Tests and conservatives: the beat goes on.

American schools are not doing worse than in earlier times. Evidence seems to be that they are doing better, with the most dramatic gains coming from minority students, who now have closed some of the gap with whites in academic achievement.

--Richard Rothstein, from The Myths and Realities of America's Student Achievement

What do George W. Bush and his father have in common? Both, it seems clear, have gone out of their way to suppress reports that highlight the efficacy of public schools in the United States. In August 2004 the National Assessment of Educational Progress did the first national comparison of test scores among children in charter schools and regular public schools and found, to the chagrin of the conservatives in the Bush administration, that public schools are doing measurably better than their charter school counterparts (charter schools being privately organized public magnet schools). This is cause for concern, since big business and religious groups--two of the most fervent coalitions in the Republican Party--have long argued that the best way to get rid of public schools is by trashing their performance and offering charter schools as the natural alternative.

Indeed, what is revealing about the study is not the positive results for public schools in the United States but the reaction--or lack thereof--from the Bush administration and their born-again, "education" president. Rather than trumpet the victories of hard-working teachers in hundreds of public schools, the Bush team chose to bury the study and subject it to "further scrutiny" Days after the report, when several charter school advocates were asked to respond to the report on National Public Radio, many used a refrain that is common among anti-public school groups. One suggested that this was just the first comparison and we should be circumspect in making dramatic conclusions. Another argued that charter schools need more time and that choice is still a good concept for Americans to embrace.

Of course, such careful, dispassionate reactions are sparse when public schools are on the losing end of a study or comparison. In the 1980s Ronald Reagan's administration devoted much of its two terms in office to vilifying public schools, declaring in the most inflammatory prose that they were so incompetent, so feckless that a "rising tide of mediocrity" would "threaten our very future as a nation and a people." And through all of the scare tactics and military metaphors not one study was done and not one teacher sat on their panel. Instead, the commission selectively interpreted the results of standardized tests, failing to see that disaggregated Scholastic Aptitude Test scores showed that minority students were doing better and scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress had demonstrated neither a significant rise nor fall in scores over a two decade period. According to David Berliner and Bruce Biddle, in their 1995 book The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America's Public Schools, "SAT scores for white students were nearly constant but the scores increased for every minority group during this period."

One thing is certain: when conservatives hold the White House, bad news in educational circles travels fast while any sign of public school accomplishments becomes mired in ponderous debate and fodder for "further review." This, it is fascinating to note, was the same tactic of George Herbert Walker Bush in 1990 when the Sandia Group reported that public schools weren't in crisis and that much of the jeremiads of the 1980s--including the dramatic A Nation at Risk--weren't accurate assessments of the state of public school education.

The Sandia Report, we must remember, was commissioned by the first Bush administration and was a close examination of the facts compiled over the last few decades on the status of U.S. schools. In 1990 it was thought that Bush couldn't safely make a claim to the moniker of education president without a report to examine the status of public schools. So in that year Secretary of Energy James Watkins asked the Sandia National Laboratories to do an overview of the state of American education. Unfortunately for the Bush team, the findings contradicted the time-honored histrionics that suggested that public schools were a miserable failure. And so, like his son after him, the elder Bush chose not to release the report at all, electing instead to subject it to further studies which, not surprisingly, revealed "flaws" in the research. In the end, the study was never released and millions of public school teachers were never given the good news about their performance. With little ammunition for a new conservative paradigm there was little interest or reason to act.

And so we begin to understand the secrecy. The Bush presidents, along with Ronald Reagan, have long hoped to orchestrate a decline in public education so that support for it would wane and alternatives would become more viable. All three of these conservative presidents knew that the best way to subvert a system and remake it in their own ideological image was to first demonstrate its failures and then offer their religious and business interests as the logical alternative. For all three presidents--and for the conservative coalitions that bolster their positions--education has been about undermining public schools and promoting vouchers and charter schools as the logical "choice."

The Religious Agenda

Religious groups--from the Catholic church to various Protestant denominations--are hoping that public schools will fail and have supported conservative presidents in hopes that their campaign to promote "choice" will result in more money and power for their parochial schools. Central to this issue is the recent Supreme Court decision, Harris v. Zelman, that ruled it constitutional to take public education money and use it for religiously based schools of choice. Indeed, with the opportunity to use public funds, religious-based schools have a vested interest in seeing public schools fail and then in offering themselves as the answer.

