Private Schools In Susan Nussbaum's Good Kings Bad Kings

Improved Essays
On January 8th, 2002, George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) into law. This act was created out of concern that the United States’ education system was no longer globally competitive. Under NCLB, schools were required to test all students in reading and math during grades 3 through 8, and once in high school. Schools must have all students at a proficient level, or they face state intervention. This could include taking the school over, turning it into a charter school, or even shutting it down. Since its introduction, NCLB has been widely criticized for placing an excessive amount of focus on standardized testing. Teachers are now said to “teach for the test.” Students of all ages are taught how to answer multiple choice …show more content…
Long term care and rehab services such as nursing homes and disabled living facilities used to be state-run, but many have been purchased by large companies. In Susan Nussbaum’s novel Good Kings Bad Kings, we are shown how unethical these types of places actually are. The Illinois Learning and Life Skills Center (ILLC), a facility for disabled children and young adults, is owned by a large corporation called Whitney-Palm Health Solutions. Whitney-Palm also owns multiple other facilities. Some of these places are homes for juveniles like ILLC, but others are nursing homes for adults. When the kids at ILLC “age out,” they are usually transferred to one of Whitney-Palm’s other homes. For these disabled kids, it is unlikely that they will ever live on their own or somewhere not dictated by Whitney-Palm. Their lives are a constant revolution through the system. The longer they are in homes, the more money the Whitney-Palm employees will earn. The quality of administration, physical environment, and equity of patients is comparable to the conditions we see in public schools. By reading Good Kings Bad Kings, we can understand how the American education system is tantamount to these facilities run by big …show more content…
Readers learn most information about the logistics of the company through her. It is evident that a majority of the higher-ups have little to no regard for their clients’ physical and emotional well-being. Most of them are in it for the profit. On page 30, after she recruits a new client, Michelle says, “I’m already spending the $300 [bonus] in my head.” She also mentions how Tim, Whitney-Palm’s vice president, charges the clients for physical exams they do not actually need, and wants to put more beds in the already-cramped bedrooms so they can bring in more patients. The environment of ILLC is already horrendous. Kids are restricted to manual wheelchairs when they really need motorized ones, and they are sent to the confined “time-out room” for the slightest misdemeanor. Everything Whitney-Palm and ILLC incorporates into these people 's daily lives is for the good of the corporation, not the good of the person. This is so that they can send them off to nursing homes once they are too old for ILLC. These clients are inmates stuck in a dangerous vortex of homes that they will never be able to

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