In his radio address this past Saturday, the President announced that he plans to overhaul the No Child Left Behind Act or NCLB. The act was originally proposed by the Bush administration and ushered through the legislature by Senator Ted Kennedy. Signed into law on January 8, 2002, NCLB was intended to raise student performance by establishing higher standards and establishing incremental goals to meet those standards.
The Department of Education claims success with the program in reports prepared using a series of statistics gathered by the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). The reports show statistical gains in every measured area and an improvement in the parity of test scores between different demographic groups. These encouraging numbers may simply be arranged to justify the more than 40% increase in NCLB funding since its inception.
Critics state that the statistics quoted by the NAEP are intentionally misleading as they were comparisons between 2005 and 2000 test scores. Even though NCLB had not been implemented until 2003, the rate of improvement measured from 2000 to 2003 was the same as the rate of improvement between 2003 and 2005 proving that NCLB had little if anything to do with the improvement. The incentive and penalty structure under NCLB fostered conditions that encouraged schools to manipulate test data to “create” the appearance of progress by lowering local test standards to continually show improved scores. With the same rate of improvement shown in the years after the implementation of NCLB as there was in the years preceding it, critics claim that schools that relaxed standards to show an improvement were in fact, concealing a very real decline in their students proficiency to avoid NCLB penalties.
The only argument to keep NCLB alive is that the Teacher’s unions (NEA and AFT) despised it and most of what the teacher's unions fight against is usually bad for the union and good for the students. Imagine the nerve of setting education standards! Actually, the original proposal for NCLB went even further and called for proficiency tests for instructors to determine their effectiveness. Of course, the unions howled at the idea of teachers proving they could actually teach and Congress relented, gutted this requirement which I believe was the single most important part of NCLB; the part they may have actually made it work.
So now the President wants to reform the No Child Left Behind Act. In his radio address he said he would disclose his plans on Monday. I’m a little confused here. Obama said after the election of Scott Brown that his administration would now focus on the state of the economy but he’s still wrapped up in the healthcare debate, has hinted at renewing the push for his energy bill (cap and trade) and now this? Since the President heavily favors unions, I am sure his reforms will eliminate some of the provisions that the NEA still hates about NCLB such as school choice or funding for advanced tutoring. After all, money spent on students so it is no longer available to feather the nests of unionized teachers. I am sure Obama will offer platitudes to parents about increased accountability and higher standards but those provisions were already in NCLB and didn’t work the first time.
The school choice provision currently forces schools to provide access to other schools that post higher achievements, provide extra tutoring or special after school programs for any student that has failed to improve for two consecutive years. To a Progressive bent on the redistribution of wealth, otherwise known as stealing from those that earn to give it to those that don’t, reformation of the NCLB is a golden opportunity to make the case to funnel large sums of money into inner city schools to make them “better” rather than forcing that school to use resources to transfer failing students to schools that have a measurable record of success.
Of course, a large number of failing schools are loaded with unionized teachers and reside in areas represented by the friends of BHO. Anything that can be done to keep money in those schools would be a big plus for a former community organizer and would help cement his support in those critical areas. It’s a legal mean way to buy volunteers and votes as local groups and teachers rally to support the man that is supporting them. This was the reason that the founding fathers placed their trust in the communities and not the Federal government where education was concerned. The Constitution provides no authority for the Federal government to interfere with State education standards but to Progressives, that is just a minor difficulty. After all, since the days of Theodore Roosevelt, the Federal government has found some very interesting ways to elude the enumerated powers act that severely limited the scope and power of the Federal government.
Like lobsters in a pot, we watched as the Federal government created one agency after another by manipulation of the commerce clause and through a liberal interpretation of providing for the “general welfare” of the United States. Even a rudimentary examination of the Federalist Papers proves that the general welfare of the United States referred only to the welfare of the Union of States and not some hidden authority for the Federal government to provide directly for the people; the authority to act in the interest of the citizens, including education, was clearly supposed to remain forever with the individual sovereign States and directly in the hands of the electorate of those States.
