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WorkingForChange.com
February 4, 2004
Bill Berkowitz
President Bush's faith-based initiative is doing better than you think
Last week marked the third anniversary of the president's creation of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI). Over the past three years, executive orders were issued, Centers for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives were established at seven federal agencies, web sites were created, technical assistance to religious organizations was given at seminars and conferences, guidebooks helping religious groups apply for government funds were published, and billions were earmarked for faith-based institutions.
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Forward
January 29, 2004
ORI NIR
List Compiled To Track Grants
In a tacit admission of their inability to block President Bush's faith-based initiative, the Anti-Defamation League and other civil-liberties groups are shifting their fight to the field, in a concerted effort to monitor social service programs run by religious organizations.
The Forward has learned that ADL staffers in Washington last month spent days combing through a list of some 3,600 organizations and institutions across America that received new government funds to deliver services to the homeless. The goal was to determine which religious groups received funds, the size of each allocation and how much of the total $1.1 billion in grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development was funneled to religious organizations.
After the data was analyzed, computerized lists of the faith-based grantees were sent to ADL's 28 regional offices throughout the United States. Field officers with the league were instructed to use the lists to ensure that church-state guidelines are being respected as more religious groups receive federal funds.
"We are literally following the money" as it's disbursed from Washington to religious groups in the field, said ADL's top lawyer, Michael Lieberman.
The new strategy — which liberal groups acknowledge is highly inefficient, costly and unlikely to provide an adequate check against constitutional violations — is a result of two recent developments. First, a series of court rulings opened the way for the federal and state governments to fund social services through religious organizations. The other development is President Bush's insistence on bypassing congressional opposition and pushing his "charitable choice" initiative by executive order.
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Washington Post
January 23, 2004
Republicans Fight School Mandates
The Republican-controlled Virginia House of Delegates sharply criticized President Bush's signature education program Friday, calling the No Child Left Behind Act an unfunded mandate that threatens to undermine the state's own efforts to improve students' performance.
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Letter to WSJ
January 22, 2004
Jewish ADL
...Far from "a lifeline" for D.C. students, this first federal voucher program in the nation will instead promote discrimination, since private schools are allowed to discriminate in the selection of their students and employees on a variety of grounds, including religion.
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AP
December 23, 2003
LAWTEY, Fla. (AP) - Gov. Jeb Bush dedicated what is being called the nation's first faith-based prison Wednesday, telling its nearly 800 inmates that religion can help keep them from landing in jail again.
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Black Commentator
December 3, 2003
School Funds Diverted to Subvert Public Education
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Mark Kleiman
November 10, 2003
Jay Matthews in the Washington Post tries to defend the No Child Left Behind Act from what Matthews calls "a host of myths and misinterpretations" by examining "10 statements about the law that experts say are heard often but are not firmly anchored in reality."
ABC News's The Note finds Matthew's piece "highly informative." I have no idea why. It seems to me a masterpiece of illogic.
...Now I wish I could feel absolutely certain that the publication of this story, written largely (though not entirely) in defense of a bill that is showering dollars on the testing and test-preparation industry had nothing to do with the fact that the Washington Post's parent company now also owns Kaplan Educational Systems, which advertises "effective, research-based programs to help schools raise K-12 state assessment scores, improve graduation rates and demonstrate the adequate yearly progress required by No Child Left Behind." (Note: Kaplan now has larger revenues than any other division of the company: higher, for example, than the Post itself.)
In the spirit of standardized testing, let's try a little fill-in-the blanks:
For the Post to publish a story blatantly illogical story with a slant that favors a sister company is a _______ of ________.
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Boston Globe Magazine
November 1, 2003
Charles P. Pierce, Globe Staff
A powerful faction of religious and political conservatives is waging a latter-day counterreformation, battling widespread efforts to liberalize the American Catholic Church. And it has the clout and the connections to succeed.
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People for the American Way
October 31, 2003
Analysis of U.S. Department of Education Grantmaking Reveals Steady Stream of Public Funds to Support School Privatization
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Associated Press
October 25, 2003
LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Six companies responsible for teaching 17,000 Michigan's charter school students fail to produce test scores that match even low-scoring traditional public schools, records show.
The companies manage about $123.7 million in tax money each year.
The low- performing companies include three of the biggest for- profit charter school managers in the state, The Detroit News said Sunday.
They are Mosaica Foundation, The Leona Group and Charter School Administration Services. Together, they manage schools with more than a quarter of the 63,000 students in charter schools in the state.
The other three are Alpha-Omega Education Management, Black Star Education Management and CAN Associates, which have one school each.
The students at these schools often fall far below minimum standards in reading, writing and math, state education records show. The companies' schools also spend a smaller share of their budgets in the classroom than others.
