So if you hadn’t yet heard, Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act is a shitty law that does nothing but suck resources away from schools for creating and administering tests on a state level, and then pulling funding from “underperforming” schools. Between that and cuts in national and local government budgets for education, public schools are really eating shit right now.
I’ve missed out on most of the NCLB act, it’s really just starting to kick in now that I’m on my way out of High School, but my school has been tumbling a steep slope for the last few years. Budgets for things like the language department (my favorite) and the art department have been cut drastically, auxiliary district funds have been consolidated into the principal fund1. I can’t say that all this is due to the Bush’s educational platform, Minnesota’s governor is also a jackass poorly funding education, but it’s great that the NCLB act is starting to be contested.
Both the Utah bill, which requires educators there to spend as little state money as possible in carrying out the law’s requirements, and the teachers’ union lawsuit filed today, rest heavily on the same section of the federal law, which forbids federal officials from requiring states to spend their own money on the law.
I sure hope this law gets taken down, in my experience it’s really helped to mess things up. I can’t say it’s just because of school funding, but in the last six years my experience in public schools has dramatically worsened, and something is really going wrong in one of the most important parts of America right now.
1 By thousands and thousands of dollars to just my high school, I can’t remember exactly, but all the teachers took the time the day after the 2004-2005 year budget came out last year to draw out financially what is happening, Language dept. had something like 1/4 of the funds from the district that they did before.
2 Which leaves individual departments within individual schools around the district with even less to buy supplies and pay teachers.
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