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Guest Editorial
The Politics of Education
Leslie T. Thornton, Esq.
Friday, October 1, 2004; Page 18
In 2000, then presidential hopeful George W. Bush campaigned to be the “real education president” borrowing rival candidate Al Gore’s “no child left behind” mantra and former education secretary Dick Riley’s “all children can learn” ideal. Bush promised sweeping changes in education that, through tough love, would provide enhanced access and opportunity for all children, and propel him through his 2004 re-election.
Four years later, on the eve of the 2004 election, incumbent president Bush still calls education one of his top domestic priorities. This, in spite of the fact that his signature education initiative reauthorizing the elementary and secondary education law -- No Child Left Behind (NCLB) -- has been at best a challenge, at worst – a disaster. Personally, I think the whole thing misses the point.
Notwithstanding the fact that he -- by his own admission -- has not actually read the new law, President Bush has been traveling the country talking about the new law’s importance to the improvement of education, and its early successes.
The new law requires annual testing of students in grades three through eight in a variety of core subjects. It requires schools whose students do not meet the law’s standards for “adequate yearly progress” to take remedial action, face designation as a “failing school” and/or suffer consequences from forced transfer of students to being taken over by the state. The complicated new law is more than 1,000 pages long, not including the accompanying implementing regulations, and attaches the continued availability of federal funding to successfully meeting the bill’s stringent, high-consequence requirements. A comprehensive study of the law’s first year of implementation, completed by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, says that the federal law’s “accountability requirements have derailed state education reforms and assessment strategies”…. “leaving too many children… and teachers…behind” – an obvious play on the bill’s title.
Moreover, both Democratic and Republican state and local legislators have been pushing back, making the criticism of NCLB a domestic election-year issue. For example, Democratic leaders in Oklahoma were so unhappy with NCLB law that they drafted a resolution asking Congress to overhaul it. Before that resolution could be voted on, however, one of the state’s most conservative Republicans stepped in with his own resolution – to have Congress repeal the law entirely. The new resolution passed – amidst a standing ovation. Even Senator Arlen Specter, the powerful Republican chairman of an education subcommittee in the Senate, has seen the writing on the black board. In the spring of 2004, Senator Specter invited several superintendents from his home state (Pennsylvania) to the Senate so that President Bush’s education secretary Roderick R. Paige could hear their criticisms of the bill. There are numerous other congressional attempts to amend and/or repeal it.
Certainly, the events of September 11, 2001 have overshadowed most other important issues in the upcoming presidential election but, unquestionably, a candidate’s view of and plan for education is one of the issues voters prioritize in evaluating and picking, or re-picking, their president. Unlike other presidential cycles, incumbent President Bush faces opposition to his own education policies from his own party. For the first time I can remember, state governors, legislators and administrators have seriously considered declining Bush’s federal education dollars. Imagine it. The federal government offers hundreds of millions of education dollars to budget-strapped states and the states say, “naaaaaaaaah – you keep it.” It’s extraordinary -- particularly at a time when almost every state in the union has a budget deficit.
Still, the most important issue remains: how does one fundamentally change public education in a way that is not intrusive or over-reaching but actually, and in the short-term, indeed turns education around? No matter what anyone says (including Bill Cosby, who in fact was right when he said the fundamentals begin at home) you have to pay to play. You have to invest for success. That is, until we figure out fundamentally how to equalize resources in our public schools -- from qualified, well-paid teachers teaching in field, to up-to-date text books (heck, text books at all), to after-school opportunities, to universal pre-school to health care, to mentoring, to college preparation to access to college – we have changed nothing. So, if President Bush is re-elected, this must be the “real” transformation he seeks. If Senator Kerry is elected, it should be a given.
Leslie Thornton is a Partner with the law firm of Dickstein Shapiro Morin & Oshinsky LLP where her practice focuses on dispute resolution, litigation and regulatory law as it relates to educational institutions and related entities. She also served as Chief of Staff to former U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley. She can be reached at ThorntonL@dsmo.com.
The opinions expressed within this article are the author’s personal views and do not reflect the views of Dickstein Shapiro Morin & Oshinsky LLP. |
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