What The Senate Is Sellin’, Informed Parents Aren’t Buyin’
Thanks to a buy off, I mean buy-in, by the teachers’ unions, the Senate now feels ready to push ahead with their Every Child Achieves Act. They have dressed it up pretty with superficial changes meant to make parents happy, but cross dressing this bad boy won’t fool many parents who have not only read the bill, but lived through its predecessor NCLB. We know what double speak sounds like and that prohibition without enforcement is as powerful as Barney Fife with his empty gun in Kandahar. 
Instead of peeling back federal intrusion, the NCLB replacement bill steps up federal meddling, monitoring and essentially unfunded mandates for expensive testing. Parents know that, once they get a little bit of data, the Department of Education and/or Congress will feel compelled to act on it, like Pavolv’s dog when the bell rang. Parents have good reason to be worried about what programs such data might inspire and, are justified in their continued dissatisfaction with the details in this growing bill given what history has shown.
Instead of peeling back federal intrusion, the NCLB replacement bill steps up federal meddling, monitoring and essentially unfunded mandates for expensive testing. Parents know that, once they get a little bit of data, the Department of Education and/or Congress will feel compelled to act on it, like Pavolv’s dog when the bell rang. Parents have good reason to be worried about what programs such data might inspire and, are justified in their continued dissatisfaction with the details in this growing bill given what history has shown.Alexander and the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee have been telling parents that this bill returns control of education to the states and prohibits federal involvement in state education plans. This is supposed to reassure us. Remember that prohibition against the federal government being in any way involved in a national assessment that was included in the General Education Provisions Act? Yeah, that didn’t stop the USDoED from fully funding, to the tune of $330 million, both the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortia and the Partnership for Assessment of College and Career Readiness which developed a national assessment.
Remember the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment that said no federal program could fund any survey, analysis, or evaluation that reveals information concerning mental and psychological problems potentially embarrassing to the student and his/her family, or sex behavior and attitudes? That didn’t stop the Kevin Jennings of the US Department of Ed from issuing a 10 page memo on October 26, 2010 to all public and private schools and colleges, detailing how they were to support Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) behavior or face the loss of federal Title IX funds. The department used a twisted interpretation of Title IX,which forbade harassment based on race, color, national origin, sex, or disability based on federal civil rights laws, to force educators, under threat of prosecution, to “promote” the LGBT lifestyle as being normal. In order to prove that they are teaching effectively they will have to assess whether student’s sexual attitudes match What The Senate Is Sellin’, Informed Parents Aren’t Buyin’ » Missouri Education Watchdog:
