NCLB renewal faces tough sledding


The No Child Left Behind Act is scheduled for renewal by 2008, but observers are saying it will not come so soon because of the national elections. The Act will face significant phalanx of people and organizations demanding changes, too.

Media General’s Gil Klein produced a general piece of reporting on the politics and issues for NCLB renewal, which started appearing in U.S. newspapers on December 22.

It has shaken every teacher in every classroom, and when the No Child Left Behind law comes up for renewal next year, it faces a political battle that could last until after the 2008 election.

“We did a survey of Washington insiders and it is almost unanimous that it won’t happen until 2009, regardless of what all the politicians are saying,” said Michael Petrilli, an education analyst with the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, who worked in the Education Department when the law passed.

[There is a lot of good reporting out of Washington by regional news agencies and smaller services, like Media General, Knight-Ridder (used to be a bigger player than today), and other groups. Bloggers would do well to bring some of these reports to the attention of the world, instead of relying on the New YorkTimes, Washington Post, and major broadcast outlets. This is a case of a smaller agency simply providing a solid story ahead of the curve.]

I have been sorely disappointed with the “one size fits all” approach the law requires. Special programs for gifted and talented kids have suffered, as well as programs designed to provide remediation for kids who are left behind now — under the law, we have to ignore those kids mostly, creating a fiction that they just fumbled one test, and a year-long do-over will fix things good as new.

“Children do not learn at the same rate, at the same speed, at the same time, but this law expects that to occur,” said Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teacher union. “Our folks just cannot continue to be under this gun.”

Watch that issue.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 28th, 2006 at 5:32 pm and is filed under Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), Education reform, Education spending, No Child Left Behind Act, Public education, Teaching, TEKS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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