State lawmakers want No Child Left Behind overhaul

WASHINGTON -- State lawmakers issued a scathing rebuke of President Bush's education overhaul on Wednesday, calling it a coercive, unconstitutional act that sets an unreachable goal of getting every child up to par in reading and math.

The National Conference of State Legislatures wants changes in the fundamental parts of the No Child Left Behind Act: how student progress is measured, how schools are punished if they fall short and who decides when the rules are waived for struggling districts. Overall, the proposal would give states significantly more power to administer the law.

As a bipartisan statement from all 50 legislatures, the report is significant for its sweep and tone, underscoring tensions over which level of government has final say over education. Schools are traditionally a state matter, but the federal role has grown much more aggressive as Bush and Congress have ordered higher achievement among all students.

The new report contends the law leads to unintended consequences and that the federal government is indifferent to them -- the lowering of academic standards, increasing segregation in school, and the driving away of top teachers from needy schools. It claims the government is also violating the Constitution by coercing state compliance.

Republican state Sen. Steve Saland of New York, co-chairman of the task force that reviewed the law, compared it to a "weed" that has stifled state innovation. Co-chairman Steve Kelley, a Democratic state senator from Minnesota, said the federal government is right to target the achievement gap among poor and minorities but wrong to meddle with the states.

Still, at a news conference in Washington, leaders from the state group also tried to send a cooperative message. They spoke of working with Congress, the White House and new Education Secretary Margaret Spellings to get legislative changes and more state flexibility.

State leaders say the law's goal of getting 100 percent of children proficient in reading and math by 2014 is "admirable but absolutely unattainable." They say it will put states at constant risk of lawsuits when schools fall short and claim they were underfunded.

Unclear is what will happen if the states don't get the changes they want. At least nine state legislatures are considering bills that challenge the law in different degrees. In the least, the report is a firm form of protest to Bush on his signature education law.

The report says states should be able to:

-- Decide how much weight to give to standardized tests and any other measures of student performance schools use. The law says tests must be the primary way progress is measured.

-- Measure the academic growth of students as they move among grades, as opposed to comparing the test scores of the current year's students to last year's, as is now required.

-- Decide when teachers can be exempted from having to be "highly qualified" under law.

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On the Net:

National Conference of State Legislatures: http://www.ncsl.org