By Nirvi Shah
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
This negative side affect is one that we do not see in press accounts often enough.
The Palm Beach County School District will set aside $11 million next school year to deal with students at schools who failed to meet the No Child Left Behind requirements — money meant to help schools with many poor students pay for teachers, books and other classroom materials. That's about a third of the $30 million the district gets in federal money to improve schools where at least half the children are so poor they qualify for free or reduced-price meals. The money will pay to bus children who want to switch schools and to tutor others — a requirement for schools that aren't progressing for two or three years in a row. That $11 million is "money that's taken off of the top," said Kay Scott, who oversees No Child Left Behind for the school system. "It's money that the schools could use to pay their own incentives to get highly qualified teachers, tutorial services, parental involvement activities, additional classroom supplies, more computers — anything extra." It's money that schools could use to better themselves but that's not the way NCLB is set up. It is set up to funnel those funds to the private sector. And then there's this from O'hanian's site. Do we need yet more proof of where a good deal of the impetus for NCLB is coming from. Nina S. Rees leads the Office of Innovation and Improvement (OII) at the U.S. Department of Education, overseeing the administration of approximately 28 grant programs. The office supports education innovation, broadly disseminates the lessons learned from these programs and helps to make strategic investments in promising educational practices. It provides leadership for efforts in the areas of parental options, information and rights. Working with the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, Rees coordinates the implementation of the public school choice and supplemental services provisions of the president's No Child Left Behind Act. In addition, she oversees the implementation of the DC School Choice Incentive Act, the passage of which she led. This program offers low-income students in the District of Columbia an opportunity to attend a private school of their choice...
From 1997 to 2001, she served as the chief education analyst for The Heritage Foundation. She was the foundation's lead author and spokesperson on education and worked closely with members of Congress and state legislatures on policy proposals aimed at reforming federal education programs and aiding disadvantaged students. She has testified before Congress on a number of education issues, including the benefits of school choice for low-income students.
Prior to joining The Heritage Foundation, Rees served as director of outreach programs at the Institute for Justice and as a policy analyst at Americans for Tax Reform. She spent two years on the staff of Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla...Rees has been a frequent media commentator on education issues. Her articles and views have appeared in various national newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. She has also appeared on CBS's The Early Show and Evening News, CNN's Inside Politics and Lou Dobbs Tonight, C-Span's Washington Journal, Fox Morning News, Fox News Channel's Special Report and The O'Reilly Factor, and PBS's The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.
She appears to be especially good at getting the neo-conservative educational word out.
1 comment:
It hit the news here in New Mexico that one of the private tutoring services has started bribing the parents with gift cards to get their children to enroll with them instead of competing tutoring services. Our tax dollars at work.
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