Are you saying that the Federal Government is not responsible for national standards or that a majority of conservatives are experts on the bill. The supreme court has already established through many rulings that the federal government, under the commerce clause, is responsible for setting national standards, thus the national standards on weights, measures, time, etc. The only question then becomes whether there should be a national standard that a high school diploma should meet. The conservatives I have contact with don't argue against it. I would entertain arguments though.
An interesting side note, the Va. House of Delegates, which is quite conservative and completely dominated by Republicans, just voted 99-1 to ask Congress to exempt the state from No Child Left Behind. The conservatives in the HOD said the act "represents the most sweeping intrusions into state and local control of education in the history of the United States" and will cost "millions of dollars that Virginia does not have." They say the federal plan is also undermining Virginia's own Standards of Learning, which educators and politicians alike say are among the toughest in the U.S.
Very sweeping statements, very light on details. Details please? What does the bill contain that is counter to what Virginia is trying to do in the first place?
The article says one of the "hoops" is "adequate yearly progress." Even some of the state's top schools can be judged to not be making adequate yearly progress simply because their standards were so high to begin with. If you don't make adequate yearly progress then you might have to pay to send a child to a school that has. The problem with this is that in some rural areas the next closest school is more than an hour away (in really rural states it can be hours and hours away) and THAT school might not have made adequate progress either.
So, are you saying you think the bill says that a school that is meeting the standards could be held at fault for not making adequate yearly progress toward the standards? Doesn't make sense.
You follow that by saying that parents would force school systems to send their children to a school hours away when that school is no better or worse than their current school. Exactly why would the parents want to subject their children to the hours of travel for no apparent gain?
And in some urban areas the closest schools that have made the progress are already horribly overcrowded. So do you send in a pile of new students, which would almost certainly damage the education of the kids already there?
I will admit to not being a lawyer, only having had business law classes, I won't swear to knowing the complete legal ramification bills, but no one has shown me anything in the bill which under closer examination required schools to accept students which they were not capable of handling.
Another problem is that No Child Left Behind expects ALL children, even ones who are severely learning disabled, to meet the same standards. As a teacher, I'm sure your wife can tell you that is not logical, nor is it possible.
Actually my wife teaches reading enrichment and Dyslexia students. She believes that the most striking progress didn't take place until after the exemptions for learning disabilities were removed. Until then, schools used the exemptions to hide behind. Now the delivery of the test is modified to address the disability, but all students are tested and all students are part of the final result. She literally cursed about the stupidity of it before hand and loves it after seeing it implemented. School administrators hate it, but schools aren't supposed to be about making the administrators happy, are they?
I don't pretend to be happy with the total dollar figures associated with the bill. Unfortunately, I think those dollar figures or more would be present under any administration given the current political climate. So, I look past the dollars to the other elements of the bill. Those I believe set the framework for accountability so that in the years to come we will at least have accountability for the dollars being spent. When there is accountability, improvement is possible. Without accountability, no improvement will take place.
As you know, to graduate HS, students must pass a comprehensive Standards of Learning (SOL) test.
And under the No Child Left Behind Act -- schools also are "graded."
The bill proposed suggests that a student attending a "failed" school, who also fails his/her SOL test, be given a diploma anyway.
Now, isn't that the limit of irony (stupidity) -- the state (commonwealth) sends a kid to a failing school, doesn't teach him adequately to pass the SOL, and then they send out the door into a cruel world with a diploma that is meaningless.
Maybe, instead they ought to use these metrics to identify a kid who has been shortchanged and needs remedial education, until he can pass the SOL, and then send him into the world with a credential that truly means he really can read, write and cipher at some minimal level.