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August 31, 2005
Connecticut Education: Incompetence Lobby Outflanked
By now everyone know that the No Child Left Behind act is an "unfunded mandate" foisted off on the states by the backwards-looking, Bible-thumping, chain'em-to-the-desks conservatives of the Bush administration. It's all that evil testing, you see. Of course in a postmodern world, facts and figures, achievement and knowledge are all outdated concepts. And testing just prolongs their inevitable demise.
Or so say the "progressive" professional educators who have allied themselves with their enabling politicians and union leeches to form an armored front that's been resistant to almost all reform efforts.
But in a promising development, the forces of institutionalized incompetence has been seemingly outflanked--from the Left. From yesterday's Wall Street Journal Online (subscription required):
When Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, a liberal Democrat, decided to sue the federal government over testing provisions in the No Child Left Behind Act, he probably wasn't expecting flak from his political left. But that's exactly what he's received since filing the lawsuit last week.
As first reported in the Hartford Courant, two national civil rights leaders, William Taylor and John Brittain, fired a letter to Mr. Blumenthal calling the lawsuit "ill-advised" and disputing his claim that the federal law is "an unfunded mandate." Messrs. Taylor and Brittain run civil rights organizations based in Washington but are veterans of Connecticut's school-desegregation wars. Their threat to break with traditional political allies is welcome as a change from the lock-step fealty of black leaders to the education status quo.
"The fact of the matter is that a couple Democrats, in particular [Senator] Ted Kennedy and [Representative] George Miller, helped twist the arm of this administration and brought about a really large increase in appropriations for No Child Left Behind," said [national civil rights leader William] Taylor, dismissing Connecticut's plea for more money. "I also think the National Education Association," which agitated for the suit, "is really doing damage to the interests of kids and to the interests of its own members. We've got to figure out a way to get really good teachers into central schools, and this law pushes for that."
The proponents of public school reform desperately need more voices like those of Taylor and Brittain--they represent those most affected by our pathetic public schools: the poor inner-city minorities.
And there's another reason Connecticut doesn't want accountability reform: the state's well-educated rich kids are masking a gap between low-income kids and their better-off peers that is among the worst in the nation. No wonder the incompetence lobby is mortally afraid of testing.
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