Let's just repeal No Child Left Behind Act

The New Hampshire Sunday News ^ | 1/12/03 | JACK KENNY

[RJCogburn]

THE U.S. Superintendent of Schools — George W. Bush — has called for a $1 billion increase in programs to educate poor children, a request congressional Democrats were quick to label inadequate. At least New Hampshire is not the only place where "adequacy" is an issue in education funding.

Oh, for the bad old days when Democrats had the White House and were the majority party in both houses of Congress. At least then Republicans could blame the nefarious growth in the federal budget on those free-spending liberals in the Democratic Party. Why, with those liberal Democrats, the late Everett Dirksen used to say, "It's a billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you're talking about real money."

But Republicans are in power these days, and we need not worry that power has corrupted them. Nay, it has enlarged their vision. They're no longer skinflints on spending, fearful of big budgets. No, sir. Not when President Bush can boast — boast, mind you — that his administration has increased federal spending on education by 40 percent in just two years. Not when the No Child Left Behind Act, the President's signature achievement in "education reform," is itself a $22.5 billion program.

"A lot is being spent — and a lot is being expected," said Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee. "Democrat leaders have repeatedly said they want more spending than the President has proposed, but they've never explained where the money would come from."

Since we are once again running budget deficits in the $160 billion to $200 billion a year range, it could be argued that the President and his party are not entirely successful in figuring out where the money is coming from, either. But the old game of using conservative rhetoric to cover liberal spending increases is being played rather well by the Bush administration.

Secretary of Education Rod Paige, in an op-ed piece that appeared in The Union Leader last month, wrote that "if we are truly to help our nation's schools, we must abandon the outmoded, old-fashioned and false idea that America's students are failing (or ever failed) to learn because of a lack of money." In fact, said Paige, the federal government alone has spent $321 billion on education since 1965. ("Pretty soon you're talking about real money.")

"What have we gotten for this?" he asked. "Less than one in three fourth-graders can read proficiently." The education "czar" doesn't appear to be making a case for more spending, does he?

Yet the Bush administration has been boosting school spending considerably. In fact, the President appears to have been too modest in his claim of how much federal education spending has increased in the short time he has been in the White House.

The No Child Left Behind Act is a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary School Education Act, first passed by Congress in 1965 during the heyday of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.

According to figures published in Education World magazine, last year's appropriation was a 27 percent increase over the previous year and a whopping 49 percent increase over the year 2000. Rather generous for a party that used to oppose federal involvement in education.

Defenders of the law claim the reforms enacted under the No Child Left Behind Act are "conservative" in nature, oriented toward results rather than process. Thus conservatives, who for years opposed the national testing of students, now boast of a federal mandate for state testing.

And they apparently see nothing wrong with requiring states to submit their plans for school progress and accountability to the federal Department of Education — the agency Republicans forgot to abolish — for approval.

The new law is said to allow greater flexibility to shift funds from one program to another, according to the varying needs of the local school districts. But when the Congress authorizes the taking of our money for something the federal government has no business doing in the first place, shall we then be grateful when they allow us some "flexibility" in spending it?

According to the New Hampshire School Administrators Association, the 1,200-page law and its myriad pages of regulations impose $575 in new costs to the state and its local school districts for every $77 in new aid. "If the federal government is interested in offering ambitious new standards for schools, then it follows that they should pay the full cost of those new requirements," said Mark Joyce, executive director. Wrong.

What the federal government — primarily the Congress and the President of the United States — should recognize is that there is no authority in the Constitution for the federal government to "offer" or impose any standards for education — funded or unfunded. The best way to "fix" the No Child Left Behind Act is to repeal it.

[RJCogburn]

But when the Congress authorizes the taking of our money for something the federal government has no business doing in the first place, shall we then be grateful when they allow us some "flexibility" in spending it?

[weikel]

Bump

[Coleus]

The only "good" thing about this boodoggle is that it makes teachers and school districts accountable to the students, public and the DOE. They will now, for the first time, have to produce to get the funding and have their school names listed in the newspapers as failing schools if they don't pass.