Thank goodness for small favors. The feds are going to give us a little leeway on education:
Six states are getting the OK to write their own prescriptions for ailing schools under the Bush administration's signature education law.
It's a softening from how No Child Left Behind currently works — with schools having to take certain steps at specific times for missing math and reading testing goals. Critics have complained that the approach is too rigid and treats schools the same regardless of whether they miss the mark by a little or a lot.
The states getting more freedom under a pilot program are Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Illinois, Maryland and Ohio. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings made the announcement during a speech Tuesday in Austin, Texas.
The states that won approval have come up with plans to more closely tailor solutions to individual schools' problems and focus resources on schools in the worst shape.
Isn't that a wonderful insight, that states might be able to tailor solutions "to individual schools' problems"? But isn't that the whole point of federalism, the idea that states would be laboratories of democracy? If the problem is that No Child Left Behind made a mockery of federalism (and it did), the solution isn't to slightly exempt six states from the mess that was created.
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And with the federal cuts in drug enforcement, we can proudly state that we'll soon have :
NO DRUG DEALER LEFT BEHIND (as well).
yeah, rrrrrrrrrrriiiiight.
Mockery is as mockery does.
;)
B.G.
If the problem is that No Child Left Behind made a mockery of federalism (and it is)
<raising eyebrows>
You think federalism is the problem with NCLB?
That it would be a good program if individual states had instituted it, instead of the federal government?
The problem is not that public education was in bad shape, and that NCLB made it much worse?
The next thing you know, the GOP will be declaring "better red than not" and fighting to engage in the same torture tactics that the communists used to use, and we'll attack two countries because civilians who were NOT from those two countries engaged in violence against US targets.
And we'll declare that those torture tactics have protected us, so that we're safe, instead of having terrorists sniping people around the DC beltway, distributing anthrax in the mail, flying an airplane into a NYC apartment building, making a bridge collapse on the Interstate near Minneapolis, contaminating food and feed with melamine or spreading e. coli and salmonella contamination in olives, lettuce, spinach, and tomatoes.
But our public education system has kept us aware of the real hazard to America - allowing gays to marry.