isn't just throwing money at problems. She has shut down 150 Head Start agencies around the country that failed to meet quality standards, and salvaged 200 others that were in crisis.

Conservative hostility to Head Start is only part of the story, though. There is also the politics of literacy: In recent years, educational conservatives have also coalesced around the call to return literacy education to the old "phonics" method, instead of so-called "whole language" techniques embraced in many classroom since the 1960s. (Some conservatives just like phonics because it seems traditional, but more extreme conservatives also see whole language as a vehicle for cultural relativism.)

Bush and his wife, Laura, have leaped onto the phonics bandwagon, and seem to intend to make Head Start their phonetic-reform vehicle. This, too, comes in for some harsh judgment from Zigler, who has studied literacy education for decades: "Governor Bush seems unaware of numerous studies comparing whole language and phonics, which show that one curriculum is no better than the other."

Whether Bush's motivation is a sincere belief in the value of phonics, or he is simply pandering to the right, the governor Tuesday night declared war on the nation's most successful vehicle for early-childhood education. Head Start has survived the Great Society of the 1960s just as Social Security survived the New Deal, and for the same reason: It works.

"I'd like to ask the governor what he thinks produces literacy in childhood," said Zigler. If Bush follows his plan, the Head Start creator cautioned, "everything that makes Head Start a success would be lost."

BUSH IS BEGINNING TO BELIEVE HIS OWN ED SPIN. It's one thing to spin the facts, but wise politicians know better than to make generalizations based on their spin. It's too easy to get caught. Take the case of Dubya's dash through Jackson, Mississippi last Friday on the way to Florida. He managed to attend a $1,000-a-plate lunch at the Crown Plaza Hotel, took 15 minutes to shake the hand of every single person at all 36 tables, raced through his usual stump speech, and squeezed in a 7 minute press conference. That was where he made his mistake. When a reporter asked George W. to comment on the endorsement of Gore by the National Education Association, he said, ""In the state of Texas, I have terrific support amongst the teachers, but oftentimes their spokespeople weren't for me. That's politics." Spin's one thing, living in a dream world is something else.

G-Dub started out in the summer of '98 reminding teachers of a previous pay raise they never got. After he apologized for his error, he then said the state would send the local districts money for numerous things and the districts could use some of that money for teacher raises, if desired. By the time the session began, the state was to give "1 billion additional dollars to local districts to raise salaries, or hire more teachers to reduce class size." The actual bill began with only beginning teachers getting raises. It was foot dragging by Bush every. Step. Of . The. Way. Why? Teachers don't give him money; Theocratic school voucher backers like billionaire campaign contributer "Sugar Daddy" Leininger do. It's that simple. The House-Dems hung in there on this one, finally getting a $1.7 billion wage package for across-the-board teacher raises. This is where the Bush property tax money went. Bush is now claiming teacher raises as his victory. The facts say otherwise.

Why in the world, then, would Bush have the "terrific support amongst the teachers" that he says he does? The truth is he doesn't. He's making it up. There is not a single scrap of fact or even statistically meaningful anecdotal information to suggest that Texas teachers give Bush "terrific support." More inportantly, given Dubya's teachers' pay record, they would have no reason to do so, unless he's talking about non-public school teachers, charter school teachers, or parents as teachers. None of those folks are paid to teach by the state. Yet. But with respect to public school teachers, the only teachers presently working under Bush, support for him is not "terrific." "Lackluster" would be an exaggeration. George should know better than to say otherwise, even outside the state. There must have been one or two Texas reporters in Jackson, Mississippi, frustrated by an inability to ask a follow-up question, as Dubya, surrounded by a phalanx of suits, hurried toward his waiting van on the way to the airport. 10/12/99---Sources: Salon, Biloxi Sun Herald, and Dallas Morning News

Like his "faith-based" plan, the Guv wants voters to look at his education success in Texas as a guide to what he could do on the national level, but it's widely-known that much of what Bush has bragged about with respect to education in Texas was as much as ten years old before he ever became Governor.   In fact, his major education accomplishment as Governor is his recently-passed prohibition on "social promotion" (SB4) and his insistence that promotion be based on passing a newly designed TAAS test. (SB103).  However, while "social promotions" are not politically fashionable, over 800 studies suggest that retaining students is counterproductive.  "After being retained twice, a student is 90% likely to drop out." This was reported by the Texas Eduation Agency in 1993 and studies since have not changed the thinking of most educators. About the other bill, the law describing the most recently passed version of TAAS contains a passage that says the test, which will now include "integrated" chemistry and physics, must assess the student's "readiness to enroll in an institution of higher education." Bush signed both bills into law.

