No failed education policies left behind

Before the White House gets its heart set on expanding Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” law, administration officials may want to step back and realize that everyone outside Bush’s payroll (we’re looking at you, Armstrong) sees the law as an abject failure.

Concluding a yearlong study on the effectiveness of President Bush’s sweeping education law, No Child Left Behind, a bipartisan panel of lawmakers drawn from many states yesterday pronounced it a flawed, convoluted and unconstitutional education reform initiative that had usurped state and local control of public schools.

Yeah, but other than that, the law’s great.

This bi-partisan research, which was completed by the National Conference of State Legislatures, said NCLB’s accountability system “undermined school improvement efforts already under way in many states and relied on the wrong indicators. The report said that the law’s rules for educating disabled students conflicted with another federal law, and that it presented bureaucratic requirements that failed to recognize the tapestry of educational challenges faced by teachers in the nation’s 15,000 school districts.”

It’s reached the point in which officials in Utah — yes, Utah — believe Bush’s policy is such a disaster, it no longer wants federal guidelines to dictate state education standards.

In Salt Lake City, the state Senate is nearing final passage of measures that unanimously cleared the Utah House last week to favor state testing standards over the federal competency mandates of the 2001 law.

Federal officials have scrambled to quell the Utah insurgency as national news media have focused on the irony that the state that gave President Bush his biggest victory margin in the nation is on the forefront of opposition to his signature education law.

Even some House Republicans are prepared to roll back much of the law, which has grown increasingly unpopular with education officials nationwide.

By the way, NCLB comes up for reauthorization in Congress in 2007. It should be a real hoot.