THE BUSH GLITCH PROJECT BY DAVE MUNDY:
The following essay was written to predict what would happen if George Bush were elected.
See for yourself how prophetic Mr. Mundy was.
Subject: The Bush
Glitch Project
Date: Saturday,
August 14, 1999 6:41 PM
By DAVE
MUNDY
Republicans
around the country appear hell-bent on making Texas Governor George W. Bush their
party's presidential nominee long before annoying
anyone to the point
of actually having to cast a vote. What's mystifying is the fact that many
of the party's more prominent leaders, especially
the "money men," have
latched on to the Bush bandwagon
without, apparently, ever
giving a second thought as to the man's record: a very
clear record of not
only centrist "Third Way" policies, but outright bashing of his own
party's conservative wing..
So what will the
Republican Party's conservatives get if, as expected, Bush steamrolls to
the nomination and barnstorms into the White House
with their help?
Frustration, public
humiliation and outright enmity, if Bush's record as Texas Governor is any
indication.
Bush enjoys being
called "The Education Governor," perhaps picking up on and refining a
political stratagem initiated by his father as President.
He has made education
his No.1 issue as Governor, and his candidacy for the White House is
banking heavily on his record of success in turning
around Texas'
woebegone public school system. Yet a closer examination of Bush's record as
Texas' "Education Governor" reveals a lot of
half-truths,
misdirection, manipulation and outright lying - and a ruthlessness in
silencing criticism and opposition which eclipses even
that of the
morally-turgid Clinton Administration.
The
Bush agenda - same as Clinton's
Liberal Democratic Texas Governor Ann
Richards and her Education Commissioner, Skip Meno, in 1992-93 set out to accomplish in Texas the
objectives of the Hillary Clinton/Marc Tucker plan to "transform" American public
schooling ... the plan itself having been adapted from
President George
Bush's Goals:2000 idea, federalizing control over all public schools.
Richards and Meno were ousted by the electorate in 1994,
but their agenda only
suffered a name change. Campaigning against
Richards in 1994, George W. Bush promised to "do
away with the power
of the Texas Education Agency" and "return local control over our
schools" -- as well as pretty much anything else he
could say to convince
voters he was "conservative." He scored an upset victory over the
wildly-popular Richards thanks primarily to the Texas
Republican Party's
well-organized, well-financed conservative wing. Once in office, he
appointed Lubbock schools superintendent Mike Moses,
someone beholden to
the power of the education establishment, as his new Education
Commissioner.
Then he immediately
set about breaking his campaign promises.
The power of the TEA
continued to grow; Moses "cut
personnel" by transferring them
from the central office in Austin to regional offices
around the state, to
exercise more direct control. The Bush-Clinton-Richards
agenda never missed a beat.
Bush's ally, State
Senator Bill Ratliff, a Republican from Mount Pleasant, pushed
Senate Bill 1 - a massive rewrite of the state
education code -
through the Legislature in 1995. The bill was hailed as a landmark for
returning control to local schools - but instead of
giving control to
local school boards, Senate Bill 1 instead gave more control to local
school district administrators. The result was that
local school boards
became little more than a rubber-stamp for whatever ideas dribbled down
from the TEA, the Texas Association of School Administrators
Bush himself affixed
his signature to an Education Commission of the States report,
"Bending Without Breaking," which called for the eventual
elimination of
locally-elected school boards as well as elected state school boards.
Appointed bodies of educational administrators, "business
leaders" and
politicians would replace them.
Bush also applied for
a national School-to-Work grant of some $67 million, spelling out
in the grant application that "all" students
"will" participate in
mandatory career training, regardless of their wishes or the wishes
of their parents. The Governor reorganized the
Texas Employment
Commission into the Texas Workforce Commission, and ordered the
establishment of 20 regional "workforce development boards"
to determine
"business employment needs," and to encourage schools in that region to
fulfill those needs. In plain English, that means the
regional workforce
boards are designed to establish employment quotas for each school
district, funneling students into careers starting as
early as the eighth
grade ... a design chillingly reminiscent of the disastrous "polytechnical"
schooling system used by the Soviet Union and
other socialist
countries.
Dr. Jack Christie, a
Bush appointee to chair the State Board of Education, made two
trips to Germany to study polytechnical schooling
up-close and
personal. "Kids don't need a Shakespearean education any more," he later said.
To complete the
Tucker/Clinton three-pronged troika of "cradle-to-grave" control over
children, Bush in 1997 signed a bill passed by the
Legislature
establishing the Texas Healthy Kids Corporation, to provide medical insurance for
"at-risk" students, despite heated arguments that
the same program had
led to unspeakable atrocities in other states, notably Pennsylvania.
Two years later, what began as a "Texas" plan was
enthusiastically
integrated into the federal Children's Health Insurance Program, violating
the familial privacy of hundreds of thousands of
Texans.
