One of the Gentry-Left Changes His Mind on NCLB 
By Martin Harris

If you look up the erudite Atlantic Magazine (formerly the Atlantic Monthly, and still related in corporate organization, even after its headquarters-flight from Boston to the District of Columbia) on Wikipedia, you’ll find it described as "generally considered to have a liberal slant", about the same categorization which is awarded to The Center for American Progress, in which think-tank one Matt Miller draws a paycheck as a Senior Fellow. Thus, when said Miller takes keyboard-on-lap to write a piece highly critical of public school boards (and teacher unions) for "crippling education in America" and specifically focuses on their refusal to support national achievement targets, he’s sounding less like the quintessential gentry-leftist whose Washington politicians made sure, seven years ago, to defend "states’ rights" with regard to the testing of student achievement, and a lot more like the Hamiltonian rightists who argued for a national test plan. The Miller article has appeared in the January/February issue of The Atlantic Magazine and can be seen, in part (to see the whole you must pay real money, a genuflex on the part of Atlantic’s editors to the capitalistic need to make sales so as to pay bills) on its Web page under the title "First, Kill All the School Boards". Shakespearean readers will remember the "first-kill-all-the-lawyers" similarity in Henry VI.

Miller’s argument is exactly that which the Right in Congress tried, and failed, to build into the design of No Child Left Behind back in 2001-2. NCLB has been, ever-since, much derided by the Left in general and educators in particular, as its Web site shows, with a section devoted to "Teachers Speak Out Against NCLB". It is the Bush Administration initiative which, among other things, requires that public school students’ test scores actually be used to evaluate the quality of the job those schools are doing. The Right wanted to use a testing protocol which dates back to 1969-70, called the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and provides for the testing of carefully selected statistical samples of students in every State in Math, Reading, and a few other subjects. Using the NAEP test results, which are published in the annual National Digest of Educational Statistics but not locally in most states or school districts because, I’d guess, they’re so dismal (typically in the low 200’s out of a possible 500, as I’ve reported frequently in this space) one can make not only state-by-state comparisons for, say, cost or class size against scores, or for score improvement over time (not much) or even for the relative achievement of various ethnic cohorts. In contrast, most states, Vermont included, have taken advantage of the Left’s successful insertion of a states’ rights provision in NCLB authorizing them to purchase, use, and report the results of specially-designed tests on which, miraculously, their students appear to do much better than on the NAEP’s. Vermont, for example, has been through VtDRA, NECAP, and a few other custom-designed tests in search of the privately-designed miracle in which, as in Lake Woebegone, all the students will demonstrate that they are above average, and –additional virtue—none of the test results can be compared with most other states because they aren’t administered there.

Miller further argues that, as a result of the Left authorizing, and States and local districts accepting, hiding behind these designed-to-be-easier tests, American students are now falling further and further behind their internal peers in such basic skills as math and reading.

If you’re on the Right, you won’t find Mr. Miller’s proposed remedy for this situation attractive. He could have –but chose not to—argue that the NAEP tests be used as the sole national standard, and such localized tests as, say, VtDRA or NECAP, be junked: a very simple proposal and, in fact, what the drafters of NCLB wanted in 2001, precisely because they wanted the nationwide standard, which has been in place for 38 years, but which has received Progressively (pun intended) less publicity, to be the well-known benchmark for comparisons between states and over time. Instead, he proposes –typically for the Left— more Federal money to go to local public education, "limiting the school boards’ role by sharply increasing the federal government’s share of education spending" and leaving unspoken the quietly understood maxim about supposedly free money –that there are, inevitably, controlling strings which come with it.
 

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights