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Trapped (Clint Bolick and Star Parker)

On March 23, our two organizations took a major step to test the vitality of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and expand educational opportunities for children in large urban districts across the nation. We filed legal actions in California against the Los Angeles and Compton Unified School Districts for their failure to make school choice available for children in failing schools.

The cornerstone of NCLB is that every child is entitled to attend a quality public school and those in failing schools should not be forced to remain in inadequate schools while improvements are being made. Rather, the law makes clear that it is the right of every child to attend an effective school today.

But in school districts across the nation, that promise remains unfulfilled; and to date, the sanctions to noncompliance – a cut-off of federal education funds – have gone unused. 

Along with the legal actions, CURE and the Alliance for School Choice asked U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings to take action against the school districts and to impose sanctions for noncompliance. These actions, the first of their kind, will in large measure determine whether NCLB will accomplish its mission of providing high-quality educational opportunities to all schoolchildren or is merely another empty promise.

Secretary Spellings said during an April 5 speech at a school choice forum in Jamaica, New York that said she had directed Henry L. Johnson, the department’s assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education, to look into the matter, but she hinted that she would take a hard line against recalcitrant districts.

“There are a number of steps we can take to enforce these provisions, including withholding federal funds,” she said.

The Bush Administration has proposed a partial remedy in the form of the Opportunity Scholarships for Kids, which it has proposed as part of the 2006 budget.  The proposal is a $100 million demonstration project that would allow communities to compete for grants to provide scholarships for private schools or additional supplemental services to schools that have been failing for six or more years.  This bill is a good first step in recognizing that public schools alone cannot solve the crisis of inner-city education.  We must look to all possible educational life preservers, and worry less about where children are educated and more about whether they are educated.  

Nationally, a tremendous mismatch exists between the number of children eligible to transfer from failing to better-performing public schools under NCLB and the number of seats available in better-performing public schools.  In 2002, the New York Times reported that in Baltimore, for instance, 30,000 children were attending failing schools, but there were only 194 slots available for transfer to better-performing public schools within the district; and in Chicago, 145,000 children were eligible for only 1,170 spaces.

For the 2003-04 school year, the California Department of Education reported that 250,000 students in the LA system were eligible to transfer to a better-performing school.  Yet, there have only been 527 transfers. The notion that only two of every thousand families with kids in failing schools want to get them into better schools is absurd. In Compton, zero students have received transfers despite appalling educational conditions.

Los Angeles has by far the nation’s highest number of students in failing schools who are eligible to transfer.  Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa has called for mayoral takeover of the school district, declaring that to serve the students it is necessary to “take on the powerful and entrenched interests” and “shake up the system.”  Compton, meanwhile, was already under state control, which did not significantly improve educational conditions.

Regardless of one’s perspective on the specifics of the No Child Left Behind Act, clearly it reflected a good-faith, bipartisan attempt to bring our nation closer to achieving its moral obligations, by holding schools accountable and by providing options for children trapped in failing schools.  The two are interconnected: without meaningful parental choice for children in failing schools, there can be no true accountability.

For more than 50 years since Brown v. Board of Education, our nation has struggled to make good on the sacred promise of equal educational opportunities.  For many that promise has become a reality; but for millions of others, particularly low-income and disproportionately minority children, that promise remains a cruel illusion.

Clint Bolick is president of the Alliance For School Choice (www.AllianceForSchoolChoice.org). Star Parker is president of CURE, Coalition on Urban Renewal and Education (www.urbancure.org).