This from New Politics, Winter 2005. It's worth putting here for reference.
A snip:
Why then were liberals and moderates in both parties so willing to support a legislative package with these (and other) equally regressive provisions? The glue that held together the bipartisan endorsement of NCLB is the shared ideological support for neoliberalism's program for the global capitalist economy, a global transformation in education's character and role.1 NCLB enacts the program for education that neoliberal economists and governments pursue internationally. In both industrialized nations and the developing world, neoliberal reforms are promoted as rationalizing and equalizing delivery of social services. Towards this end, the World Bank demands curricular and structural change in education when it provides loans. The "wish list" is seen in the draft report of "World Development Report 2004: Making Services Work for Poor People," (WDR 2004), which describes education's purpose solely in preparing workers for jobs in a global economy: Reformed educational systems will allow transnational capitalism to move jobs whenever and wherever it wishes, that is, to the country with the working conditions and salaries that are worst for workers and best for profits. (Like all the documents from the World Bank that I analyze, it is on the World Bank website: draft and final version.)
The draft was later modified in negotiations with governments and non-governmental organizations, but the original version is a declaration of war on every aspect of the social contract, especially provision of pubic education and the existence of independent teachers unions. Public education remains the largest realm of public expenditures that is highly unionized and not yet privatized, and the draft report identifies unions, especially teachers unions, as one of the greatest threats to global prosperity. The draft argues that unions have "captured governments," holding poor people hostage to demands for more pay. The report combines a savage attack on teachers and teacher unions, including a suggestion that teachers should be fired wholesale when they strike or otherwise resist demands for reduced pay, with a call to privatize services, greatly reduce public funding, devolve control of schools to neighborhoods, and increase user fees. The World Bank has implemented many elements of the draft report by making loans and aid contingent on "restructuring," that is, destroying publicly-funded, publicly controlled educational systems. The results, including reduced literacy rates, have been devastating, as University of Buenos Aires Professor Adriana Puiggros describes in her report contrasting the reality of implementation in Argentina with the World Bank's rhetoric of equality.
A key element of the program is limiting access to higher education through the imposition of higher tuition and reduced government support to institutions and individual students. Limiting access to higher education means that lower education is charged only with preparing students for work, for jobs requiring basic skills, jobs that multinationals aim to move from one country to another. Schools that train most workers for jobs requiring limited literacy and numeracy, which WDR 2004 explains is all we can realistically expect for poor people in poor countries, do not require teachers who are themselves well-educated or skilled as teachers. In fact, teachers who have a significant amount of education are a liability because they are costly to employ; teacher salaries are the largest expense of any school system. Minimally educated workers require only teachers who are themselves minimally educated, and so teacher education is eliminated or deskilled in the neoliberal program.
Most of NCLB's elements for reorganizing education in the U.S. are straight out of the draft report for WDR 2004. Charter schools (and the Bush administration's not-yet-realized plan for vouchers to be used in private schools) fragment oversight and control; testing requirements and increasingly punitive measures for low test scores pressure schools to limit what is taught so that the tests become the curriculum; privatization of school services, like tutoring and professional development for teachers tied to raising test scores, undercuts union influence and membership.
NCLB's attack on teacher education deserves more than the cursory attention I can provide in this article, but an element generally accepted by liberals as an improvement needs to scrutinized in light of neoliberalism's program internationally. NCLB's definition of a "highly qualified" teacher actually deskills teaching because it assumes that all one needs to teach well is content knowledge in selected disciplines in the liberal arts. There is no question that teachers are more successful when they have deep knowledge of the subjects they teach, but school conditions as well as students' desire and preparedness to engage in intellectually-demanding study, factors closely related to social, economic, and political supports outside the school, also influence the sort of preparation teachers require.2 Defining a "highly qualified teacher" as one who has knowledge of the content to be taught parallels the neoliberal stance that teaching can be defined as the transmission of content and that schools have no social or political responsibilities beyond providing an education that is de facto vocational training. Toward this end, NCLB eliminates psychology and sociology as acceptable majors for middle school teachers, a measure that has the effect of making these majors less attractive to all prospective elementary teachers, who will want to acquire teaching certifications that enable them to teach both lower and upper grades. In kindergarten through fifth grade, teachers generally work in "self-contained" classrooms, meaning they must teach ALL subjects, including art (if it is still offered), math, social studies, science, reading, and writing, so a major in just one discipline cannot possibly prepare them to teach every subject. Seen in this light, ALL of the disciplines that now make an elementary teacher "highly qualified" are also problematic. In several states teachers can become "highly qualified" by presenting a B.A. and a passing score for an online exam of teaching which Chester Finn developed with a 35 million dollar grant from the Bush administration.
Lots more
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