George W. Bush really IS the education president, says Sol Stern in the summer issue of City Journal.

Though now pilloried by many Democrats and educrats, Bush's landmark No Child Left Behind Act not only advances smarter reading instruction, and accountability, but also contains an important "sleeper" school choice provision becoming known to more and more parents, says Stern.

One key component of the Bush-driven NCLB legislation is more solid, phonics-based reading instruction over the lax "whole language" approach. Stern notes:

....All 50 states have submitted proposals to the Department of Education requesting Reading First grants and vowing that they will use the funds only for science-backed phonics instruction, and they have already received more than $2 billion. Though it’s too early to say that the nation’s schools are “hooked on phonics,” the schools are more aware than ever that scientific evidence, not ideology, should guide decisions about reading instruction.

State-driven proficiency testing of students in core subjects was, of course, another key component of NCLB - with results broken down by demographics. So too, the hammer allowing students to leave schools not making "adequate yearly progress" on test scores. But in urban school districts such as New York or Washington, D.C., Stern points out, there aren't enough places in better public schools for those left behind at chronically underperforming facilities.

Which is one place school choice rears its head. While vouchers were politically D.O.A. due to Democratic resistance when NCLB was being formulated....

...a major advance for school choice did make it into the act: Supplemental Educational Services (SES). Largely unnoticed by most commentators at the time of NCLB’s signing, the SES provision has turned out to be the new law’s school choice sleeper.

..(it) gives disadvantaged students in schools that have failed for three straight years a voucher—worth up to $1,700 in some states—to buy tutoring services from licensed providers, both public and private, including religious institutions....more than 110,000 children across the nation received SES tutoring in 2002–03....that number will surely climb as reform organizations rush to get the word out.

Tom Carroll, a seasoned school choice activist in upstate New York, thinks that over time SES will whet parents’ appetite for more reforms. “What parents are willing to accept from their public school districts will change when they see that there are private groups and churches that may be doing a better job of raising their kids’ academic performance,” Carroll says...

This - along with the more pressing threat of competition posed by public charter schools - is precisely what the National Education Association and its state and local affiliates fear. The Washington Education Association has even managed to get on the fall ballot Referendum 55, to rescind an exceedingly modest charter school bill passed by our legislature last spring.

The WEA worries public charter schools will bleed money from existing schools due to declining head counts, though in Seattle enrollment has declined to the extent officials are mulling the closure of 11 schools. More consolidation would surely result from real choice, and over time, competition would spur improvements in Seattle's troubled system.

Yet the WEA's retrograde stance should come as no surprise: the leader of one of its local chapters, in south suburban Seattle, earlier this year accused charter school backers of using Nazi propoganda tactics.

Such is the fruit of a government-funded monopoly which puts its own entitlement ahead of society's mandate to properly educate children.

As Stern reports, the federal government has fed $200 billion to local school districts over the last four decades. In addition, he writes:

...combined "state, local, and federal expenditures on K-12 public education have tripled in inflation-adjusted dollars since 1960 and are nearing half a trillion dollars a year. The nation today spends from 30 to 80 percent more per pupil than other industrialized countries. Yet the U.S. usually comes in around 15th in international comparisons of student performance in math and reading."

The system is broken, and Bush has launched a serious effort to begin fixing it.

There's a long way to go, and it is President Bush who will best utilize the White House's bully pulpit to further champion effective reading instruction; accountability; and school choice.

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at August 10, 2004 07:59 AM

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