According to the Post yesterday and the Times today, time's up for reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act this year, and Congress has nothing to bring to class.
Despite dozens of hearings, months of public debate and hundreds of hours of Congressional negotiation, neither the House nor the Senate has produced a bill that would formally start the reauthorization process.
To some, this really comes as no surprise. The political alliances of the bill were really tricky to begin with and nobody wants to attach their name to anything that Bush supports (I wrote about the decomposing alliances earlier this year). But it is a shame that K-12 ed policy is going to fall off the radar once again. Hopefully, local educators will take this impasse as a sign to implement more innovative and engaging classroom strategies on their own.
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Adam Doster, a contributing editor at In These Times, is a Chicago-based freelance writer and former reporter-blogger for Progress Illinois.
