Civil Rights Coalition Petitions Congress to Re-Authorize and Strengthen No Child Left Behind Program

On Monday, the Campaign for High School Equity announced that while the Senate is holding up the debate on the future of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the coalition of high-profile civil rights organizations is going to make a case for protecting and strengthening the accountability contained in NCLB through a series of briefings and
Roundtable discussions titled, "A Stronger NCLB in 2008: Critical for High Schools and Students of Color."

The initial briefing, called "High School Accountability and Equity in NCLB," will propose strategies for ensuring that high schools are held accountable for preparing students of color for success in college and work.

The Campaign comprises a diverse coalition of national civil rights organizations that represent communities of people of color that believe high schools should have the capacity and motivation to adequately prepare every student for graduation, college, work, and life.

The Campaign was formed to address the lack of equality in the public education system that fails to provide high-quality education to students of color and youth from low-income neighborhoods. Black, Latino, Native American, and Alaskan Native students have less than a 58 percent chance of graduating high school with a regular diploma.

However, NCLB has some harsh critics, among whom are many schoolteachers themselves, who call the program nothing more than one more fatally flawed affirmative action plan that is harming the education of almost every child of every race and ethnicity and of both genders because it seeks to push children through the system instead of teaching to their individual needs, learning capacities, and mental abilities. Teachers and parents alike have decried the program for forcing educators to "teach for the test" instead of instilling real knowledge or useful skills.

Some educators have also expressed concern that they cannot do the right thing for children because this often takes the form of politically incorrect actions that activists and the media pounce on as being "racist" or otherwise prejudiced in some way; one example would be a situation where a teacher created a special, remedial class for children who were struggling with mathematics and that class wound up, by chance, being all-black. Educators fear that such a result would end in the teacher being fired and the helpful class dismantled on the grounds of racism, even if the vast majority of black students were actually in standard and higher-level math classes.

NCLB has previously been cited as deeply flawed for one of its provisions that excludes schools who have only small populations of a certain ethnicity from needing to report that group's test scores to the federal government.

Some state leaders and Congressional representatives have expressed outrage over the fact that schools that want to disregard NCLB on the grounds that they can do a much better job of teaching without bureaucratic interference get punished by losing federal education grant money, labeling such a scheme as socialized government control of education.

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