Think tank says No Child Act is destined to fail
We're a red state that is seeing red over a program the red people tout as their biggest domestic-policy achievement. Of course, it's also an underfunded program from Washington, where people like to spend in the red.
I'm not sure what all that means, living as I do in a state where "red" tends to refer most often to the sports teams of the state's largest public university. Color schemes don't tend to work well with the intricacies of politics.
Still, those two facts — Utah's rebellion against the law and support for the president — are indeed ironic. But they are not contradictory. Utah voters tend to prefer conservative candidates, and President Bush fits that description in many ways. The No Child Left Behind Act, however, is definitely not one of them.
Or, put differently, it is the exact opposite of some of the president's other initiatives, such as Social Security reform, which is designed to put choices into the hands of the people and away from distant bureaucrats. It is as if the administration, appalled that the centralized Great Society initiatives of Lyndon Johnson have failed through the years, decided the only way to fix the problem was to install its own centralized Great Society initiatives.
When people are forced to do something, they'll look for shortcuts. Over time, states will find ways around the law's requirements. If too many schools are failing, or not showing "adequate yearly progress," states will want to relax the standards. Uzzell predicts this will lead to a "race to the bottom" that is typical of centralized programs.
"Washington will be forced either to allow the states great leeway in how they implement NCLB or to make NCLB more detailed, prescriptive and top-heavy. If Washington chooses the former, the statute might as well not exist; if the latter, federal policymakers will increasingly resemble Soviet central planners trying to improve economic performance by micromanaging decisions from Moscow."
But beyond the failures of centralized control, Uzzell makes an eloquent argument for the need to bring decisions about education as close to parents as possible. "Education," he writes, "is inherently personal and inherently value laden." You cannot run a school without eventually having to make decisions about "truth and virtue," the very concepts that strike at the heart of the culture wars.
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