Obama: Clinton and Edwards made a "serious mistake" in voting against suspending enforcement of NCLB

Manchester, N.H.

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No Child Left Behind was designed to force schools to track data on low-income and minority students and hold the schools accountable if those pupils did not do well.

Obama faulted Clinton and Edwards for not supporting a 2003 Senate measure that would have suspended enforcement of the law if it wasn't adequately funded. The New York senator and former North Carolina senator made "a serious mistake" by not voting for it, Obama said.

"Forcing our teachers, our principals and our schools to accomplish all of this without the resources they need is wrong," Obama said. "Promising high-quality teachers in every classroom, and then leaving the support and the pay for those teachers behind, is wrong. Labeling a school and its students as failures one day, and then throwing your hands up and walking away from them the next, is wrong."

Spokesmen for Clinton and Edwards had no immediate response to requests for comment.

Obama's plan would spend $10 billion a year on programs for children up to 5 years old. It would expand Head Start and other preschool programs and increase the availability of child care to working families.

"For every dollar we invest in these programs, we get $10 back in reduced welfare rolls, fewer healthcare costs and less crime," Obama said.

The program would also expand training for teachers and reward those who work in underperforming schools. It would offer $200 million to states and districts that lengthen their school day and academic year.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-obama21nov21,1,5553578.story?coll=la-headlines-nation&track=crosspromo

just another hogwash by Bush. It should be repealed completely. Figure it out. Republicans don't want public education. They want everything to be private (schools, jails, toll roads, everything). So NCLB is part of their agenda to break the public school system. Should we fund a loser?

if it was not adequately funded.

They should have shown more backbone.

Hard to fault that logic

To the Hague with all of them.


GObama!

:bounce:

to vote to suspend NCLB until all sections requiring high-stakes testing, school takeovers, making student info available to recruiters, and any other punitive federal action were excised.

I don't want to fully fund that weapon of public education destruction, I want to tombstone it.

by 2009. Then we can start the work of rebuilding the public schools after 30 years of disastrous programs perpetrated by the repubs. All of which were designed to destroy public education.

The premise behind NCLB is demonstrably wrong. What happens when teaching is required to meet testable metrics is that teaching becomes entirely about reaching those test objectives, students be damned. The funding issue was an additional abomination on top of the teach the kids to pass the test idiocy.

I think that states and local governments should fund education. The only exception would be a state with a desperately low standard of living and no realistic way to fund a decent education. The western and southern states are doing fine by now, so funding is not necessary. My hunch is that the only states that need federal funding are a short list including: Maine, West Virginia, and Mississippi.

School systems funded through property taxes result in poor rural and urban areas having underfunded/underperforming school systems while wealthy, generally suburban school systems have well funded and generally overperforming school systems. So that, challenged in court, leads to state-wide income-based taxes for school systems, at which point the question is 'why not fund all schools system across the country on the same basis, adjusted for regional cost differentials?'.

I start from the premise that in an egalitarian meritocracy, each child is entitled to start from approximately the same place, and then make the best of that entitlement that he or she can. The federal government guaranting a base level of education from pre-school to university would seem to be fundamental to that goal.