Lies,
misdirection and half-truths
Work began in earnest
on rewriting the state's education standards in 1992-93, and reached
their fruition under Bush. "Real-world forums" took
place during Moses'
tenure, during which the Texas Education Agency claimed that hundreds
of public meetings took place, attended by
thousands of people.
One mother and school board member who attended one of those public
meetings said later she was a little perturbed by the
way the meeting was
conducted; later research revealed she had been subjected to the
Delphi Technique, a manipulative method which pushes an
audience toward
foreordained "conclusions." Evidence also indicated that only a few,
not "hundreds," - of meetings actually took place, and those
meetings were
attended by only a handful of the public - not "thousands."
Under Meno, the Texas
Education Agency had openly advertised plans to transform Texas into
an Outcome-Based Education state; under Moses, it
was stressed that
Texas would henceforth be a "standards-based" state, following the change
in terminology issued by Tucker's organization, the
Washington,
D.C.-based National Center on Education and the Economy.
When confronted by
the evidence via newspaper reports in The Katy Times and by members of the
State Board of Education that Texas had - contrary
to what Bush's
appointee had maintained - secretly paid more than $2 million to Tucker's
organization to manipulate the development of
education standards
in the state, Moses complained he had been "ambushed."
Over the next several months,
heated debates continued to erupt every time the State Board
of Education met to wrestle with everything from
the new curriculum
guidelines to textbook adoptions. The battles pitted six conservative
Republicans against a coalition of six liberal
Democrats and
three "moderate" Republicans, including Jack Christie. The coalition was quite
willing to go along with Moses' contention that the
new state guidelines,
the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) were gold, but the
conservative bloc didn't buy it.
Moses and the TEA produced testimony from
renowned educators across the country calling the
TEKS wonderful; unfortunately for the education
establishment in
Texas, those renowned educators are as persnickety about being misquoted
as any political candidate. Diane Ravitch of the
Brookings Institute,
one of those said by the Commissioner to have given her stamp of
approval, sent a copy of her original letter along to
conservative State
Board member Bob Offutt - who read the whole text during the Board's
May 7, 1997 meeting. Ravitch called the TEKS "...a
miscellaneous
collection of unrelated facts, skills and concepts that will prove to be both
unteachable and unlearnable."
"Commissioner of Education Mike Moses was
caught red-handed adding a little too much spin
to his promotion of the state's new curriculum
standards,"
The Lone Star Report noted in its May 16, 1997
issue. "His actions have served
to vindicate conservative State Board of Education
members who have been
ridiculed for their 'unreasonable' criticism of the document."
Bush himself, in January 1997, had called
the new state standards "mush." Six months
later, with only token improvements made in the
English/Language Arts
portion of the guidelines, he hailed the Texas Essential Knowledge
and Skills as the definitive example of state
curriculum standards,
defending Moses and Christie. Christie and his coalition, possibly
in an effort to prevent any of the political fallout
from tarnishing Bush,
eventually squashed the debate in a series of 8-7 and 9-6 votes.
Conservatives refused to be silenced,
however; the battlefield moved from the board room
to researchers and the media. In November, 1998, the
Tax Research
Association of Houston held a news conference to announce the results
of an analysis of the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills - the lynchpin
in the state's heralded school-accountability system -- by an
independent panel of experts. TRA President George Scott
purposely timed the
conference after the November election to avoid making the release of
the findings appear in any shape, form or fashion
to be "political."
"We've got to take the facade and the
public relations out of this," Scott said. "We're
not doing this to embarrass or castigate anyone."
The researchers - three members of
California's Mathematically Correct organization and
English/Language Arts specialist Sandra Stotsky of
Harvard University -
issued a devastating indictment of the TAAS: it wasn't very difficult
to begin with, and it had been getting
progressively easier
during Bush's tenure in office. The result: the Texas Education
Agency crows each summer about record numbers of
students passing the
test, Mike Moses looks good and George W. Bush looks like a genius.
The researchers found that the exit-level
math test, given at the tenth grade, tested
students on eighth-grade level (and below) skills. The
reading portion of
the TAAS also showed similar regression. The end-of-course Algebra
I exam, which was not part of the TAAS at the
time,
tested sixth- and seventh-grade math skills - very little algebra. Yet less
than half of Texas students passed the Algebra test
that year.
And even with an easy test, a sizeable
proportion of students still apparently couldn't
pass it. ." A Houston Press investigative piece by
Shaila Dewan finally
put into print what conservatives had been wondering aloud for
years. In 1998 and 1999, news reports revealed that teachers and
administrators in schools in Austin, Dallas, Houston and elsewhere might have
changed students' answers on the tests. Some
sharp-eyed members of
the media also noticed that not all students were being tested; at some
Houston ISD schools, 70 percent of students'
scores were not
counted. Reports ranged from certain students being told to be "sick" on test
day, to a sudden sharp rise in the number of
non-countable
students classified as "special education." The record grows even darker on the
subject of school dropout rates. In
March, 1999, The Lone
Star Report published "Fuzzier math? How Texas Computes School
Dropouts" by James A. Cooley. Two months later, the TEA
acknowledged that
many school districts under-report their dropout rates - some by staggering
amounts. A Katy Times piece on July 25, 1999,
showed that in the
three high schools in the suburban Katy Independent School District,
1,827 freshmen comprised the Class of 1997, while only
1,435 graduated four
years later, even though Katy ISD is one of the fastest-growing
school districts in the state. Yet the "dropout rate" in
Katy ISD is
officially listed near one percent.
