As an educator, a policy analyst, and an economist who spends a lot of time looking at education issues, I am in the unexpected position of being in agreement simultaneously with the North Carolina public schools, the Southern Baptist Convention, and the National Education Association on the federal No Child Left Behind law.
I understand that you can’t be against a law that has good intentions, even if the thing is terrible, but there it is. As there is seldom a reward for honesty, and often a punishment, folks who ought to oppose this law are keeping mum. Perhaps they’re hoping for the best. Good luck to them. The NEA, to its credit, is baldly self-serving and isn’t even trying to hide its scheming to retain union power in the public schools.
Let’s clarify a few things with respect to No Child Left Behind. NCLB is one of those “good intentions” federal programs (I hesitate to call it just a law at this point) that centralizes the administration of school standards — accountability — and makes schools responsible to the federal government for certain prescribed outcomes. The hoped-for by-product is schools that are more acceptable, responsible, and effective with respect to parents and children. But why should they be?
Certainly it’s a good idea to want public schools to improve, but what have they been doing up until now? Just blundering along because they couldn’t figure out how to do better, or just didn’t want to? Schools do need to improve. NCLB, unfortunately, is producing lots of incentives to satisfy THE LAW, as recent wriggling to “adjust” as much of it as possible reveals, but there is little evidence that this will eventually satisfy parents, or make children more accomplished.
Charter schools are the only schools in the K-12 public orbit that are willing to endure any element of market test, and as Roger Gerber, head of the League of Charter Schools, pointed out May 12 at the “charter day at the legislature” press conference, they are held accountable to parents every day. Parents have no obligation to bring those kids back to the charter if it’s not up to snuff — whatever their view of what “snuff” is.
Wherefore NCLB, then? Lots of teachers and school officials are unhappy with it because they may be caught in the headlights of poor performance, and nobody wants their incompetence or phony efforts exposed. The wriggling to adjust NCLB benchmarks and calculation methods is solid evidence that schools don’t want those federal sanctions. That they oppose NCLB is good, they just oppose it for the wrong reasons.
Federal intrusions into local control of local services are not the first-best, and perhaps not even the second or third-best solution to schools that have basically crashed and burned in terms of educational effectiveness. Like other federal programs (highways, health care, higher education) that impose standards in return for dollars, we should be careful not to be dazzled by the dollars, or by the old saw that “it just takes time.”
Nope. It’s not time, and it’s not dollars. We should be opposed to this law because it’s all wrong for freedom, even though it affords lots of opportunities to grandstand about how much whomever “cares” about the children. I think the Southern Baptist Convention has seen the writing on the wall on this one, and, applause to them, they are taking a pro-freedom stand.
The problem with the federal approach is that there is virtually no going back, inefficient or not; besides that, there is little opportunity to test the alternatives that were crowded out. No Child Left Behind is a bad law with good intentions, the consequences of which will certainly be a need for further regulation in some areas and watering down of intended standards in others. The schools may turn out to be “right” with the law, but where will the kids be? Same place, different day.