McClatchy: No Child Left Behind faces contentious reauthorization

[babylonsister]

No Child Left Behind faces contentious reauthorization
By Halimah Abdullah | McClatchy Newspapers

* Posted on Thursday, October 4, 2007


WASHINGTON — In the five years since No Child Left Behind was enacted, resistance to the law has created some strange political adversaries and bedfellows in the halls of Congress and among education advocates.

Take, for example, the strained relationship between Jonathan Kozol, an award-winning author and education activist, and Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass, an NCLB co-author and the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. Though he's enjoyed a more than 40-year friendship with the senator, Kozol has grown frustrated by what he sees as Kennedy's reluctance to commit to a major overhaul of the law, which demands that every child be "proficient" — working at grade level in reading and math — by 2014.

"I pray Democratic leadership will not cave in and genuflect in front of a Republican agenda," Kozol recently told a gathering of journalists. "I'm here to make a plea to Kennedy to rethink his views about the law." Kozol has been on a modified hunger strike to protest the act for roughly three months.

Then there's the pairing of conservative Republicans such as Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who want to return such matters to local authority, and teachers unions such as the National Education Association, which is vowing to oppose reauthorization over proposals to include a performance pay provision.

"Education is a function that is best left mainly to parents, teachers and local school boards," Cornyn said in a statement. "As we reauthorize NCLB, we should pursue ideas to reinforce local control of innovation, even while ensuring accountability in the results."

Some states have threatened to opt out of NCLB, charging that the extra cost of testing causes an undue burden and that some of the law's accountability provisions unfairly penalize them.

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http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/20201.html

[Elspeth]

1. This should NOT be reauthorized. PERIOD.

We've got to fight this one.