Moment of Truth

I usually post my essays, like the one below, at the link above. Click on it and you can read past essays, plus a lovely almanac of sorts. I thank Yosephus for allowing me to display my essays here. You can also hear them at http://www.thisishell.net - the website of the radio show on which I read them.

jd

2-26-05 NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND GETS SPANKED

Welcome to the Moment of Truth, the dark matter of political discourse, invisible, and yet affecting the motions of everything in the universe with its gravity.

The National Conference of State Legislatures just released a report calling No Child Left Behind flawed, convoluted, and unconstitutional, according to the New York Times of February 24. The NCSL is a bipartisan conference of representatives from state legislatures. It's made up of over three-and-a-half thousand of each Republicans and Democrats, with Republicans in the majority by one member, plus a few members from some of those little, meaningless gadfly parties it's so amusing to ignore. The Times article says the report supports longstanding complaints by educators and members of state legislatures.

The only dissent to the report that is mentioned in the article, as representative of "[s]everal groups that strongly support [No Child Left behind and] took issue with the report," comes from The Business Roundtable. The Business Roundtable is a collection of executives from big corporations whose only expertise in public education policy come from their desire to privatize it, sell products in it, and advertise themselves in its learning materials.

One example of the flaws of the Bush plan pointed to in the Times is the case of testing the mentally disabled. "[A] disabled eighth grader whom educators deem to be working at a sixth grade level must take examinations for eighth graders." It's a rule that conflicts with another federal law, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which "mandates that students be taught according to ability." It also brings down test scores at public schools, and when that happens, Bush's brilliant punishments go into effect. Many schools have been shut down for low test scores. It's this kind of provision that led school administrators in Texas, laboring under a similar plan under the Bush gubernatorial reign, to reclassify or administratively disown underperforming students in order to avoid being closed or radically overhauled by the Central Authority. The falsification of the "achievements" of the Texas plan were exposed during the first President W administration.

Bush tried to resolve the problem while he was governor of Texas by executing kids who read below grade level. We all know that to be true. The rest of this paragraph is a kind of "what might have been" scenario: Bush discovered that the legal system was a cumbersome way to go about weeding out the mentally disabled, though, even the Texas legal system, and came up with a way to speed up the process. But his planned facility in New Auschwitz, Texas, under the "No Behind Child Left" program, had to be abandoned so he could run for president. Halliburton had to wait a whole two years for an equally lucrative contract to be handed to them.

Back to the truth:

The Department of Education is issuing a rebuttal to the report. I'm not sure why they don't just pay some conservative talk show host to rebut it for them. Maybe all the conservative pundits the Bush cabinet has bribed to peddle its various initiatives have been exposed and fired from their papers and TV and radio stations. Still, if you hear or read a belligerent conservative voice condemning the report by the National Conference of State Legislatures, remind yourself that they might be getting checks from the Secretary of Education. You'll have to provide your own disclaimer, because, for some reason, pundits in the pay of Bush appointees can't seem to remember to provide that caveat to their audiences on their own. It's weird, because whenever they're busted they claim they did nothing wrong. So why not just let people know at the outset?

Audiences are more likely to trust honesty than crookedness, right? Of course, someone who's honest about being a crook is still a crook. So the only way a crook can maintain the appearance of honesty is by being dishonest. That's why it didn't work for Nixon when he said, "I am not a crook." Conservatives have learned from his mistake. It's this post-Nixonian type of thinking that the NCSL might have been talking about when it described No Child Left Behind as "convoluted."

As for "unconstitutional," I quote the Times again:

One chapter of the report says that the Constitution does not delegate powers to educate the nation's citizens to the federal government, thereby leaving education under state control. The report contends that No Child Left Behind has greatly expanded federal powers to a degree that is unconstitutional.

"This assertion of federal authority into an area historically reserved to the states has had the effect of curtailing additional state innovations and undermining many that had occurred during the past three decades," the report said.

I guess it's okay to let Big Government push people around when it comes to education and same-sex marriage and library lending records and tours of military service and limiting the amount a negligent corporation can be forced to reimburse a victim. It's just not okay when Big Government tries to regulate corporate impacts on communities and the environment and the health and well being of workers. And don't even THINK about taxing corporations in order to PAY for pushing and not pushing people around in ways according to corporate caprice.

It's almost as if the Business Round Table were the philosophical arm of the Republican Party.

And it's like Cheney is Business King Arthur, and Bush is Sir Percival, and Alan Greenspan is Merlin.

And the public school kids are like unnoticed mushrooms and toads they squish under the hooves of their battle steeds.

This has been the Moment of Truth. Good day!