The federal education law known as No Child Left Behind is getting sillier by the day. Besides the fact that the Bush administration handed down this behemoth soon after 9-11 when the nation's attention was elsewhere, it also conveniently decided not to fund it.
Further, two recent studies found huge discrepancies between states in student achievement on tests. For example, "three-quarters of children across the country would fail South Carolina's tough fifth-grade test, one study shows, while seven out of eight would ace the third-grade tests in Colorado and Texas," according to the New York Times article today.
Across the nation, there is no agreement on how much students need to know to be considered proficient. This could spell trouble for schools that don't meet standards under the federal law, including loss of students and mass reorganization--by the federal government.
This is not to say that the feds should apply blanket standards for students nationwide--they should not. Setting standards should be a state-by-state decision, with ample input from school district communities. However, what No Child Left Behind has done is to throw even more unfunded, bureaucratic regulations onto states, most of which have already been struggling to implement their own higher-standards plans.
In Washington state, our energies should solely be on seeing our own state Education Reform Act through, not buckling under the weight of yet another unfunded federal mandate. Teachers, parents and community and business leaders in this state began plans to boost education standards a decade ago in a thoughtful, research-based way. When times start getting tough--and they will when high schoolers will soon need to pass a state test to graduate--we cannot water down our standards and buckle under pressure.
The Bush administration has overstepped its welcome in the classroom. Most states had already done their homework and formed their own ed. reform plans--we don't need the feds telling us how it should be done.
Especially not when Texas--where Bush was formerly governor and where apparent progress on a state test in the '90s paved the way for No Child Left Behind--came in near the bottom in both studies.
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