NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND TURNS 5

As President Touts Education Law, Another Federal Official Say’s It’s Flawed

By Headwaters News, 1-09-07

To celebrate his landmark education law’s fifth anniversary, President Bush gathered a bipartisan group of federal lawmakers to discuss renewal of the No Child Left Behind law. After the White House meeting, Bush said there was strong interest in making some changes to the law but denied any interest in weakening it.

The New York Times reports that Democratic leaders in Congress have vowed to overhaul the law to make it less punitive for under-performing schools and to increase funding for impoverished schools singled out by poor scores on the law’s mandated tests.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., who did not attend the meeting at the White House, said he wants states to have more flexibility in how they meet the federal standards.

Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy, who now chairs the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said he’s in favor of states adopting a uniform academic standard that would help prepare students for the rigors of college and or workforce demands. Kennedy is also championing the expansion of social programs for low-income students and for the federal government to assume a role in school construction and renovation.

Just as President Bush was urgng lawmakers to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind law, a former Education official who helped promote the law during the past five years, said the legislation was fundamentally flawed from the get-go and said the legislation should be dumped.

The Salt Lake Tribune reports that Michael Petrilli, a former U.S. Department of Education associate assistant deputy secretary, now says he had doubts about the law from its inception, despite his five years spent championing the law. Petrilli, who is now a vice president at the education reform-minded Fordham Foundation, said the law’s incentives and punishments to prod school districts in the direction the federal government wants education to move have proven unworkable. Petrilli, who characterized himself as a former “true believer” in the law, has added his voice to other groups who oppose the law, calling for a complete overhaul of the legislation.

But a Fordham poll of “education insiders” in Washington found that 11 of the 12 respondents believed that reauthorization of the law would not go anywhere until after the 2008 presidential election.

Opponents of the law weren’t swayed by the poll, who began calling for an overhaul of the legislation long before Democrats took control of Congress.

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