Louisville op ed supports major overhaul of NLCB

["Monty Neill" <monty@fairtest.org>]

An op ed in the Louisville Courier-Journal, by David Hawpe, supporting major changes to NCLB. Monty



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Wednesday, October 3, 2007

 On education bills, Yarmuth is not about to be left behind 

John Yarmuth replaced a member of Congress who was deeply, passionately involved in education, and who was recognized in many quarters as an especially thoughtful advocate, especially in the area of reading. 

However, in the short time he has been encamped on the Potomac, Yarmuth, too, has made his mark. He just received the Outstanding New Member Award from the nation's largest non-partisan education group, and the Kentucky Reading Association just named him Legislator of the Year. 

The bulk of the bills he personally has introduced are education-related, including proposals to promote teen literacy, better teach children with autism, develop performance-based testing in a reauthorized No Child Left Behind (NCLB) program, improve family literacy and put state-of-the-art technology into more classrooms. 

As Alexander Russo reported in Education Week, Yarmuth "is shaping up to be the key freshman Democrat on the committee for the anti-NCLB crowd." 

That should please many of those who think the NCLB's massive assault on the long-established prerogatives of state and local educators and politicians -- the Bush administration's most ballyhooed domestic achievement -- is a real bust. 

Yarmuth is at the center of a great national debate, and he has the ear of veteran House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller, who has produced a controversial version of NCLB reauthorization. Among its provisions is a pilot program that would permit states to use standards developed locally to assess progress toward NCLB's 2014 goals. 

As Lisa Caruso reported in The National Journal, "Miller had been talking to Yarmuth," who helped him craft the proposal based on legislation Yarmuth had authored and the National Education Association (NEA) has embraced. 

Among those who object is a lobbying group called Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights, whose executive director, Dianne Piche, said the proposal would impose a plethora of different standards for low-income schools to meet. 

During a recent hearing, Yarmuth took offense at the notion states would use this to water down the law. He told reporter Caruso, "Most states are doing the best they can. When you have the heavy hand of the federal government hanging over us, I think you have to remember there are a lot of people at the local level trying to accomplish these goals." 

Piche called the fight over No Child Left Behind a "struggle for the heart and soul of the Democratic Party." 

In that struggle, Yarmuth lines up alongside the NEA, American Federation of Teachers, National Association for the Advancement of Colored people, National Alliance of Black School Educators, Asian American Legal Defense Fund and League of United Latin American Citizens. They tend to think NCLB is rigged to assure failure for students, teachers and schools, and many believe its real goal is crushing the teacher unions and paving the way for broad-scale public support of private schools. 

On the other side are Piche's Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights, the National Council of La Raza, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Education Trust and the Center for American Progress. They buy, among other things, the idea that NCLB is needed to counter the "soft bigotry of low expectations," by holding schools accountable for narrowing the achievement gap between poor kids and rich kids. 

Back in Louisville, the Jefferson County Teachers Association is pushing Yarmuth to do something about "a very troubling bill." JCTA, correctly in my view, sees NCLB as too narrow, in that it judges progress only by scores on reading and math tests, which leaves out important areas of potential student development and achievement and encourages the teaching of a blinkered curriculum. 

Tough standards are important, but the NCLB version is naïve and counterproductive. It allows even schools making real progress to be branded failures if they miss a single goal. 

The question is whether to end it or mend it, and I don't think the answer is obvious. 

The mantra of NCLB's supporters is, "We know it's working." And that's clearly untrue. 

David Hawpe's columns appear Wednesdays and Sundays in the Community Forum. His e-mail address is dhawpe@courier-journal.com. 

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Monty Neill, Ed.D.
Co-Executive Director
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