Education Secretary Fixes a Flaw

By Murray Light

The Bush administration, with the aid of a Republican controlled Senate, has ruled the roost now for more than seven years and unfortunately for the country has made, in my opinion, more than its share of mistakes, led by the misadventure in Iraq.

Now, however, in the waning days of its power, it is about to do something that absolutely needs to be done for the good of all. Under the leadership of Margaret Spellings, the secretary of education, it will be instituting a change in one of President Bush’s principal boasts of achievement on the domestic front, the No Child Left Behind law.

Spellings is exercising her executive power, with the president’s approval I am sure, to correct a provision in that law that correctly has been seen by a great many of America’s educators as a major problem.

Spellings has said she will relax the law’s provisions for some states, allowing them to distinguish schools with a limited few problems from those that she feels need major surgery. What she wants to do makes eminent good sense and corrects something that should not have been written into the law initially. Her action comes at the same time Congress is mired in attempts to change the law, efforts that to date have not been successful.

Under the Spellings program, states will be able to focus their reform efforts on schools that are drastically underperforming and, most importantly, they will intervene less in schools that are raising the scores of most students although still struggling with one or more groups that have not been able to meet the desired level of achievement. The law Bush signed in 2002 was set up to force states to bring all students to proficiency in reading and math by 2014. Schools that failed to do so would be cited as failing schools and be subjected to sanctions that could result in the closing of schools. Under those terms, even schools doing a reasonably good job with most of their students would be subject to the same sanctions as those schools with the worst problems. That provision never made any sense and now Spellings is going to rectify that problem.

The president of the largest teachers’ union, Reg Weaver, said the ruling by Spellings “is something good, something we’ve been advocating.” But at the same time Michael Petrilli, president of the conservative Thomas Fordham Foundation, said the change is “likely to let affluent suburban and rural schools off the hook.”

I definitely take issue with Petrilli’s stance on this. It is important to note that he is a former member of the Bush administration that framed the original law, and obviously does not approve of any significant changes in it.

The No Child Left Behind law became effective in 2002 and in its six years of existence has identified 9,000 of the nation’s 90,000 public schools as in “need of improvement,” which in the law’s terminology means a failing school. Educators and legislators in the states involved have complained bitterly that it makes no sense to put the nation’s worst schools in the same category as those doing a reasonably good job.

Spellings’ plan would leave it to the states to determine how their schools would be treated. She would eliminate the mandatory closing provisions of the existing law. She pointed out that some states might opt to send their best and most experienced teachers to work in the neediest schools. Another option she outlined would involve businesses and non-profit groups helping to restructure troubled schools.

In New York State last year, some 600 schools would have been eligible to participate in the new program that Spellings has outlined. A spokesman for the state’s Department of Education was quoted as saying he was not certain New York would apply to participate. I certainly hope that our state will be involved.

Murray B. Light is the former editor of The Buffalo News

Originally published by SPECIAL TO THE NEWS.

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