By Daniel Pryzbyla

President Bush administration's political gaffs are beginning to unfold faster than the patches he needs to fix them - except his voucher orchestrated No Child Left Behind education act's dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane testing.

Similar to NCLB's authors trying to create a public education repellent, Swiss chemist Paul Müller and his colleagues were trying to create a better moth repellent while working at the major European chemical firm Geigy Ltd. back in the 1930s. In 1939 after routinely testing dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane on flies, he discovered it to be an almost perfect solution: "lethal to insects, long lasting, and relatively non-toxic to humans," wrote authors Eric Skjei and M. Donald Whorton in their book, "Of Mice and Molecules: technology and human survival." In 1940 Geigy Ltd. patented the chemist's discovery. With WWII in the making, both the Allies and the Germans had, with the cooperation of the Swiss, obtained the formula (To preserve its neutrality, Switzerland made certain that each side received copies of it.), noted the authors. Soon, both powers were "feverishly producing it for military use in the tropics to protect troops from such devastating insect-born diseases as malaria, typhus and dysentery." By 1944, factories in the United States were producing some 1.3 million kilograms a year (A kgm = about 2.2 pounds). Later in1948, Müller was even awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (combined category) for his discovery of DDT, its abbreviated acronym. "For the next two decades, DDT and it numerous chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticide (CHI) cousins were used with great abandon on nearly everything, everywhere." Rachel Carson, a biologist, environmental activist and author then wrote the book "Silent Spring" in 1962, exposing many of its damaging side affects to animals and the environment. It "brought the enthusiasm of DDT insecticide boom years to a quick end." After numerous government hearings, it was legally phased out in 1972.

NCLB repellant, like DDT, has its "insecticide cousins" too. The politically bipartisan national education act depends on high-stakes test scores for all Title 1 (aimed for low-income families) public education students, but thereafter also includes draconian measures for schools allegedly "failing." Schools not making adequate yearly progress (AYP) on these high-stakes tests are directed to hire tutors, preferably by private tutoring companies. If that insecticide doesn't increase test scores within 3 years, the entire school and its alleged infections will be fumigated.

Noticeably absent from the NCLB Title 1 education repellant camp are private, religious and growing numbers of charter schools. Their private status exempts them U.S. Department of Education DDT sprayers. However, this doesn't mean they don't have their own private repellants such as preferred religious beliefs, income status, high-test score requirements, etc. This cause and reaction scenario enables them to become beneficiaries of public schools not making AYP or forced to dismantle their education operations. "School choice" salespersons actively recruit former public school students and the tax dollars that come with them. Their ludicrous contention "private is public" is only heard when they are demanding tax dollars from the public trough to fund their personal education beliefs. Thereafter, they glow in their distinctive education enclosures and exclusivity outside the public education domain. President Bush's "faith-based initiatives" have fueled private education voucher demands and bank accounts of anti-public education zealots, hoping to drain even more tax dollars from already socioeconomic distressed and under-funded public school districts.

Educators and others who are still trying to eke out some "reform" credibility for NCLB high-stakes testing and its "insecticide cousins" remain aloof from NCLB connections with our country's ongoing love affair with "meritocracy." Its definition is clear: "An education system whereby the talented are chosen and moved ahead on the basis of their achievement (as in competitive examinations)." Contrary to NCLB propaganda for all students to succeed, its foundation is based on similar high-stakes "competitive" test scores, the essence of meritocracy. NCLB didn't invent meritocracy rules. It merely followed in the shadows of college education, first implementing them for K-8 public schools. Following orders of her pro-voucher chiefs, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings is currently trumpeting NCLB plans to expand high-stakes testing meritocracy and its "insecticide cousins" to Title 1 public high schools also.

Nicholas Lemann's exceptional book, "The Big Test: The secret history of the American meritocracy," provides one of the most detailed analysis of its origins beginning officially after WWII. Published in 1999, he incorporates societal political issues that have had profound effects on meritocracy's bumpy road. "Some countries had meritocracies that were purely based on the Platonic idea of selecting a few deserving people to become statesmen," he wrote. "The American meritocracy, set up as a system for everybody and fueled by powerful rhetoric about equal opportunity, blended into this idea the distinctive national obsession with success. The result was that the meritocracy began to look more and more like a means of handing out economic rewards to a fortunate few. Rather than being about public service for the elite and expanded opportunity for the mass, it was about opportunity to join a prosperous elite." Critical of constricted disputes of education, Lemann added, "Arguments about American education concerned how fairly it distributed the goodies, not how wisely the new elite it created was guiding the nation. The drama of the lives of those chosen had a large complement of that old, simple American theme - making it."

In the 1940s, Henry Chauncey was director of Education Testing Service (ETS), the forerunner of SAT tests. Testing limitations back then continue with limiting patterns for high-stakes testing today. "For ETS to become big and established, it had to emphasize multiple-choice aptitude testing for use in selective admission to higher education. All other potential uses for testing were more expensive, and nobody was willing to pay for them," said Lemann. "Economic necessity and institutional ambition, rather than principle, had pushed ETS into being the Procrustes of contemporary America; but the result mattered more than the reason for it." Not much has changed since then.

"To place so much stress on the SAT numbers may seem irrational and unfair, since the SATs put a premium on quick multiple-choice thinking that may neglect other qualities of intelligence, and there is so much more than those scores in each applicant's record," wrote Andrew Hacker in The New York Review of Books issue November 3, 2005. His article "The Truth about the Colleges" reviewed 5 recently published books on college education. "Obviously, other factors will be considered, and some applicants with high SAT scores won't make the final cut," he said, referring to Yale's 17,735 applicants last year (2004), "but organizing the admissions process on the ability to score on SATs means that many other qualities of applicants may be ignored. Still, if one were faced with 17,735 folders, what better way to start?" Listing the top 12 universities in 4 categories; accepted, enroll, combined SAT scores and tuition for the "top quarter" of the 2004 entering class - Yale ranked No. 3. It accepted 11 percent of applicants, 67 percent actually enrolled, 1540 was their combined SAT scores, and tuition was $29,820. Explaining how difficult it is to gain admission to the top 12 universities, he stated, "Collectively, admissions officers at these schools considered 171,824 applications last year, and turned down 145,962 - for an overall acceptance rate of about 15 percent." Even given such odds, according to Hacker, thousands are willing to try. "On their side, colleges don't discourage applications, since a high rejection rate raises their standing in US News & World Report and similar rankings."

For NCLB, its rejection rate raises their standing in the pro-voucher Heritage Foundation and "similar rankings." In the book "Raising Standards or Raising Barriers; Inequality and high-stakes testing in public education," published in 2001 by the Century Foundation, Inc. and edited by Gary Orfield and Mindy L. Kornhaber - the 9 essays address these current issues. George Madus and Marguerite Clark authored a relevant report titled, "The adverse impact of high-stakes testing on minority students - evidence from 100 years of test data." Concerning "motivation," they observed, "There seems to be little appreciation among reformers that motivation may be even more complex in the context of external (that is, imposed from outside the school), high-stakes, national examinations, embedded as they are in complex school, cultural and social networks. In other words, advocates of the motivational potential of examinations have not paid enough attention to who will be motivated and who will not." They added, "This point is particularly relevant when the examinations are referenced to 'world class' standards that all students, regardless of grade level, circumstances, context, and individual differences, are expected to attain."

DDT was later found to be "less harmful" when used with less dosage and combined with other chemicals. There's a message here, but don't expect NCLB high-stakes testing to change its dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane education formula.