Teachers Vs Students

My personal experience with No Child Left Behind is positive.

However, today’s New York Times says, “Democrats Make Bush School Act an Election Issue.”

Mrs. Clinton is not the only presidential candidate who has found attacking the act, President Bush’s signature education law, to be a crowd pleaser — all the Democrats have taken pokes. Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico has said he wants to “scrap” the law. Senator Barack Obama has called for a “fundamental” overhaul. And John Edwards criticizes the law as emphasizing testing over teaching. “You don’t make a hog fatter by weighing it,” he said recently while campaigning in Iowa.

This was to be the year that Congress renewed the law that has reshaped the nation’s educational landscape by requiring public schools to bring every child to reading and math proficiency by 2014. But defections from both the right and the left killed the effort.

Now, as lawmakers say they will try again, the unceasing criticism of the law by Democratic presidential contenders and the teachers’ unions that are important to them promises to make the effort even more treacherous next year….

Seven years later, policy makers debate whether the law has raised student achievement, but polls show that it is unpopular — especially among teachers, who vote in disproportionate numbers in Democratic primary elections, and their unions, which provide Democrats with critical campaign support.

“There’s a grass-roots backlash against this law,” said Tad Devine, a strategist who worked for the past two Democratic presidential nominees. “And attacking it is a convenient way to communicate that you’re attacking President Bush.”

These political realities are making it extremely difficult to rebuild the bipartisan majorities that first approved the law during Mr. Bush’s first year in office, when he worked on the legislation with Mr. Miller and Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat who is now the chairman of the education committee….

“I don’t think you recognize the magnitude of the anger that’s out there,” said Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association. “My members are driving me, and if they think I’m not doing everything I can to change this law, they’ll take me to the woodshed.”

What is not acceptable to union members is unlikely to be acceptable to Democratic presidential candidates….

My son, Jason, is in second grade. His learning, across a range of subjects, is far beyond my own at his age. His teachers, and the curriculum, more demanding than I experienced, are excellent. My wife, German born and product of a lesser education, guides my son in his homework, and the clear track of requirements that flows from No Child Left Behind makes her path clear.

This is an example of how No Child Left Behind’s clear guidance of learning requirements, also, aids other parents – especially our many foreign born parents – who truly care about their children’s academic success. Parental involvement is the proven denominator of childrens’ academic progress. No Child Left Behind is, in my household, a proven product.

I appreciate that No Child Left Behind may have made teachers’ tasks more demanding, and even circumscribed somes’ tangents – nice to have or not. However, that is not a reason to throw out the child with the washwater.

Teachers unions better get more constructive if they really care about our childrens’ education more than their own ease.

P.S.: I hear the same support for NCLB and the consequent achievement of their children from all other parents at my son's school, across political and ethnic lines.