My local newspaper switched to a fee system for archived articles, so I can't easily research the NCLB impacts on Alaska. I don't follow the issue, but I know there's a lot of griping about it.
Some of our rural villages are real basket cases, and you can't fix the school without fixing the village. Some villages are "wet", with high rates of alcoholism, family dysfunction, fetal alcohol syndrome, and suicide. In some the kids are into "huffing", i.e. inhaling solvents such as gasoline and paint thinner. Furthermore, many of these villages are suffering severely from skyrocketing fuel prices, loss of state benefits, and rapidly eroding coastlines.
So imagine you are some kind of village leader facing all these pathologies, and along comes NCLB with a bunch of onerous rules and paperwork you have to deal with. What do you do? I'm glad I don't have to deal with it. I don't mean to say that the situation in what we call the Bush is entirely negative, but there are some real severe problems out there. |
