Elmer Smith: On education, this is a president left behind
He bounded on stage to the warm welcome of an adoring crowd. He drew loud cheers with a scathing critique of President Bush's signature education plan, calling No Child Left Behind "the emptiest slogan in the history of American politics."
Fast forward two years. Candidate Obama is now president, and No Child Left Behind is no longer in need of a major overhaul. Obama's proposal to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act would give No Child Left Behind only a slight tuneup.
He would scrap the punitive Adequate Yearly Progress standard that labeled a third of public schools and most of their students failures and replace it with an ill-defined goal that all students should graduate from high school prepared for college and a career.
"Under these guidelines," the president said in a weekly radio address, "schools that achieve excellence or show real progress will be rewarded."
Local districts "will be encouraged to commit to change in schools that are clearly letting their students down," the president said.
He got a chance to demonstrate what he meant by that two weeks ago when he went out of his way to applaud a decision last month to fire every teacher in Rhode Island's Central Falls High School.
If a school "doesn't show signs of improvement," he told the New York Times, "then there's got to be a sense of accountability. That's what happened in Rhode Island."
No, that's not what happened. What really happened is that teachers in a school that had raised