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St. Petersburg Times
September 24, 2003
If the deal stands, the fund that provides for pensions of Florida public school teachers will own a company [Edison] that privatizes school management
Florida's state pension fund is investing $174-million in a controversial for-profit school management company.
Through one of its money managers, Liberty Partners, the pension fund has agreed to buy out the shareholders of Edison Schools Inc., taking the New York company private.
In effect, the fund that provides for the retirement pensions of Florida teachers and other public employees will own a company that has played a leading role in privatizing school management.
Josh Marshall comments:
So, you start a company to privatize education and take on the teachers unions. Your company fails miserably both in terms of the market and academic success. Then after you've hollowed the company out to cover your other bad debts friendly pols come along to bail you out with a couple hundred million from the teachers' (and other public employees') pension fund. I love symmetry.
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New York Times
September 12, 2003
Editorial
The 500,000 people who live in Washington, D.C., are accustomed to being humiliated by Congress, which dictates everything from how the city spends its tax dollars to how it collects the garbage — while denying Washingtonians a vote in the body that runs their affairs. This arrangement becomes painfully obvious at election time, when Republicans typically grandstand for the far right by ramming outrageous proposals down the throats of the city's overwhelmingly Democratic voters.
...Congress is trying to force the city to send about 1,300 public school children to private, mainly parochial, schools at public expense over the objections of the school board and a majority of the city's elected officials, including Eleanor Holmes Norton, the city's nonvoting representative in the House.
...This proposal is antidemocratic, but its faults run deeper. It further erodes the wall between church and state by pushing children toward parochial schools, which make up a vast majority of Washington schools. Private school tuition would be covered by the proposed stipend of up to $7,500. This new federal money is likely to drive out the private money that Washingtonians have been raising for children trying to move into private schools.
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Black Commentator
September 10, 2003
OUTRAGOUS: Did FOX News conspire with House Republicans to draw voucher opponents away from Washington, DC to sneak through a House vote on vouchers for Washington D.C., which passed by one vote?
On the evening of September 9, House GOP leadership staged a surprise vote on H.R. 2765. Forty miles away, the Congressional Black Caucus was co- sponsoring with Fox TV a Democratic presidential candidates debate. Despite furious efforts by DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton and House Democratic leadership, the voucher bill passed by one vote. In addition to candidates Dennis Kucinich and Dick Gephardt, eight other Democrats failed to make it back to the House floor to cast their votes against vouchers, including Congressional Black Caucus members Elijah Cummings (MD), Harold Ford (TN), Charles Rangel (NY) and Edolphus Towns (NY).
Republicans rebuffed requests from Democratic leadership and the Black Caucus to reschedule the vote (Rep. Cummings is Caucus Chairman), and the bill goes to the Senate for the final battle, later this month. There, key Democrat Diane Feinstein (D-CA), a 30-year opponent of vouchers for her state or the public schools in general, has decided to make an exception in the case of mostly Black Washington, DC. “If we look at what works for children,” Feinstein told the September 4 Washington Post, “we would probably agree that different models have to be provided, because what works for one child may not necessarily work for another." Translation: Vouchers are bad policy for white kids, but hell, let’s experiment on the Black children.
...The $10 million DC voucher program will only “benefit” 1,300 students, but that is not the point. Polls show that the people of DC overwhelmingly oppose vouchers (85 percent, among Black residents), as does a majority of the school board and city council but, that is not the point, either. With tens of millions in public and private dollars at their disposal and the endorsement of the “liberal” Washington Post (liberal in the same sense as Feinstein), the Right is determined to create its private school showcase in the nation’s capital in order to soften opposition in the rest of the country.
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Washington Post
August 31, 2003
Jerry Parks / Commentary
I'm a recently retired Iowa elementary school principal, and I can't figure out why educators all over the United States aren't screaming and yelling about the federal No Child Left Behind law.
...Is it possible this bill is an elaborate setup, designed by those hoping to usher in an era of vouchers, charter schools and other alternatives to public education?
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Center for Economic and Policy Research
August 28, 2003
David Rosnick
In effort to denigrate US public education, Bush administration propaganda overstates the federal role in education funding, and understates real educational attainment by US students
The Department of Education’s homepage prominently features a graph that appears to show a vast increase in federal spending on education over the last thirty five years, but no improvement whatsoever in student test scores. (http://www.ed.gov/) (Figure 1). The message seems clear.
(Figure 1: http://www.ed.gov/images/title-one.jpg)
However, Figure 1 does not give an entirely accurate representation of the situation for several reasons. A better representation of the data might look like Figure 2 below.
There are several important differences between the two graphs.
* The generally accepted way to judge growth in expenditures is measured on an inflation-adjusted, per-capita basis. Whereas Figure 1 shows nominal growth in total federal expenditures, Figure 2 shows total K-12 expenditures adjusted both for inflation and for the number of students enrolled in K-12 schools...
