Sunday, February 22, 2004
No Child Left Behind
Take a look at the editorial Accountability Test in Sunday's Post by Lil Tuttle. She used to serve on the Virginia State Board of Education and she really understands the problems inherent in public education. Her column is a defense of Virginia's participation with The No Child Left Behind Act, and her reasoning works like this:
a. Public school employees are accountable to the public school system,
b. Therefore, parents whose children attend public schools are not the customers,
c. Parents have no real recourse when the public school system fails their child,
d. The Standards of Learning (SOL's) were supposed to ensure quality, however, their accountability standards have been weakened recently and they always lacked the authority to penalize poorly performing schools,
e. The No Child Left Behind Act corrects the shortcomings of the SOL's, and
f. Not embracing the Act will give credibility to the school choice movement's mantra that only the marketplace can correct the problems with public education.
The problem with her argument is that the No Child Left Behind Act does that correct the structural problems with public education that Ms. Tuttle identifies in her article. The law is supposed to guarantee that all students are making annual yearly progress as measured through testing. What is going to happen when most schools are deemed to be failing because students are not meeting targets? Exactly what we are seeing now. States are fighting with the federal government over the standards and just last week some were relaxed. Other jurisdictions will soon start pulling out of participating all together when they realize that the strings that come with accepting increased Title 1 dollars are not worth the price.
Of course, the President and Congress never should have passed this legislation. Education is a local matter and our constitution says nothing about a right of the federal government to interfere in this area. The Republicans actually had in right back in 1994 when the Contract for America called for the elimination of the Department of Education.
The only true way to fix the problem is by ending the government's monopoly over public education. We see the value of competition in business. We should extend the same lesson to educating our kids. I predict that Ms. Tuttle will come to realize that those of us in the school choice movement have a solid case to make.
PermaLink | 5:08 PM |
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a. Public school employees are accountable to the public school system,
b. Therefore, parents whose children attend public schools are not the customers,
c. Parents have no real recourse when the public school system fails their child,
d. The Standards of Learning (SOL's) were supposed to ensure quality, however, their accountability standards have been weakened recently and they always lacked the authority to penalize poorly performing schools,
e. The No Child Left Behind Act corrects the shortcomings of the SOL's, and
f. Not embracing the Act will give credibility to the school choice movement's mantra that only the marketplace can correct the problems with public education.
The problem with her argument is that the No Child Left Behind Act does that correct the structural problems with public education that Ms. Tuttle identifies in her article. The law is supposed to guarantee that all students are making annual yearly progress as measured through testing. What is going to happen when most schools are deemed to be failing because students are not meeting targets? Exactly what we are seeing now. States are fighting with the federal government over the standards and just last week some were relaxed. Other jurisdictions will soon start pulling out of participating all together when they realize that the strings that come with accepting increased Title 1 dollars are not worth the price.
Of course, the President and Congress never should have passed this legislation. Education is a local matter and our constitution says nothing about a right of the federal government to interfere in this area. The Republicans actually had in right back in 1994 when the Contract for America called for the elimination of the Department of Education.
The only true way to fix the problem is by ending the government's monopoly over public education. We see the value of competition in business. We should extend the same lesson to educating our kids. I predict that Ms. Tuttle will come to realize that those of us in the school choice movement have a solid case to make.
PermaLink | 5:08 PM |
| 
