Did Fordham Fail To Meet History Standards?
December 19, 2007 04:05 PM
UPDATE: Mike Petrilli e-mailed to say that his comments to Ed Daily didn't apply to IASA and that he didn’t say President Clinton broke with the unions over IASA but over accountability in general in the 1990s.
In a recent Education Daily, the Fordham Foundation's Michael J. Petrilli is quoted as saying the "teachers unions" -- which, presumably would be the NEA and the AFT -- didn't support NCLB's predecessor in 1994, but is it true?
Here's the full sentence: "President Clinton, he [Petrilli] pointed out, broke with the teachers unions in supporting 1994’s Improving America’s Schools Act, the first ESEA legislation to attach accountability consequences to tests."
It's true that AFT President Al Shanker had some problems with an early version of the bill, which he expressed in a July 1994 column. But, as I noted earlier this year, by October 1994 the AFT was sharply critical of those trying to block passage of the bill, saying, "America's children and parents deserve better than to be pawns in this cynical, partisan, scorched earth warfare."
Maybe Mike Petrilli has more information than I do about what happened at the AFT in 1994. Or maybe Petrilli was misquoted. [Looks like the latter. See above.] But one thing is for sure: Fordham opposed motherhood and apple pie in 1994. And you can quote me on that.
The full text of the AFT's October 1994 news release is after the jump.
Clearly, eleventh-hour opposition to an education reauthorization bill is designed to inflame groundless opposition as part of a larger, cynical strategy to block passage of any meaningful legislation at all cost prior to the November elections.
This bill has been 18 months in the making. After too many years of faltering commitment to educational excellence, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act would encourage the states to set high standards for student achievement, but doesn't tell the states what the standards must be, and to adopt assessments that better measure student achievement.
In fact, states and local authorities would have unprecedented flexibility to determine academic standards and adapt federal education programs to achieve the standards they set. The bill is suffused with provisions to involve parents in all aspects of shaping how programs operate, and to encourage parents, teachers and other instructional staff to participate in new teamwork efforts.
Killing this bill now won't just stop progress toward higher academic achievement for all students, it will seriously harm what we have now, and all in the name of gridlock. America's children and parents deserve better than to be pawns in this cynical, partisan, scorched earth warfare. Two former secretaries of education who proposed precious little legislation...* to further academic achievement when they had the opportunity should be ashamed of themselves for joining the effort to defeat the bill now.
(Thanks to dd for retrieving this press statement from the AFT archives.)
*I've omitted the words "do little" here, which were included, apparently by accident, in the original.
