No Child bill ignores reality

We have more than a few problems with the educational juggernaut that is No Child Left Behind.

It’s a continuation of the overweening reach of the federal government into our lives at the local level which requires states to hold all K-12 students to the same standard, but allows states to set those standards.

The feds then assess such steep penalties for not meeting wildly unrealistic goals of every school improving performance in every grade and subject that states are forced to dumb down the standards.

But the focus on a bill introduced in the Legislature last month by Rep. David Schapira, D-Tempe, and approved by the full House Tuesday, is pointless at best and counterproductive at worst. We hope a 3-3 vote in a Senate committee Wednesday will be enough to stop the bill. But the Associated Press reported Schapira will try to revive it next week and he was able to get bipartisan support in the House.

HB2392 requires the state Department of Education and the School Facilities Board to study the cost of withdrawing from NCLB and the funding attached to it, versus the savings of not having to comply with its mandates.

If there is some money to be saved and/or the Legislature appropriates enough money from elsewhere to make up the difference, the state would pull out of the program in mid-2010.

This report is to be completed by July 2009, at which time we will have a new president and a reconfigured Congress who may be busy unwinding seven years of creativity-killing, bureaucracy-enriching regulations.

The fact sheet for HB2392 offers no insight on how much the study alone might cost. Or why we need to spend time figuring out whether the state can afford to walk away from $600 million for its schools when the budget is $1.5 billion in the red for the current fiscal year alone, which ends June 30. The $591 million of NCLB-dependent cash Arizona is to receive this year is about 10 percent of the total state education budget.

So why are we even talking about this? Because Virginia’s General Assembly recently adopted a similar measure, and several other states are trying to legislate or litigate themselves out of the NCLB vise. And most states are having financial difficulties, if not on the magnitude of Arizona’s.

So passing a joint resolution opposing reauthorization of the federal No Child Left Behind law makes far more sense. Such a resolution may not have any teeth, but the state budget doesn’t have any teeth to spare, anyway.