Finally!

President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have announced plans to reconfigure the No Child Left Behind Act. Included in his 3.5 trillion dollar budget is a 7% increase in funding an a change if focus from test scores to real outcomes, such as the development of career skills.

As a parent of a school age child my perception is that NCLB, Bush 43's biggest domestic success (and interestingly for a Republican President and a Republican Congress represents the biggest intrusion into state's rights since the Reconstruction, not that I am complaining, the states, left to their own devices, usually end up looking like idiots), has resulted in nothing more than the amputation of quality educational programming such as arts programs and physical education and health programs and has damaged the very math and reading education programs it was intended to improve.

Obama and Duncan want to improve the Act by looking at where children go as they move through school "We want accountability reforms that factor in student growth, progress in closing achievement gaps, proficiency towards college and career-ready standards, high school graduation and college enrollment rates,” Duncan said, noting that the new approach is a “cradle-to-career agenda.

As attractive as this sounds, it is simply a hopeful fix of a broken system. There are two major - and integrally related - problems with the US educational system that these earnest men's efforts do nothing to address.

The first is funding. Funding for US schools is based primarily on local property or school taxes. What this means generally is that poorer states spend less per student than wealthier states, even when things such as cost of living are accounted for. The result is a system that is inherently tilted toward better education for the affluent and than for those in poverty.

Despite the nationalization of education under NCLB, nothing was done to address this inherently inequitable funding scheme. This was due in part to the Bush administrations paradoxical embrace of both states rights and legislation that abrogated them, but also because Congress never would have supported funding reform as it would have meant the end of its members' political careers. In the end the Bush administration did not even provide the funds originally promised NCLB.

The second issue is poverty itself. Schools in impoverished areas do not provide an achievement oriented education except for the most talented and motivated of the students within them. Poverty and its correlates - fatherlessness, single parent homes, drugs and drug related violence, gang activity, poor nourishment - all conspire to destroy educational environments, both within and without the child.

The problems with our educational system arise from a cycle of impoverished educational systems failing to provide the tools for people to rise out of poverty, leaving poverty itself to render children in impoverished areas virtually ineducable.

Good teachers will not work in impoverished areas and impoverished areas do not have the resources to support students in schools even if good teachers remained.

There is no single fix for this but there are basic issues that must be addressed to form a bedrock on which further progress can be made. The first is funding. States must be required to abandon local funding in favor of uniform pupil-weighting funding mechanisms. Teachers salaries must be structured in a way that encourages them to work in challenging districts.

There are other changes that must be put in place as well. One is the an end to the "War on Drugs" with its imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of men and women on minor drug charges, with its distinctions between crack and powder cocaine that result in harsh prison sentences for young black men and slaps on the wrist for affluent white folks. This "war" has done more damage to the lives of American young people than any amount of drug use could have done.

A focus of law enforcement on the interdiction of illegal weapons would properly use the otherwise wasted resources sucked up by the "war on drugs".

Finally health care reform must make pre and post natal care, parent education, nutritional information, education and supplements available to all Americans.

These are not easy fixes and they are only the beginning. They will all piss of some interest group or other, which means that we will have to have leaders with the courage and political will to advocate for them. What I am suggesting here is a basic reformulation of our society around preparing our citizens for self-sufficiency in a world that is changing at a breakneck pace. Drug reform is necessary but not sufficient, health reform is necessary but not sufficient and education reform is simply a waste of time if we do not address the infrastructural and cultural issues that undermine the capacity of the individual to be educated.

Tags: Education, NCLB, Bush, War on Drugs, Poverty