Posted by Tina
No Child Left Behind: a maligned law that’s working, by Jay Ambrose
** Guess what? Because of the much-maligned No Child Left Behind law, fewer children are being left behind in America’s public schools, and you can thank the even more maligned president of the United States for that. **
** George Bush, after all, was the prime proponent of this idea of holding schools accountable through testing students, and pursued its implementation in a bipartisan spirit. The Senate’s strongest, most persistent liberal voice, none other than Democrat Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, was both a sponsor and author of the legislation. *** The bill was signed into law in 2002, eventually incurring Kennedy’s wrath mostly because of what he considered insufficient funding, but nevertheless instigating higher student achievement just as it was supposed to do. *** As much seems clear from a comprehensive study six years later by a nonpartisan group, the Center on Education Policy. Examining both state test data and results from the federally conducted National Assessment of Educational progress, researchers found that scores had gone up in reading and math and that differences between different groups of students had been narrowed. **
This is an excellent article! Ill leave you with a cautionary quote from one expert on the No Child plan:
“Instead of demanding more money for No Child Left Behind, critics should ask why states and local communities get such dismal returns on the half-trillion dollars, or nearly $10,000 per student, that they already spend on primary and secondary education every year.” – Chester Finn, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University