* Figure 1 leads the viewer to believe that federal education appropriations are especially important for children’s achievement. However, these federal appropriations to elementary and secondary schools accounted for only 3.5% of all K-12 expenditures in 1999. Figure 2 shows all K-12 spending.
* Figure 1 provides little information as to what the test scores are measuring and whether this is the only measure of student achievement. The choice of scale is also misleading: 500 is the highest possible score, but it is placed near the bottom of the graph, making it seem low. In 1999, 90% of nine-year-olds scored between 173.4 and 285.4 on the reading test, but this is not evident from Figure 1. Figure 2 scales the test from scores of 208 (“Basic” 4th grade understanding) through 238 (“Proficient”) to 268 (“Advanced”).
...From the standpoint of showing returns for increases spending, it is worth noting that private schools have not performed better. As seen in Figure 3 below, from 1970 to 2001, nonpublic school expenditures per K-12 student have grown at a 3.8% annual rate, compared to only 3.1% for public schools. However, the NAEP data from 1980 to 1999 indicates that average reading scores in nonpublic schools have not changed significantly, dropping one point over that time.
Figure 2 actually understates the improvement in scores made by minorities. In 1999, 68 percent of nine-year old Hispanics scored at least 200 on the mathematics NAEP exam, compared to only 54 percent in 1978. For African-American students, the difference is even greater: the percent of students scoring at least 200 rose from 42 percent in 1978 up to 63 in 1999.
Fortunately, all the necessary information is available to the public. From enrollment and expenditure data in the Statistical Abstract of the United States 2002 and test score data available at the National Center for Education Statistics an informative graphic may be produced.
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New York Times
August 13, 2003
ROBERT KIMBALL, an assistant principal at Sharpstown High School, sat smack in the middle of the "Texas miracle." His poor, mostly minority high school of 1,650 students had a freshman class of 1,000 that dwindled to fewer than 300 students by senior year. And yet — and this is the miracle — not one dropout to report!
Also see:
The Myth of the Texas Miracle in Education
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Slate.com
August 4, 2003
Mark Kleiman
How a Bush-promoted Christian prison program fakes success by massaging data
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Christian Science Monitor
July 31, 2003
Neoconservatives and their blueprint for power
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MediaTransparency.org
July 24, 2003
Bill Berkowitz
Bush recruits religious youth groups as ground troops for the 'drug wars'
What does advocating "religious hiring rights," a $4 billion workplace retraining bill, and the war on drugs have in common? The short answer: Bring on the faith-based organizations!
Although 30 months have passed since President Bush announced the centerpiece of his domestic agenda - his faith-based initiative - and no significant broader efforts to fund his initiative has emerged from Congress, the administration continues to move ahead on a number of fronts.
Bush's latest faith-based proposal involves enlisting religious youth groups in the war on drugs. According to the Washington Times, the administration recently printed 75,000 copies of a guidebook to the drug wars called "Pathways to Prevention: Guiding Youth to Wise Decisions." The 100-page pamphlet "seeks to teach youth leaders how to handle questions and concerns about substance abuse." In addition to the publication, there's a new Web site (www.TheAntiDrug.com/Faith) and an e-mail newsletter.
The new anti-drug project is built around three premises which are spelled out in a fact sheet titled "Marijuana and Kids: Faith": 1) "Religion plays a major role in the lives of American teens;" 2) "Religion and religiosity repeatedly correlate with lower teen and adult marijuana and substance use rates and buffer the impact of life stress which can lead to marijuana and substance use;" and 3) "Youth turn to faith communities [but] most faith institutions [with] youth ministries [do not] incorporate significant teen substance abuse prevention activities."
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USA Today
July 1, 2003
The nation's largest teachers union plans to sue the federal government on behalf of states, school districts and teachers to amend or throw out President Bush's far-reaching education law
In its strongest stance yet against the No Child Left Behind law, the National Education Association said Wednesday that schools can't be forced to pay for the law's extensive testing, tutoring and transfer requirements. "We're prepared to take the criticism," said Robert Chanin, NEA general counsel. "We're going after this law."
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WorkingForChange.com
June 26, 2003
Bill Berkowitz
Thousands of Head Start workers and volunteers could be displaced as Bush Administration claims faith-based organizations have 'religious hiring rights'
What does the Head Start program have to do with President Bush's faith- based initiative? Nothing -- and everything.
Last week, the House Education and the Workforce Committee passed "The School Readiness Act of 2003," H.R. 2210. If a Republican-sponsored provision in the bill -- which allows religious organizations receiving government funds to provide Head Start services to discriminate in their hiring practices -- is retained in the final version, thousands of Head Start workers could lose their jobs. In addition, hundreds of thousands of parent volunteers who serve as teachers' aides and chaperones could also be displaced.
