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A few words on No Child Left Behind
January 10, 2004Speaking of left-of-center, at the Daily Kos, an elementary school principal
For one, there's the whole federal involvement in education, which we believe is not within the scope of the U.S. Constitution. Every state in the union has a Department of Education, and there's no reason to believe that the folks in D.C. are in any better position to affect education in this country, than folks at the local level.
But federal involvement means two things: Federal Dollars and Federal Regulations.
We think both stink.
There's something troubling about taking taxpayer funds collected from all fifty states, then redistributing a portion of it (after paying their own salaries in the federal Department of Education) back to the fifty states. But that's not the bad part. The real trouble comes in the form of Federal Regulations (also known as Unfunded Mandates).
Many of these regulations revolve around testing, ratcheting up the pressure on schools to perform.
While we feel that someone should be shining a bright light on underperforming schools, we don't think it should be the Feds. For one, there are too many layers of bureaucracy between a given school and the federal Department of Education. Thus the mandated testing--and the mandated reporting of scores--simply cannot be as valid as the Feds hope.
There's also the problem of defining classes of children. We can't understand it, but defining children as either "Special Ed" or "English Language Learners" makes little sense when there's little or no longitudinal reporting of data.
Thus all the SpEd children and ELL students who are successful in learning English and academically joining their peers, simply drop off the SpEd and ELL charts. While in the real world, this would be considered a "win" in the upside-down world of public education statistics, it is a "lose."
(We'll speak of our proposal for a new method of collecting and organizing testing statistics in a future post.)
We'd like to go on record as supporting No Child Left Behind's efforts on behalf of returning schools to Phonics, versus Whole Language or Balanced Literacy. Unfortunately, this could change after a few major elections. It's possible for some future Secretary of Education to federally mandate that all schools receiving federal funds teach (cough) Whole Language.
In our view, the one bright area of No Child Left Behind was to be increased avenues of Parental Choice. That would be easy, and one that requires zero funds. Simply offer parents the choice on where to send their school, or to even homeschool if they so choose.
Because true parental choice for poor parents doesn't mean giving them an option between several equally-mediocre public schools, vouchers must be part of the solution, especially in our cities.
Another good aspect of this form of choice is that it would be unlikely to be rescinded under a future change-of-administration, for fear of a organized citizens revolt!
Unfortunately most of the meaty Parental Choice provisions were gutted in order to get bipartisan support for the bill's signing.
We don't think it was worth it.