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No child law is unconstitutional says panel { February 24 2005 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0502240301feb24,1,3433087.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hedhttp://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0502240301feb24,1,3433087.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed
Panel says `No Child' law left the Constitution behind
By Sam Dillon
New York Times News Service
Published February 24, 2005
A bipartisan panel of state legislators that conducted a yearlong study of President Bush's No Child Left Behind education law pronounced it flawed on Wednesday.
Further, the panel characterized the law as a convoluted and unconstitutional education reform initiative that has usurped state and local control of public schools.
The panel's report, based on hearings in six cities, praised the law's goal of ending the gap in scholastic achievement between white and minority students. But most of the 77-page report, which the Education Department rebutted Wednesday, was devoted to a detailed inventory and discussion of the education program's flaws.
It said the law's accountability system, which punishes schools whose students fail to improve steadily on standardized tests, undermined school improvement efforts already under way in many states and relied on the wrong indicators. It said, moreover, that the No Child Left Behind rules for educating disabled students conflict with another federal law and its bureaucratic requirements fail to recognize the tapestry of educational challenges faced by teachers in the nation's 15,000 school districts.
"Under NCLB, the federal government's role has become excessively intrusive in the day-to-day operations of public education," the National Conference of State Legislatures said in the report, which was written by a task force of 16 state legislators and six legislative staffers.
Several education experts said the task force had accurately captured the views held by thousands of state lawmakers and local educators.
Nine state legislatures are considering various challenges to the law, and the Utah Senate is about to vote on a bill, already approved by the Utah House, that would require state education officials to give higher priority to Utah's education laws than to the federal law. In Illinois, the Ottawa High School district filed suit against the Education Department this month in federal court, arguing that No Child Left Behind contradicts provisions of the federal Individuals With Disabilities Education Act.
The National Conference, which has criticized the federal law in the past, represents the nation's 50 state legislatures, with a membership that includes 3,657 Republicans, 3,656 Democrats, as well as a few dozen elected from smaller parties, as independents or without any party affiliation.
An assistant secretary of education, Ray Simon, met with members of the task force in Washington on Wednesday to discuss the report.
"The department will continue to work with every state to address their concerns and make this law work for their children," Simon said in a statement. "But the report could be interpreted as wanting to reverse the progress we've made."
He added: "No Child Left Behind is bringing new hope and new opportunity to families throughout America, and we will not reverse course."
One chapter of the report notes that the Constitution does not delegate powers to educate America's citizens to the federal government, thereby leaving education under state control. The report contends that No Child Left Behind has greatly expanded federal powers to a degree that is unconstitutional.
"This assertion of federal authority into an area historically reserved to the states has had the effect of curtailing additional state innovations and undermining many that had occurred during the past three decades," states the report.
"The task force does not believe that NCLB is constitutional," the report said.
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