The Hypocrisy of Accountability
in the "No Child Left Behind" Act
by Hank Edson
This week a report issued by Senator Edward Kennedy, who serves as chairman of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, revealed that although the NCLB Act makes a big deal about holding students and teachers accountable, it does not go far enough in imposing appropriate standards on the adults who hold political offices administering compliance with the law. Apparently four directors of the Reading First Technical Assistance Centers who advised state governments in the selection of reading programs that would meet the NCLB's regulatory guidelines were simultaneously reeping sizeable incomes working for education publishers. Joseph Rhee of ABC News reports:
Dr. Edward Kame'enui, the director of the Western Technical Assistance Center, was found to have received more than $400,000 from publisher Scott Foresman after authoring a reading program that was widely adopted by schools under Reading First. ... Today's report follows six investigations by the Department of Education's inspector general that found bias, mismanagement and conflicts of interest in the implementation of Reading First.
One reaction to this story I found was that "the Federal Government should not be involved in the state's education system. The Federal Department Of Education should be closed." This response I find to be a classic example of unnecessary confusion surrounding education issues. It smacks of the favorite fallback of conservative politicians whenever education is discussed: Local Control. This gentleman who opposed a federal role in education has suddenly introduced a topic that is not only mistaken, but that is completely separate from the real issue at the heart of this example of corruption. This was my rebuttal:
To all who claim the Federal government doesn't belong in education and that the department of education should be closed, your argument is flawed. As a former junior high school teacher, I can tell you the same corrupt crap goes on at the state level and has for years! Publishers lobby for standardized testing and for regulations that call for text books aligned with state standards. Then they provide a complex array of costly reading programs for the state to buy. Instead of spending money on teacher salaries that will attract and keep better teachers, the state makes the text book publishers rich and the text book publishers make the politicians appear to be informed in the latest educational methodologies. This is an old con-game the public asks to have played on it when it falls for political rhetoric that blames teachers rather than pays them. Closing the Department of Education in response to this scandal is absolutely off-point.
The problem is that the political process through which education standards are implemented imposes accountability on poor children but not on the rich adults who manipulate the system. Send these people to jail on felony charges and prevent them from ever holding government employment again. That's the kind of accountability that will really improve education. While we're add it, we should never have re-elected a President who makes political hay out of a law he calls "No Child Left Behind", but then leaves under-funded to the tune of $7 billion, (yet while finding $240,000 to pay columnist Armstrong Williams to promote it on his radio show without disclosing that he too has a conflict of interest.) Yes, this has happened all before. The problem in government corruption is not the government, but the corruption. We should not blame the government and pretend that this will make the corruption go away.
This scandal is just part of a broader problem in our society, which is that in 75% of the instances, 
government regulatory processes are being corrupted and the regulations that result serve to make a few rich at the expense and injury of the rest. The solution is not to give up on regulation, which is essential to promoting the general welfare, but to improve the integrity of the political process. Part of this effort includes imposing criminal liability that will sting. Rather than a war on drugs, we should direct our prosecutorial resources at those who corrupt the political processes that are the primary line of common defense upon which the American people rely. In a democracy, crimes against the political process are acts of sacrilege. They carry longer lasting and broader impacts than we usually are able to appreciate. We need a more sophisticated perspective that appreciates that crimes against our democratic principles are far more serious than crimes that are practically contingent on poverty. If we do not make this distinction, we do not understand the fundamental purpose of accountability, which is to maintain political process integrity, not simply to punish error. Above all, we miss the point when we blame the the idea that government should protect our children for the acts of adults willing to injure them for the sake of a lucrative contract.
copyright © 2007 by Hank Edson