NCLB's demise?

MANIFESTO

The original terms of the hideous No Child Left Behind Act are about to run out, and a flurry of activity is taking place in Washington as a renewal of the law is being discussed. Both US News and the Washington Post are reporting that such a renewal is unlikely no matter what the uneducated denizen of the White House may wish.

From the Post:

Republican critics of the No Child Left Behind law flexed their growing muscle [Thursday] as 57 GOP lawmakers, including the national party chairman, endorsed legislation that would undermine President Bush's signature education initiative.

House Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), who voted for the law in 2001, said he now opposes it because it has shifted control of public schools to the federal government in a more dramatic way than he ever imagined.

And from US News:

The Republican legislation ... would not just delay that process; it would gut the law, releasing states from testing and restructuring mandates without forcing them to lose federal funding. The legislation will almost certainly not win approval, but it did send a clear message: Republican leaders no longer stand strongly behind the Bush administration on education ...

[T]he mutiny is against more than Bush. It is also against the law itself. In just five years, the law has transformed public education, giving the federal government more say over what and how children learn than perhaps ever before. To maintain federal funding, all levels have had to change practice: States have had to develop detailed math and reading standards for third through eighth grade, teachers have had to devote weeks of their school year to testing those standards, and schools have had to live by the tests' consequences, facing sticks like forced restructuring or mandatory after-school tutoring if their students don't perform.

Here's hoping that something comes of this.

This has really been a productive six years, hasn't it? President Unelected's foreign policy is such a fiasco that he doesn't even talk about it anymore, and now the crown jewel of his domestic policy, the primary domestic legislation he's had passed (Remember when he tried to pass himself off as the "Education Candidate" in the campaign of 2000?) in his tenure may very well be eviscerated. And to think we've still got almost two more years of this wheel spinning.