Posted on 09/09/2007 8:53:23 AM PDT by Kaslin
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.
No Child Left Behind was the first clue that Jorge Bush was out to establish the Teddy Kennedy Wing of the Republican. As a life long voter for Republican candidates for President, I was too ignorant to recognize that Jorge, a elitist fratboy from a wealthy family with a political history in national politics and who misspent his youth in a drunken stupor, would embrace his soul brother, Teddy Kennedy, at the expense of the conservative base. The facts are simple Bush has more in common with Kennedy who wishes him nothing but harm, than some working schmo like me who worked hard and played by the rules, and had no family fortune or reputation to rescue me from the youthful indulgences which Bush outgrew and Kennedy never did.
Then why did Bush double the Education Department’s budget by the end of his first term? I can blame a lot on Ted and company, but I’ll be darned if I would have done anything less than destroy the DoE if it at all possible.
True, but that isn’t limited to California any longer.
Way more than half, I'm afraid.
You cannot do anything with a special ed student without having the parent sign permission.
In the inner cities especially, parents are inclined not to want to bother to come to the meetings. Multiple written notifications as well as certified mail are used to assure the parent has received notice. Parents have to be notified of their rights on every occasion and these rights have to be published in many languages. In addition, if parents are not fluent in English, the school system is obligated to provide an interpreter.
Recently we were told that if a parent says they do not have transportation to one of these meeting, the school system is obligated to provide it.
I agree and in this sense NCLB has succeeded by plugging the loopholes that enabled teachers, schools and school districts to avoid accountability. I have seen more improvement under NCLB than at any other time.
However, there are also two serious downsides to NCLB. First, it has compounded the bureaucracy and secondly, for those few really good and creative teachers of which most of us know at least one, it has taken away their freedom to teach as they know best.
Thanks for that confirmation about special education teachers. I think the readers here at FreeRepublic often don’t understand how many teachers are working quietly and conservatively in their jobs.
It’s the administrators who don’t want to be accountable. Thet run the schools. The tests measure the schools, not the teachers. Theywould love to have thr standards gutted, because that would leave in place the bureaucracy that now handles the federal paperwork but with little threat that the federal money will cease to flow. We should do what the Netherlands do. 70 % of the students are in private schools. The money follows the child. Much greater efficiency when the state subsidizes schools rather than operates them. Since 1944, the British schools have moved further and further away from that principle, and the schools have got progressivesly worse.
>>If you were to boil NCLB down to one word, that one word is accountability, and the teachers don’t want to be accountable.
I agree and in this sense NCLB has succeeded by plugging the loopholes that enabled teachers, schools and school districts to avoid accountability. I have seen more improvement under NCLB than at any other time.
However, there are also two serious downsides to NCLB. First, it has compounded the bureaucracy and secondly, for those few really good and creative teachers of which most of us know at least one, it has taken away their freedom to teach as they know best.<<
If there was a market-based approach to education, accountability would be quickly accomplished as parents fled crappy teachers and lined up for the best. If would be tough for the lazy teachers out there, but once competitiveness became the norm, most of my colleagues would rise to the occasion. (They’d have to or they’d be out of work... LOL)
Milton Friedman had it right in that public education is a state funded monopoly and it is bloated and extremely inefficient.
You’re right, basically the public at large has no idea.
About seventy years ago, teachers in some places in Texas were under individual contracts. The principal of my elementary schools started out that way. He was head teacher in a two teacher school. He had just got out of teacher’s college but was not afraid to go head-to=head with the farmers who ran the board. He frustrated the heck out of them because he refused to be cowed, but he had allies on the board who liked a man who could drive a hard bargin. Heck, THEY had to do it. He ended up as the best paid “principal” in the county. making almost as much as the County Superintendent. He left to go to a school in the East Texas field, one which could pay a lot more money. The war came and he went into the armyfor four years, energing as a msgt. Went back to work under Gilmer Aiken, where the district set a general schedule. Less room for negotiation, but he still did it, and found a way to get more than the schedule dictated as part of his contract. But as more and more teachers were satisfied to take what was offered, pretty soon only the coaches fought for higher wages. Now teachers are like civil servants, but with less job security.
