George "Ron Paul" Will
December 10, 2007 01:48 PM
Maybe I think Will is a libertarian because I recently served on an NCLB panel with Neal McClusky of the Cato Institute. Or, maybe it's because of this part of Will's recent column on NCLB:
NCLB was passed in 2001 as an extension of the original mistake, President Lyndon Johnson's Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which became law in the year of liberals living exuberantly -- 1965, when Great Society excesses sowed the seeds of conservatism's subsequent ascendancy. ESEA was the first large Washington intrusion into education K through 12.
McCluskey said essentially the same thing on our panel, but, when someone from the Cato Institute says it, I yawn, when Will says it, am a little more concerned. People actually read the Washington Post and some care what Will thinks (sorry Neal).
Talk of getting rid of NCLB, and therefore ESEA, is problematic because the resources provided by the law are a lifeline for most urban districts. We seem to forget that "supplement not supplant" is not just a bureaucratic expression, it means that NLCB funds, and especially Title I, are designed to even the school finance playing field for districts with more limited resources. On our panel, MCCluskey argued, as he does in his book, that as a society, we have gotten nothing out of ESEA. I countered that without ESEA, the achievement gap would probably be even greater.
Mike Petrilli offers a different critique, that leaving accountability to the states does not ensure that you will end up with a better system. Petrill writes:
While NCLB may be inciting the Michigans of the world to keep their standards low (so as to meet the law's fairyland mandate of "universal proficiency" by 2014), it's far from clear that repealing or gutting that law will encourage the Wolverine State or its peers to suddenly raise the bar dramatically. They had low standards before NCLB, and they would probably have low standards after.
My concern is somewhat different than Petrilli's: leaving accountability to the states is no guarantee that diverse, urban school districts will be treated any more fairly than they are by NCLB.
Is this the definition of a conundrum?
