No Child Left Liberal

With the nomination of Bush advisor, Margaret Spellings, as the Education Secretary there will be the inevitable regurgitation of the merits of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLBA). Recent studies have found the US will not be the world’s largest economy in 75 years. Current trends indicate China and India will both surpass the US by 2100 and perhaps sooner. Statistics also reveal that for every engineer who graduates from a U.S. college, 40 graduate in China. Considering this, it seems the introduction of NCLBA is a good solution to the problem of increasing student performance across the country. It’s similar to the introduction of the PATRIOT act, at the time when it was touted as reform that would make the country safer it also seemed like the right solution. The reality is different, like the PATRIOT act NCLBA has increased the level of government intervention in citizens’ lives.

Schools are held to federal standards that have given the government unprecedented control over public education. Mussolini said, "At every hour of every day, I can tell you on which page of which book each schoolchild in Italy is studying". Substitute Mussolini for Bush, make the sentence grammatically incorrect, and replace Italy with the US and that’s where we are headed.

Spellings has bi-partisan support, Kennedy and Frist have both remarked that she is a great candidate for the job. Is she really going to have any say in policy? Of course not, like Rice she is a puppet in a bigger game and has been rewarded for her blind loyalty.