'No Child Left Behind' law bumps into hard reality
"The law, No Child Left Behind, encourages - but does not require - districts with failing or persistently violent schools to develop partnerships with neighboring districts if they have no internal solutions.
Chester Upland sent letters to the 14 other districts in Delaware County in August, asking whether they would accept some students.
All 14 said no.
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"They [the parents] got a rude awakening when we got the responses back," said Granville Lash, vice chairman of Chester Upland's Board of Control. "They didn't really understand... the other schools don't really have to accept our kids."
Norristown got a similar response. The Montgomery County district asked for transfer help from seven neighboring districts within a 10-mile radius and got seven rejections.
The 200,000-student Philadelphia School District, where more than half of the schools qualify as "needing improvement" under the federal law, made overtures - though not official requests - to some suburban school officials in June, and were told in summary: Forget about it.
In New Jersey, as of 10 days ago, no school district had entered into an agreement to use the interdistrict transfer provision under the law, according Mike Yaple, a spokesman for the New Jersey School Boards Association.
The Camden School District, which has all five of its middle schools on the "needing improvement" list and its two traditional high schools on the early-warning list, has not asked suburban schools to take students.
Transfers a 'hoax'
The law as it appears on paper could transform lives: Students from under-resourced schools in the Philadelphia area suddenly could find themselves in educationally advanced classrooms.
But the transfer aspect of No Child Left Behind is not working nationally, and that makes it nothing more than a "hoax," said Arnold Fege of the Washington-based Public Education Network. He said he hasn't heard of one case nationwide in which a high-performing district has welcomed children from low-performing ones...
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