In the meantime, the Post produced a thoughtful editorial on the impact - or lack thereof - of the provision of NCLB that allows parents to move their children from schools that have failed to meet their goals. For the little good it does, the provision is hardly more than a big pain in the rump for local school administrators.
Last year, 12 Fayette County schools offered transfers to 6,931 eligible students and only 131 students took advantage. But parents can't choose whatever school they want due to space limitations and transportation constraints. School administrators try to provide an excellent education in every school. But some parents see school choice under NCLB as death by fire, or death by water.
The Post hints at vouchers for "whatever educational institution would accept them" as a possible solution. For the middle class - fine. But I'm not sure how that works for poor folks; therefore, how does it work for the entire system?
Setting aside the unprecedented federal intrusion into state education under NCLB; the good intentions of the law are further impaired by underfunding. The desire to offer school choice through the present method is big-hearted, but empty-headed. Why not adequately fund the system before we look for ways to declare it dead? The goal is not "putting teeth into the transfer rule." The goal is an adequate education for all Kentucky students.
This from the Cincinnati Post:
A brittle little stick
Even though the federal government provides less than 10 percent of the money for most primary and secondary schools in Ohio, Kentucky and the other states, it has through the No Child Left Behind law gained an enormous voice in education policy.
This has been accomplished in no small part through the testing requirements imposed on the states. The notion is that the public's response to test results will force state and local officials to improve the quality of the schools.
The No Child Left Behind law also has an ostensible stick. It requires that students in schools that repeatedly fail to reach specified targets on reading and math tests be allowed to transfer to better-performing schools within the district.
This has turned out to be a brittle little stick. Most districts with one failing school, it turns out, usually have others that aren't much better. And most families who live in such districts are stuck there because of poverty - if parents had the money to move to a better school district, they would do so.
Moreover, the upheaval and logistical problems associated with transferring a youngster from one school to another - particularly at the elementary and middle school levels - makes the transfer option one that is rarely exercised. In fact, according to an Associated Press account, just 320 of the 70,526 Kentucky students eligible to transfer out of failing schools in 2005-06 did so.
Comes now even more evidence that the No Child Left Behind transfer rule is a joke.
The Kentucky Department of Education, with permission from its federal overseers, has announced that it doesn't plan to release school test scores - the ones that determine whether students are eligible to transfer - until Sept. 12. That's a full month after school has started in most districts.
How many parents are going to pull their children out of one school and send them to another a month into the new year? It would be a surprise if more than a handful took advantage of the transfer option.
State officials told the Associated Press the delay in reporting test results is due to the fact that every child in grades 3-8 was tested last year. In the past, only some students were tested. That beats the excuse that a dog ate the tests, but not by much. Put it this way: If the increased number of test takers really did overwhelm the department's capacity to compute the results on time, Frankfort has more problems than we thought.
Were the transfer policy actually working, this would be cause for outrage.
As suggested above, on preemption grounds alone we have reservations about the No Child Left Behind law, which is up for authorization this year. If Congress wants to intrude this far onto state and local prerogatives, it ought to be putting up a heck of a lot more of the money needed to run the nation's schools.
But here's a thought: If they are in fact serious about putting teeth into the transfer rule, policymakers should expand their horizons. Give vouchers to the families of students in failing schools, good at whatever educational institution would accept them. Of course, if Congress did that, the state education bureaucracies would doubtless start holding on to the test scores until Christmas.
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