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The Obama administration plans to send a wide-ranging overhaul of the No Child Left Behind education law to Congress on Monday, arguing that the current legislation has pushed schools to lower their standards to meet federal requirements.

The 8-year-old law was one of the signature policies of the Bush administration. It set up a regimen of state reading and math tests for students in third through eighth grades, intended to identify failing schools. But critics have said the Bush administration never properly funded the effort and that states needed more flexibility in meeting those goals.

During his weekly radio address Saturday, President Obama said his administration's proposed overhaul will "set a high bar -- but we also provide educators the flexibility to reach it."

"Under these guidelines, schools that achieve excellence or show real progress will be rewarded, and local districts will be encouraged to commit to change in schools that are clearly letting their students down," he said.

During his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama said the law's goal was "the right one," but the legislation "has significant flaws that need to be addressed." And Education Secretary Arne Duncan told CNN last week that educators have "lowered the bar" to meet No Child Left Behind standards.

"We've had low expectations -- not because it's the right thing educationally, not because it's the right thing for our economy. We did it because of political pressure," Duncan said.

The Department of Education has identified 11 states it said lowered math standards. But several of those states have disputed that conclusion, and it was not clear whether any reduced their standards so that their scores would look better.

The administration's "Blueprint for Reform" shifts the focus from singling out underperforming schools to fostering a "race to the top" to reward successful reforms. The proposed revisions promise that low-performing schools that fail to improve will be asked to show "dramatic change," but states and school districts be held accountable for those shortcomings as well.

It supports the expansion of public charter schools and calls for giving states and school districts additional flexibility in how they spend federal dollars, "as long as they are continuing to focus on what matters most -- improving outcomes for students." And it also allows them to use federal grant funds to change the way teachers and principals are paid, "to provide differentiated compensation and career advancement opportunities to educators who are effective in increasing student academic achievement," among other considerations.

But the newly published "blueprint" immediately came under fire from the nation's largest teachers union, the National Education Association, which said it was "disappointed" by Obama's proposals.

"We were expecting more funding stability to enable states to meet higher expectations," the union's president, Dennis Van Roekel, said in a statement issued over the weekend. "Instead, the 'blueprint' requires states to compete for critical resources, setting up another winners-and-losers scenario. We were expecting school turnaround efforts to be research-based and fully collaborative. Instead, we see too much top-down scapegoating of teachers and not enough collaboration."

The Obama administration's $50 billion proposed education budget adds $3 billion in funding to help schools meet these revised goals, with the possibility of an additional $1 billion if the overhaul plan passes Congress.

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the law's main Democratic architects, Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Rep. George Miller of California, continue to defend the law as an essentially positive program for schools.

The Bush Administration is trying to use NCLB to promote an aggressive agenda of privatization, including attempts to revive a voucher movement that has been defeated in every state referendum where people had a chance to vote. For Bush, education reform is an "outreach" issue. He came into office as a dubiously-elected President with historically low levels of support among African Americans and a well-deserved anti-poor, pro-business image. Education is one of the few areas that allows a Republican President to posture, however disingenuously, as an ally of poor communities of color, especially those that have been badly served by public education.

But the common ground that really gave birth to NCLB was the standards movement. And this traces back to the first education, President George Bush the elder, and to the Governor's Education Summits promoted by then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton.


One of the more amazing things about NCLB is how the most intrusive education law in the history of federal policy, which now has Washington mandating test score targets for every school in the country, could be passed by an Administration that regularly presents itself as a deregulating enemy of big government. NCLB represents a virtual nationalization of control over local schools, and its highly prescriptive and punitive sanctions are the kind of wrongheaded social engineering by Washington that political leaders like the President have supposedly railed against for years.

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We are now in year five of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Once hailed as a historic new federal commitment to leave no child behind, today NCLB inspires fear and loathing from coast to coast — and beyond. Puerto Rico and Hawaii hate it too.

Every one of the 50 states has introduced legislation rejecting all or part of NCLB. Several have filed lawsuits against it. More than 10,000 schools have been put on NCLB's infamous list of "schools in need of improvement" and face an escalating series of sanctions that address neither their needs nor their challenges. Thousands more will be added to the list in the next few years as increasing numbers of schools are squeezed in the tightening vise of unreachable "adequate yearly progress" (AYP) test targets and inadequate resources. This year more than a quarter of all public schools (nearly 23,000) failed to reach AYP. Missing AYP two years in a row earns a spot on the list.

Today, NCLB is almost as unpopular as the administration and Congress that created it. With the law coming up for reauthorization in 2007, debate is heating up about whether we need Band-Aids to "fix" NLCB or a bulldozer to bury it.

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The screws of high-stakes "accountability" are tightening on high school students. On Jan. 12, President Bush announced his new "high school initiative" to expand high-stakes testing through the 11th grade under No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Under this new initiative, high school students would be tested in two high school grades in reading and mathematics. Their scores would be calculated into a school's adequate yearly progress (AYP) goals for test score improvement. Ironically, even while the Bush administration is pushing to cut programs that assist low-income students and students of color, the new "high school initiative" allocates $250 million of the FY2006 budget to fund these new tests.

High-stakes standardized tests like the ones Bush is proposing can only mean big trouble for small schools. All other arguments about testing aside, small schools are extremely "volatile" when it comes to measuring their progress statistically through standardized test scores. To be volatile in a statistical sense means that you may be subject to wild swings in test scores from year-to-year, grade-to-grade, and school-to-school.

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