Posted on 08/10/2011 3:19:10 AM PDT by markomalley
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced on Friday that he will soon be granting waivers to selected states exempting them from the reading and math proficiency requirements of No Child Left Behind, former President George W. Bush's signature accomplishment in education reform. According to Duncan, as many as 82 percent of U.S. schools could be deemed to be failing this year under standards established by NCLB. "The states are desperately asking for us to respond," Duncan told reporters via conference call. States are, in fact, clamoring for relief from the law's burdensome regulations. But there is just one small problem in Duncan's plan: There is no legal basis for it.
To be sure, NCLB is unpopular among many liberal and conservative education policy experts. It requires states to identify "annual yearly progress" targets for standardized reading and math scores, and then labels schools that miss those targets as "failing." By 2014, 100 percent of all students must be proficient in reading and math or schools that fall short will suffer severe federal sanctions.
Liberals relish NCLB's emphasis on federal direction of education policy, but they dislike the law's focus on standardized testing. That allies them with teachers unions, which hate anything that holds their members accountable for how well children learn in their classrooms. For their part, conservatives believe local school districts should be free from federal interference and reject the burdensome paperwork that comes with NCLB funding. There is bipartisan consensus for repealing NCLB in Congress, but Obama has yet to propose a replacement during his nearly three years in the Oval Office.
Instead, Obama chose to use stimulus dollars to bribe states into adopting reforms favored by Duncan. But now that the stimulus money has run out, Obama is replacing the stimulus carrot with an NCLB stick. Any state can apply for a NCLB waiver, but only those states that present applications that are personally approved by Duncan will be granted waivers. The New York Times has called Duncan's waiver plan "the most sweeping use of executive authority to rewrite federal education law since Washington expanded its involvement in education in the 1960s."
Unfortunately, Obama's penchant for governing either by selective enforcement of federal laws or using regulatory action to circumvent them is not limited to education policy. Obama has ignored the War Powers Act, declined to defend the Defense of Marriage Act, trampled on long-established bankruptcy laws to bail out Chrysler, failed to enforce anti-voter fraud laws, defied a federal judge's order to allow offshore oil drilling, and refused to enforce our nation's immigration laws.
In Federalist 47, James Madison wrote: "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny." Duncan's NCLB waiver plan will make him the judge, jury and executioner of national education policy. This is exactly the type of government action our Constitution was designed to prevent.
So, as always....you can write a thousand page bill into law...and it’ll just be wavered or ignored.
It requires a congress with backbone to make it otherwise.
It would REALLY help if Congress would STOP writing laws that give the Executive Branch these kinds of powers, because that’s EXACTLY how dictatorships work (i.e., selectively reward friends and punish enemies).
The Health Care law is the classic example and the widespread use of waivers in and of itself should be enough to throw the whole thing out.
You have to simply NOT PERMIT waivers. If the law is “too hard” on certain people (or companies), then let them take up their exceptions in Congress, as it’s Congress’s law, not the Executive’s.
Without testing, there is no OBJECTIVE measure of success. To Liberals, the only measure of “success” is the school budget. Despite the rhetoric, they care far more about teacher Unions than about the kids.
That being said, teachers can only do so much. The kids have to show up willing to learn and the parents have to be supportive of learning. I’m sure this will NEVER be the case in many communities. That is why the school budget is almost irrelevant. If this is true, kids will learn—even on a shoestring budget. If its not, all the $$ in the world won’t make a dent.
When education is a preventative measure to starvation, education will be valued, not before.
All “czars” just make everything up as they go along. Congress needs to shut them all down, along with all policy-making by the heads of agencies. The United States is not supposed to be ruled by individual whim.
Like Income Tax?
Now that Obama is in more trouble from the left as he enters election season he is reversing the administration's stance in order to win back favor from the teachers.
“Like Income Tax?”
Actually, no, in most cases. Most of the time the IRS does play by the rules that Congress imposes on them...and they do apply it fairly, and when they don’t there’s a court system that can be accessed. Now you do have suspicious stuff that happens, like EVERY prominent conservative being audited when Clinton was president, but even with the audits, they can’t and don’t change the laws.
Now these waivers are different...those become laws to the people involved. It’s the same as letting the federal decide to exempt certain people they choose, by name, from having to pay any taxes. We’re still not there yet.
Answer: With the beginning of the US Department of Education.
Question: How can the quality of education be improved?
Answer: Reduction and/or removal of the US Department of Education and return of complete control to States and communities.
Especially when the uneducated get all the trimmings (cell phones) for free.
I no longer differentiate between the three branches of government on most issues as the real delineation is between DemonRat and Repugnican (or lawyer and non-lawyer)
If anything mandated by law has an automatic expiration date printed, in invisible ink, at the bottom of each page:
“Void at the next election or six months, whichever occurs first.”
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