By Joe Williams, DFER Executive Director
All of the hooplah about granting waivers so states can get out of being held responsible for educating children (especially children of color and children with special needs) has us feeling a bit nostalgic for the good old days when we, as a nation, first decided we never had any real intention of making NCLB work.
If you remember, it was actually kind of cool in a goosebump-producing kind of way. When the law was signed in early 2002, Congress and the President were making a pretty bold declaration. No, they weren’t going as far as saying that every child in America was entitled to a good education. (That would have unleashed a Holy Hell of sorts, most agreed.) But our nation took a bold step nonetheless. For the first time in our nation’s history, we were saying that every child had a right to NOT ATTEND a crappy school.
Unfortunately, the delta between attending a good school and not attending a crappy school proved to be too large for most states and districts to be able to handle (or to want to handle). So states and districts did what they always do when they don’t like what the feds are pushing: they ignored the mandate, but pocketed the hundreds of millions of federal dollars that came along with it.
Under NCLB, any child who attended a failing school had a right to transfer to a non-crappy school or a right to access free tutoring. School districts from coast to coast, acting with all deliberate speed, did their best to ensure that these new “rights” were as difficult to understand as humanly possible. (See ‘No Smoke Screen Left Behind.’) School districts sabotaged the tutoring process and, if a warrior mom fought hard enough to try to transfer her child to a non-failing school, the educrats showed her who was boss by assigning her precious bundle to a school miles and miles away, and often – arguably – just as crappy as the school the child was fleeing.