Empty Threats

I was having lunch with a friend last week, super-smart guy but not an education person, when he mentioned that Arizona was about to opt out of the No Child Left Behind Act. He was surprised when I said it was the first I'd heard of it, because here I'm supposed to be the person who gets paid to keep track of this stuff. So I went ahead and looked for it and sure enough: "The Arizona House of Representatives is on the verge of opting out of the controversial No Child Left Behind Act, President Bush's premier educational accomplishment."

Huh! Of course they'll have to get it passed the State Senate and the governor, but still...whoops, wait a minute...few grafs later..."Some of the support stems from a change [the author] added to the bill Wednesday. If the state would not reimburse local school districts for the amount of lost federal dollars, Arizona would stick with No Child Left Behind." Ah.

That amount being $600 million per year. In the state with the worst budget deficit in the nation.

So my policy of ignoring all state threats to boycott NCLB on the grounds that they never come to anything turned out to be solid after all; this is no different than the Arizona House passing a resolution expressing the sense of the membership that the Cardinals should stop losing so many football games.

It seems fair to say that over the past five years, the leaders of the 50 states have collectively weighed the consequences of (A) cutting school spending by 5% to 10%, (B) raising taxes or cutting spending on other things in order to raise an amount equal to 5% to 10% of school spending, or (C) implementing NCLB, and they've all decided that (C) is the best option. You may disagree, but that's what they believe.