Education lawsuit is a political issue
WASHINGTON – Last Wednesday’s lawsuit by the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, against the federal No Child Left Behind Act received plenty of news media coverage.
In some of the nation’s largest newspapers, the suit received front-page billing, as well it should have.
After all, it isn’t every day that a legal challenge is launched against a program that has been the centerpiece of President Bush’s education agenda for the past four years. And when the challenge is brought by a union that represents 2.7 million elementary and secondary school teachers, it is that much more compelling.
The suit alleges that the law, which requires public schools to show “adequate student progress” in reading and math verified by annual standardized tests, is underfunded and creating a serious financial burden on cash-strapped local school districts.
Nine local districts in three states have joined the NEA suit, which says Congress should more than double current spending on the law from $12.7 billion this year to $28 billion.
“Today, we’re standing up for children whose parents are saying ‘no more’ to costly federal regulations that drain money from classrooms and spend it on paperwork, bureaucracy and big testing companies,” NEA President Reg Weaver said in announcing the suit.
But many, if not most, of the stories reporting the suit left out one essential ingredient of the story: The NEA has long been an opponent of No Child Left Behind, opposing it almost immediately after it was proposed by Bush in the 2000 presidential campaign and campaigning against it with money and political pressure as it made its way through Congress in 2001.
Aside from what it saw as too much federal involvement in local schools, one of the provisions of the law the teacher union frowned on requires teacher qualifications and quality, as well as student performance, to improve.
And once it was enacted, the union continued its opposition, using the argument that not enough money was put behind the law to allow it to be effectively implemented. It is a charge that has been taken up by Democrats in Congress and one that was used against Bush by Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry in the 2004 campaign.
In the third Bush-Kerry debate last October in Tempe, Ariz., the Democratic candidate said, “The president who talks about No Child Left Behind refused to fully fund – by $28 billion – that particular program so you can make a difference in the lives of those young people. … The president reneged on his promise to fund No Child Left Behind.”
That $28 billion Kerry mentioned is the shortfall figure the NEA uses in its argument now. It’s not a coincidence. In the 2004 campaign, the NEA spent $1.16 million to fund ads, mailings and other activities to defeat Bush. Many of the ads attacked No Child Left Behind.
At their annual convention last July in Washington, NEA members were urged by Weaver and other union leaders to host “house parties” before the November elections to build opposition to a law that “forces us to spend money we don’t have, on programs we don’t need, to get test results that don’t matter.”
NEA also spent another $235,000 on behalf of Kerry. Kerry and the NEA have long been close friends and allies. The union endorsed Kerry in 2004. Moreover, the NEA spent more than $1.6 million on the 2004 congressional elections, the vast majority of it – 91 percent – on behalf of Democratic candidates.
There’s nothing wrong with any of that. It’s all a legitimate part of democracy. But news reports on the lawsuit that failed to mention the politics involved, and in effect cast the NEA as a neutral party here, just didn’t tell the whole story, or at least put it into proper perspective or context. The lawsuit is as much a political fight as it is a fight over education quality.