Bush Education Policy Leaves Common Sense Behind
by Assemblyman Steven Sanders

When parents are informed that their child attends a "failing school," many rightfully react with bewilderment and urgency and if possible will seek to find a school that is "succeeding." Tragically, under the No Child Left Behind law, a school could be labeled (or libeled) as failing even though 90 percent or more of the students are meeting academic benchmarks.  And even more tragic, unbeknownst to such parents, they may request a transfer to another school that while not labeled as failing may actually be doing less well than the so-called failing school! Sounds crazy, doesn't it?

But this is the great irony and paradox of the Bush education initiative, which either by accident or design is causing havoc in public school districts across the country and the dissemination of bad information to parents-which leads to bad decisions on their children's behalf.

All this comes about as a result of these federal guidelines, which calculate a school's success based on how well even minuscule subsets of a school's student population do on academic assessments. Consequently, if a majority of students in a subset of less than 10 percent of the overall student population is doing poorly, the entire school is labeled as failing.

This then triggers notification to parents of their right to transfer their child to another school. Rarely, if ever, does a parent know why a school is labeled as failing; nor do they know if the preferred school is actually performing better. Moreover, taken literally, these federal regulations would allow this transfer policy to cause schools to become unmanageably overcrowded by virtue of a parent's absolute right to choose the school of their preference.

Such simpleminded designations of a school's academic worth are misleading and dangerous. Blind adherence to the absolute transfer policy does not ensure a better education for any child but certainly does cause chaos and instability in our public schools.

For Washington to try to micro-manage local education decisions with regard to the assignment of local resources, personnel and students is a very bad precedent, not to mention unworkable. We need less regulation from Congress and more federal assistance in funding. That funding is needed to support a new generation of qualified teachers, up-to-date technology, and early childhood education.

If Washington is truly interested in advancing public education and improved outcomes, it will leave behind its misguided ideology, leave educating to educators and local school decision-making to dedicated superintendents and school boards.#

Assemblyman Sanders is chairman of the Education Committee. E-mail him at sanders@assembly.state.ny.us or phone 212.979.9696. His mailing address is 201 East 16th Street, New York, NY 10003.