The Tribune 02.03.05

“No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) was President Bush’s first legislative victory and his signature education program. It was hailed as an extension of “The Texas Miracle” – a gift to the nation’s struggling inner-city schools. During Bush’s governorship, Texas schools were lauded for their unprecedented success in raising achievement scores and virtually eliminating dropouts, especially among Hispanic and African-American school populations. The Houston School Superintendent on whose watch this happened was Rodney Paige – who was later appointed Secretary of Education by President Bush.

“The Texas Miracle” proved to be all hype, and – like so much else in the Bush administration – a fraud.

I’ll never forget seeing the photograph of my old high school on the front page of the Washington Post in September, 2003. Stephen F. Austin High School, home of the “Buckin’ Broncos” and the “Scottish Brigade” (where I learned to play bagpipes, dance the Highland Fling, and lead a drill squad), was at the center of an erupting scandal that exposed the myth of “The Texas Miracle.”

My old neighborhood is now largely Hispanic. For years, Austin High School, and 13 others with mostly minority populations, had been reporting dropout rates as low as 0%, while their state-mandated 10^th Grade test scores soared. Unfortunately, a massive deception was taking place. Actual dropout rates were as high as 40%, and the practice of holding students unlikely to pass the tests back in 9^th Grade, until they got discouraged and left school, was systemic. Thousands of minority students were being erased from the books as if they had never existed.

In Charlottesville, Clark Elementary School, which failed to meet the federal standards under NCLB, was forced to offer its students the option of attending other city schools. The idea behind the law is that low-achieving students deserve to attend a school that will help them succeed. Ironically, Clark’s exodus followed the national pattern: it was mostly higher-achieving students who fled. Thus, a superb school that struggles brilliantly to meet the needs of the city’s poorest and most disadvantaged children is even more likely to be tagged a failure in the future.

The federal law heaps additional requirements on schools already straining under the state SOLs and imposes draconian and potentially unattainable standards on schools with high special education or limited English populations. The law requires failing schools to hire private tutors and offer school choice and even vouchers, yet it provides no new money for programs to help them improve.

Some Virginia officials are ready to tell the federal government to fix NCLB or Virginia may leave it behind. The risk is that the federal government may withdraw $350 million in education funding if Virginia opts out of the program. It’s almost as if the purpose of NCLB is not to improve public education but to dismantle it, substituting a system of private schools and vouchers for the universal, locally controlled, free public education that has been a basic tenet of our Democracy since the nineteenth century.