When elected, George W. Bush promised a new Republican emphasis on education. Surprising, from a party that has several prominent members who say one of their goals is to eliminate all federal funding for public schools. Called "No Child Left Behind," the center piece of Bush's education agenda
forces a series of standards and testing for every school in the country. Those schools that do well on the test will receive more funding, while those that do not see their budgets slashed.
It's a brilliant idea: take the schools already not doing well and then cut their budgets. That'll fix the problem. Of course, it's not just schools in poor districts that suffer. Because the law has little flexibility, special education students and pupils who are learning English as a second language are forced to take these tests. Of course, these students don't do very well, killing the scores of any school with a large program for the developmentally disabled or non-English speaking population.
Now, Gov. Ed Rendell and his Education Secretary Vicki Phillips are calling for more flexibility under the law:
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"In Pennsylvania, we're caught between dual challenges," Phillips said. "On the one hand, our special-needs students fall much farther from our performance targets than is the case in many other states. ... On the other hand, we believe that to classify a school as failing or as needing serious consequences based on just the special-education subgroup alone is not a fair picture of a school's performance."
More than 60 of the state's schools have been classified as not making "adequate yearly progress" based solely on performance of special-education students, she said. Adequate progress is currently defined as having at least 35 percent of students at grade level in math and 45 percent at grade level in reading."
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Schools in Pennsylvania are some of the most unequally funded in the country, comparing distribution of funds across the state. If Rendell increases up his rhetoric on No Child Left Behind, and places the blame squarely where it belongs-- on President Bush-- John Kerry could have a major campaign issue in the Keystone state.