Cleveland
Plain Dealer...
No
quick fix for No Child Left Behind
October 4, 2011
President
Barack Obama correctly
overturned a hopelessly optimistic provision in No Child Left Behind,
the
bipartisan school reform law signed by President George W. Bush in
2002, that
could penalize districts for failing to have 100 percent of students
proficient
in math and reading by 2014.
But
Obama may not simply edit the
measure to suit himself. Congress has to have a say.
According
to NCLB, Obama and Secretary
of Education Arne Duncan have the authority to waive the 100 percent
standard,
but Republicans are on solid ground when they say that the
administration lacks
the power to go any further.
The
impossible standard -- even the
best schools have youngsters who don’t measure up -- could have
affected tens
of thousands of 100,000 public schools, according to the U.S.
Department of
Education.
Districts
that missed the mark would
have had to fire staff and either close schools or hand them over to
presumably
more effective charter organizations.
The
penalties would have created chaos
-- and all for naught, in some cases.
More
questionable than the waiver
itself, which Ohio is still considering applying for, said a spokesman
for the
Ohio Department of Education, was the Obama team’s next step -- trying
to make
the waiver conditional on a state’s promise to reform its
lowest-performing
schools and create a system for evaluating teachers’ performance.
Obama
cannot take it upon himself to
remake education in the United States. The Republicans make an
air-tight case
that if such a job is to be done, it falls to Congress.
So,
faced with an unrealistic law that
no one wants even to try to enforce, Congress needs to get back in the
saddle
and try again.
Read
it at the Cleveland Plain Dealer
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