"Dozens in GOP Turn Against Bush's Prized 'No Child' Act"
March 15, 2007 08:25 AM
Note to NCLB foes: Better read past the headline of today's front page Washington Post article about a bill that would allow states to opt out of NCLB. It's hard to know what the legislation will be, but the article hints that it might let suburban schools off the NCLB hook. That means -- mixed metaphor alert -- NCLB would come down on urban schools like a hammer.
It's interesting that the headline describes NCLB as "Bush's Prized" law. Sen. Ted Kennedy and Rep. George Miller have supported the law from the start. So, as I see it, one of three -- oops, four -- things happened:
A. President Bush took ownership of the law when his administration politicized it in the run-up to the 2004 elections -- paying Armstrong Williams to tout it, rating reporters' coverage of the law, and sending grants to groups like baeo.
B. Rep. Miller and Sen. Kennedy ceded ownership as they saw the administration bungling its implementation.
C. The media, always eager to simplify, proclaimed Pres. Bush as NCLB's owner because noting the law's bipartisan backing made NCLB coverage too complicated.
D. All of the above.
My vote: D.
Comments
My question is why any lifelong progressive Democrats support NCLB.
The targets, parametricians will tell you, will put most schools into restructuring. So you have to judge the restructuring proposed not as a means of remediating underperformance, but rather as standalone recommedations, reforms that are good for all schools, whether or not they are high or low performing schools.
And to my thinking, turning all schools into charters, or privatizing their managment, or firing most of their staff, these things just aren't high on the list of positive reforms.
And what to do about the 95% of charter schools that will fail? Since you can't turn them into charter schools, does that mean they should have their operations turned over to outside managers approved by the federal DOE?
If we're going to insist on 100% proficiency to high standards, the only reality-based way to justify that is by having sanctions that are well conceived reforms for all schools. And the current set of sanctions are set up as punishments and deterrents, rather than as positive reforms that can be rationalized as the right way to move ed in and of themselves.
Posted by: MassParent | March 15, 2007 10:15 AM
HaHa! MassParent makes me laugh because I can't believe any conservative Republican would support NCLB. It flies so totally in the face of limited government and local control as to resemble the communist systems our system of education helped defeat!
Which only goes to show that this is a law with enough badness to be universally disliked. Sort of like Bush, himself. While Kennedy was a major author, Bush was the only one who could get enough Republicans (they were still a majority, remember?) in both houses to pass it. So he gets credit. And blame.
This law was bad as it was written. No amount of funding would ever make it good. It would only stink slightly less.
Posted by: Dick Dalton | March 16, 2007 10:18 PM