The Importance of No Child Left Behind: Part III (The Misguided Opposition to Federal Mandates)

Now that I've given my fellow liberal Democrats their just excoriation for deferring to the interests of teachers' unions over those of students in the public schools, I'll turn now to the misguided Republican opposition to No Child Left Behind that has emerged during the last half-decade.

For the first half-decade of the new millennium, following the overwhelming bipartisan passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, Republicans were strong supporters of No Child Left Behind. Here in Minnesota, Governor Tim Pawlenty was a strong supporter of the law, and he appointed a Minnesota Department of Education Commissioner, Cheri Pierson Yecke, with whom I made common cause in helping to draft the content area standards that gave rise to the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs). Conservatives such as William Bennett and Chester Finn, with whom Yecke had worked, posed themselves against proponents of so-called "progressive" education such as Alfie Kohn, Deborah Meier, and Theodore Sizer. Conservatives promoted education with strong subject area content and academic skills measured by standardized testing, while liberals tended to align themselves with the "progressive" approach to education, emphasizing student learning through cooperative groups pursuing projects focused on topics of high student interest and evaluated by portfolios and presentations.

Conservatives were therefore on solid ground during this first half-decade following the passage of No Child Left Behind; interestingly enough, they often drew heavily from the work of my fellow liberal Decmocrat, E. D. Hirsch, the founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation and the most articulate proponent of education based on strong subject area content. But Hirsch also argues that we would be much better off with a nationally consistent curriculum offered throughout the United States in the manner of the best educational systems of East Asia and Europe.

In many ways, No Child Left Behind seemed to move in this direction, by at least asserting that students across the nation should be tested for their acquisition of skill and knowledge sets appropriate at given grade levels. Tests for such knowledge and skill acquisition emanated from people working at the state level, but federal government officials evaluated the suitability of these tests, and investigated whether there was follow-through on the federally mandated steps to be taken if students at particular schools performed below grade level on the tests.

And it was on this matter of federal mandates that conservative Republican support for No Child Left Behind eventually wavered. With the usual conservative failure to realize the benefits that flow from strong national government programs ensuring citizen health and education, Republicans came to see key measures of No Child Left Behind as an intrusion of the federal government that preempted state and local prerogatives.

For reasons that I shall explore more fully in coming articles, the perception of local control in public school systems of the United States is an illusion. We in fact have a nationally consistent system, not in curriculum, but in the lack thereof. This is because teachers are trained much the same way by education professors at universities across the nation who virtually universally embrace the "progressive" approach that reviles education based on subject area content and measurable achievement through standardized testing.

Thus, without realizing it, conservatives who think that the elimination of No Child Left Behind will result in more local control are actually returning control to education professors and the nationally consistent "progressive" approach that has done so much to harm students in the United States, especially children from economically challenged families at the nation's urban core.