October 09, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

PHONY NUMBERS FOR NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND

George W. Bush is perhaps the most ignorant man ever to occupy the Oval Office, so it's weirdly ironic when Bush talks about education. Bush and his neocons thought the way to solve problems in the educational system was to mandate higher test scores. What has happened is that kids become test takers, not learners, and that the people whose livelihoods depend on those test scores find ways to enhance the numbers. This column by Bob Herbert is at www.commondreams.org:

It’s time to rein in the test zealots who have gotten such a stranglehold on the public schools in the U.S.

Politicians and others have promoted high-stakes testing as a panacea that would bring accountability to teaching and substantially boost the classroom performance of students.

“Measuring,” said President Bush, in a discussion of his No Child Left Behind law, “is the gateway to success.”

Not only has high-stakes testing largely failed to magically swing open the gates to successful learning, it is questionable in many cases whether the tests themselves are anything more than a shell game.

Daniel Koretz, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, told me in a recent interview that it’s important to ask “whether you can trust improvements in test scores when you are holding people accountable for the tests.”

The short answer, he said, is no.

If teachers, administrators, politicians and others have a stake in raising the test scores of students - as opposed to improving student learning, which is not the same thing - there are all kinds of incentives to raise those scores by any means necessary.

HOME OWNERSHIP DECLINING

It's going to be difficult for any future administration to achieve as many disasters as the Bush administration. This administration should go into The Guinness Book of World Records for doing everything wrong. Home ownership under Bush is going to decline from the time he took office. That old "free market" demon of deregulation or no regulation is haunting the economy like a Halloween spirit. This editorial from The New York Times is linked at www.truthout.org:

For the first time since the Carter administration, homeownership in the United States is set to decline over a president's tenure. When President Bush took office in 2001, homeownership stood at 67.6 percent. It rose as the mortgage bubble inflated but is projected to fall to 67 percent by early 2009, which would come to 700,000 fewer homeowners than when Mr. Bush started. The decline, calculated by Moody's Economy.com, is inexorable unless the government launches a heroic effort to help hundreds of thousands of defaulting borrowers stay in their homes.

These days, modest relief efforts are in short supply, let alone heroic ones. Some officials seem to think that assistance would violate the tenet of personal responsibility that borrowers should not take out loans they cannot afford. That is simplistic.

The foreclosure crisis is rooted in reckless - and shamefully underregulated - mortgage lending. Many homeowners - mainly subprime borrowers with low incomes and poor credit - are now stuck in adjustable-rate loans that have become unaffordable as monthly payments have spiked upward. Their predicament is not entirely of their own making, and even if it were they would need to be bailed out because mass foreclosures would wreak unacceptable damage on the economic and social life of the nation.

The relief efforts so far have been too little, too late. In August, the White House established a program to allow an additional 80,000 borrowers to refinance their loans through the Federal Housing Administration - on top of 160,000 who were already eligible. That's not enough. Foreclosure filings soared to nearly 244,000 in August alone.