No Child Left Behind: What Do The Real Conservatives Think?

It appears that President Bush's No Child Left Behind program is not being lovingly embraced all across the nation. Below is a recent editorial from one of the nation's leading conservative daily newspapers.

NEW HAMPSHIRE school officials despise No Child Left Behind, and no wonder. For the first time, they are being held to very high standards, and everyone knows when those standards are not met.

Normally we don't buy excuses from education bureaucrats who complain that their students are not learning. Too often the students are not learning because of the bureaucracy's failures. But when it comes to No Child Left Behind's rigid standards, the bureaucrats have a point.

There is no doubt that New Hampshire public schools need improvement. Only 40 percent of eighth-graders scored at or above "proficient" in reading in the last National Assessment of Educational Progress tests. Only 35 percent scored at or above proficient in math. But No Child Left Behind, through which bureaucrats in Washington order bureaucrats in New Hampshire to achieve large yearly gains in test scores, is not the right tool for fixing this problem. Too few New Hampshire students know what they are supposed to know because the public schools don't provide the proper incentives for improving student performance.

"We have been state average, or slightly above state average. However, that has not been good enough for the federal government," Dover Superintendent John O'Connor complained on Tuesday. Well, why has the state average been good enough for Dover?

That kind of complacency is why Washington took action. Unfortunately, it was the wrong action. Now education officials are scrambling to meet Washington's goals instead of exercising the kind of creative reforms that might have come had Washington devolved all educational responsibilities to the states.

Check out the New Hampshire Union Leader