Submissions please!

It was recently brought to the attention of the staff here that certain individuals who engineered and supported the passage of NCLB, and who marketed it under the guise of concern for our nation's poor and minority students (the ones being most harmed by it), actually had the ulterior motive of sort of "blowing up" public education and paving the way for privatization.

You could have blown me down, I was just shocked!

Certainly not all who managed to get this legislation passed had selfish, ideology-driven intentions in mind - some were just morons. Still others true believers in the magic and glory of the unfettered free market (it's in the scriptures you know).

Anyway, I am proposing here that these selfless individuals be subjected to polygraph crap detector tests. It is only right that they be questioned about the destruction and misery they have imposed in our public schools. It has to be pretend of course. Unlike them, we do not have the power and resources to be heard by millions. This little blog's crap detector will work like a seismograph, rating the magnitude of the spin/deception/evasion we suspect they would use in their responses were we really given the opportunity to question them. We'll say the scale is 1 - 10.

Here's how it works. We (assuming some of you would like to participate in the fun) ask difficult and inconvenient questions to anyone we want...George Bush, George Miller, Sandy Kress, Amy Wilkins, Congress, the Business Roundtable, Margaret Spellings, whoever. We assign our questions a number from 1 - 10, rating the magnitude of the spin we think they would respond with were this real. I'll start by asking Margaret Spellings and the Congress a question and assigning them a number.

I'm hoping some of you will participate once the ball gets rolling by submitting questions in the comments. As I write and collect a few from you, I'll add them to the post and keep it updated.

1. To the U.S. Congress and Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings:

The 1100 page No Child Left Behind Act uses the phrase "scientifically-based research" over 100 times, demanding that such research support the programs and instructional practices adopted in our nation's public schools. Yet incredibly, there was no scientifically-based research whatsoever to support the law's absurd mandates - indeed research available both then and now argues against attaching life altering consequences to children, teachers, and schools based on standardized test scores. Not only this, there was not one iota of science or research supporting the law's punitive "remedies" for the alleged failures of our public schools. None. Zilch. After the first couple of years, these sanctions are merely market schemes that divert public education money into the private sector.

How can you justify this?

Maggie's number: 10!!!
Members of Congress: Varies from 2 - 10