Some School Districts Challenge Bush's Signature Education Law

READING, Pa. — A small but growing number of school systems around the country are beginning to resist the demands of President Bush's signature education law, saying its efforts to raise student achievement are too costly and too cumbersome.

The school district here in Reading recently filed suit contending that Pennsylvania, in enforcing the federal law, had unfairly judged Reading's efforts to educate thousands of recent immigrants and unreasonably required the impoverished city to offer tutoring and other services for which there is no money.

"We're not trying to make a political statement, but this law can just overwhelm a school system's ability to meet its requirements, especially when a district is as financially stressed as we are," said Fred Gaige, a school board member. His school system has been struggling to comply with the law, he said, even as it flirts with bankruptcy because the local manufacturing economy is collapsing.

The law, known as No Child Left Behind and signed in January 2002, seeks to raise achievement by penalizing schools where test scores do not meet annual targets. It is the most sweeping plan to shake up public education in a generation, as well as the most intrusive federal intervention in local schools. But until recently it had provoked little more than grumbling, though polls showed that educators in most of the nation's 15,000 districts considered several of its requirements ill-conceived.

http://nytimes.com/2004/01/02/education/02RESI.html?hp

with out money public schools are lost. Who will teach the children? Oh, I know--home schooling, that ought to do it.

180

"faith based" education.

After hearing lots about this bill from educators and others, I have become convinced that it is purposely designed to destroy public education.

This is a key goal of the "Christian" right who now control the GOP. Because of course in their view the churches, not the government, should be responsible for "education"... (for more: http://www.theocracywatch.org/)

This is a GREAT issue for the dems to run on in 2004, because as the article points out in a few snippets:

In recent weeks, however, three Connecticut school districts have rejected federal money rather than comply with the red tape that accompanies the law, and several Vermont districts have shifted federal poverty money away from schools to shield them from sanctions.

Republican lawmakers from the National Council of State Legislatures, who consider the law a violation of states' rights, took their complaints to the White House in November, where they got a chilly reception.
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"The signs all show that as the law takes effect at the local level it is going to cause a reaction," said Jack Jennings, director of the Washington-based Center on Education Policy, who is overseeing a nationwide study of how the law affects school districts. "This is not a crisis; these are just early flares of resistance. But next year the reaction could be sharper."
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But in the presidential campaign, criticism of the law by Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, and other Democratic candidates has been drawing an enthusiastic response. School boards, Dr. Dean told a New Hampshire town meeting recently, call the law "no school boards left standing." Teachers call it "no behind left," he said.
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cutting funding to the bad schools, doesent common sense tell you to put more money INTO failing schools? I swear we need a resistance movement