Education Expert Sees Pros, Cons with 'No Child Left Behind'
by Jim Brown
January 8, 2004
(AgapePress) - An education reform expert is predicting President Bush's signature education law will fail to close the racial gap in academic achievement.Under the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, every state is now required to test all children in grades 3 through 8 and report scores broken down by race and ethnicity. Each group must show significant annual progress, and all students must reach "proficiency" by 2014.
Author and journalist Abigail Thernstrom likes the standards-based testing and accountability in the Act, but says the law does not offer real school choice.
"The notion that kids should be able to leave failing schools is good," she says, "but if you confine that freedom to only public schools, there's no place to go for children in many of the big urban districts."
Thernstrom says the options are extremely limited for a student who might want to leave a failing school in Boston, for example. "I don't know what other public school you're going to choose because the ones that are a little better are totally filled."
The senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York says real school choice has to include private and parochial schools with a voucher for low-income kids. In addition, she believes schools should be concerned about setting clear academic standards and measuring student progress in meeting them, rather than spending $15,000 per pupil.
And to close racial gap in learning, Thernstrom says the nation's system of education must be fundamentally altered. Principals, she says, must have the freedom to do such things as manage budgets, pay teachers based on their performance, fire teachers who are ineffective, and structure the school day "in ways that make sense." And she adds that principals should be able to do those things "out from under the collective bargaining agreements -- and out from under the hold of the teachers' unions."
