As part of the New York Times' all out assault on education reform this election year, the editorial board (which has yet to retract or correct its misleading editorial on the AFT charter report--click here and here for more) put forward another series of misleading and contradictory arguments on Sunday entitled "How to rescue education reform." The core of the Times' argument is that the Bush administration undermined NCLB "when it saddled the states with new responsibilities and shortchanged them by $6 billion." We've covered this argument before (click here). Bottom line: the editorial writers assume that states will choose unnecessarily expensive assessment mechanisms and achieve no efficiencies in their implementation of NCLB. (It's also worth recalling that they're getting $4 billion in additional federal funds to cover such costs.) Now, the Times uses the GAO's recent report (reviewed below) to argue that the administration has been lax in its oversight of state implementation of NCLB, a critique not evidently shared by state departments of education and legislators now howling about the federal intrusion due to NCLB. "Part of the problem," the editors complain, "is the lingering presumption that public schooling is largely a 'local matter' - even when states contravene the national interest by doing a horrendous job." So, is the Times now for a national education ministry to run the schools? Perhaps. We're not. Yes, they're right that portions of NCLB are ill-drafted, that states are exploiting some loopholes in that statute, and that the administration sometimes lets them get away with it. In the Times's words, "the Department has blithely accepted bogus graduation rates and unrealistic progress schedules, and simply rolled over for plans that depict teacher preparation as just fine - when the whole country knows that the teacher corps, especially in poor areas, is riddled with unqualified and inexperienced people." True. But it's also true that some states are failing to live up to their responsibilities by providing those bogus data, unrealistic schedules, and loophole-riddled plans. If states, which bear constitutional responsibility for educating their people, insist on not doing so, nobody in Washington is going to be able to make them. The Times's solution is to "provide the states with the money it promised and build the capacity and authority that the Education Department needs to further reform." Which sounds ominously like underwriting misbehavior by the states and building an even larger federal bureaucracy.
"How to rescue education reform," New York Times, October 10, 2004