No Times editorial writer is left … who hasn't written about No Child Left Behind
January 10, 2004
School Reform Left Behind
When President Bush campaigns for re-election, he will probably point to the No Child Left Behind Act as proof that his philosophy of compassionate conservatism is working. He should be forced to answer questions about the way the law has been put in place. The administration has failed to make the states live up to the education standards it claims to be upholding. And the states have been encouraged in their resistance by the failure of the federal government to come up with all of the promised aid.
The administration is right when it says that education financing has increased sharply since No Child Left Behind was signed two years ago. Indeed, the funds for Title I, which is aimed at the poorest students, have jumped 30 percent since then — with proportionately more of the money going to the poorest districts. But the Title I allotment is also $6 billion short of what Congress authorized when it passed the law. The new money would have come as a windfall if most schools were not so poorly financed in the first place. As things stand, however, districts need every cent they were supposed to get if they are to reach the strict new standards laid out by the federal government.
Back in Washington, the Education Department has come under criticism for politicizing the new law while halfheartedly enforcing its most crucial provisions — like the one that requires states to place a "highly qualified" teacher in every classroom by 2006.
When it passed the law, Congress required that the states close the achievement gap between rich and poor students over the next decade by beefing up instruction and holding all children to the same high standards. The states were supposed to file detailed reports on teacher quality and student performance, most notably dropout rates. But recently a study by the Education Trust, a nonpartisan Washington foundation, found that the states have been getting away with falsifying even the most basic data.
The report, titled "Telling the Whole Truth (or Not) About High School Graduation," says that many states reported implausibly high graduation rates, which are at odds with most research into the dropout problem. A companion report on teacher preparedness says that in that critical area, some states have crossed "the line that separates fact from fiction, to paint a rosy picture that is simply at odds with reality."
Common sense tells us that education reform will go nowhere unless students are taught by strong, qualified teachers. The administration, however, never believed in the teacher quality provision and accepted it only because Congress had forced the issue. Now it is undermining the law by failing to enforce that requirement.
The Bush White House seems to believe that it can create quality education by requiring unprepared students to take high-stakes tests, and then labeling their schools as failing when the students do not measure up. This page has always believed that the president is sincere in his desire to improve public education. But it is easy to see why some critics suspect that the Bush plan is less about fixing the schools than about undermining them in order to create a federal voucher system that sends children to private schools at public expense.
Congress should resist efforts to roll back the new standards — and ride herd on the Education Department to make it do a more credible job. But given the immensity of the task at hand, education reform will have a difficult time succeeding until the federal government comes up with all of the money it promised the states two years ago.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |
