NCLB: No Private School Left Behind? 

Just after school opened this year, Bill Collins, former Mayor of Norwalk, Conn., broadcast a hard hitting commentary on Connecticut PBS about No Child Left Behind. Bill reviews what we know: that poor districts don’t meet federal standards; that next summer, these schools will be ordered to provide tutoring and to offer kids a transfer to a better school in town. But the “real mischief,” according to Collins, begins down the road with “the final sanction”: cities will be ordered to give failing school district parents money to send their kids to private school! Collins again: “Not enough, of course, to get them into spiffy schools, which wouldn’t want them anyway. No, just enough to pay for religious school. This has long been the goal of the President’s Christian fundamentalist supporters – the use of public money to support those schools. And that’s what the NCLB Act is all about. It’s aimed at pleasing a particular political constituency by bringing them in through the back door.”

With these and other significant sea changes possible on the educational scene, this issue of The Journal features possible problems we will have to deal with as a result of the President’s legislation.

The Journal urges all our members to download the document from NYSED entitled, “Information for School Officials: What School Officials Must Do to be in Compliance with NCLB” by James A. Kadamus. You’ll find it at: http://www.emsc.nysed.gov/deputy/nclb/ administratorfacts.htm