Texas Key, the newsletter of the Learning Disabilities Association of Texas, reported the above in its summer issue. "LDAT questioned why a student should be required to pass a college readiness test (including questions treating courses in chemistry and pyhsics which are not required to graduate) in order to receive a high school dipolma, since only half of all high school students go on to college," the newsletter reported. The question went to Sen. Teel Bivins (R-Amarillo), Bush educational point-man in the lege as well as a top-money contributor to the Bush presidential campaign and a Bush Pioneer sent out to collect maximum contributions from others. Bivins decided to delete the chemistry and physics courses from the test, but added questions from the "integrated" physics and chemistry course. That course is not required for graduation, either. Then, Bivins included the following wording in the bill: "this subsection does not require a student to demonstrate readiness to enroll in an instutution of higher learning." However, since the offending clause requiring that the student pass the test to demonstrate "readiness to enroll in an institute of higher education" was not deleted, this could mean that non-college-bound high school students are still required to answer questions from a course that is not required for graduation. Educators in Texas have been told by the Texas Agency that there might be two sections to the TAAS or that there might be two passing standards, but no one knows for sure and educators are quite confused about how to legally apply the bill that Bush backed and signed into law. See a pattern here? Confusion and double-speak are earmarks of many Bush-backed bills signed into law in Texas, and there is no reason to believe that this behavior and these results would change on the national level.

Why, then, does Dubya float such flawed plans and then sign them into law? With respect to the education bills, the folks at Texas Key suggest that it's politics, not concern for the student: "The major education reform legislation--ending social promotion and strengthening the state assessment program (TAAS)--is a popular political move, but it is not based on validated educational research or recommendations from many experts in the field. The actual impact of this legislation on many children and their families will be devastating for years to come and may serve no useful purpose." Paul E. Burton of the Educational Testing Service seconds that remark: "Mr. Burton concludes that since tests are inexpensive and quick to put in place, political leaders are increasingly overusing and misusing them: 'Testing is becoming a means of reform, rather than one way of finding out whether reforms are working,'" he adds in the 6/23/99 issue of Education Week

We find Texas Key's conclusion of particular value because it underlines the basic mean-spiritedness of so many of George W. Bush's plans, offered as being compassionate but actually being political: "It is interesting that Texas education reforms seem to mainly focus on what the child can do for us and what we will do to the child if he doesn't....Demonstrate appropriate behavior or be (denied a diploma), suspended, (or) expelled....It would be interesting to see the outcome of focusing on what we can do for the child--smaller classes, smaller schools, accredited teachers with quality...training, appropriate curriculum." Remember that while Bush education point-man Bivins was holding the line on the social promotions bill and clouding the revised TAAS bill with contradictory clauses that could keep lawyers and state agencies haggling for years to come, Bush was trying to get money out of the kindergarten education bill to increase the bottom line on his tax cut bills. Again, his CEO style is to have a poorly thought-out plan, call it compassionate when it's political, pass it on to others to iron out the specifics, neither oversee the evolution of the plan nor supply the funds and manpower to carry it out if it becomes law, and then have his spinners try to hide the resulting mess. Bush politics. As usual. 8/7-9/99

NEXT SEE THE COUNCIL ON NATIONAL POLICY

BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS

DISCLAIMER: The Religious Freedom Coalition of the Southeast (RFCSE) is a non-advocacy Religious site paid for with volunteer labor and edited by Rebecca, a non-affiliated U.S. citizen.  The RFCSE site is being hosted by the Association of Cymry Wicca, a religious organization based in Marietta GA, the RFCSE Web site was published beginning on February 1, 1999.   No Permission is required by the RFCSE, for reprinting.  But permission by originating authors may be needed.  The duration of the working links are not under our control.  RFCSE has not reviewed all of the sites linked to our site and is not responsible for the content of any off-site pages or any other sites linked to our site. Your linking to any other off-site pages or other sites from our site is at your own risk.

Our Original Web Master, an associate died after a threat from a Hacker who did not appreciate Religious Freedom.  Before she died, she asked us to continue her Religious Freedom Page.  We will.  Even though we have been attacked by Right Wing extremists, we still exist because of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  

Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, who were deists (not Christians), helped frame the Constitution of The United States of American and placed language in the First Amendment to guarantee Religious Rights for all Americans.  We will uphold that tradition.