Fwd: letter to the editor

[EClinchy@aol.com]

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• To: letters@nytimes.com
• Subject: letter to the editor
• From: EClinchy@aol.com
• Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2004 12:37:38 EST
• Full-name: EClinchy

To the Editor:

I am profoundly disturbed by your editorial ("Rescuing Educational Reform,"
March 2) strongly supporting the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind
Act. As thousands of students, teachers, parents -- and even some state
legislators -- all across this land are beginning to realize, the problems with
this purported "educational reform" agenda go far beyond inadequate funding
and inept, dictatorial administration.
With the obvious exception of the enforcement of all civil rights
laws (as in Brown v. Board of Education), the U.S, Constitution directs that all
important educational decisions be left up to the states. Historically, the
states have recognized the immense importance of the democratic rights and
power of local citizens to make those important educational decisions through
their locally elected boards of education. Indeed, the United Nations
Declaration of Human Rights specifically states that parents have "a prior right" to
choose the kind of public education their children will receive. The entire
"high academic standards" and high stakes standardized testing agenda of recent
years, of which the Bush Act is a part, is an authoritarian, anti-democratic
assault on the rights of parents, teachers and all local citizens to
determine what is going to happen to children in our public schools.
While no one advocates "low" academic standards or inadequate funding
or leaving any child "behind," the fact is that many of our poor and minority
children are being driven out of our schools by being unfairly labeled as
'failures" as a result of a single, high stakes standardized test.
If we truly want to "reform" and improve our public schools, we might
better follow John Kerry's proposal that every public school should become an
adequately funded, educationally distinctive, relatively autonomous, racially
integrated charter school within its local district, a school that parents
and teachers are empowered to choose because they agree with the school's
educational philosophy and pedagogical approach. Given such a powerful "reform,'"
we could begin to see all of our children and young people flourishing in an
educational, system that is truly democratic and truly effective.

Evans Clinchy
79 Chestnut St.
Boston, MA, 02108
617-723-5799
The writer is senior consultant at the Institute for Responsive
Education at Northeastern University.





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