Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Overhaul of No Child Left Behind Makes Untrue Claims

By Douglas V. Gibbs

George W. Bush, when he was President of the United States, has been hailed as being a conservative Republican Executive.  However, when it came to domestic issues, Bush was anything but conservative.  One of the worst, and most unconstitutional, big government leviathans to come out of his administration was the federal government's further intrusion into education called "No Child Left Behind."  On February 11, 2015, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce sent H.R. 5, No Child Left Behind reform and reauthorization to the House floor.  A floor vote is expected next week.  Despite the claim that the bill restores autonomy to States, eliminates programs, allows local schools to make their own funding decisions, and “limit[s] the federal role to ensuring parents have the information they need to judge the quality of their children’s schools,” the reality is that those claims are nothing more than massive deception.  None of the claims by the proponents of H.R. 5 are accurate. According to Heritage Action, the bill actually mandates the following:

–Yearly testing in grades 3-8 and once again in high school (the same testing mandate as NCLB).

–A single statewide curriculum.

–Same-level funding for programs, merely consolidating many programs instead of eliminating them.

–A statewide accountability structure with “a system of school improvement interventions to be implemented at the local level for…schools the state determines to be poorly performing.”

In other words, it will be yet another tool to push into place Common Core, a collectivist curriculum that uses Marxist strategies to dumb down our kids even further, and extricate the parents from the education process, making math, for example, so complex and unlike what any of us have ever learned, that the only option for a child to succeed in his studies is to rely completely on his teacher, and ultimately creating a dependency upon The State.

The only way to stop the further unconstitutional encroachment of the federal government is to contact our Congress Critters in Washington, and urge them to oppose H.R. 5.  Then, if the piece of garbage passes, and becomes law, we must work through our States demanding that our local education systems refuse to implement the law's provisions.

-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary

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