Three centuries ago, we must remember, religious groups had a tight grip on public schools, controlling the content of the reading, the words of the teachers, the essence of the curriculum. When students read, they recited prayers and were humbled by the New England Primer. Today there is no mandatory school prayer, a paucity of creationism in biology classes, and gays and lesbians are increasingly seen as worthy of basic human rights. Without question conservative religious leaders--from Phyllis Schlafly to Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson--find themselves on the outside of an educational system that is increasingly secular, critical, and humanistic. In response to this situation many religious zealots have chosen to try to dismantle public schools and replace them with religious or charter schools by offering parents vouchers that redirect tax money toward these parochial alternatives. Other groups have long hoped simply to undermine progress so that parents will choose vouchers for religious education. In his book, The Children Trap, Religious advocate Robert Thorburn said:

   I imagine that every Christian would
   agree that we need to remove the
   humanism from the public schools.
   There is only one way to accomplish this:
   to abolish the public schools. We need to
   get the government out of the public
   school business. According to the Bible,
   education is a parental responsibility. It
   is not the place of the government to be
   running a school system.

Business Motives

Where religious groups aspire to control the minds and hearts of students and promulgate their religious agenda, big business simply wants access to the vast amount of money that is inherent in education. With vouchers and charter schools, businesses become players. But one cannot ask parents to abandon their neighborhood public school if there isn't a clear and present absence of success. Consequently, it becomes incumbent upon big business to prove that public schools are failing and need to be injected with a saving dose of competition. When schools are seen as complacent, business is quick to answer with a panacea-like talk of the business metaphor. In Pinckney, Michigan, the public school system was replaced with Educational Alternatives Incorporated, which also took control of the Baltimore school district for a short time. In both cases the campaign to improve the schools was unsuccessful, but that didn't prevent EAI from making money off the perception that the business paradigm can do better.

While pro-business groups that support vouchers would have you believe they only seek better education for minorities mired in failing schools, in fact they are many of the same groups that have opposed affirmative action. Research shows that the conservative think tanks that support campaigns for vouchers are also opponents of affirmative action. According to journalist Barbara Miner, "One of the biggest links between their views on affirmative action and vouchers is financial. The groups all receive significant support from right wing foundations such as the Bradley Foundation and Olin Foundation? Miner reminds us that the leading voice for vouchers is Clint Bolick, who has been a leading spokesperson against affirmative action. "It was Bolick," adds Miner, "who wrote an opinion in the Wall Street Journal in 1993 that dubbed Lani Guinier a 'quota queen' and helped scuttle her nomination to head the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division."

So why would someone who opposes affirmative action campaign for vouchers that lead to more minority choice and opportunity? Skeptical people might wonder about the claims of those who campaign behind the banner of "choice." Is this really about more choice for minorities or is it about more opportunity for businesses? In the same way, if religious groups are simply concerned with better education, why are they working to drain money from public schools through vouchers and choice plans? When the deception is brushed away one begins to see the true motives behind those who advocate choice. The Bush administration isn't concerned that children are left behind but, rather, that its most valued contributors aren't getting a piece of the education pie.

Conspiracy theories and arguments about right-wing agendas are often treated with derision, but much can be gleaned from the reticence of the current Bush White House when it comes to the recent findings of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. While nothing is said about the success of public schools in comparison to charter schools, even less has been done about the increasing failure of charter schools. Once hailed as the conservative answer to apathetic public education, charter schools are mired in controversy over how they operate and their general inability to perform well. "Around the country," writes Luis Huerta of Columbia University in the September 10, 2004, San Francisco Chronicle, "more than 80 charter schools were forced to close, largely because of questionable financial dealings and poor performance."

And yet from our retiring Secretary of Education Rod Paige we hear nothing. Is this reticence a result of the conservative goal to replace public schools with profitable, business-run schools? Do conservatives have an interest in the demise of public school education so as to make room for religious groups that would love a bigger share of educational revenues? Clearly, Republicans have invested much time and money in championing experiments that have done little more than make public school teaching more difficult. For those of us who aren't afraid to confront the clear presence of politics in our classrooms, it is yet another reason to campaign for regime change and an end to defamation and persecution of the public school system.

Gregory Shafer is an assistant professor of English at Mott College in Flint, Michigan.