On Thursday, the Fairfax County, Virginia, school board voted to defy the U.S. Department of Education and not test immigrants with the same reading exams as their native English-speaking peers.

One of the many goals of No Child Left Behind is to decrease the “achievement gap” between rich and poor, white and minority. We already know that isn’t happening. At the center of the debate is often money. If these schools only had more of it, they could solve all their problems. In fact, the states themselves seem to generally favor NCLB if only they got a larger portion of the taxpayers’ income.

Much of what No Child Left Behind seeks to accomplish is “contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution and subversive of the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded.”

Virginia is planning a pilot program for the state’s proposed universal preschool program. The pilot program is to begin next year for 1,000 children and gradually expanded to include all four year olds in the state.

On Tuesday, school districts in Michigan, Vermont and Texas, together with the National Education Association asked a federal appeals court to revive an old lawsuit, arguing that schools should not have to comply with requirements which aren’t funded by the federal government.

Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings notes that college graduates have an unemployment rate of 2% as compared to an overall unemployment rate of 4.6%. This, I guess, is not tolerable.

Why is it, Secretary Spellings, that we are so graciously praising mediocrity and penalizing success?

I want my children to learn so much more than how to answer multiple choice questions based on lower order thinking skills and how to fill in all the bubbles neatly with a number two pencil.

Early America boasted an educational system almost entirely supported by local communities without tax money. And they gave rise to one of the most literate societies of the time, with literacy rates perhaps higher than today. Consder the fact that the Federalist Papers, rarely read today even in universities, were written for and understood by the common man. Today, our focus seems to be minimum competency, measured through minimum competency testing for the purpose of establishing a competitive workforce.

Over the past several years, Columbus Public Schools have lost 7,000 students to charter schools. More students are expected to leave this fall with the implemenation of school vouchers. This may prove to be a serious issue for Columbus Public Schools. According to a survey by KidsOhio, only 49% of CPS parents with preschool-aged children plan on sending their children to CPS when they reach school age.

The National Center for Education Statistics released a study Friday comparing private and public schools and factoring for socio-economic differences between the two populations. The study measured fourth grade and eighth grade reading and math achievement using the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which has been testing children for more than thirty years to provide information to policy makers. In summary, the report concludes that after factoring for population differences, there is little difference in achievement for students in public vs. private education settings.

Research overwhelmingly shows that parental involvement in education leads to greater student achievement. In fact, in his 1984 review of 29 studies of school-parent programs, Herbert J. Walberg found that the family’s involvement in education was “twice as predictive of students’ academic success as family socioeconomic status.” More intensive programs lead to effects ten times greater than other factors.

The National Education Association approved a plan Monday to aggressively lobby Congress to reform the No Child Left Behind Act. Only three of the 9,000 members argued against the lobbying effort, saying the act was too flawed to reform.

America’s largest education union, the NEA has been critical of the act but this will be “the most organized effort to date.”

The No Child Left Behind Act, signed into law by President Bush January 8, 2002 includes as one of its measures the standard to staff our public schools with “highly qualified teachers” by June 2007. The main difficulty with this is that school districts are suffering chronic teacher shortages across the nation.