No child was left behind in Black Panther Party Liberation Schools, where learning was fun!

Calling it No Child Left Behind gave it the benign imagery of caring for children and their futures. It's like the so-called Patriot Act - an act, to be sure, but one so patently unconstitutional in its evisceration of the Fourth Amendment and other constitutional provisions that no true patriot could ever support it.

While the imagery of a catchy title might've helped in its selling, the lesser known side of the law is now about to kick in. And it threatens to transform public schools into private businesses, transfer them into charter schools, allow state takeovers - or close them.

This law is of a piece from the right's central array of evils - an attack on the very idea of public education and a fixation with privatizing everything.

Who will suffer more from these transformations? School staff or children? For No Child Left Behind was but another example of business uber alles, and the poor be damned.

Can the same states that made boot camps into squalid hellholes of torture for children somehow make schools pristine halls of learning? Indeed, in many states, the "business" of boot camping children has been tried and, while it has made money, it has been the epicenter of abuse, mistreatment and, actually, state-subsidized child abuse.
So much for the business model.

The law was both a punishment for the poor and a cold, calculating recognition that some children have no real place in the post-industrial society being built and, thus, were to be left behind.

Uneducated, left to the tender mercies of the streets, to stew in a hopeless funk or to feed the cavernous maw of prison ... how left behind can you get?

According to a recent report in the New York Times, Florida faces the closing of 441 schools; Baltimore has nine schools on the failure list; in New York State, 77 schools face so-called restructuring; and in California, over 1,000 schools have been designated chronic failures.*

By the year 2014, all of the schools located in California's poorest districts, some 6,063 schools, are expected to be on that list!

No Child Left Behind was designed to fail, to deliver the coup de grace to public education and also to disable or destroy the hated teachers' unions. It was a law designed to fail, not to solve a pressing social problem.

The question shouldn't be whether this new and supposedly "improved" Congress should tinker with the law.

Congress should repeal it.

*Source: Schemo, Diana Jean, "Failing Schools Strain to Meet U.S. Standard," New York Times, Tuesday, Oct. 16, 2007, pp A1, A21.

© Copyright 2007 Mumia Abu-Jamal. Read Mumia's latest book, "We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party," winner of the 2005 People's Choice Award, available from South End Press, www.southendpress.org or (800) 533-8478. Keep updated by reading Action Alerts at www.mumia.org and www.moveorg.net. To download Mp3s of Mumia's commentaries, visit www.prisonradio.org or www.fsrn.org. Encourage the media to publish and broadcast Mumia's commentaries to inspire progressive movement and help call attention to his case. Send our brotha some love and light at: Mumia Abu-Jamal, AM 8335, SCI-Greene, 175 Progress Dr., Waynesburg PA 15370.

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