While Bush managed to come through the
curriculum war relatively unscathed, he
realized that the conservatives could do him big political
harm should he try to
run for President. Republican State Senator Bill Ratliff began working
legislatively to curb the power of the State Board, succeeding
with Senate Bill 1 in 1995 and augmenting those restrictions in 1997
and 1999. Texas Attorney General Dan Morales, a
Democrat, ruled in
late 1996 the State Board had very little control over state textbook
selections - they would only be allowed to determine
whether or not
textbooks met a narrow range of general guidelines, such as wearability.
Conservative David Bradley, in frustration, tore the
cover off one algebra
book in an effort to show it was unfit for students, since he
couldn't reject it for teaching the notorious "fuzzy
math."
To make sure the
conservatives were stilled, just before hitting the campaign trail to run
for re-election as Governor in 1998, Bush turned
his personal axe-man,
Karl Rove, loose on them. The idea that Republicans never
attack Republicans is, apparently, out of favor in the
Bush camp.
In October, 1998, Rove convinced the
New York Times to run a scathing piece on the
conservative State Board members - Donna Ballard, Richard
Neill, Richard
Watson, David Bradley, Bob Offutt and Randy Stevenson.
Rove, Christie, Moses
and Ratliff all took pot-shots at the conservatives in the
article, with Rove himself saying "... in the
carnival of life,
they are in a very distant booth." The Times, of course, neglected to
point out that the board's conservatives were
merely doing their
job as elected representatives of the people.
A short time later,
left-wing Fort Worth Star-Telegram columnist Molly Ivins did the same,
singling out Ballard, Watson, and three new
conservative
candidates, Don McLeroy, Shirley Piggott and Judy Strickland, prior to
the 1998 elections. The state's
three most
influential
newspapers - the Houston Chronicle,
Dallas Morning News and
Austin American-Statesman - didn't even need Rove's intervention; their
reporters had been
equating the words "conservative" with "kook" in every education story
they had run for months. It's apparently all right to label a
conservative politician as "backed by the religious right" without equally
labeling liberals as "backed by the National Education Association."
Ballard and Piggott were defeated by
Democrats backed by Bush; conservative Terri
Leo had been undermined in the same fashion in 1996,
when she'd campaigned
against Jack Christie.
The State Board members and candidates,
of course, weren't the only victims of Bush's
political back-stabbing: during his gubernatorial
campaign in 1998, he
traveled the state swapping endorsements with any Democrat running
against a conservative Republican. The Republican
Party's top elected
official didn't even endorse his own party's candidate for
lieutenant governor, Rick Perry - who would succeed him if
he's elected
president. His tendency to submarine fellow Republicans is apparently recognized
by the party's other elected officials: all but
one of the state's
Congressmen have endorsed Bush's presidential bid, the lone holdout
being strict constitutionalist Ron Paul. State GOP
chairman Tom Pauken
was forced out .
Nor, apparently, is the Bush camp content
merely to squash dissent within the ranks of
the party. One San Antonio radio journalist reported
being arrested by
Texas Rangers after he asked Bush a question about the Bush family's
connections to the secretive Council on Foreign
Relations.
Other journalists report intimidation not only by Bush insiders, but by
their own corporate bosses.
Many Republican leaders nationally are
flocking to Bush because they believe he's
"electable," perhaps with the notion that once he's in the
White House, he'll be
more amenable to party politics. Conservatives in Texas made the same
mistake in 1994 and 1998, on a wide range of issues
besides education.
The state Republican Party platform, for
example, calls for renewed emphasis on states'
rights, an end to government by Executive Order,
more restrictions on
abortion, an end to federal control over Texas prisons and a wide
array of other conservative issues. During his term
as Governor, Bush
signed a law requiring parental notification before abortions can be
performed on minors - but didn't lend it his support
until it was clear
the bill would pass the Legislature overwhelmingly.
The Governor has made
no move to aid two Republican legislators - J.E. "Buster" Brown and
John Culberson - trying to take Texas prisons back
from federal Judge
William Wayne Justice. In short, Bush has pretty much ignored his own
party's platform.
What's clear is that, if winning the
White House is all that's important, Republican
conservatives can't lose with George W. Bush. If
pragmatism and
principle are more important than power, however,
Republican
conservatives can't win with him.