By Joy Resmovits
(From Huffington Post, January 25th 2012)
A broad coalition of 38 civil rights, education reform and business groups sent House education chairman John Kline a scathing letter Wednesday, describing his No Child Left Behind legislation as potentially racist.
“It undermines the core American value of equal opportunity in education embodied in Brown v. Board of Education,” the groups wrote.
Their letter calls Rep. Kline’s bills a rollback of federal accountability, a return to an era that ignored achievement gaps. The bills would “thrust us back to an earlier time when states could choose to ignore disparities for children of color, low-income students, ELLs [English language learners], and students with disabilities. The results, for these groups of students and for our nation as a whole, were devastating.”
The 38 groups were organized by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. They include the American Association of People with Disabilities, the American Civil Liberties Union, Democrats for Education Reform, the Education Trust, the NAACP, Stand for Children, The New Teacher Project, the U.S. Chamber of Congress (which now employs George W. Bush’s secretary of education, Margaret Spelling), and the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers union.
The No Child Left Behind Act, which reauthorized the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, mandates the regular testing of students in math, reading and science. These test results have become a key lever in an accountability system that divides schools into those that are making “adequate yearly progress” and those that aren’t. Poor rankings lead to increasingly stiff federal sanctions for schools, including mandatory setting aside of No Child Left Behind money for tutoring and permission for students to transfer to nonfailing schools. By 2014, the law requires 100 percent of public schools to reach student proficiency in math and reading.