Washington Post: DOZENS OF REPUBLICANS TURN AGAINST BUSH’S NCLB ACT
More than 50 GOP members of the House and Senate — including the House’s second-ranking Republican — will introduce legislation that could severely undercut President Bush’s signature domestic achievement, the No Child Left Behind Act, by allowing states to opt out of its testing mandates.
One high-ranking Republican lawmaker is convinced that the burdens and red tape of the No Child Left Behind Act are unacceptably onerous. For a White House fighting off attacks on its war policy and dealing with a burgeoning scandal at the Justice Department, the GOP dissidents’ move is a fresh blow on a new front, reports Jonathan Weisman and Amit R. Paley in the Washington Post.
Some Republicans said yesterday that a backlash against the law was inevitable. Many voters in affluent suburban and exurban districts — GOP strongholds — think their schools have been adversely affected by the law. Once-innovative public schools have increasingly become captive to federal testing mandates, jettisoning education programs not covered by those tests, siphoning funds from programs for the talented and gifted, and discouraging creativity, critics say. “Republicans voted for No Child Left Behind holding their noses,” said Michael J. Petrilli, an Education Department official during Bush’s first term who is now a critic of the law. “But now with the president so politically weak, conservatives can vote their conscience.”
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