Four Out Of Five Children Left Behind

Education Secretary Arne Duncan says with massive education budget cuts and a law that kicks the can down the road, No Child Left Behind is about to detonate America's public school system.

With the clock ticking, federal education officials fear that calamity awaits.


If Congress doesn't move quickly to change the No Child Left Behind law, they project that a whopping 82 percent of the nation's public schools could fail to meet proficiency targets this year, facing sanctions that ultimately can include a loss of federal aid. That's up from 37 percent last year.

Beset with a case of the jitters, Education Secretary Arne Duncan is warning of "a slow-moving educational train wreck for children, parents and teachers" — and he's not waiting for the crash.

With Congress showing no signs of meeting a request by President Barack Obama to overhaul the law by this fall, Duncan said he'll use executive authority to waive some requirements of the law, essentially freeing states from any harsh consequences if their schools fail to meet the federal testing requirements.

His threat has set off a clash on Capitol Hill, where key lawmakers say it would be a mistake to bypass Congress. They're not particularly eager to relinquish their authority to the executive branch.

No doubt Republicans in Congress want to eagerly pin failure of schools to meet NCLB standards on the President, but then again they've blocked any reform to the bill since Obama took office, especially since that means federal education money will be slashed across the board for schools that don't meet the standards.  

The problem with NCLB is that on paper it's great, but the money to cover these higher testing standards was never put into the budget.  Instead, school districts were on their own, and told unless they improve they lose funding...which of course makes it harder to improve.  The whole point was to set up schools to fail, and that's exactly where we are ten years after Bush passed NCLB in the first place.  Instead, trillions of dollars went to Iraq and Afghanistan and tax cuts to the wealthy.

And Republicans know if they do nothing, they can point at America's "failing schools" and demand that billions more education dollars get stripped from public schools and put into charter school experiments. 

The game's been rigged for years, folks.  And our kids are the losers.