Abolish No Child Left Behind

"The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school."       -- George Bernard Shaw - (1856-1950) Irish comic dramatist

No Child Left Behind (NCLB), according to a Harvard study, has been a colossal failure in terms of money spent and little improvement in achievement scores for public school students. With NCLB costing states almost $2 billion through 2008 and 6 million hours of time to administer testing requirements, and the federal Education Department spending many tens of billions of dollars each year, it's time to just get the federal government out of education. Another 10 years of federal involvement in education would be another colossal mistake.

The Constitution never gave the federal government authority to be involved in education. Help return educational authority back to where it should reside, according to the Founding Fathers' intent, with the local communities and never higher than the state level, instead of expanding federal authority over school districts, schools, teachers, parents, and students.

 "We must create out of the younger generation a generation of Communists. We must turn children, who can be shaped like wax, into real, good Communists.... We must remove the children from the crude influence of their families. We must take them over and, to speak frankly, nationalize them. From the first days of their lives they will be under the healthy influence of Communist children's nurseries and schools. There they will grow up to be real Communists."
      -- Communist Party Education Workers Congress - 1918

Repeal the NCLB, now known as the Elementary and Secondary Education Reauthorization Act (ESEA), once and for all. And reject any number of specific bills that may be a piecemeal attempt to reauthorize the provisions of the NCLB/ESEA.

COMMENT:
      Do we really need 800+ more pages of federal regulations telling state run and locally funded (primarily with property taxes) schools how to teach? No.

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