I agree re the Dept. of Ed.
Thank you SportuteGrl
As a contract public CC teacher it is exactly as you say, all the fulltimers, 1) are Democrats 2) do whine about NCLB, which I myself agree is a classic centralized (read federal) boondoggle, 3) and cannot articulate in any objective way why they are leftists, with the result it only comes down to their salary and publicized self importance.
It is also true that administrators, who I suggest gain additional authority through the bureaucratic NCLB, are a major impediment in the teaching realm.
I also agree, much of the public, especially the AARP crowd, really don't have a clue, and DON'T CARE.
I have a friend, retired marine pilot, and later aviation executive, who thought he might contribute (in some way) teaching math, remedial and trig, at the local community college - turned down flat because no appropriate master's degree. And a good proportion of those employed teachers down there, including D.Ed's, are genuinely stupid!
Like the courts, like government spending, like business, the only way out is we trust and check one another at the local level, federal government be damned. The latter, like Schumer, like Hillary, and like the SOVIET UNION, will ALWAYS end up corrupted.
I couldn’t agree with you more.
If I could make one change that I think would help education, it would be to take it out of the hands of the government. If I could make a second change, it would be to dismantle the teacher’s unions.
Public education is a noble idea, but a failed one. Give us a tax cut and require us to educate our own children. Free market competition will bring better options. People don’t value what’s given them for free. If they had to pay for education, they would value it a lot more. Private schools aren’t a guarantee of quality, either, I might add.
Teachers, don’t whine to me about how you need unions to protect you. My grandmother was a teacher. Some of my best friends are teachers. Some are in unions because they feel coerced to join.
I make $75-$100/hour tutoring. Why? Because I’m lucky enough to live in an area where there are parents who can afford to pay that much to get their kids the remedial help they need.
Why do the kids need remediation? Some are victims of lousy, but tenured teachers. All are victims of a terrible school system which is held up as being one of the best in the country. The reason it’s considered one of the best in the country is because the kids here test high. Is that because of the school system? NO! It’s in SPITE of the school system. It’s because a large percentage of the kids are very bright and their parents spend the time and money necessary to make up for the lousy schools.
If you look at test scores of minorities in this school system, you would find that they lag far behind minority scores in other school districts that aren’t so highly rated. That’s because the minority parents can’t afford to pay for the extra help or don’t know that they need it or are just not part of a culture where education is valued. If the school system were so great, the minority scores would be comparably high.
Who is Jorge Bush. Your hatred against the president is pathetic. Why don’t you go over to DU or Daly Kos. I am sure they appreciate you over there
Daily not Daly
Great comments...
I agree that private schooling isn’t a guarantee. Although I do think it’s a cut above, it’s still not a guarantee by any means.
You touched on another good point when you got to the tutoring. I’d not contemplated that dynamic before, but you made a lot of sense. Even some of the schools in our middle-income areas aren’t all that great, but the parents seek out help for their kids.
God how the school system sucks. It’s one great big shell game that our kids are loosing, while the hucksters keep seeking more people to step right up and play the confidence game. Our kids can’t win this game folks. Quit playing...
Thank you.
From what I understand — from a friend who just retired (early) from LA Unified, NCLB encourages the schools to fall behind, because then MORE bureaucrats get to get involved. She said it was so top-heavy, even in her classroom, with people from ‘downtown’ (Admin) that the ‘specialists’ all but outnumbered the students.
She also said the children had to be taught what they were learning and why — as in, ‘This lesson will teach you the social and scientific (followed by bureaucratic names for all the things being covered).’ Like any child needs to learn that.
I heard about a school that was failing. They totally dropped everything except reading and arithmetic, for the entire year, and doubled their scores.
Makes sense to me.
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