In all their years of "showing who's in charge" and ideological chest-beating, however, the Legislature has never stooped to hurting children - until now. This time they will hurt children, lots of them. They will hurt them directly and hurt the ones who are in the most need. House Bill 135, the measure to opt out of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), damages children's education by turning back millions of dollars in federal funds that support education for the handicapped and the disadvantaged among Utah's school children.
In Salt Lake District the loss is reported as $9.3 million, or just under $400 a child for the district's 24,000 or so students. Under current tax laws, this money is irreplaceable. Maybe other districts are better off, maybe others are worse. It doesn't matter - 24,000 casualties are more than enough to give anybody pause.
The bill has the usual key benefit for Utah conservatives - it allows them to thumb their noses at somebody. (In this case it's the Bush administration for daring to correct an educational system that has allowed school districts to hide their failures for decades.)
The bill also would replace the burdensome NCLB mandatory reporting system, based on testing in two subjects, with a burdensome state system of mandatory reporting of testing in four subjects. So much for saving money. The bill also would impact procedures that allow educators to monitor the progress of the less-successful groups, thus removing the key reform of NCLB. The best kids will again be used to bring up the scores of the worst, and failure will once again be safely hidden.
So, to recap, the bill's sponsors have been so quick to jump on the states' rights bandwagon that they've overlooked that they're giving the feds back $110 million (which they propose to replace with a $63 million state surplus) and they're increasing the reporting burden while eliminating a good portion of its effectiveness. We're spending $63 million to lose $110 million for little or no benefit. No Child Left Behind is far from perfect but it's better than this dog by miles.
The primary point, however, is still that this bill hurts kids. There is no way you can take $8,000 to $10,000 out of a classroom and not hurt those kids' education. Children are our future economic stability, our future caretakers and our hope for the future of America and the world. To degrade them is to degrade ourselves.
The cowboys in the Legislature can spout justifications to their hearts' content on this one; you can't justify hurting kids. As an analyst, I found this bill to be financially unsound, administratively cumbersome and morally deficient. As a parent I find this bill to be a whitewashed pile of stinking offal.
So call the governor, folks, or call his education deputy, Tim Bridgewater, and tell them the only sensible and honorable thing to do is to forget HB135. It would be nice to not have to, but history shows the legislative majority is short on sense, and they are currently expected to pass this travesty.
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Jim Jenkin is a research specialist at the University of Utah School of Medicine, a member of the Greater Avenues Community Council and the Salt Lake City Transportation Advisory Board. His twin daughters attend school in the Salt Lake School District.
