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December 08, 2006

NYT adds to Congress's to-do list

Probably the biggest education-related piece in the MSM today is the New York Times' editorial on No Child Left Behind:

It’s impossible to brand No Child Left Behind as a failure, because its agenda has never been carried out. The law was supposed to remake schools that serve poor and minority students by breaking with the age-old practice of staffing those schools with poorly trained and poorly educated teachers. States were supposed to provide students with highly qualified teachers in all core courses by the beginning of the current academic year. That didn’t happen.

The country would be much further down the road toward complying with No Child Left Behind if the Department of Education had given the states clear direction and the technical assistance they needed. Instead, the department simply ignored the provision until recently and allowed states to behave as though the teacher quality problem did not exist. Thanks to this approach, the country must now start from scratch on what is far and away the most crucial provision of the law.

I think it's interesting that the paper zeroed in on the "highly qualified teacher" provision rather than any of the other controversial aspects of the law (take your pick--AYP, the deadline of 2014, USDOE's recent growth model pilot program).  In fact, the editorial staff takes critics of the law to task, in essence saying that we can't afford to push the deadline out and that schools must be held accountable. 

Secondly, if Congress is going to make HQT top priority during reauthorization as the Times recommends, alternative teacher certification has got to be part of the mix.  There's just no way around it.  As Arthur Levine's recent report details, ed schools are seriously behind the curve, and if we're serious about the 2014 deadline we don't have time to wait for ed schools to get it together. 

Between this and the Paul Tough column from last week, I think we're seeing a pretty significant sea change at the New York Times on education matters.  For whatever deficiencies Tough's article may contain, I think the most remarkable aspect of all this is that the Times is talking about this stuff at all. 

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