By Jim Brown
A former assistant education secretary under President Ronald Reagan says public school officials are undermining the No Child Left Behind Act by ignoring it completely or delaying its implementation.
Under the law signed by President Bush in January, the more than 8,000 public schools that have been failing for at least two years are obligated to provide their students with other school options to attend this fall. But an expert on education reform says that is not happening. Dr. Chester Finn is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based education reform group. From 1985 to 1988, he served as Assistant Secretary for Research and Improvement at the U.S. Department of Education.
For more than 20 years, Finn has been in the forefront of the national debate about school reform. He says he is not surprised schools are refusing to implement the new law. Congress, he says, left the “fox in charge of the hen house” when it comes to school choice.
“The people obliged under this law to provide school choice to kids are the public school systems that run those failing schools and that, for the most part, don’t believe in school choice,” Finn says. “So they are dragging their heels, throwing sand in everybody's face — and, for the most part, doing a really crummy job of making choices available and letting people know about them.”
One of the provisions in the president's original school-choice proposal would have allowed students in failing public schools to leave for another school in their district or attend a charter or private school. But Congress balked at the private school provision, and public school lobbyists scored a big victory. Finn explains that the school establishment got the law restricted to just the public schools within a district's boundaries.
“If you're a kid in a school district where 75% of the schools are failing, to have another option within only that school district is pretty crummy,” he says. “There aren't very many good schools, and they're probably full, and there are many more kids needing these options than there are options.”
Finn says the new federal reform plan is mired in confusion and will only benefit a small number of children this fall. He also worries that the early problems with implementing the law could be a portent of things to come.
(This article courtesy of Agape Press.)
