Editorial: Education act overhaul long overdue in Congress

What do you get when you have state and federal administrators who don’t respect federal education guidelines and a Congress that agrees that its overbearing law needs a serious rewrite but hasn’t gotten around to it?

A big, fat mess that doesn’t do schoolchildren any good.

And so it goes with the No Child Left Behind Act, which was adopted in 2001, and calls for perfection by 2014. Many who voted for it back then had reservations about its unrealistic goals, but they figured the law would be revised by now. However, like seemingly all issues in Washington, D.C., these days, members of Congress haven’t been able to reach agreement since beginning work on a renewal of the law four years ago.

Into this leadership vacuum has stepped U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who is openly advertising waivers for states that want to avoid the increasingly hard-to-hit student proficiency targets, and state administrators who are gladly taking him up on these offers.

However, there is only so far Duncan and the states can go.

As U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said in July, “If we give over to the administration complete authority to determine from the rooftops what those requirements are going to be, I think we have not done our responsibility.”

That’s true, but the answer isn’t to have Duncan step back if Congress refuses to step up.

In the meantime, we can’t fault actions like those taken by Idaho. In June, Idaho Schools Superintendent Tom Luna informed the feds that it would be keeping the same proficiency standards the state had imposed the previous two years. Under federal law, states have to continually raise the bar until reaching 100 percent proficiency by 2014 in math and reading. States can maintain the same benchmarks for three straight years, and this is what Luna proposed. The feds and the State Board of Education agreed.

However, when Montana petitioned to keep its benchmarks for a fourth year, the feds declined and have threatened to pull some Title I funding if the state does not comply by Aug. 15. Ironically, such funding is used to help students reach proficiency, so withholding it is counterproductive. The federally mandated benchmarks would put an additional 128 Montana schools into the “failing” category but, as the Billings Gazette points out, many of those schools have achieved remarkable improvements over the years.

It’s this rigid adherence to unrealistic standards and the failure of the law to recognize significant successes that have turned so many people against the No Child Left Behind Act. Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky, Kansas, Michigan and Utah are other states that have recently requested relief from the law.

As another school year approaches, Congress needs to stop granting itself waivers and get cracking on a revision of the No Child Left Behind Act. Otherwise, its grade will go from Incomplete to Fail.