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Friday, July 21, 2006
Expanding government’s reach OK if it adds education options
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The only thing tolerable about the growth of domestic spending during the Bush presidency is that, in some instances, there’s a devilish brilliance to it.
He noted one of those instances in Thursday’s remarks to the NAACP. “Let me tell you the strategy behind the act,” he said of No Child Left Behind, which is up for renewal next year.
The strategy, he explained, is to measure how well children are learning. And then to give informed parents, who know what’s best for their children, options. “When we find schools that are not teaching and will not change, our parents should have different options,” Bush said. Wealth can move from a bad school. Poverty can’t. Charter schools, where they exist, are an option. Choice is another, or public school choice, as Bush put it.
And now another option. Two days before Bush spoke, his education secretary, Margaret Spellings, joined the education secretary who served his father’s administration, U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), in announcing a $100 million scholarship program for low-income students in non-performing public schools. The program, if approved by Congress next year, would grant scholarships of up to $4,000 per year and tutoring assistance worth up to $3,000 to poor kids in bad schools.
“This offers a way out for students whose families don’t have the money for tuition or the luxury of moving,” Alexander said.
For conservatives, the idea of an expanded role in k-12 education has been difficult to swallow. More money is always popular, so even those who want the feds kept out relish the newfound dollars that NCLB brings.
The testing requirement is an example to conservatives of how to bring about reform — and get better outcomes. Whether children are compared across state lines is immaterial. That’s relatively meaningless.
But if the curriculum is standardized and children are tested on it, as Georgia is doing with its Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests in grades 1-8 , what it reveals about how schools and children compare is important. It identifies where the problems are — and draws attention to them.
Over time, incidentally, as Georgia upgrades the curriculum and pulls up the laggards, children here will perform to national standards on tests such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the SAT. It’s a matter, I believe, of standardizing curriculum and testing it, constantly raising standards for what’s considered passing. Georgia’s on the right course.
Once parents get information about their child and their child’s school, they need to be able to act on it. The brilliance of NCLB is that it begins to promise parents the same thing that HOPE scholarships promise parents. The promise is that there’s a reward for effort.
HOPE says to eighth-graders that regardless of family income or circumstance, effort will be rewarded and the doors of college will be opened.
NCLB says to parents that if they care enough about their child’s education to get involved, they don’t have to eat their frustration simply because they can’t afford to move and are powerless to force change on their child’s school.
The law now says outside tutoring is available and their child can change schools. That promise actually makes public schools better by forcing officials to target assistance to nonperfomers, lest parents who are financially able take their children and run.
The next level is the scholarships Bush is proposing. “I believe in opportunity scholarships to be able to enable parents to move their child out of a school that’s not teaching, for the benefit of the United States of America,” he told NAACP members.
For the poor, the first key is to provide access to better education. The second, as he spelled out to delegates, is to own something. A home. And for some, a business. “Ownership is vital to making sure this country extends its hope to every neighborhood,” Bush said.
It starts with families, a mother and father in the home. Then education. Then ownership. Then self-sufficiency and independency. Then less government.
If an expanded federal role in the traditional purview of state and local government does indeed bring about reform, and competition — by giving parents information and incentive and means to act on it — it will have been a completely worthwhile expansion.
• Jim Wooten is associate editorial page editor. His column runs Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays.
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New cities, suburban sophistication
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s Friday free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• All the old folks were right. Imagine stealing a Bible — “captured,” in the Yankee soldier’s words, from a home in Decatur during the 1864 Battle of Atlanta. Yes, the old folks were right. The heathen invaders needed the Good Book. It’s now returned.
• Oh, the hand-wringing. That mean old No Child Left Behind law punishes those schools that nobly cultivate “real-world diversity” by penalizing them for failing to educate all of the “diverse” populations. We can do three things. One is educate every student. The other is to change the law, as the educrats want. Or we could group-test and let the kiddies share answers.
• All that high-profile agonizing about whether a tougher new law on panhandling in Atlanta would be too draconian and now we know. It’s pretty much worthless. That is the story of get-tough -on-crime legislation in the liberal city. It’s for show.
• Headline: “4 openly gay people in primary.” Wonder how many transplants from Pennsylvania are in the race? Or Tifton? Or what they have in common that provides some clue as to how they will act in public office?
• An Indian tribe’s suit against Ralph Reed and Valerie Plame’s suit against Vice President Dick Cheney and others have one thing in common: They’re both attempts to use the court for political theater.
• It’s near criminal that the most-congested state route or arterial road in metro Atlanta — Medlock Bridge Road/Peachtree Parkway between Peachtree Industrial Boulevard and Ga. 120 — is not due to get another dime to relieve traffic congestion over the next 25 years.
• Welcome to Georgia’s newest cities — two more north Fulton communities — Johns Creek and Milton. And now Tucker is pondering incorporation. If the result is that people get better service, know whom to call and believe they have brought government to a more manageable scale, the more new towns the better.
• Straw polls are ballot clutter.
• Shirley Franklin on Billy Payne’s endorsement of a civil rights museum here: “Billy Payne shatters the stereotype that the South is resistant to Dr. King’s legacy.” Huh? What stereotype? If one exists, it’s in the liberal mind.
• “Urban sophistication,” or a variant of it, is a phrase commonly used to describe something about intown — most recently, loft apartment living. The phrase “suburban sophistication,” or a variant of it, has appeared only once in more than 20 years in this newspaper — and then by a national columnist describing the people who buy drugs in the inner city.
• The United States should pressure Israel for a cease-fire. Five minutes after Hezbollah’s capacity to rain missiles on Israel is destroyed.
• Universities, researchers and pharmaceutical companies are free to conduct embryonic stem cell research, using any source they wish, and taking it in most any direction they think promising — just not with federal money. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will soon be endowed with $60 billion. Others are generously endowed as well. Until there’s a way off the slippery slope that would obligate those with moral, ethical and religious objections from funding the creation of life for the purpose of destroying it, designating another batch for use with their tax dollars is just incrementalism.
• We don’t need to see any more audits of government spending during Katrina chaos to know: Shovel money out the door without spending guidelines or controls, and it’s wasted, stolen and generally spent like, well, it’s free government money. The solution? Plan and write rules before disasters hit.
• Cynthia Tucker put her ideas out there and the free market rejected them. Decisively, overwhelmingly and expeditiously, just as I suspected they would. Poor Cynthia. Poor, poor Cynthia. The one here? Oh, no. The one who ran against state Rep. Karla Drenner in DeKalb County. And, before reacting angrily and demanding apologies, as the lieutenant governor did last week when I hinted at the youthfulness of the potential first lady, I’m just joshing. I’ve never met the real Cynthia McKi, uh, I mean Tucker. Or heard her speak.
• And, by the way, I did apologize to the lieutenant governor. Herewith: I am sorry this misunderstanding happened at all and I regret its escalation and I apologize. It sounded sincere when I heard it.
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