This past Saturday the Obama administration released its plan for the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, which is hereafter to be referred to by its new—well, make that old—name as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. ESEA was originally passed by Lyndon Johnson in 1965 and has had several face lifts over the years till it became what we know it as today.
But the Obama administration is giving up the No Child Left Behind moniker, ostensibly to distance itself from the Bush version of the law. If only education reform were as simple as giving up a tainted name.
This is what we know right now: the new ESEA proposal is a 41-page blueprint. Much of it is remarkably uncontroversial: Obama wants new academic standards that are more comprehensive. The goal is to have all high school students college-ready by 2020. The new plan would take students’ rate of academic growth and improvement into consideration when measuring school achievement, regardless of the level the student started at. The state will stop offering vouchers to parents to send their children to private schools if their local public school is failing. Hard to argue over, no?
While the new ESEA is still just a proposal, education advocates are voicing concern over already-implemented initiatives that really show Obama’s ideological stance on ed policy and how ESEA will shake out for communities of color. Race to The Top, a national competition for $4.35 billion worth of federal money dangles up to $700 million in front of states that adopt Secretary of Eduation Arne Duncan’s dramatic
| Baptists decry Texas board’s votes on textbook standards |  |  |
| By Robert Marus | |||
| Tuesday, March 16, 2010 | |||
| AUSTIN, Texas (ABP) -- A Texas board that sets curriculum standards for the nation’s second-largest textbook market has voted, along party lines, to leave a conservative imprint on history, social studies and economics courses. And the effects won't be felt in the Lone Star State alone. The Texas State Board of Education voted 10-5 March 12 to approve a set of social-studies standards that many textbook publishers use to guide their publication standards. All of the board’s Republican members voted in favor of the guidelines, and all of its Democratic members voted against them. A Religious Right voting bloc on the board had, over the previous two months, won scores of contentious votes inserting more than 100 amendments into a set of standards that a group of professional educators had recommended. Among the amendments was the move to excise Thomas Jefferson from a section on how Enlightenment philosophy influenced the founders, replacing him with 13th-century theologian Thomas Aquinas and 16th-century Reformer John Calvin. And the board’s conservative majority rejected -- again along party lines -- an amendment that would have required textbooks to “examine the reasons the Founding Fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion over all others.” Several of the board’s conservative members have argued -- both during board meetings and in other public statements -- that church-state separation is a myth or an incorrect interpretation of the First Amendment. The first 15 words of that amendment -- “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” -- are generally divided by legal scholars into two halves known as the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause. Thinkers, politicians and judges dating back to Jefferson have interpreted the two clauses, when taken together, as requiring an institutional separation of religion and government.
“I think what we’d like to say in reaction to that is that it’s unfortunate that such a basic understanding of the First Amendment was victim to the hyper-politicization on the State Board of Education,” said Stephen Reeves, the CLC’s legislative counsel. “But it just reinforces the need for churches -- Baptists and others -- to educate their students about how the First Amendment protects religion in this country.” Reeves emphasized “that the First Amendment -- both the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise [Clause] -- protect religion, and do so even when the government tries to favor religion.” Other critics were less measured in their reaction to the board’s decisions on the First Amendment as well as other changes to educators’ original recommendation for the standards. “What I’ve been telling people is the Texas State Board of Education obviously can’t remove the First Amendment to the Constitution, but they can do something equally frightening -- they can erase it from kids’ history classes. And that’s what they voted to do last week,” said Ryan Valentine, deputy director of the progressive group Texas Freedom Network and a member of University Baptist Church in Austin.
Other changes to the curriculum include:
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