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New York Times
June 23, 2003
The Supreme Court rulings on the University of Michigan admission policies set off a wave of consternation among conservative groups today. As a result, several officials of the groups plan to demand that President Bush choose someone whose opposition to affirmative action is beyond doubt for a vacancy on the court.
..."This is a very political decision, and the administration's brief played a crucial role, I believe, in influencing Justice O'Connor, who turned out to be the swing vote," Linda Chavez, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, said. Her group was among those challenging the Michigan programs...
..."It's outrageous that the majority in favor of these racial preferences was formed by Republican appointees," said Clint Bolick, vice president of the Institute for Justice, another conservative group that challenged the Michigan programs...
"Conservatives will want to make sure that anyone appointed to the court in this administration is a strong and sure opponent of racial preferences," Mr. Bolick said.
Also see:
Justices Back Affirmative Action by 5 to 4
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People for The American Way
June 16, 2003
Press Release
PFAW Debunks Hatch Characterization of Federalist Society, Responds to Senator’s Extraordinary Ad Hominem Attack
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WorkingForChange.com
June 5, 2003
Bill Berkowitz
Legislation weakens but doesn't slow down president's faith-based initiative
After more than two years of haggling, in early April the Senate passed the Charity Aid, Recovery and Empowerment (CARE) Act of 2003 (S. 476), a stripped-down version of President Bush's highly-touted faith- based initiative. While the House has yet to pass its version of a faith-based bill, it appears that the proposal’s most noxious element, the charitable choice exemption, will remain on the cutting room floor. Does the shredding of the centerpiece of the administration's "compassionate conservative" domestic agenda signal an end to the president's obsession with pursuing faith-based solutions to vexing social problems?
While the president's full package failed to generate enough Congressional or public support, the core of the initiative is alive and well. Administration-driven faith-based programs are moving down the pike at a steady clip.
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Washington Post
June 2, 2003
Firms Sponsor School Activities and Books
...The two classes from Arnold Elementary School in Arnold, Md., were on a field trip, 10 minutes from school, visiting a local Petco that was already as familiar to the students as McDonald's..."
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Washington Post
May 23, 2003
News Section
The assumption behind President Bush's faith-based initiative is that religious charities can do a better job, at a lower cost, than secular organizations in providing many social services, from drug treatment to employment training. But an Indiana study suggests it isn't necessarily so.
The study by researchers at Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis is among the first attempts to compare the effectiveness of faith-based and secular organizations using objective data.
The researchers looked at 2,830 people who went through job training programs run by 27 government-funded organizations in two Indiana counties. They found no difference between secular and religious programs in job placement rates or starting wages. But clients of faith-based groups worked fewer hours, on average, and were less likely to receive health insurance.
"It's a surprising result," said principal investigator Sheila S. Kennedy, an associate professor of law and public policy. "All the political rhetoric beforehand was: Everybody knows faith-based organizations are better."
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New York Times
May 20, 2003
Education Section
For the first time, Florida third graders must pass a reading test or be held back, and earlier this month Gov. Jeb Bush announced that 23 percent -- 43,000 -- had flunked...hundreds of studies in the last two decades have concluded that holding children back has no long-term academic benefit..."It would be difficult to find another educational practice on which the research findings are so unequivocally negative."
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People for the American Way
May 7, 2003
In line with statements supporting ideological court-packing he made on the campaign trail, George W. Bush seems to have used his first opportunity to select mostly jurists who could be expected to move the courts solidly to the right.
"This slate of candidates appears to have been packaged to push the envelope far to the right," said Ralph G. Neas, president of People For the American Way. "It’s ironic that this group has already been noted for its diverse physical characteristics, like gender and race. What’s really troubling is their near uniformity of ideology."
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New York Times
May 6, 2003
Education Section
...In the midst of the Bush-Gore presidential race...Paul E. Peterson released a study saying that school vouchers significantly improved test scores of black children...
The Harvard professor appeared on CNN and "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer." Conservative editorial writers and columnists, including William Safire of The Times, cited the Peterson study as proof that vouchers were the answer for poor blacks, that Al Gore (a voucher opponent) was out of touch with his black Democratic constituency and that George W. Bush had it right.
"The facts are clear and persuasive: school vouchers work," The Boston Herald editorialized on Aug. 30, 2000. "If candidates looked at facts, this one would be a no-brainer for Gore."
[But]...a Princeton economist...recently concluded [using Peterson's data] that Peterson had it all wrong — that not even the black students using vouchers had made any test gains...It is scary how many prominent thinkers in this nation of 290 million were ready to make new policy from a single study that appears to have gone from meaningful to meaningless...
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Antiwar.com
April 9, 2003
Michael Lind
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