NCLB popular among those it’s designed to serve
Thursday, June 26, 2008Written by: Uncle Charley
It’s the middle of the summer, and I’m writing a post about No Child Left Behind. Someone please check my mental health (of course, most readers here have long been skeptical). Frankly, I couldn’t help it, after reading this enlightening post by David Hoff at Education Week (H/T Eduwonk):
Today, the Public Education Network released a poll that sheds some light on the reason why. Although the poll focuses on where education stands in the current political debate, the response to one of its questions shows that the minority community likes NCLB.
Forty-one percent of blacks and 39 percent of Hispanics believe that NCLB has helped improve their schools. Only 21 percent of African-Americans and 23 percent of Hispanics say the law is hurting their schools. (The rest says there’s no difference.) By contrast, 27 percent of whites say the law is helping schools, 31 percent say it is hurting, and 27 percent say it hasn’t had an impact.
Combine the three groups and here’s what you get: 31 percent say “helping;” 31 percent say “hurting;” and 27 percent say “no difference.”
Seldom do you see public opinion results so evenly divided three ways on a major question. Anyone who uses the term consensus to describe public opinion in a debate about NCLB should be ridden out of town on the rails.
Think about the different factors out there that have worked to push public opinion against NCLB:
- The National Education Association has spent lots of good money on a front group designed to rail ceaselessly against the requirements of NCLB – Its membership, largely unhappy with NCLB, makes a vast activist network throughout the nation’s public schools
- Barack Obama, the so-called great agent of hope and change, has parroted the NEA’s line on NCLB being too rigid and underfunded
- Many hard-core conservatives have never liked the growth of federal government intrusion into education, and have grumbled ever more loudly about it in recent years – many Congressional Republicans proposed scrapping the NCLB model for the more flexible A-Plus Act
- The program is unmistakably attached to the agenda of an unpopular President, who has used the bully pulpit throughout his term in office to trumpet NCLB
Yet in the end, none of this has seemed to deliver a crushing blow to the way Americans feel about the federal government’s reigning education program. Notably, racial and ethnic minorities tend to believe NCLB has improved their schools, an observation which must give us pause. All its flaws aside, the program is doing something to move toward closing the achievement gap.
Reform is needed, and a debate must ensue. But we can’t take the “scrap NCLB and start over” approach. As one recent president famously said, “Mend it, don’t end it.”
