Lawmakers to launch bipartisan effort to rewrite No Child Left Behind

[alp227]

Source: Nick Anderson, The Washington Post

Senior House Republicans and Democrats plan to announce Thursday that they will team up to rewrite the No Child Left Behind education law, a rare show of bipartisanship in the polarized Congress.

Last month, the Obama administration launched talks with lawmakers on an overhaul of the 2002 law, which mandated an expansion of standardized testing and established a national framework for school accountability. This month, President Obama's budget proposed eliminating the standard of "adequate yearly progress" for schools to close test-score achievement gaps, a key element of the law.

Many analysts say time is growing short for passage of a major education bill before the midterm elections because Congress is consumed by the economy, health care and financial regulation, among other issues.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), a former U.S. education secretary, said the most realistic approach would be to focus on a few fixes to the law that can attract consensus and save other reform issues for another time. "A thousand-page bill is likely to get bogged down," Alexander said. Better, he said, "to work on a big problem step by step."

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/17/AR2010021705195.html

[WillParkinson]

1. Yes, because all other 'bipartisan' efforts go so well...

At least until someone doesn't get their way and wants to take the ball and go home.

[Doctor_J]

2. "Bipartisan" means some Repukes are on board, which means

it's probably designed to screw working people and the president.

[midnight]

3. No Child Left Behind was a way to further test our children with the

test makers raking in huge amounts of cash... This bonanza was never funded, because it was to be used as a tool to create more cash not learning. The most realist approach to improve our schools would be to provide teachers with smaller groups of kids, and not more tests.....

Excerpt from Armed Madhouse

They take away your overtime, your 40-hour week, your regulatory protection against corporate marauders, your right to courtroom justice, your protection against unfair trade, even the right to get your ballot counted. But there's always hope. Hope is the last thing to go. And your hope is your kids, that they'll have an opportunity you didn't have. On January 21, 2004, the President told you they'd have to take that away too. On that night, deep into his State of the Union sermon to Congress, when sensible adults had turned off the tube or kicked in the screen, our President opened a new front in the class war. And like the one in Iraq, it began with a lie. "By passing the No Child Left Behind Act," our President told us, "We are regularly testing every child...and making sure they have better options when schools are not performing."

I can't say that Mr. Bush doesn't offer "better options" to the kids stamped "failed." Under No Child Left, if enough kids flunk the tests, their school is marked a failure and its students win the right, under the law, to transfer to any successful school in their district. You can't provide more opportunity than that. But Bush does not provide it, he promises it, without putting up a single penny to make it happen. In New York, in 2004, a third of a million students earned the right to transfer to better schools -- in which there were only 8,000 places open. New York is typical. Nationwide, only one out of two hundred students eligible to transfer manage to do it. Well, there's always the army. (That "option" did not go unnoticed: No Child has a special provision requiring schools to open their doors to military recruiters.) There's not a lot of loot for schoolkids in the No Child Left law, but Barbara Bush's kids made out just fine. Her youngest, Neil Bush, jumped into the No Child biz big time. A company he founded in 1999 in Texas, Ignite! (exclamation point included), promotes robo-teaching. Instead of teachers, kids are plunked in front of a TV screen and blasted with automated lessons. It's cheap and, I'll admit, quite effective for communicating rote information and preparing children for a world in which they cannot deviate from the orders coming from machines and screens.http://www.gregpalast.com/no-childs-behind-left-2/