Parents -- The No Child Left Behind Law Won't Do Much For Your
By Joel Turtel, Fri Dec 9th
Past experience with federal education programs predicts thatthe No Child Left Behind act (NCLB) will also fail parents whosechildren are doing poorly in school. The federal government hasspent over $120 billion on Title 1 programs for low-incomestudents since 1965. Yet the literacy rates for these childrentoday are appalling and the achievement gap between low-incomechildren and their peers has not closed.
If the U.S. Department of Education wants to give real choice toparents, they should not be tinkering with a failedgovernment-controlled school system that, by its very nature,strangles free choice and competition.
Americans have been blessed with a system that gives them almostunlimited choices in their daily lives for almost four hundredyears — it’s called the free market. If parents could pay fortheir kids’ education in a totally unregulated, fiercelycompetitive education free market, free from governmentcontrols, parents would have all the school choice in the world.This education free market would also give their kids a superb,low-cost education.
Yet too often, government officials with their bureaucraticmentality, distrust the free market, the same free market thatbrings them their cars, clothes, computers, electricity, andfresh food. The No Child Left Behind Act adds yet another layerof federal regulations to the already strangling layers of localand state government regulations on education.
If the federal government truly wants to give parents moreschool choice, they should be working to remove local and statecontrols over education, not adding to those controls with theNo Child Left Behind law and other regulations. That is liketrying to cure a person dying of arsenic poisoning by giving himmore arsenic.
Naturally, government education officials can’t understand thefact that government control of education is not the solution,it is the problem.
Over the past fifty years, federal, state, and city governmentshave spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to “fix” thepublic schools. They have failed, time and again. For example,in July, 2005, the Congress-mandated National Assessment ofEducation Progress showed that high-school students’ dismalreading skills have not improved since 1999.
High-school drop-out rates in inner-city, low-income minorityareas range from 30 percent to over 50 percent. High-schooldropouts are far more likely to end up in prison during theirlifetimes. A U.S. Bureau of Justice report estimates thatapproximately 47 percent
