Obama Administration wants “No Child Left Behind” revamped
Education Secretary Arne Duncan is a man on a mission: to hear what teachers, students and parents in at least 15 states think about No Child Left Behind, the controversial education law championed by former President George W. Bush.
Duncan is visiting schools in West Virginia Tuesday, the first stop in the first steps toward reviewing and reforming the program.
President Barack Obama has pledged to overhaul the law, but he has been vague about how far he would go, or whether he would scrap it altogether.
Scrapping it completely would be music to the ears of many conservatives I know, a sensation I’m equally sure they’d be unfamiliar with recognizing when it came to an Obama initiative. NCLB was a Bush program that never sat well with lots of folks on my end of the political spectrum. It centralized and federalized control of the education of our youth, taking it further and further away from the control of the people and specifically the parents of those children.
On the other hand, why should we not be insisting on a set of minimum criteria for what kids have to know to graduate? A high school diploma should be seen in the same light as many of the professional certifications in my industry are: a sign that the person holding the cert knows a certain set of knowledge.
I think there are ways of achieving this state without the huge expansion of a federal agency and without exporting control of the school curricula to DC bureaucrats. In truth, I don’t think any thought was given to how this could be done before someone made the call for the DoE to start running the show. Perhaps we can do that now. As I said, this is an interesting development and one we should watch closely.
