Left Behind
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
President Bush touts the No Child Left Behind Act as one of his top domestic accomplishments. One key provision is the mandate that students be allowed to transfer out of failing public schools.
The New York Times reported Saturday that New York City next year plans to slash the number of students permitted to transfer out of the worst schools to less than 1,000 from more than 7,000. City officials, according to the Times dispatch, are concerned that the transferred students might “destabilize” the supposedly better schools that they are transferring into. The Times reports that “poor children with low test scores”will get priority in transfers under the new system. That sends the signal to the city’s middle class and those with higher-scoring children that they are a lower priority to school administrators.
In a school system with more than 1 million students, 1,000 transfers don’t amount to much. The city can get away with this because No Child Left Behind enforcement is nonexistent. The law requires only that states make “adequate yearly progress” in meeting federal mandates. Washington largely leaves it to the states to define what constitutes “adequate.” So far, no state has been denied funding for failing to meet the law’s demands, and if anyone in Congress or the administration is pressing for such penalties, they are doing so awfully stealthily.
Mayor Bloomberg and his schools chancellor, Joel Klein, have shown a laudable willingness to embrace school choice by backing the creation of 50 new charter schools in the city in five years. If the transfer provisions in the federal law can’t be met by the government-run schools without undue disruption, and if as a result students — even non-poor ones — are stuck in failed schools without the option of transferring, maybe Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Klein can strike a deal to turn the students and the hefty funding that comes with them over to some of the local parochial schools or private schools. It’s a question of what’s a higher value — avoiding disruption in the government-run school system, or really making sure that no child is left behind.
