Education Reform Goes From Bad to Worse

No Child Left Behind has seen better days. Under attack from both the right and left, President Bush’s signature education achievement might not survive if some members of Congress get their way.

House Education and Labor Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.) offered a 435-page legislative draft last month that rewrites several provisions and guts the few measures in the law that limited-government conservatives support.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) wants to go one step further and rename the law to something other than No Child Left Behind.

So not only does the Bush administration face the prospect of significant policy changes, it could also lose the marketing appeal of the law’s name.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, who last week fought back against the proposed changes, might be better off with the status quo than trying to reauthorize the law in a hostile Congress. Her biggest gripe was Miller’s attempt to water down the penalties schools face for failing to live up to the law’s testing requirements, but it’s just one of many differences that need to be addressed.

Meanwhile, conservatives who are seeking to trim government bureaucracy, end ineffective programs and restore state and local control in education won’t find much to like in Miller’s 435-page draft. His other changes include new regulations, more programs and fewer options for school choice. Miller has also made no attempt to fix No Child Left Behind’s structural problems.

Changes to the school-choice provisions are particularly troublesome given the large number of congressmen who support private schools in their personal life. A report from The Heritage Foundation last week revealed members of Congress send their kids to private schools at a rate nearly four times that of the general population.

Two notable examples are Sens. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.). But they’re not alone. More than 37 percent of House members and 45 percent of senators have sent their children to private school. Meanwhile, 52 percent of Congressional Black Caucus members and 38 percent of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus have had at least one child in private school.

Despite those surprisingly high numbers, Miller’s proposed changes to No Child Left Behind gut its school-choice provisions. It seems some members of Congress—who are paid $165,200 per year—have no problem personally taking advantage of school choice, but they are willing to reduce the school-choice options for those without financial means to afford it on their own.

As Democrats push for these changes, conservatives have taken the opposite approach. Led by Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), a group of Republicans are pursuing legislation known as A-PLUS. Their bill attempts to bring greater transparency to No Child Left Behind and reduce the additional 6.7 million hours that school officials are spending to comply with the law.

“No Child Left Behind originally sought to return some education policy-making authority to the states, but in its current form the legislation is a massive spending bill filled with federal mandates that increase the presence of federal bureaucrats in our classrooms,” Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.), a co-sponsor of the A-PLUS Act, said last week on the House floor.

It’s too bad Spellings was so quick to reject the conservatives’ ideas earlier this year. While their proposal might not have been exactly what she wanted, it would be a significant improvement over the big-government solutions that Miller hopes to pass into law.

At this point, no conservative could support what Miller has proposed. If liberals are serious about the changes they want to make, it’s only a matter of time before the Bush administration realizes it won’t get anything good from this Congress on education policy. The status quo just might be a better option.

What bothers me the most about the need for education reform, is that it always winds up the people who screwed it up in the first place, who are charged with fixing it.

Congress can’t fix it. The Department of Education can’t fix it. The same old battle axes on campus can’t fix it.

We need some new blood in the mix somewhere. Otherwise the same old idiots will keep coming up with the same old idiotic ideas. And then, five to ten years later the same old idiots will have another great fix to solve all the problems they’ll create this time.

I still say, our schools need to be gutted. We need to start all over. Well, we won’t. The liberals will convince everyone once again that they know what’s best, and the conservatives will whine about it and life will go on as it has for the last 50 years.

Sorry kids, nobody cares enough to do what needs to be done.

I’m sitting here at my desk getting ready to grade papers. Now that I’ve seen this, I feel a little sick.

I’m in favor of school choice. If a doctor or a lawyer can come to town, hang a shingle, and open an office, a teacher should be able to do the same thing. Folks like myself would thrive under a system of professional competition where parents determine which teaching is best for their children. The fact is that there are many different kinds of students, too, and schools should be able to quickly and effectively adapt to circumstances as they emerge. Parents have a right to demand ethical and moral structure in the education of their children, and the teacher needs to be able to respond effectively to that, too.

No Child Left Behind, however, is the socialized medicine of the schoolroom. My job has been federalized. Bureaucratic rules determine where I go and what I do. Some of this has not been bad; holding schools accountable on the basis of student tests scores has been useful, for instance.

The problem with bureaucratic rulemaking was well summarized in a book called “The Death of Common Sense.” The more detailed the regulation, the more opportunity there is for someone to find a loophole in those regulations, and eventually, you have to hire a professional regulation reader (a.k.a., an attorney) to wade through the thousands of regulations in order to determine what they are and how they apply to you. Compare the mind-numbing length of the No Child Left Behind Act to the simplicity and elegance of the First Amendment.

Here’s an example: I worked for 20 years as a reporter and editor at various newspapers throughout the West. No Child Left Behind says that I am not qualified to teach writing or reading. I must have a degree in English. There is a regulation that states I can take a competency test (which I took and passed with almost a perfect score), but my point is that background and experience matter less than a slip of paper.

I love to astonish my fellow teachers and ask them to find the clause in the Constitution allowing the federal government to regulate schools. Most of them haven’t even thought about it.

In the meantime, since the original tinkering with education is flawed - which makes sense, since it is top-down planning at its worst - there will be more tinkering. I’ll get conflicting messages from administration about what to do and how to do it as they wade through the changes. Maybe I’ll get to waste a few grand on useless college classes, only to find out that the regulations change again and I didn’t need to really jump through that hoop.

If you really want to listen to nightmares, speak with a special education teacher about their paperwork, due process hearings, and regulations. My observation is that half of a special education teacher’s job is spent filling out paperwork.

I can see the benefit to all this. Federalizing my job makes me and my colleagues wards of the government, and that means ready votes for the party of government, which is currently called “The Democrats.” Most of my fellow teachers are Democrats, although most can’t articulate the reasons for their support, but when we discuss the matter in depth they almost always return to the issue of job protection. Hayek would have a field day with that one. In essence, teachers are now serfs, with the federal government the lord of the manor.

COMING SOON: The No Patient Left Behind Act.

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