THE FIRST HARRIET MIERS MOMENT (via mc):

'No Child' Closes the Gap: Harder for Special Needs, Low-Income Students to be Left Behind (Jay Mathews, 10/11/05, Washington Post)

Ricki Sabia began volunteering to help children with disabilities when she was in high school on Long Island. She went to college at Georgetown University and law school at the University of Maryland. When her second son, Stephen, was born in 1992 with Down syndrome, her youthful interest became a major focus of her life. She tried to do what she could to improve services for children with disabilities in Montgomery County, where she lived with Stephen, her older son David and her husband Peter, a cardiologist.

It was often a struggle and led her to appreciate an unexpected ally, the federal No Child Left Behind law.

NCLB was not very popular with educators, particularly those whose schools were threatened with unattractive labels if their special education students did not reach the annual achievement targets under the law. But for Sabia, now associate director of the National Down Syndrome Society Public Policy Center, and other parents the law was an effective tool precisely because it forced educators to try to do difficult things that, before the law, they could easily let slide. NCLB slaps a "needs improvement" label on a school, and forces it to let students transfer and get them special tutoring if any of its student subgroups, including low-income children or children with disabilities, do not improve at the rate prescribed by the law and state authorities. [...]

To those who say the law requires children with disabilities to take tests they cannot pass and forces them out of school...

Those, including most on the Right, haven't understood the genius of the law. What it does is use kids who can't possibly pass the test to make it so that all kids can choose their own schools. Once the voucher provision is amended to allow for private and parochial school attendance a complete voucherization of public education will have been effected.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 11, 2005 1:03 PM