Love NCLB? You’re in luck!
I spent yesterday afternoon on Capitol Hill and it confirmed what I already suspected: Washington is in complete paralysis around the No Child Left Behind act.
Republicans are commencing their stampede away from the law, particularly in the House, now that moderate Republicans have been all but eviscerated. Consider the new GOP Members of the House education committee, for example. Here’s what Representative Tom McClintock has to say about the federal role in education:
Returning control and decision making power to our local communities and families regarding our children’s education is crucial in making our education system work again. It is not the federal government’s role to force every school district into a predetermined one-size fits all formula.
The federal government has no business poking its nose into our local schools, telling parents and teachers what is best for our kids. Our public schools suffer from too much bureaucracy that eats up resources. We need more resources in the classroom, where they will do the most good.
These are not Margaret Spellings Republicans, to say the least.
Meanwhile, a sizable chunk of the Democratic caucus is owned by the National Education Association, and will only vote for an NCLB update if the law’s accountability provisions are watered down. So where does this leave Chairmen Kennedy and Miller, and the incoming Obama Administration? Up a creek, if they want to push through an NCLB that looks anything like the current law, as the votes in the center simply aren’t there. Which is why they won’t touch reauthorization anytime soon (best case scenario is now 2011!) and why we get to enjoy NCLB-as-is for several more years to come.
Related posts:
- Is NCLB reauthorization moving?
- To renew NCLB, redefine “reform”
- Arne Duncan’s planned speech shows Obama administration slowly wading into NCLB
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January 13th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Anyone who believes that everything will be made better by a big heaping dose of “local control” does not understand the nature of the threat. How many of our 15,000+ school districts actually have the capability to benchmark themselves again Finland, Korea, Singapore, etc.?
The Feds should do what they are best at–measuring things. If parents understood how their children were actually performing (18% of Mississippi 4th graders proficient readers on NAEP) as opposed to the to the fantasy spun by the states (89% of Mississippi 4th graders proficient readers) it would be a great first step to dramatic educational reform. There are all sorts of things that parents/citizens would not support or tolerate if 89% of their kids are at grade level that they would take to the streets and demand if that number were 18%.
Local control would come at the level of instruction. Try any book, any pedagogy, any hare-brained idea you wish. (The fact is that we do not have the strong education research to really know “what works” in most instances.) But the children will be tested on the Federal exam and the results sent home to parents in a clear and understandable fashion.
All sorts of reforms that seem impossible today would become possible if parents were really to understand how poorly their children are performing on a world level (and understand that their child’s performance will presage, eventually, their standard-of-living.)