ALL PUNDITS LEFT BEHIND:

Flunking Out Bush's pet education bill is in serious trouble. (Alexander Russo, August 28, 2003, Slate)

Earlier this summer, school officials in California announced the preliminary results from their latest round of standardized testing, and the results were ugly: Roughly two out of three schools had failed to meet the state's standards for academic progress. But what sounds like bad news for California's students could be even worse news for the Bush administration and for education reform: The state's academic standards track closely with those of the No Child Left Behind Act, the education bill that Bush signed into law with bipartisan support and great fanfare less than two years ago. If other states go the way of California, as many expect, there is about to be a lot of bad news surrounding No Child Left Behind—and a serious chance that No Child Left Behind will itself be left behind.

NCLB was supposed to improve schools by holding them to higher academic standards and letting students transfer out of failing schools. Instead, over the past few months especially, this massive education law has generated little more than bad news, indifference, and increasing resistance. The hard-to-imagine numbers of failing schools in California and elsewhere have worn down the public's confidence in the law. Low-income and minority parents have failed to show strong interest in the transfer option that was supposed to help them escape dysfunctional schools. Congressional Democrats and some of the nation's largest education groups have already begun working to stop it in its tracks. The law seems to have few friends and many enemies. [...]

What's more, the law unintentionally creates a situation in which NCLB is pretty much all bad news, all the time. Parents who thought their children's schools were doing fine are told the schools are lagging. Parents who were supposed to get the chance to transfer their children to a better school find out that there's nowhere to go, or decide they'd rather keep their kids in a failing neighborhood school than ship them across town. Parents at schools that are required to take in transfer students worry about the impact of the transfers on the school. The press has frequently taken side with the teachers, progressive reformers, and education officials who generally dislike the law. So far, at least, it's hard to find a winner.

One can only gaze in wonder at a column so purblind as to ask, in all apparent seriousness: who has emerged as the winner from a law that has demonstrated that even many "good" public schools are failing their students, that there are too few public school choices available to students in those schools, and that the main obstacles to improving education are the public education establishment itself, the media, and "progressives" generally. Let's put on our thinking caps and ponder real hard: who benefits if this becomes accepted wisdom?

Posted by orrinj at September 5, 2003 12:33 PM