Instead, the Federal government increased the tax burden on the American people, drawing money from the economy that could then be redirected to the States as grants. Of course those grants had quite a few strings attached to them. Since the Federal government could not pass laws that mandated the States to do much of anything within their own borders, the standards that the Federal government wished to impose were written into grant applications as a provision of the grant. If you wanted Federal highway money then you had to agree to Federal speed limits; if you want health and hospital funds you had to agree to a partial funding of Medicaid and if you want education funds, you had to agree to Federal education standards. In short, if they couldn’t control these things through direct legislation, they would control them by buying support through the grant process.
The current Progressive tax system is the most insidious device ever created by the Progressive underground. The burden on the American people is now so great that the individual States can no longer increase taxes to fund the programs that are important to their own citizens. In order to provide those programs, the States are forced to accept one Federal mandate after another to receive the maximum amount of government largess or be forced to pare back essential services within their own communities.
Here we are again, being forced into yet another corner as the President prepares to unveil his “reform” of Federal education edicts. So far, every incursion this President has taken into the education system has been met with horror. The speech he had scheduled for the opening of the new school year in 2009 created a fire storm of controversy as we discovered the materials the Department of Education had distributed to the school districts to accompany his speech. The materials were basically study guides to the speech that encouraged students to identify ways they could help the President move his agenda forward. Such blatant attempts at politicizing our schools have always been forbidden and they knew that. That is why they chose to keep the speech a secret until the weekend before it was schedule to be delivered. Truthfully, I think that since parents found out about the “study guides” the speech had to be re-written at the last moment and that is what caused the delay in its release.
Then there was the call for school aged “volunteers” to act as organizers in our high schools and community colleges. These organizers would create groups in the schools that would also garner the support of the students for the President’s agenda. The application process was administrated through the President’s own website and was only made public after the application process had expired and the applications themselves were removed from the site.
There is ample cause for concern anytime this man wants to be involved in education and I am highly suspect of his sudden interest in reforming NCLB. Let’s face it; totalitarian leaders like Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Mao, to name just a few, have always turned to the schools first as they attempted to “transform” their nations and their societies. That is where the impressionable and unprejudiced minds reside. The minds that with some simple and cost effective “nudging” had become the brutal guardians of the new regime just as the fearless leader had expected.
Paul
The Department of Education claims success with the program in reports prepared using a series of statistics gathered by the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). The reports show statistical gains in every measured area and an improvement in the parity of test scores between different demographic groups. These encouraging numbers may simply be arranged to justify the more than 40% increase in NCLB funding since its inception.
Critics state that the statistics quoted by the NAEP are intentionally misleading as they were comparisons between 2005 and 2000 test scores. Even though NCLB had not been implemented until 2003, the rate of improvement measured from 2000 to 2003 was the same as the rate of improvement between 2003 and 2005 proving that NCLB had little if anything to do with the improvement. The incentive and penalty structure under NCLB fostered conditions that encouraged schools to manipulate test data to “create” the appearance of progress by lowering local test standards to continually show improved scores. With the same rate of improvement shown in the years after the implementation of NCLB as there was in the years preceding it, critics claim that schools that relaxed standards to show an improvement were in fact, concealing a very real decline in their students proficiency to avoid NCLB penalties.
The only argument to keep NCLB alive is that the Teacher’s unions (NEA and AFT) despised it and most of what the teacher's unions fight against is usually bad for the union and good for the students. Imagine the nerve of setting education standards! Actually, the original proposal for NCLB went even further and called for proficiency tests for instructors to determine their effectiveness. Of course, the unions howled at the idea of teachers proving they could actually teach and Congress relented, gutted this requirement which I believe was the single most important part of NCLB; the part they may have actually made it work.
So now the President wants to reform the No Child Left Behind Act. In his radio address he said he would disclose his plans on Monday. I’m a little confused here. Obama said after the election of Scott Brown that his administration would now focus on the state of the economy but he’s still wrapped up in the healthcare debate, has hinted at renewing the push for his energy bill (cap and trade) and now this? Since the President heavily favors unions, I am sure his reforms will eliminate some of the provisions that the NEA still hates about NCLB such as school choice or funding for advanced tutoring. After all, money spent on students so it is no longer available to feather the nests of unionized teachers. I am sure Obama will offer platitudes to parents about increased accountability and higher standards but those provisions were already in NCLB and didn’t work the first time.
