From: Bob Schaeffer <bobschaeffer@earthlink.net>
Date: Thu Mar 22, 2007 9:46:13 AM US/Pacific
To: ARN Main List <arn-l@interversity.org>, arn2-strategy
<arn2-strategy@yahoogroups.com>
Subject: [arn2-strategy] Battling the NCLB Backlash
Reply-To: arn2-strategy@yahoogroups.com
The long-term voice of the "bi-partisan Washington punditry" weighs in
BATTLING THE "NO CHILD" BACKLASH
Washington Post -- March 22, 2007
David Broder Column
The last thing President Bush needs is another fight with his political
base. But that is what he has found as he presses Congress to renew the
No Child Left Behind Act, his signature education program passed by a
bipartisan majority in the first months of his first term.
Last week, 57 Republican legislators signed on as sponsors of
legislation that would -- in the view of the administration -- destroy
No Child Left Behind. The bill would allow any state that objected to
the law's standards and testing to excuse itself from those
requirements
and still receive federal school aid.
The sponsors, who include Rep. Roy Blunt of Missouri, the House GOP
whip, and Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida, the chairman of the Republican
National Committee, say the measure is needed to curb federal
interference in local schools.
The backlash against No Child Left Behind has been building almost from
the moment it was enacted in the winter of 2001-02 as one of Bush's
first legislative successes.
By requiring annual tests in the elementary grades in English and math
and by demanding that schools show that all students, regardless of
background, are making progress toward proficiency, the program sought
to eliminate racial and ethnic disparities and lift overall performance
toward world-class standards.
But parents complained that the emphasis on testing basics was
narrowing
the curriculum for bright students and that the rankings were not
making
allowances for the poverty or language limitations of many kids who
were
failing.
Teachers and their unions, especially the big National Education
Association, asserted that they were being unfairly regimented and
penalized by the application of the new law -- and also challenged the
evidence that it was improving student performance.
These are not trivial concerns, and the Republican effort to change the
law shows that politicians have been hearing and heeding the
complaints.
But the remedy they are recommending seems drastic -- and the
abandonment of the first serious national effort to raise standards in
the schools would be disastrous.
Under the Republican proposal, states could, at their own initiative,
opt out of the law's requirements while continuing to receive their
share of the billions the federal government invests in elementary and
secondary schools. To measure progress in the schools, states could use
their own standards.
As Chester E. Finn Jr., a conservative who once worked for the late
senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and a group of other education
specialists wrote recently, most state standards "were mediocre-to-bad
ten years ago," before No Child Left Behind, "and most are
mediocre-to-bad today. They are generally vague, politicized, and awash
in wrongheaded fads and nostrums. With a few exceptions, states have
been incapable (or unwilling) to set clear, coherent standards, and
develop tests with a rigorous definition of proficiency."
Finn and his colleagues at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, an
education think tank, are critical of No Child Left Behind and the
Education Department for getting too deeply enmeshed in the day-to-day
routine of schools, instead of emphasizing the goal of proficiency in
key subjects and encouraging states to find their own best methods of
teaching, then testing for results.
As the legislation comes up for renewal, thoughtful legislators of both
parties, such as Ted Kennedy, George Miller, Buck McKeon and Mike
Castle, are working with Margaret Spellings, the secretary of
education,
to apply the lessons of the past to the specific provisions for the
future.
The president, who has disdained compromise with the Democrats on Iraq
policy, or the budget, or much of anything else, finds himself
dependent
on Democratic help to rescue this notable domestic initiative. He is
lucky that they are still willing to give it.
There are ways to reinforce the goals of high proficiency for all
students while reducing the bureaucratic regulations, and that should
be
the measuring stick for renewal of No Child Left Behind.
But the dissenting Republicans' idea of letting every state set its own
standards and measure its own progress is a certain way to consign many
youngsters to second-class educations. And that would be a serious step
backward.
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