The Wrong Education Fix

Wall Street Joural
Saturday, July 12, 2008

President Bush has often spoken about education reform as a civil rights issue. So we're not entirely surprised to see civil rights groups now defending the No Child Left Behind law against attempts to gut its most effective provisions.

Last month, Representative Sam Graves, a Missouri Republican, introduced the NCLB Recess Until Reauthorization Act, which would essentially suspend the law's accountability provisions but not the funding. Under Mr. Graves's bill, schools would no longer have to file progress reports that expose achievement gaps between kids of different races, ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Since NCLB passed in 2002, minority parents in particular have come to rely on this information to find out if a school is serving the needs of their children. But apparently Mr. Graves and his co-sponsor, Democrat Timothy Waltz of Minnesota, believe that the problem with public education today is too much accountability. Not surprisingly, teachers unions like the National Education Association are supporting their efforts.

What's heartening about this story is who has lined up to block this nonsense. The coalition includes the Citizens Commission on Civil Rights, the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, the National Urban League, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund and more than a dozen other liberal outfits.

In a letter to House Members, the coalition said it opposed the proposal because "it would allow states, districts, and schools to receive federal funding under the No Child Left Behind Act with no accountability for complying with key provision of the law."

None of these groups supports NCLB in toto. But they do realize that, whatever the law's problems, the accountability provisions are not among them. NCLB has forced schools to pay attention to the learning gap, and the result has been that poor and minority children are doing better. We are nowhere near closing that gap, but it is undeniable that the lowest-performing students have made significant gains on standardized tests in the NCLB era. Easing up on accountability would be a big step backward.