The school choice provision currently forces schools to provide access to other schools that post higher achievements, provide extra tutoring or special after school programs for any student that has failed to improve for two consecutive years. To a Progressive bent on the redistribution of wealth, otherwise known as stealing from those that earn to give it to those that don’t, reformation of the NCLB is a golden opportunity to make the case to funnel large sums of money into inner city schools to make them “better” rather than forcing that school to use resources to transfer failing students to schools that have a measurable record of success.
Of course, a large number of failing schools are loaded with unionized teachers and reside in areas represented by the friends of BHO. Anything that can be done to keep money in those schools would be a big plus for a former community organizer and would help cement his support in those critical areas. It’s a legal mean way to buy volunteers and votes as local groups and teachers rally to support the man that is supporting them. This was the reason that the founding fathers placed their trust in the communities and not the Federal government where education was concerned. The Constitution provides no authority for the Federal government to interfere with State education standards but to Progressives, that is just a minor difficulty. After all, since the days of Theodore Roosevelt, the Federal government has found some very interesting ways to elude the enumerated powers act that severely limited the scope and power of the Federal government.
Like lobsters in a pot, we watched as the Federal government created one agency after another by manipulation of the commerce clause and through a liberal interpretation of providing for the “general welfare” of the United States. Even a rudimentary examination of the Federalist Papers proves that the general welfare of the United States referred only to the welfare of the Union of States and not some hidden authority for the Federal government to provide directly for the people; the authority to act in the interest of the citizens, including education, was clearly supposed to remain forever with the individual sovereign States and directly in the hands of the electorate of those States.
Instead, the Federal government increased the tax burden on the American people, drawing money from the economy that could then be redirected to the States as grants. Of course those grants had quite a few strings attached to them. Since the Federal government could not pass laws that mandated the States to do much of anything within their own borders, the standards that the Federal government wished to impose were written into grant applications as a provision of the grant. If you wanted Federal highway money then you had to agree to Federal speed limits; if you want health and hospital funds you had to agree to a partial funding of Medicaid and if you want education funds, you had to agree to Federal education standards. In short, if they couldn’t control these things through direct legislation, they would control them by buying support through the grant process.
The current Progressive tax system is the most insidious device ever created by the Progressive underground. The burden on the American people is now so great that the individual States can no longer increase taxes to fund the programs that are important to their own citizens. In order to provide those programs, the States are forced to accept one Federal mandate after another to receive the maximum amount of government largess or be forced to pare back essential services within their own communities.
Here we are again, being forced into yet another corner as the President prepares to unveil his “reform” of Federal education edicts. So far, every incursion this President has taken into the education system has been met with horror. The speech he had scheduled for the opening of the new school year in 2009 created a fire storm of controversy as we discovered the materials the Department of Education had distributed to the school districts to accompany his speech. The materials were basically study guides to the speech that encouraged students to identify ways they could help the President move his agenda forward. Such blatant attempts at politicizing our schools have always been forbidden and they knew that. That is why they chose to keep the speech a secret until the weekend before it was schedule to be delivered. Truthfully, I think that since parents found out about the “study guides” the speech had to be re-written at the last moment and that is what caused the delay in its release.
Then there was the call for school aged “volunteers” to act as organizers in our high schools and community colleges. These organizers would create groups in the schools that would also garner the support of the students for the President’s agenda. The application process was administrated through the President’s own website and was only made public after the application process had expired and the applications themselves were removed from the site.
There is ample cause for concern anytime this man wants to be involved in education and I am highly suspect of his sudden interest in reforming NCLB. Let’s face it; totalitarian leaders like Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Mao, to name just a few, have always turned to the schools first as they attempted to “transform” their nations and their societies. That is where the impressionable and unprejudiced minds reside. The minds that with some simple and cost effective “nudging” had become the brutal guardians of the new regime just as the fearless leader had expected.
Paul
