Thomas Molitor

The No Child Left Behind Act may someday be remembered as the Every Parent Left Behind Act.

Loss of control is a key reason why so many New Mexican parents and teachers have expressed dissatisfaction with our education system. Federal programs such as No Child Left Behind have left teachers spending more time testing than teaching and parents feeling like they have no say over their children’s school life or their curriculum.

The No Child Left Behind Act stripped much of local school autonomy and expanded red tape and created micromanagement dictates from Washington. As such, lack of local control is destroying parental control of their children’s education and replacing it with federal control.

According to the think tank the Rio Grande Foundation, in the past decade public-school enrollment in New Mexico has been flat. Meanwhile, funding has increased 57 percent, and certified school employment has grown 10.2 percent. New Mexicans now spend more than $2 billion a year on public schools – more than two-fifths of the state’s main budget account – and the outcomes are demonstrably poor.

The national average rate of high school graduation is 71 percent, while the rate in New Mexico is 54 percent, second from dead-last in the United States.

We are now entering the eighth year of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), predicated on the belief that all children can perform at grade level. The fact is, half of them can’t.

Everyone wants only the best for every child but a federally-driven, centralized, cookie-cutter education delivery system does not allow for learning strategies that can be localized and made to fit a particular region of a state or to fit a particular town – or to fit a particular child, for that matter.

Clearly, we need to empower New Mexicans with more control over their children’s educational destiny.

We can do better

We can do better. Take the state of Florida, for example. The National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) is the gold standard of national education achievement tests. Over the past decade, NAEP reading scores for fourth graders have soared nine percentage points – more than twice the national gain. Florida’s eighth-grade reading gains were almost double the national average. Math scores also registered solid gains, exceeding the national average.

Most impressive has been the success of minorities. Today, more than 20 percent of America’s public school students are Hispanic. In New Mexico, the figure is closer to 50 percent.

Scores among Florida’s low-income black and Hispanic students have risen much faster than the national average. Hispanic fourth-graders in Florida now boast reading scores higher than the all-student average in 15 states.

How did Florida accomplish this turnaround? For starters, the state didn’t play games with test standards. Florida’s test methodology measures what students actually know, not just how well they do compared with other Florida students. And each public school in the state gets its own A-F report card annually. Successful schools get bonuses. Failing schools get tough remedial action.

Second, Florida ended “everyone-passes” social promotion at the third grade. Failing students get remedial help, not a free pass.

Third, Florida got serious about school choice, promoting a range of public and private options. For instance, 20,000 students with disabilities now receive private-school scholarships. And more than 100,000 children attend charter schools.

Fourth, Florida acted to reward good teachers. The state awards large bonuses to teachers with demonstrated success rates. And Florida instituted alternative paths to teacher certification in order to attract top-flight educators who would be stymied by the normal bureaucratic rules. Today, about half of the new Florida teachers come through the alternative certification route.

Give parents more control

Unfortunately, giving parents a choice often meets with opposition from the education establishment. But I know teachers are as frustrated with the centralized, federal programs such as NCLB as parents and taxpayers are. In fact, I attended a political party meeting recently in which more than one teacher expressed frustrations with having to “teach to the test” and having to spend more time testing than teaching.

As we enter a new legislative session in Santa Fe, I would like to see more legislation introduced that empowers parents with more educational choices. Legislation that increases competition for the education dollar.

Whether a parent wishes to send his or her child to a private school, public school, parochial school, or school them at home, New Mexico would benefit from a freer education market that gives parents more freedom to choose and more value for their tax dollar.

Today, New Mexico can fulfill the wishes of New Mexicans for greater control over their children’s education by simply allowing parents to keep more of their hard-earned money to spend on state-driven education solutions rather than force them to send it to Washington to support education programs that end up not only leaving their children behind, but them, too.

Molitor is a Republican candidate for the state House of Representatives, District 23.