BONNIE ERBE Bush's 'No Child' initiative discredited

The president's No Child Left Behind act was thoroughly discredited last week in embarrassing detail by the National Conference of State Legislatures. The law is denigrating lower and middle school public education, it said. Days later, the nation's governors (many of whom view the law's unfunded mandates as federal shackles) collectively announced American high schools are too easy and need to be made tougher. The governors were in Washington for a national summit on the state of public high school education.
It's perfectly understandable the governors would call for a better-equipped crop of high school graduates. After all, American businesses are outsourcing low-skill jobs to other countries where these workers earn a fraction of what low-skilled Americans command, and the pool of people looking for work is oceanic in proportion. Meanwhile, tech companies claim to be so starved for talent, they are importing highly skilled workers.
But if our public schools are failing elementary and middle school students, is this the time to talk about boosting standards for high school graduates? How can we exact tougher standards from high school students while neglecting the lower and middle school students who are tomorrow's high school students?
Stifling innovations
The National Conference of State Legislatures spent 10 months studying the effects of the No Child Left Behind act. Analysts lobbed a nuke of a report at the Bush administration. They described the act as stifling state innovations, impeding programs that were previously working just fine, thank you, to educate students, and starving states of funds they desperately need to deliver on the higher student test scores that the law orders them to produce. That was the complimentary part.
The conference report also called the law an unrealistic one-size-fits-all student performance measurement tool that fails to recognize the "special challenges" many schools face. One major such challenge is teaching English to the tidal wave of immigrant students public schools are forced to absorb and educate. The law requires schools to boost reading and writing test scores by a hefty percentage each year. How can they do so when many of the students being tested show up unable to speak English?
Wait, there's more irony. The governors' call for tougher high school standards comes as the nonprofit Educational Testing Service reveals American high school graduation rates are dropping -- down to 70 percent in 2000 from 72 percent in 1990. The fact that one-third of our citizens fail to complete high school in this, the information age, is nothing short of cataclysmic.
How can we possibly maintain our position as the world's greatest economy with a less-educated populace? Before we get to fixing high schools, we have to fix the damage done to lower and middle schools by the No Child Left Behind law. President Bush signed the law in January 2002. It has been resisted and decried by most states ever since. At least nine state legislatures are weighing bills that challenge the law's starvation-level funding coupled with draconian and costly testing requirements.
Annual testing
The law mandates new annual testing at the third- to eighth-grade levels, the designation of all teachers as "highly qualified" by 2006 and economic sanctions for schools that fail to show "adequate yearly progress." In Tennessee, as one example, three Nashville schools face severe challenges for not producing the requisite higher test scores each year.
Schools such as these three (and many others nationwide) that do not meet performance standards for six years enter a phase called alternative governance where consequences include converting public schools into charter schools or replacing all or most of the staff.
No one opposes the law's goal (raising teaching standards) nor the governors' new goal (improving high schools.) The governors' high school curriculum would include four years of English and math (including geometry, beginning and advanced algebra.) It's a sad commentary on U.S. education that only two states---Texas and Arkansas---require students to study math through advanced algebra.
Clearly we need reform, but education is a bottom up, not top down proposition. If kids can't read, how can they understand algebra? Let's clean up the detritus left behind by the No Child Left Behind law before undertaking high school reforms.
X Bonnie Erbe is a TV host and writes this column for Scripps Howard News Service.